Aug 28 2009

Climate Changes

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Several news stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:

Rising temperatures over the next century could slash yields of three leading cash crops--corn, soybeans and cotton--by as much as 80 percent in the United states, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Despite these implications, "Democratic leaders are finding that resistance in the [agricultural] heartland is one of the biggest hurdles to Senate passage of climate-change legislation," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Southern California is likely to get not only hotter but muggier, according to researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Warmer ocean currents off Mexico's Baja Peninsula are increasing humidity, a trend that contributed to the severe summer heat wave of 2006 that caused the deaths of 600 people and 25,000 cattle in the state.

One of the world's top climate scientists has called for drastic cutbacks of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said he now endorsed a target of 350 parts per million, a goal endorsed by most of the world's poor and vulnerable nations. Current CO2 levels of nearly 390 ppm are already high enough to cause prolonged droughts, destructive storms and a measurable rise in sea levels.

Expert witnesses told a Senate subcommittee this week that global warming threatens to dramatically harm many U.S. national parks. Glacier National Park will lose its glaciers; Joshua Tree National Park may lose its Joshua trees; Rocky Mountain National Park will lose its tundra; and Ellis Island National Monument "could be lost to rising seas," the experts warned.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has long railed against the cost to business of unnecessary litigation, this week threatened to sue the EPA if it does not agree to hold a public hearing on the evidence for and against human-caused climate change. Likening it to the infamous Scopes monkey trial, William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, said, with unintended irony, "It would be evolution versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial."  The EPA termed the Chamber's demand "frivolous" and most climate scientists dispute the Chamber's skepticism about global warming.

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