Vowing to curb the authority and the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, congressional Republicans are attacking the agency to a degree not seen since President Richard Nixon created it 40 years ago.
Republicans, launching an attack on the Obama administration's powers to act on climate change, proposed a 17% budget cut to the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposed $1.6bn cut to the EPA was the largest in dollar terms of some 70 budgetary measures put forward by Republicans on Wednesday, February 9th.
In a follow-up strike, they repeatedly challenged the legal authority of 
the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions during a contentious hearing in Congress. The GOP proposal would block the Environmental Protection Agency from reducing greenhouse gases and reverse the agency's scientific finding that climate change is dangerous.
While the plan might be blocked in the Senate or vetoed by President Obama, the comments during Wednesday's hearing were a fresh indication of the depth of opposition in Congress to action on reducing U.S. carbon pollution. Supporters of the measure to revise the Clean Air Act to take away the EPA's authority to regulate this type of pollution said that curbing emissions would be too costly.
The EPA's planned regulations "would boost the cost of energy, not just for homeowners and car owners, but for businesses both large and small," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the author of the legislation. "EPA may be starting by regulating only the largest power plants and factories, but we will all feel the impact of higher prices and fewer jobs."
The EPA's effort to tackle the latest and perhaps most challenging environmental problem - global warming - has made it a central target 
of the new Republican leadership's anti-regulatory agenda. Having failed last year to enact new legislation to curb global warming, the administration is left to use existing law - the Clean Air Act - to start reducing the pollution causing the planet's temperature to rise.
"Congress intends to reassert itself in the statutory and regulatory process at EPA and specifically the Clean Air Act," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., chairman of the subcommittee on energy and power. He is a sponsor of a draft bill that would block the EPA from using the law to control heat-trapping pollution.
Lisa Jackson, the EPA chief, said the attacks were part of a larger Republican project to roll back years of environmental and safety protections.
"I think this is a serious effort to weaken the clean air act," she said.
Jackson and the EPA have emerged as prime targets for the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, who have promised to block what they say are "job-killing" regulations.
A number of other Republicans declared the science on climate change was "mixed".
In other exchanges, Jackson was accused repeatedly of overstepping her legal authority by introducing limited regulations on greenhouse gas emissions earlier this year – despite a supreme court ruling that such actions fell within the remit of the EPA.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told the panel that the proposed legislation "would eliminate portions . of the landmark law that all American children and adults rely on to protect them from harmful air pollution."
During more than two hours of testimony, Jackson said the law and overwhelming scientific evidence on global warming compelled the EPA to act.
Jackson said Congress would be wrong to overturn the EPA's 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gases are a threat to American health and welfare. "Politicians overruling scientists on a scientific question — that would become part of this committee's legacy," she said.
She cited the National Academy of Sciences, the government's chief 
science advisory body, which has reported that "there is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that the climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities."
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., the author
of the draft bill, denied that it would limit the federal government's ability to monitor and reduce health-damaging pollution.
At the same time, Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., proposed a sweeping $1.9 billion cut - about 18 percent - to the amount of money requested for EPA this year by President Obama. Rogers' proposal would also shave millions from EPA programs that reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, and those that boost energy efficiency in household appliances and collect data on heat-trapping emissions.
The agency has been caught before in shifting political winds. In the past, however, Congress passed nearly unanimously the laws that cleaned up the air and water. Longtime observers say the atmosphere for the agency today has never been more toxic.
"It's really been quite extreme," William Ruckelshaus (left), EPA administrator under Nixon and again under President Ronald Reagan, said of the rhetoric aimed at the agency. "What are they supposed to do? Sit there and do nothing?"
The latest and perhaps most draconian attack came from 
Newt Gingrich (right), the former House speaker and possible 2012 GOP presidential candidate. Gingrich called for abolishing the EPA and replacing it with an organization more friendly to business.
During a campaign commercial last year, Democrat Joe Manchin (left) of West Virginia used a rifle to blast a hole through legislation limiting the gases blamed for global warming. He won a seat in the Senate.
Mike McKenna, a Republican strategist, says Gingrich and Manchin are outliers in a more reasoned debate over how big the global warming problem is and how to deal with it.
"I don't think the (political) base is ready to throw EPA out the window," McKenna said. "There are plenty of people across the country who want EPA ratcheted down and think it has gone too far, too fast."
In fact, Americans in large numbers do not support the Gingrich - Upton agenda. Public opinion polling released February 2nd by the Opinion Research Corporation finds that Americans don't want to eliminate the EPA as Gingrich suggests, nor do they want Congress to stop it from doing its job of protecting public health, as Chairman Upton and others want to do.
