Frogger
08-08-2007, 05:14 PM
While liberals decry the fact that the United States has not acceeded to the Kyoto Accords, something that would cripple the American economy, they ignore the fact that China is one of the world's greatest polluters and is exempt from the Accords restrictions as are most countries of Southeast Asia.
Al Gore's head in wrong kind of clouds
By Judi McLeod
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Bubba's buddy Al Gore's got his head in the wrong kind of clouds.
While Gore works to rid the world of Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, while leaving his well-lighted Tennessee mansion looking like the proverbial you-know-what, a giant toxic cloud in Asia may bring floods and droughts to some two billion people.
There are storm clouds gathering around Gore's contention that greenhouse gases are the main culprits in destroying earth, as we know it.
While Gore has Democrat friends like Senator Barbara Boxer leading delegations of 10 senators on a late-July trip to Greenland "for a first-hand look at the devastating effects of global warming", it's unclear whether the Inconvenient Truth celebrity even has an inkling about the massive Asian cloud.
"Words like "awesome", "majestic" and "incredible" don't go far enough to describe what we saw as our boat rode alongside icebergs as large as coliseums. These icebergs--average age 9,000 years--have broken off an ice stream and are now melting at an astonishing rate. The entire Greenland ice sheet is 1,200 miles long by 500 miles wide and, unless we act now, this melting will lead to a catastrophic rise in sea levels," Boxer wrote in a recent press release.
Experts say some of the rivers of polluted air coming from the Asian cloud are "wider than the Amazon" and "deeper than the Grand Canyon".
"Scientists have already observed that two thirds of the 46.000 glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking leading to increasingly severe floods downstream and eventually, to widespread drought. Greenhouse gases were previously thought to be the main cause of the problem, which threatens the sources of Asian's nine main rivers--including the Indus, the Ganges and the Yangtze. (Timesonline, August 3, 2007).
"A research team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California says that the Asian Brown Cloud--made up of gases and suspended particles known as aerosols--is just as much to blame."
Barbara Boxer and the team of politicians she recently led on a fact finding global warming mission to Greenland, need to do their homework in Geography.
"They call it the Asian Brown Cloud. Anyone who has flown over South Asia has seen it--a vast blanket of smog that covers much of the region.
"(Scientists) say that it is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt, with potentially devastating consequences for more than two billion people in India, China, Bangladesh and other downstream countries.
"In a study published yesterday by Nature, the British journal, they say that black soot particles in the cloud are absorbing the Sun's heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers.
"My one hope is that this finding will intensify the focus of Asian scientists and policy makers on the glacier issue," Veerabhdran Ramanathan, who led the research, told The Times. "These glaciers are the source for major river systems, so at least two billion people are directly involved in this."
The cloud is an enormous plume of smoke from factories, power plants and wood or dung fires that stretches across the Indian subcontinent, into SouthEast Africa.
The professor said that some aerosols in the cloud reflected sunlight, cooling the earth beneath in a process known as "global dimming" that is also worrying climate change experts.
Others absorbed heat radiation from the Sun because of their dark color.
As long as the toxic cloud with its black soot particles are absorbing the Sun's heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers, Gore and company should stop measuring cow burps and blaming John Travolta's fleet of jets.
When Professor Ramanathan put his data into a computer model for climate change, it estimated that Himalayan temperatures had risen 0.25C (0.45F) a decade since 1950--twice the average rate of global warming. "If we continue to use outdated technology to achieve industrialization, this is going to get worse," Ramanathan said. "But there is some good news." Unlike greenhouse gases, which can stay in the atmosphere for 200 years, aerosols drop to the ground after two to three weeks.
"Asian countries can therefore tackle the problem relatively quickly if they find alternatives to fuels such as coal, diesel, wood and dung, which account for the majority of aerosols in the air."
"The main cause of climate change is the build-up of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels," said Achim Steiner, the United Nations under-secretary-general and the executive director of UNEP. "But brown clouds, whose environmental and economic impacts are beginning to be unraveled by scientists, are complicating and aggravating their effects."
