Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NASA said. That was despite the presence of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly.

The world’s average global temperature is now 1.1 C to 1.2 C higher than in pre-industrial times.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it had ranked 2022 as the sixth warmest since 1880. European Union scientists this week said 2022 was the fifth warmest year in their records.

Climate assessments produce slightly different rankings depending on the data sources used and the way records account for minor data alterations over time, for example, a weather station being moved to a new location.

NASA said temperatures were increasing by more than 0.2 C per decade, putting the world on track to blow past the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 1.5 C to avoid its most devastating consequences.

“At the rate that we’re going, it’s not going to take more than two decades to get us to that. And the only way that we’re not going to do that is if we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Schmidt said he expected 2023 to be slightly warmer than 2022, due to a weaker La Nina cooling phenomenon.

“The global mean temperature will be even higher in 10 years from now,” said ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne, adding that unless countries stopped burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels temperatures would continue to climb.

Weather extremes

The changing climate fuelled weather extremes across the planet in 2022. Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, while in Pakistan floods killed 1,700 people and wrecked infrastructure, drought ravaged crops in Uganda and wildfires ripped through Mediterranean countries.

Despite most of the world’s major emitters pledging to eventually slash their net emissions to zero, global CO2 emissions continue to rise.

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere last year reached levels not experienced on earth for three million years, Schmidt said.

At this year’s COP28 climate conference, countries will formally assess their progress towards the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C goal — and the far faster emissions cuts needed to meet it.

COP28 host the United Arab Emirates on Thursday appointed the head of its state-owned oil company as president of the conference, sparking concerns among campaigners and scientists about the fossil fuel industry’s influence in the talks.

— Kate Abnett is Reuters’ European climate and energy correspondent in Brussels.

The post Last year tied as world’s fifth-warmest on record, U.S. scientists say appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“Agriculture is a unique sector,” University of B.C. Professor Navin Ramankutty said earlier this month during this year’s edition of the Bentley Lecture in Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Alberta.

“Agriculture is a contributor to climate change, as well as a solution to and a victim of climate change.”

On the one hand, a warming planet means farming in more northern climes may get a boost, said Ramankutty, a Canada Research Chair whose work focuses on global agriculture and food security.

“In warmer regions like the tropics, crops might fail as it is too hot for them,” he said. “Colder regions may benefit because there might be fewer frosts and a longer growing season. Places like Canada and Russia may benefit from climate change.”

But a longer growing season doesn’t do you much good if growing conditions are poor, and there’s evidence that could be the case.

As temperatures go up, so does the rate of evapotranspiration, which means soil dries out more quickly. But overall rainfall doesn’t go up — although some places see more rain, others less.

Moreover, extreme weather is expected to occur more frequently, with drought and heat waves greatly affecting yields.

As well, warmer weather may not only mean more insect infestations but more severe ones.

“When it is warmer, pests are more active,” said Ramankutty. “I’ve said that crop production in the temperature zone might benefit from climate change, but so might the pests.”

Some research has estimated that for each degree of warming, yield loss because of pests would increase by 10 to 25 per cent.

These sorts of gradual changes may not seem important right now, especially if your focus is on this season’s crops, he said.

“If you’re a farmer, you’re not thinking about gradual changes in temperatures — it’s a frost or a heat wave that matters,” he said.

But hidden behind yield gains generated from better varieties and improved production practices are losses from a changing climate, he said.

“Just from 1980 to 2008, we’ve established losses of maize (corn) of about four per cent and wheat by about four per cent globally,” he said, adding rice and soy yields also fell during that time frame, but not as dramatically.

“Climate change is here and it’s already affecting crop production. This is not something of the future, this is something that is happening over the last 20 years.”

Using historical data and sophisticated modelling, climate researchers are trying to predict what might happen to crop yields in the future. One model predicts wheat and corn yields will drop by six to seven per cent for every degree the planet warms (with rice and soy losing two to three per cent of yield).

Some of those yield losses could be mitigated if farmers adjust seeding dates and use cultivars better adapted to warmer and drier conditions. That makes development of new cultivars key, said Ramankutty who has conducted a study looking at research and development funding and yields. He argued there is “a need for increased investment in some of the publicly funded crops like wheat.”

His research also looks at how agriculture on a global scale affects the environment. While that, too, is a complicated matter, there’s no doubt it does have a major impact.

For example, agriculture is a major contributor of the loss of biodiversity globally, he said.

“Sixty per cent of the threat to birds is due to habitat loss,” he said, adding agriculture is also the biggest consumer of water on the planet.

There is no silver bullet that will solve agricultural problems created by climate change, but farmers should be thinking about management practices that preserve the environment, Ramankutty said.

There are multiple methods of practising agriculture, and farmers may be able to mitigate some of the problems by making adaptations or adopting climate smart practices, which increase productivity while maintaining economic and environmental standards, he said.

