David Masterman's List: Climate Change

• The global output of heat-trapping carbon  dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of  how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
• The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse  gases are higher than the worst  case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
• It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor  of geology
• Extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase
• the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections  from the climate panel
• the question now among scientists is whether the future is the panel's worst  case scenario "or something more extreme

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• Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast  U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often
• there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate  extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.
• This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily  average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze freak events that  grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people.
• 80 percent chance that the killer Russian heat wave of 2010 wouldn't have  happened without the added push of global warming

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• The floods began in July and have devastated large parts of the central Chao  Phraya river basin, killed nearly 400 people and disrupted the lives of more  than two million
• The floods submerged four million acres (1.6 million ha), an area roughly the  size of Kuwait, and destroyed 25 percent of the main rice crop in the world's  largest rice exporter

• A prominent physicist and skeptic of global  warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end,  he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

• Senator John McCain had even co-sponsored one of the first congressional bills to create a carbon cap-and-trade system. And it wasn't just McCain; Mitt Romney, runner-up for the GOP nomination last time around, supported a regional cap-and-trade program while he was governor of Massachusetts.
• you can't find a Republican presidential candidate who unequivocally believes in climate science, let alone one who wants to do anything about it.
• Perry, who told voters in New Hampshire over the weekend that "I don't believe manmade global warming is settled in science enough."
• it's worse when they refuse even to believe that a problem exists — despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that says it does. One of America's major political parties has, in effect, adopted denial as policy.
• denialism exists in part because there has been a long-term, well-financed effort on the part of conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science
• The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine
• Exxon and Peabody Energy
• Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity
• All of the naysayers seem to be following the playbook written by the tobacco industry in its long, ongoing war against medical findings about the dangers of smoking.
• don't straight-up refute the science, just raise skepticism and insist that the findings are "unsettled" and that "more research" is necessary
• denial makes Americans "look like a joke,
• climate science has become less about the science than about establishing a cultural identity — you're a denier or a believer depending on whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, just like you're a Yankees or a Red Sox fan depending on whether you're from New York City or Boston. Of course, polarization is harmless in sports — and indeed, it can be essential to the fun. It's insanity as a basis for complex public policy.
• we find it too easy to disregard very clear science — and disregard our long-term health — in order to satiate our immediate desires.
• There's no excuse for the sort of half-fictions and outright lies that too often make up the climate-change-denial machine, but it's human psychology — as much as politics — that's preventing us from dealing with one of the greatest threats the species faces.

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• The ants are probably native to South America,
• Now they're making their way through parts of the Southeast

• Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in new research.

• Scambos said the loss of the Arctic shelves is significant because they are old and their rapid loss underscores the severity of the warming trend scientists see now relative to past fluctuations such as the Medieval Warm Period or the warmer times in the pre-Current Era (B.C.).
• Between 1906 and 1982, there has been a 90 percent reduction in the areal extent of ice shelves along the entire coastline

• Copland said mean winter temperatures have risen by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade for the past five to six decades on northern Ellesmere Island.

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• the "greenhouse effect" is real and is happening.
• Polls find a widening Republican-Democratic gap on climate.
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money
• Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.
• Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
• carbon dioxide traps heat
• Temperatures were rising
• scientists studied Greenland's buried ice for clues to past climate,
• global warming had begun
• That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products
• an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact," oil executive William F. O'Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted
• to 369 parts per million - just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted - compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution
• The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record
• t hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles,
• ntual large
• The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests
• , glaciers are shrinkin
• ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere
• oceans are turning more acidic
• coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.
• Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040,
• permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
• methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane
• Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt.
• They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.
• scient
• "Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate
• climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry' parts of the United States."

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• Scientists want to install a stadium-size blimp 12 miles above Earth to pump out sunlight-reflecting particles — much like a volcano

• "It's a long-term change in Arctic climate."
• 36 percent below the average minimum
• The University of Bremen in Germany, which uses a different satellite sensor and has been monitoring levels since 2003, reported last week that this year's sea ice actually fell below the record set in 2007.

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• Oklahoma's average statewide temperature of 89 was the highest ever recorded for any state.
• worst in U.S. history. With punishing blizzards, epic flooding, devastating drought and a widespread heat wave,
• climatologists warn, get used to it.

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• also said he does not know if human activity is the primary cause of climate change and does not favor spending heavily on climate solutions.
• n June, a day after launching his second bid for the White House, Romney caused a stir by saying he thought humans had contributed to climate change to some extent.
• A Romney aide said the candidate has not altered his position on climate change

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• does not believe in manmade global warming, calling it a scientific theory that has not been proven

• more than $1 billion in damage.

• 17 percent increase over the previous month
• 312.6 square kilometers (120 square miles) were destroyed in June
• Massive deforestation has made Brazil one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters

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• Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming

• transplanting struggling species to new habitats

• "Dirty Dozen" chemicals, including the notoriously toxic DDT, are being freed from Arctic sea ice and snow through global warming