Meanwhile, Al Gore has his head up in the clouds, but still doesn't acknowledge Asia's destructive brown one.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover080807.htm
China exporting pollution
Made-in-China massive air pollution ignored by global warming gurus Al Gore & Maurice Strong
By Judi McLeod
Friday, July 27, 2007
You’ll never hear this from global warming guru Al Gore and Canadian sidekick Maurice Strong: Massive dust plumes from China fouling air breathed in North America, are causing dramatic changes in climate.
China, in the proverbial doghouse for exporting tainted food for humans and pets, is also sending pollution of nightmare proportions through the air that we breathe.
“An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate.” (The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2007).
These are not occasional little puffs of air headed your way from the Orient. These are rivers of polluted air, some of them wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Though the dust plumes sound like something out of a Hollywood thriller, they’re part of life on this planet.
“There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth,” said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
The infamous smog over L.A. is, in part made in China.
“On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast,” Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Polluted air choking the residents of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco leaves a gigantic carbon footprint about which we haven’t been hearing from global warming champions Gore and Strong.
This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.
The dust plumes are straight out of a pollution nightmare. They carry aerosols—airborne microscopic particles, which are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.
The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming.
Asia is the world’s largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tain Shan Mountains, 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.
Once aloft, the plumes can circle the world in three weeks. “In a very real and immediate sense, you can look at a dust event you are breathing in China and look at this same dust as it tracks across the Pacific and reaches the United States,” says climate analyst Jeff Stith at the National enter for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. “It is a remarkable mix of natural and man-made particles.”
The team detected a new high-altitude plume every three or four days. Each one was up to 300 miles wide and six miles deep, a vaporous layer cake of pollutants. The higher the plumes, the longer they lasted, the faster they traveled and the more pronounced their effect, the researchers said.
One of their spin-offs is the spawning of fiercer thunderstorms. The plumes may also block more than 10 percent of the sunlight over the Pacific.
The only unsolved mystery about the giant dust plumes is why Al Gore and Maurice Strong aren’t talking about them in their double mission to save Mother Earth from global warming.
Strong, who is China’s top advisor on the environment, must know about them.
But both Gore and Strong are too busy spending time talking about the need for corporations in the West to buy carbon credits.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C.” of which he is both chairman and founding partner.
Meanwhile, when it comes to carbon footprints, China leaves one of North America’s biggest.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover072707.htm
Al Gore's head in wrong kind of clouds
By Judi McLeod
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Bubba's buddy Al Gore's got his head in the wrong kind of clouds.
While Gore works to rid the world of Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, while leaving his well-lighted Tennessee mansion looking like the proverbial you-know-what, a giant toxic cloud in Asia may bring floods and droughts to some two billion people.
There are storm clouds gathering around Gore's contention that greenhouse gases are the main culprits in destroying earth, as we know it.
While Gore has Democrat friends like Senator Barbara Boxer leading delegations of 10 senators on a late-July trip to Greenland "for a first-hand look at the devastating effects of global warming", it's unclear whether the Inconvenient Truth celebrity even has an inkling about the massive Asian cloud.
"Words like "awesome", "majestic" and "incredible" don't go far enough to describe what we saw as our boat rode alongside icebergs as large as coliseums. These icebergs--average age 9,000 years--have broken off an ice stream and are now melting at an astonishing rate. The entire Greenland ice sheet is 1,200 miles long by 500 miles wide and, unless we act now, this melting will lead to a catastrophic rise in sea levels," Boxer wrote in a recent press release.
Experts say some of the rivers of polluted air coming from the Asian cloud are "wider than the Amazon" and "deeper than the Grand Canyon".
"Scientists have already observed that two thirds of the 46.000 glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking leading to increasingly severe floods downstream and eventually, to widespread drought. Greenhouse gases were previously thought to be the main cause of the problem, which threatens the sources of Asian's nine main rivers--including the Indus, the Ganges and the Yangtze. (Timesonline, August 3, 2007).
"A research team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California says that the Asian Brown Cloud--made up of gases and suspended particles known as aerosols--is just as much to blame."
Barbara Boxer and the team of politicians she recently led on a fact finding global warming mission to Greenland, need to do their homework in Geography.
"They call it the Asian Brown Cloud. Anyone who has flown over South Asia has seen it--a vast blanket of smog that covers much of the region.