The post The complicated calculus of climate change appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Those three words appeared in headlines in publications such as Time magazine, the National Post, and the Times of London. But the report itself said something different, said the science director of the Beef Cattle Research Council.

“They didn’t say, ‘Don’t eat meat’ — they said sustainable meat is an important part of the sustainable diet,” said Reynold Bergen. “The mainstream (media) didn’t pick up on that. It’s a 1,000-page report and I doubt many people actually read it.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created to be the gold standard when it comes to factual, solidly documented and non-partisan information on global warming. Its latest report — titled Climate Change and Land and prepared by 107 experts from 52 countries — does draw links between meat consumption, land use, and climate change.

“The implications of dietary choice can have severe consequences for land,” the report states. “For example… if every country were to adopt the U.K.’s 2011 average diet and meat consumption, 95 per cent of global habitable land area would be needed for agriculture — up from 50 per cent of land currently used. For the average U.S. diet, 178 per cent of global land would be needed.”

In addition to pointing out it would take a massive expansion of livestock production if everyone on the planet ate as much meat as the average American, the report also says beef production produces more emissions than pork or poultry.

But again, the production system is key.

“Some dietary choices require more land and water, and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others,” said Debra Roberts, one of the co-chairs of the panel’s trio of working groups.

“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change.”

The key word here is ‘sustainable,’ said Bergen.

“The good news for Canada is the beef that we produce is as sustainable as any place in the world,” he said. “Beef does produce greenhouse gases. But not all beef from all places in the world is equal. Canada is a world leader in producing low-carbon beef.”

But John Basarab, a senior research scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, said the panel is off the mark in putting livestock production of any sort into the climate change spotlight.

The majority of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by burning hydrocarbons, said Basarab, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta.

“We are taking carbon that has been in the (ground) for hundreds of years, burning it in an inefficient process, and increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere — and yet cattle get blamed as the major contributors to greenhouse gas,” he said.

He said scientists and climatologists at the University of California, Davis calculated that if all cattle production in the entire U.S. was eliminated, it would only reduce American greenhouse gas emissions by two per cent.

“It was almost zero, it would have relatively no impact,” said Basarab. “All of the business of cattle being the major contributors to greenhouse gas does not stand up to scientific evidence.

“This is becoming more clear and I don’t know why the UN or politicians in our own country are taking this line.”

In fact, the parts of the climate change panel’s report that prompted the ‘eat less meat’ headlines were largely from the chapter on food security. That section dealt with topics such as land degradation and the loss of productive soil — issues that not only threaten the global food supply but cause more carbon to be released into the atmosphere.

“Human diets can impact global warming and so they were encouraging a shift towards less carbon-intensive diets,” said Bergen. “But when we are encouraging people to shift their diets, we need to be really aware of how that can impact land use and land exchange.

“They don’t want to see the Brazilian rainforest levelled because the consequences of that would be way worse than a dietary change.”

Feeding the world itself is going to be more and more difficult as global warming increases, the reports states. It says more than 800 million people are malnourished (versus two billion who are overweight or obese) and that number will jump in the years ahead because of crop failures caused by heat or drought and less productivity, particularly in tropical regions.

The panel’s report says a multi-pronged approach will be needed to counter that threat. Along with “sustainable diets,” the amount of food loss and waste — estimated at about 30 per cent of food production — needs to be slashed.

On the other hand, it says, food production will have to become more resilient. The keys to that are increasing soil organic matter (and reducing erosion), improved land management (both for crops and livestock), and “genetic improvements for tolerance to heat and drought.”

The post UN report on livestock and climate change gets lost in translation appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Climate change is not a new phenomenon. The definition is basically changes in wind patterns, temperature and precipitation that stretches over several decades. With that definition in mind, climate change has been an ongoing challenge for farmers and society throughout history.

Today’s advocates for radical change are quick to point to slight emitters such as cattle and cars. While it is true that all we do in this modern age of using fossil fuel will contribute to weather disruption, there is little discussion on natural or massive events that changed climate and history. This does not always mean that the world gets hot — it also could be cold.

• More with Brenda Schoepp: What’s in the engine room of your farm business?

In this 21st century there have been 87 volcano eruptions. It is well documented that volcanoes are huge disruptors of climate over a long period of time and generally have a cooling effect as millions of tons of ash and gases, especially sulphur dioxide, block or scatter the rays of the sun.

Interestingly, the eruption also releases tons of greenhouse gases and increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When this happens there are historical events of climate drought through cold or lack of rain tied to the volcanic activity. Other major events tied to volcanic activity include earthquakes and tsunamis — both of which have altering weather effects.