Almost two thirds of Americans (63 percent) say “the EPA needs to do more to hold polluters accountable and protect the air and water,” versus under a third (29 percent) who think the EPA already “does too much and places too many costly restrictions on businesses and individuals.”
More than three out of four Americans (77 percent) -- including 61 percent of Republicans – say “Congress (should) let the EPA do its job.” As far as Gingrich's plan to eliminate the EPA, the survey showed that 67% (two-thirds) of Americans oppose the eliminations of the EPA.
Despite the support for the EPA by the majority of Americans, lawmakers of both parties have already introduced a dozen bills aimed at weakening, delaying or blocking pollution regulations. Business groups invited by congressional Republicans to describe their biggest 
regulatory burdens singled out EPA rules more than any other.
The main target is the agency's use of the Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court said in 2007 the law could be used to fight global warming.
In 2009, the EPA under Obama put the law in motion by concluding that climate change caused by pollution from industries, automobiles and other sources burning fossil fuels threaten public health and welfare. Some Republicans - and some Democrats from industrial 
states - aren't convinced that's the case.
Others, including Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., think the law is ill-suited to deal with the problem. Dingell led negotiations over the last major overhaul of the Clean Air Act, in 1990. On Wednesday, he told Jackson the agency's use of the law for global warming has put it in the "intolerable hole in which I find you."
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the committee and author of the climate legislation that passed the House in 2009, circulated a letter in which even the EPA chief in the George Bush era 
conceded that the agency had a legal obligation to act on climate change. Waxman said that while Republicans could rewrite the nation's laws, they couldn't change scientific evidence showing global warming is a threat.
"The underlying premise of this bill is that climate change is a hoax," Waxman said. "The science hasn't changed in the last two years; in fact, it's only gotten stronger."
There's also growing resistance to a host of other regulations expected from the agency. Some were initiated by Obama, but others are the 
result of courts throwing regulations from the George W. Bush administration. Still others stem from reviews required by law to update standards to reflect the latest science. They cover everything from ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in smog, to coal ash disposal, to rules aimed at reducing pollution blowing into downwind states and from industrial boilers.
The EPA's defenders say the agency is simply following statutes aimed at protecting people's health - something they say has strong support and is necessary for a healthy economy.
Source:
Forbes, "Global warming heats up Republican attacks on EPA", accessed February 10, 2011
The Guardian, "Republicans propose $1.6bn cut to Environmental Protection Agency", accessed February 10, 2011
McClatchy, "House panel plans to overturn EPA's finding on climate change", accessed February 10, 2011
Climate activists Lesley Butler
and Rob Bell (R) sunbathe on the edge of a frozen fjord in the Norwegian Arctic town of Longyearbyen in this April 25, 2007 file photo.
Credit: Reuters/Francois Lenoir/Files |
A North Atlantic current flowing into the Arctic Ocean is warmer than for at least 2,000 years in a sign that global warming is likely to bring ice-free seas around the North Pole in summers, a study showed.
Scientists said that waters at the northern end of the Gulf Stream, between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (see map below right), averaged 6 degrees Celsius (42.80F) in recent summers, warmer than at natural peaks during Roman or Medieval times.
"The temperature is unprecedented in the past 2,000 years," lead author Robert 
Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, stated of the study in Friday's (January 28, 2011) edition of the journal Science.
The summer water temperatures, reconstructed from the makeup of tiny organisms buried in sediments in the Fram strait, have risen from an average 5.2 degrees Celsius (41.36F) from 1890-2007 and about 3.4C (38.12F) in the previous 1,900 years.
The findings were a new sign that human activities were stoking modern warming since temperatures are above past warm periods linked to swings in the sun's output that enabled, for instance, the Vikings to farm in Greenland in Medieval times. (There is one archaeological site that was a Viking farm in Greenland over 500 years ago - discovered when some caribou hunters stumbled across it in 1991 - see left).
"We found that modern Fram Strait water temperatures are well 
outside the natural bounds," Thomas Marchitto, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, one of the authors, said in a statement.
The Fram strait is the main carrier of ocean heat to the Arctic (right).
ICE-FREE OCEAN
The authors wrote that the warming temperatures "are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming" and that the warming "is most likely another key element in the transition to a future ice-free Arctic Ocean." (At left: Little ice left in Fram Strait)
Ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank to its lowest on record in 2007 and many experts expect the ocean will be ice-free in summers in coming decades, a threat to the hunting livelihoods of indigenous peoples and to creatures such as polar bears.
The Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the global average as part of a trend the U.N. panel of climate scientists blames on a build-up of greenhouse gases from mankind's use of fossil fuels in power plants, factories and 
cars.
The shrinking of reflective ice and snow in the Arctic region exposes water or ground which are darker colored and so soak up more heat from the sun, amplifying warming.
Source:
Reuters,"Arctic current warmer than for 2,000 years: study", accessed January 29, 2011
Carbon dioxide already emitted into the atmosphere will keep contributing to global warming for centuries, eventually causing a huge Antarctic ice sheet to collapse and lift sea levels, Canadian scientists said on Sunday.
Even the complete abandonment of fossil fuels and halt to emissions cannot prevent devastating ocean warming in Antarctica as well as increasing desertification in North Africa, the research finds.
Even so, many of the negative consequences in the Northern Hemisphere, such as loss of Arctic sea ice, are reversible. That means global efforts to cut greenhouse gases are not a waste of effort and money, said Shawn Marshall, a University of Calgary geography professor and one of the study's authors.
"But there are some parts of the climate that have a lot of inertia and it 
will take many centuries before they start to reverse," said Marshall.
The study, led by Nathan Gillett of the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis, is published in the journal Nature Geoscience (requires subscription).
Using simulations with a climate model, the scientists estimated the effects on climate patterns for the next 1,000 years by stopping 
emissions completely in 2010 and in 2100.
Major differences of the impacts in various regions lie in the centuries it takes for heat to circulate from the North Atlantic through the world's ocean currents and into the deep sea, Marshall said.
"The atmosphere cools pretty quickly when atmospheric gases go down and surface water will cool, but that doesn't reach the deeper waters of the ocean for a long time," he said.
Wind currents in the southern hemisphere may also play a role.
As a result, in the next 1,000 years, the average ocean temperature around Antarctica could rise by as much as 5 degrees Celsius, triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, according to the study.
The elimination of the ice sheet, which covers an area about the size of Texas and is up to 4,000 meters (13,120 feet) thick, could raise sea levels by several meters.
The climate impacts would also dry out the land in parts of North Africa by up to 30 percent.
Simulations show big differences in some parts of the world, however, 
between cutting emissions in 2010 and in 2100, including long-term temperature variations between 1 and 4 degrees Celsius, an argument for action on carbon dioxide, Marshall said.
"You sometimes hear that defeatist argument that it's too late and there are a lot of changes that are going to happen, so just worry about adaptation," he said. "But I think you do see a big divergence in potential futures depending on if there are some reductions in emissions."
Source:
Reuters,"Canadian study sees global warming for centuries", accessed January 10, 2011
Unusually cold winters may make you think scientists have got it all wrong. But the data reveal a chilling truth. There is now strong evidence to suggest that the unusually cold winters of the last two years in the UK are the result of heating elsewhere.
With temperatures in some parts of the UK and Ireland set to reach as low as 28°C on Monday night, many have been wondering why this winter has been especially harsh. According to NASA the reason is a natural shift the the location of the 
Gulf Stream called ‘Negative Arctic Oscillation’.
Writing on their Earth Observatory site NASA describes how the Gulf Stream, which usually bring mild air from the Mexican Gulf to the British Isles, has shifted from its usual path due to a belt of high pressure sitting in the mid-Atlantic. This oscillation has forced the stream further north bathing western Canada and southern Greenland in unusually warm weather while leaving Ireland, the UK and Northern Europe freezing cold.
The Arctic Oscillation is a climate pattern that influences winter weather in the northern hemisphere. It describes the relationship between high pressure in the mid-latitudes and low pressure over the Arctic. When the pressure systems are weak, the difference between them is small, and air from the Arctic flows south, while warmer air seeps north. This is referred to as a negative Arctic Oscillation. Like December 2009, the Arctic Oscillation was negative in early December 2010. Cold air from the Arctic channeled south around a blocking system over Greenland, while Greenland and northern Canada heated up.
The unusual cold brought heavy snow to Northern Europe, stopping 
flights and trains (right) early in December. Cold temperatures and snow also closed roads and schools in the eastern United States and Canada during the first week of December. The diagonal path of a powerful winter storm is visible as a streak of cold across the Upper Midwest of the United States.
