September 09, 2005
CO2 in the soil? That's crazy, CO2 cannot be produced naturally.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/07/MTFH63428_2005-09-07_17-49-21_MOL764095.html
lobal warming causes soil to release carbon -study
Sep 07 1:41 PM US/Eastern
By Peter Graff
LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming is causing soil to release huge amounts of carbon, making efforts to fight global warming tougher than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday.
A study in the journal Nature looked at the carbon content of soil in England and Wales from 1978-2003 and found that it fell steadily, with some 13 million tonnes of carbon released from British soil each year.
The team from Britain's National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University said its results implied a similar process would be under way in other temperate areas across the globe.
"Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is scarier than we had thought," Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told journalists at a science conference in Dublin. "The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing something."
Since the carbon appeared to be released from soil regardless of how the soil was used, they concluded that the main cause must be climate change itself.
Though they could not say where all the missing carbon had gone, much of it may be entering the atmosphere as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which scientists say has caused global warming.
KYOTO PROTOCOL
International efforts like the Kyoto protocol, which came into effect in February this year, have been aimed at stopping climate change by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by industry.
But those efforts don't take into account carbon trapped in soil, about 300 times the amount released each year by burning fossil fuels.
In a separate article published alongside the paper in Nature, scientists from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry said the carbon released from British soil wiped out the gains made by cutting its industrial emissions.
"These losses thus completely offset the past technological achievements in reducing CO2 emissions, putting the United Kingdom's success in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in a different light," Detlef Schulze and Annette Freibauer wrote.
"An effective climate policy will require a more comprehensive approach," they wrote. "The scientific and political implications of the new findings are considerable."
(Additional reporting by Patricia Reaney in Dublin)
Posted by enduringfreedom at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
NY Times via Luskin
Yesterday the New York Times editorial board wrote a fire-breathing editorial that for almost 24 hours ranked as the "most-discussed story" on Technorati and the "most e-mailed article" on nytimes.com. The board wrote that "George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday." Instead of "consolation and wisdom," the President offered "a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast." The board went on to offer a long laundry list of angry accusations. The editorial board doubted that Bush "understood the depth of the current crisis" — unlike the wizened board, which had been following the crisis on CNN.
The editorial built up to this penultimate paragraph:
While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?
Good question. Maybe because Congress listened to the NY Times editorial board in April of 2005:
Anyone who cares about responsible budgeting and the health of America's rivers and wetlands should pay attention to a bill now before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The bill would shovel $17 billion at the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and other water-related projects — this at a time when President Bush is asking for major cuts in Medicaid and other important domestic programs. Among these projects is a $2.7 billion boondoggle on the Mississippi River that has twice flunked inspection by the National Academy of Sciences... [snip]
This is a bad piece of legislation.
Lesson: Don't listen to the NY Times editorial board. (via Don Luskin)
Posted by enduringfreedom at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)