The retraction of ice is a fact and a serious consequence to polar ecology and to the air. The melting releases gases, particularly methane, into the atmosphere and is a major contributor of greenhouse gases. While the melt may open a shallow Arctic passage, the outcome is complicated by the traffic on the sea.

A large cargo ship at normal speed will burn between 150 tons to 350 tons of fuel per day with 52,000 cargo ships engaged globally each day. Yet commercial consumption is dwarfed by military fossil fuel use.

Eight active wars in the 21st century have contributed to climate change. Drought and famine are often followed by wartime activity as the environment is altered.

Excessive herbicide use by troops to clear areas, chemical warfare and the loss of life (both in terms of human life as well as those ecological residents such as fish, birds and mammals) all contribute to a release of gases and chemicals. War also creates gaps in nature. Once an area is radiated or even heated to extreme, it may not recover and life forms on that space are forever terminated or displaced.

Mining for munitions and munitions disposal are rarely discussed nor is resource mining for things of increased demand such as lithium (needed for batteries). Mining accounts for over 45 per cent of the world’s GDP. Mining and forestry (which employ more than 55 million people) are not facing the same pressure as agriculture because of the economic power they hold and the military investment in many areas to defend those activities. Rolling commercial deforestation which largely occurs in Europe (31 per cent), North America (28 per cent) and Asia (24 per cent) into agricultural activity, such as portrayed in Brazil, is inaccurate.

Space games and the busy load of traffic in our atmosphere are often out of sight and out of mind. More than 4,800 satellites orbit in space and just as many are floating as debris. Each time there is a space rocket launch, 11 million pounds of fuel are burned per second. One second is estimated to burn two million times more fuel than man will ever use in the family car and, I would suggest, an unmeasurable amount more than a herd or flock could ever release.

The testing of nuclear weapons for warfare is common practice. Of the more than 2,000 nuclear tests recorded over time, approximately 10 per cent were in the air (atmospheric) and both above and below ground release radioactive material. Temperature anomalies after nuclear activity are well documented.

My point is: We are not addressing the root of the problem, which is that the release of carbon dioxide is increasing in tandem with mining, war, volcanic activity, commercial deforestation, munitions manufacturing and testing, space travel, the burning of fossil fuels for military, and travel by land, air and sea. And largely through mining and forestry, the plants we need are being destroyed. There is a gross misunderstanding of the role of plants, food plants, ocean plants, grasses and trees in addressing carbon sequestration.

There is little evidence that agriculture is a major culprit. That does not, however, release agriculture of its responsibilities to be diligent at every juncture to reduce its environmental footprint.

The industry has the opportunity to lead on climate action and to drive significant change. Let us fund, promote and engage agriculture as the transformative, regenerative and restorative solution in times of climate change, because it is — at land and at sea, in times of peace and in conflict — and for all.

The post Many sources of greenhouse gases are being ignored appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The congressionally mandated report, written with the help of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies and departments, outlined the projected impact of global warming on every corner of U.S. society in a dire warning that is at odds with the Trump administration’s pro-fossil-fuels agenda.

“With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states,” the report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II, said.

Global warming would disproportionately hurt the poor, broadly undermine human health, damage infrastructure, limit the availability of water, alter coastlines, and boost costs in industries from farming, to fisheries and energy production, the report said.

But it added that projections of further damage could change if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply curbed, even though many of the impacts of climate change — including more frequent and more powerful storms, droughts and flooding — are already under way. “Future risks from climate change depend primarily on decisions made today,” it said.

The report supplements a study issued last year that concluded humans are the main driver of global warming and warned of catastrophic effects to the planet.

The studies clash with policy under President Donald Trump, who has been rolling back Obama-era environmental and climate protections to maximize production of domestic fossil fuels, including crude oil, already the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia.

White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the new report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario, which contradicts long-established trends by assuming that… there would be limited technology and innovation, and a rapidly expanding population.”

The government’s next update of the National Climate Assessment, she said, “gives us the opportunity to provide for a more transparent and data-driven process that includes fuller information on the range of potential scenarios and outcomes.”

Trump last year announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Deal agreed by nearly 200 nations to combat climate change, arguing the accord would hurt the U.S. economy and provide little tangible environmental benefit. Trump and several members of his cabinet have also repeatedly cast doubt on the science of climate change, arguing that the causes and impacts are not yet settled.

Environmental groups said the report reinforced their calls for the United States to take action on climate change.

“While President Trump continues to ignore the threat of climate change, his own administration is sounding the alarm,” said Abigail Dillen, president of environmental group Earthjustice.

“This report underscores what we are already seeing firsthand: climate change is real, it’s happening here, and it’s happening now.”

Previous research, including from U.S. government scientists, has also concluded that climate change could have severe economic consequences, including damage to infrastructure, water supplies and agriculture.

Severe weather and other impacts also increase the risk of disease transmission, decrease air quality, and can increase mental health problems, among other effects.