The global temperature maps published by NASA present a striking 
picture. Last month's shows a deep blue splodge over Iceland, Spitsbergen, Scandanavia and the UK, and another over the western US and the eastern Pacific. Temperatures in these regions were between 0.5C and 4C colder than the November average from 1951 and 1980. But on either side of these cool blue pools are raging fires of orange, red and maroon: the temperatures in western Greenland, northern Canada and Siberia were between 2C and 10C higher than usual. NASA's Arctic oscillations map for 3-10 December (left) shows that parts of Baffin Island and central Greenland were 15C warmer than the average for 2002-9. There was a similar pattern last winter. These anomalies appear to be connected.
The weather in UK winters, for example, is strongly linked to the The North Atlantic Oscillation also was in a negative phase: i.e. above-normal pressure over Iceland; below-normal pressure over the Azores; in Northern Europe this is usually associated with below-normal temperatures. |
contrasting pressure between the Icelandic low and the Azores high. When there's a big pressure difference the winds come in from the south-west, bringing mild damp weather from the Atlantic. When there's a smaller gradient, air is often able to flow down from the Arctic. High pressure in the icy north last winter, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, blocked the usual pattern and "allowed cold air from the Arctic to penetrate all the way into Europe, eastern China, and Washington DC". NASA reports that the same thing is happening this winter.
Sea ice in the Arctic has two main effects on the weather. Because it's white, it bounces back heat from the sun, preventing it from entering the sea. It also creates a barrier between the water and the atmosphere, reducing the amount of heat that escapes from the sea into the air. In the autumns of 2009 and 2010 the coverage of Arctic sea ice was much lower than the long-term average: the second smallest, last month, of any recorded November. The open sea, being darker, absorbed more heat from the sun in the warmer, 
light months. As it remained clear for longer than usual it also bled more heat into the Arctic atmosphere. This caused higher air pressures, reducing the gradient between the Iceland low and the Azores high.
So why wasn't this predicted by climate scientists? Actually it was. Obsessed by possible changes to ocean circulation (the Gulf Stream grinding to a halt), we overlooked the effects on atmospheric circulation. A link between summer sea ice in the Arctic and winter temperatures in the northern hemisphere was first proposed in 1914. Close mapping of the relationship dates back to 1990, and has been strengthened by detailed modeling since 2006.
Will this become the pattern? It's not yet clear. Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute says that the effects of shrinking sea ice "could 
triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia". James Hansen of NASA (right) counters that seven of the last 10 European winters were warmer than average. There are plenty of other variables: we can't predict the depth of British winters solely by the extent of sea ice.
Climate change skeptics voice howls of execration at this theory: now you're claiming that this cooling is the result of warming! Well, yes, it 
could be. A global warming trend doesn't mean that every region becomes warmer every month. That's what averages are for: they put local events in context. The denial of man-made climate change mutated first into a denial of science in general and then into a denial of basic arithmetic. If it's snowing in Britain, a thousand websites and quite a few newspapers tell us, the planet can't be warming.
According to NASA's datasets, the world has just experienced the warmest January to November period since the global record began, 131 years ago; 2010 looks likely to be either the hottest or the equal hottest year. This November was the warmest on record.
Still global warming skeptics say to just look 
out of the window. No explanation of the numbers, no description of the North Atlantic oscillation or the Arctic dipole, no reminder of current temperatures in other parts of the world, can compete with the observation that there's a foot of snow outside. We are simple, earthy creatures, governed by our senses. What we see and taste and feel overrides analysis. The cold has reason in a deathly grip.
Source:
The Guardian, "That snow outside is what global warming looks like", by George Monbiot, accessed December 22, 2010
The Sociable, "NASA explains why there has been so much snow this winter", accessed December 22, 2010
Global warming is sneaky. For more than a century it has been hiding large amounts of excess heat in the world's deep seas. Now that heat is coming to the surface again in one of the worst possible places: Antarctica. This trend means that Earth is already locked into long term melting and sea level rise.
New analyses of the heat content of the waters off Western Antarctic Peninsula are now showing a clear and exponential increase in warming waters undermining the sea ice, raising air temperatures, melting 
glaciers (melting iceberg at right) and wiping out entire penguin colonies.
"In the area I work there is the highest increase in temperatures of anywhere on Earth," said physical oceanographer Doug Martinson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Martinson has been collecting ocean water heat content data for more than 18 years at Palmer Island, on the western side of the 
Antarctic Peninsula.
"Eighty-seven percent of the alpine glaciers are in retreat," said Martinson of the Western Antarctic Peninsula. "Some of the Adele penguin colonies have already gone extinct."
