Category: RT Newswire

Public release date: 23-Mar-2008
University of California – San Diego

Contact: Rob Monroe, Mario Aguilera
scrippsnews@ucsd.edu
858-534-3624

Black carbon pollution emerges as major player in global warming

Soot from biomass burning, diesel exhaust has 60 percent of the
effect of carbon dioxide on warming but mitigation offers immediate
benefits

Black carbon, a form of particulate air pollution most often produced
from biomass burning, cooking with solid fuels and diesel exhaust,
has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater
than prevailing estimates, according to scientists in an upcoming
review article in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego atmospheric
scientist V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg
Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have
as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon
dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2. The
researchers also noted, however, that mitigation would have immediate
societal benefits in addition to the long term effect of reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.

The article, “Global and regional climate changes due to black
carbon,” will be posted in the online version of Nature Geoscience on
Sunday, March 23.

“Observationally based studies such as ours are converging on the
same large magnitude of black carbon heating as modeling studies fromStanford, Caltech and NASA,” said Ramanathan. “We now have to examine
if black carbon is also having a large role in the retreat of arctic
sea ice and Himalayan glaciers as suggested by recent studies.”

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Arkansas forecasters fear record flooding

The Associated Press

Published: 03.24.2008
LITTLE ROCK – High water pouring down the White River could cause historic flooding in cities along its path in eastern Arkansas, forecasters warned Sunday.

The river could top levels recorded in a devastating flood 25 years ago, National Weather Service meteorologist John Robinson said.

Peru tribe battles oil giant over pollution
By Dan Collyns
BBC News, Loreto, Peru

Achuar’s spiritual leader, Tomas Maynas

Tomas Maynas says fish died and crops wilted. It is a familiar story. Big business
moves into a pristine wilderness and starts destroying the environment and by turn
the livelihoods of the indigenous people who live there.

But in a reversal of plot, there are now cases of people living traditional
lifestyles who are now invading the territory of the big companies and taking them
on at their own game.

The story of the Achuar tribe living in the Amazon rainforest of north-eastern Peru
is one of them.

Last year, they filed a class action lawsuit against oil giant Occidental Petroleum,
in Los Angeles.

Now they are awaiting a judge’s decision on whether the case can proceed in the US or
will be sent back to Peru, where it stands little chance of coming to court.

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“Fagan says we’re now entering another era of extreme aridity, and that the
challenges of adapting to water shortages and crop failures won’t be easy.”

“The bad news is that elites try to super-manage their way out of droughts,
with disastrous results for ordinary people.”

” …for ordinary readers, Fagan’s book serves as another warning about a true
marvel: It only takes a temperature change of a
Celsius degree or two to rapidly
unsettle the order of things.”
————————————

The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
March 22, 2008

ENVIRONMENT

We’ve been here before, and it wasn’t pretty the first time
ANDREW NIKIFORUK

THE GREAT WARMING

Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

By Brian Fagan

Bloomsbury, 282 pages, $29.95

While the Arctic melts and our glaciers
disappear, one by one, like guests at a
late-night party, Canada’s political elites
remain the only guys too drunk to recognize that
the climate is changing. Let’s face it: Global
warming probably will never sober up Conservative
or Liberal leaders as long as tar-sands taxes
fill the federal treasury, lower the GST and give
the loonie a petro swagger. And they are not the
first group of rulers to ignore the weather.

During the medieval ages, a great warming similar
to our fossil-fuelled meltdown profoundly changed
civilizations from the Norse to the Khmer.
Archeologists call it the Medieval Warm Period,
and it served up a “silent and oft-ignored
killer”: drought. The dry-out even parched much
of present-day Alberta.

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