"(Scientists) say that it is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt, with potentially devastating consequences for more than two billion people in India, China, Bangladesh and other downstream countries.
"In a study published yesterday by Nature, the British journal, they say that black soot particles in the cloud are absorbing the Sun's heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers.
"My one hope is that this finding will intensify the focus of Asian scientists and policy makers on the glacier issue," Veerabhdran Ramanathan, who led the research, told The Times. "These glaciers are the source for major river systems, so at least two billion people are directly involved in this."
The cloud is an enormous plume of smoke from factories, power plants and wood or dung fires that stretches across the Indian subcontinent, into SouthEast Africa.
The professor said that some aerosols in the cloud reflected sunlight, cooling the earth beneath in a process known as "global dimming" that is also worrying climate change experts.
Others absorbed heat radiation from the Sun because of their dark color.
As long as the toxic cloud with its black soot particles are absorbing the Sun's heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers, Gore and company should stop measuring cow burps and blaming John Travolta's fleet of jets.
When Professor Ramanathan put his data into a computer model for climate change, it estimated that Himalayan temperatures had risen 0.25C (0.45F) a decade since 1950--twice the average rate of global warming. "If we continue to use outdated technology to achieve industrialization, this is going to get worse," Ramanathan said. "But there is some good news." Unlike greenhouse gases, which can stay in the atmosphere for 200 years, aerosols drop to the ground after two to three weeks.
"Asian countries can therefore tackle the problem relatively quickly if they find alternatives to fuels such as coal, diesel, wood and dung, which account for the majority of aerosols in the air."
"The main cause of climate change is the build-up of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels," said Achim Steiner, the United Nations under-secretary-general and the executive director of UNEP. "But brown clouds, whose environmental and economic impacts are beginning to be unraveled by scientists, are complicating and aggravating their effects."
Meanwhile, Al Gore has his head up in the clouds, but still doesn't acknowledge Asia's destructive brown one.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover080807.htm
China exporting pollution
Made-in-China massive air pollution ignored by global warming gurus Al Gore & Maurice Strong
By Judi McLeod
Friday, July 27, 2007
You’ll never hear this from global warming guru Al Gore and Canadian sidekick Maurice Strong: Massive dust plumes from China fouling air breathed in North America, are causing dramatic changes in climate.
China, in the proverbial doghouse for exporting tainted food for humans and pets, is also sending pollution of nightmare proportions through the air that we breathe.
“An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate.” (The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2007).
These are not occasional little puffs of air headed your way from the Orient. These are rivers of polluted air, some of them wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Though the dust plumes sound like something out of a Hollywood thriller, they’re part of life on this planet.
“There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth,” said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
The infamous smog over L.A. is, in part made in China.
“On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast,” Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Polluted air choking the residents of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco leaves a gigantic carbon footprint about which we haven’t been hearing from global warming champions Gore and Strong.
This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.
The dust plumes are straight out of a pollution nightmare. They carry aerosols—airborne microscopic particles, which are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.
The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming.
Asia is the world’s largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tain Shan Mountains, 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.
Once aloft, the plumes can circle the world in three weeks. “In a very real and immediate sense, you can look at a dust event you are breathing in China and look at this same dust as it tracks across the Pacific and reaches the United States,” says climate analyst Jeff Stith at the National enter for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. “It is a remarkable mix of natural and man-made particles.”
The team detected a new high-altitude plume every three or four days. Each one was up to 300 miles wide and six miles deep, a vaporous layer cake of pollutants. The higher the plumes, the longer they lasted, the faster they traveled and the more pronounced their effect, the researchers said.
One of their spin-offs is the spawning of fiercer thunderstorms. The plumes may also block more than 10 percent of the sunlight over the Pacific.
The only unsolved mystery about the giant dust plumes is why Al Gore and Maurice Strong aren’t talking about them in their double mission to save Mother Earth from global warming.
Strong, who is China’s top advisor on the environment, must know about them.
But both Gore and Strong are too busy spending time talking about the need for corporations in the West to buy carbon credits.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C.” of which he is both chairman and founding partner.
Meanwhile, when it comes to carbon footprints, China leaves one of North America’s biggest.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover072707.htm