I was listening to Triple M tonight on the way home, to hear I’d missed out on a vital piece of information from today’s news. Apparantly, a US report was released today that said CO2 levels were three times higher than what was predicted previously, and this century will see a global temperature increase of 4 degrees, not 2 degrees. I don’t know about anyone else, but this is the scariest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Please excuse the long quote here, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, the main culprit in global warming, have increased three times faster in recent years than they did in the 1990s, international climate researchers reported today.
And human-induced warming may have been responsible for an unprecedented observation reported Monday by a second group of scientists, who said that for the first time in 30 years of U.S. satellite monitoring of Antarctica, there is “clear evidence” of snowmelt on some of the continent’s highest and coldest areas.
The carbon dioxide study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the annual rate of increase for emissions of the main greenhouse gas in 2004 was 3 percent — triple the 1 percent rate during the 1990s.
“This new finding simply highlights the magnitude of the challenge we face,” said Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University. “The bottom line is that we need to make the world more carbon efficient, but in many parts of the world we’re going backwards.”
The study was led by Michael Raupach of the Australian government science agency, who is also the leader of the Global Carbon Project, which analyzes the world’s output of carbon dioxide. Field and climate scientists from France, Germany and Britain also participated.
The scientists concluded that without stronger action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the United States, Europe and Japan, the rate of increase will inevitably climb each year.
The rate of carbon dioxide emissions is climbing most rapidly in developing countries, notably China and India. But “it’s important to remember that the developed economies, with only 20 percent of the global population, still emit nearly 60 percent of all the fossil-fuel carbon dioxide released each year,” Raupach said in an e- mail message to The Chronicle…
Snowmelt was found only 310 miles from the South Pole, where ice had been thought to be all but permanent, and at elevations as high as 6,600 feet, where it has always been extremely cold.
In several areas, the scientists said, the spacecraft’s radar found evidence that the snowmelt continued for as much as a week at a time, with temperatures rising to 41 degrees, before freezing weather returned. ” (San Francisco Chronicle: Increase in carbon emissions seen tripling since ’90s / Antarctic snowmelt is shown in new data, 22 May 2007)
I read this as soon as I’d gotten home, just to check if Triple M had got all their facts straight. I couldn’t find the story anywhere on the Australian sites I usually visit, but Factiva turned up a speel from Reuters..
“”A major driver of the accelerating growth rate in emissions is that, globally, we’re burning more carbon per dollar of wealth created,” CSIRO scientist Mike Raupach said in a statement.
“It means that climate change is occurring faster than has been predicted by most of the studies done through the 1990s and into the early 2000s,” he said.
Raupach led an international team of carbon-cycle experts, emissions experts and economists, brought together by the CSIRO’s Global Carbon Project, to quantify global carbon emissions and demand for fossil fuels.
The report found nearly 8 billion tonnes of carbon were emitted globally into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide in 2005, compared with just 6 billion tonnes in 1995…
The CSIRO report found Australia’s per capita emissions were amongst the highest in the world due to a heavy reliance on fossil-fuel generated electricity and a dependence on cars and trucks for transport.
“That means that we have quite a way to go in terms of reducing our emissions to bring about CO2 stabilisation,” said Raupach. “Our own improvements in the energy efficiency of the economy … have been not as rapid as improvements in other developed countries.” ” (Reuters: World growth spurs faster climate change -report, 22 May 2007)
So there’s quite a few news values here. The main one I think is impact/consequence. So many people are concerned about what will happen as a result of global warming, and the report that was released today did little to ease their fears. There’s also the value of currency, because the issue is very topical at the moment. I am sure however that even if global warming were not topical, the report would still attract attention worldwide. I wonder if it was slipped into television bullitins tonight? There’s something about it on the ABC website, so I’m assuming they did include it (or will in their late news).