Martinson and his colleagues looked not only at their very detailed and mapped water heat data from the last two decades, but compared them with sketchier data from the past and deep ocean heat content measurements worldwide. All show the same rising trend that is being seen in Antarctica.
"When I saw that my jaw just dropped," said Martinson. The most 
dramatic rise has happened since 1960, he said.
What the rising water heat means, he said, is that even if humanity got organized and soon stopped emitting greenhouse gases, there is already too much heat in the oceans to stop a lot of impacts -- like the melting of a huge amount of Antarctic ice.
"There's the potential that we're locked into long term sea level rise for a long time," Martinson told Discovery News. Martinson presented his 
latest ocean heat results on Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
As for how fast the ice will melt and in what locations, that depends largely on whether the upwelling warm water comes in contact with the thick ice shelf that crowds the coast and holds the block the glaciers from reaching the sea.
That, in turn, depends on the winds which drive away the surface waters and make it possible for the deeper waters to rise to the surface, said senior researcher Robert Bindschadler of NASA's Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
"It can destroy the ice shelf if that heat can get to it," said Bindschadler, who at the same meeting presented his work from the melting Pine 
Island Ice Shelf (right) in Antarctica.
Now that the upwelling deep sea water is the clear cause of the melting ice shelf, rather than summer melt water, as had been thought in the past, it's a question of how winds will change in a warming world and whether they will drive more warm water into the ice shelves.
"So we have thrown the problem back over the fence to the climate modelers," said Bindschadler.
Source:
Discovery News, "Antarctic Melting as Deep Ocean Heat Rises", accessed December 16, 2010
Vowing to curb the authority and the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, congressional Republicans are attacking the agency to a degree not seen since President Richard Nixon created it 40 years ago.
the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions during a contentious hearing in Congress. The GOP proposal would block the Environmental Protection Agency from reducing greenhouse gases and reverse the agency's scientific finding that climate change is dangerous.
The EPA's planned regulations "would boost the cost of energy, not just for homeowners and car owners, but for businesses both large and small," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the author of the legislation. "EPA may be starting by regulating only the largest power plants and factories, but we will all feel the impact of higher prices and fewer jobs."
of the new Republican leadership's anti-regulatory agenda. Having failed last year to enact new legislation to curb global warming, the administration is left to use existing law - the Clean Air Act - to start reducing the pollution causing the planet's temperature to rise.
Lisa Jackson, the EPA chief, said the attacks were part of a larger Republican project to roll back years of environmental and safety protections.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told the panel that the proposed legislation "would eliminate portions . of the landmark law that all American children and adults rely on to protect them from harmful air pollution."
science advisory body, which has reported that "there is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that the climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities."
of the draft bill, denied that it would limit the federal government's ability to monitor and reduce health-damaging pollution.
"It's really been quite extreme," William Ruckelshaus (left), EPA administrator under Nixon and again under President Ronald Reagan, said of the rhetoric aimed at the agency. "What are they supposed to do? Sit there and do nothing?"
Newt Gingrich (right), the former House speaker and possible 2012 GOP presidential candidate. Gingrich called for abolishing the EPA and replacing it with an organization more friendly to business.
During a campaign commercial last year, Democrat Joe Manchin (left) of West Virginia used a rifle to blast a hole through legislation limiting the gases blamed for global warming. He won a seat in the Senate.
In fact, Americans in large numbers do not support the Gingrich - Upton agenda. Public opinion polling released February 2nd by the Opinion Research Corporation finds that Americans don't want to eliminate the EPA as Gingrich suggests, nor do they want Congress to stop it from doing its job of protecting public health, as Chairman Upton and others want to do.
Almost two thirds of Americans (63 percent) say “the EPA needs to do more to hold polluters accountable and protect the air and water,” versus under a third (29 percent) who think the EPA already “does too much and places too many costly restrictions on businesses and individuals.”
More than three out of four Americans (77 percent) -- including 61 percent of Republicans – say “Congress (should) let the EPA do its job.” As far as Gingrich's plan to eliminate the EPA, the survey showed that 67% (two-thirds) of Americans oppose the eliminations of the EPA.
regulatory burdens singled out EPA rules more than any other.
states - aren't convinced that's the case.
conceded that the agency had a legal obligation to act on climate change. Waxman said that while Republicans could rewrite the nation's laws, they couldn't change scientific evidence showing global warming is a threat.
result of courts throwing regulations from the George W. Bush administration. Still others stem from reviews required by law to update standards to reflect the latest science. They cover everything from ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in smog, to coal ash disposal, to rules aimed at reducing pollution blowing into downwind states and from industrial boilers.