Thirteen government departments and agencies, from USDA to NASA, were part of the committee that compiled the new report.

The entire report can be viewed online.

— Writing for Reuters by Richard Valdmanis.

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The article’s title is entirely fitting because articles on climate change do indeed provoke some readers — because of their one-sided nature in favour of a belief in anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

I also agree with the author that this is an important issue, though for economic and political reasons rather than any dire natural or scientific implications.

“Believe” is a word that appears several times in this article and in similar articles about climate change. I do not wish to antagonize, but the use of these or similar words reflect a lack of understanding of the nature of science.

Science is based on testing and evidence rather than consensus and groupthink. An overwhelming majority of the plethora of climate models that have been put forth over the past 30 years overestimate the influence of changing CO2 levels on global temperature. The truth is that the globe has only experienced a warming of 0.7 C since the late 1970s when ‘scientific consensus’ was focused on concern about global cooling and a coming ice age.

When examining evidence from the distant and more recent past, it is easy to see that climate has always been changing and that those changes often occurred in opposition to the ‘CO2 drives global temperature’ hypothesis. Regarding scientific consensus and groupthink, there are many historical instances where such consensus and belief was wrong. As time goes by and atmospheric CO2 continues to rise with little or no significant change in global temperatures, the current societal paradigm on atmospheric CO2 is bound to change.

The other main point that I would like to address is the bold claim in the article that “the key point of those who believe (there’s that word again) in man-made climate change is that we are putting extreme amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and we need to reduce them.” Again, I disagree with the author: It is anything but extreme.

I call CO2 “the Rodney Dangerfield of Gases,” because it gets no respect. CO2 was at 278 parts per million (ppm) at the beginning of the industrial revolution and it is currently at 400 ppm. Historically, when vascular plants evolved approximately 400 million years ago, the CO2 concentration was between 3,000 and 4,000 ppm. That is over 12 times pre-industrial levels and close to 10 times current levels!

If you look at the photosynthesis reaction in plants as a biochemical reaction, you will notice that CO2 is a reactant and according to Le Chatelier’s principle, if you increase the concentration of a reactant (CO2 or water), you will get more product (oxygen and sugar). This proves true in plant physiology in the real world, as evidenced by the fact that greenhouses actively add CO2 to increase plant growth and crop yield.

Think about this: If we could turn the clock back and instantly dial CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels, global biomass growth and crop yields would instantly drop by about 25 per cent. On the flip side, if we could instantly increase CO2 to about 1,000 ppm (still only one-quarter or one-third of ancient levels), global biomass growth and crop yields would instantly increase by about 25 per cent.

This will sound sacrilegious to anthropogenic climate change advocates, but maybe it is time for a paradigm shift regarding current thought on atmospheric CO2 levels. If soil carbon is so wonderful (and it is!), why is atmospheric CO2 so terrible?

Maybe it is time to rethink shutting down the coal-fired power plants in Alberta if we can ensure that all NO2 and SO2 are scrubbed out. I am also weary with concern and obsession over CO2 emissions eclipsing real environmental issues such as surface and groundwater contamination, habitat destruction, and soil degradation.

In summary, I find it ironic that the author invokes and relates the idea of not talking about politics and religion to anthropogenic climate change. It is totally true!

The pressure for all of us to fall in line and attempts at propping up the failing anthropogenic climate change hypothesis have essentially created a new religion. Though climatology is a young field historically, proponents have been persistent and very successful in securing the ear of the political and cultural elite of the world. When you look at the Brexit vote results and the recent election to the south along with current events in European countries such as France, Britain, and even Germany, there is an increasingly larger percentage of the public that is no longer buying what they are selling.

Eric Neilson farms near Castor.

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At the time I emailed Masters asking permission to use some of the information from his blog in an article or two. I never did write the article back then, probably because I was too comfortable sitting on the public fence. In this article I will try to summarize the information, but if you are interested in reading the whole article, it can be found at the Wunderground website.

The idea of manufactured doubt began back in the mid-1950s when the tobacco industry started to realize it had a problem. More and more studies were coming out showing a link between smoking and lung cancer. The tobacco industry turned to a large public relations firm to come up with a campaign to convince the public that smoking was not dangerous. At the core of the campaign was the idea of developing research organizations controlled by the tobacco industry and designed and funded to produce science that emphasizes doubt about any negative research being published on the effects of tobacco.

• Read more: Articles on climate change provoke some readers

In the book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, author David Michaels wrote, “The industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain.”

Fast-forward 60 years and we still have most of the different doubt-manufacturing research organizations that sprung up back then. We also have new groups that label themselves as ‘think tanks.’ These groups have had decades to finely hone how these campaigns work and thanks in part to the Internet, it is now easier than ever to apply the tricks of these campaigns.

Here is how it works:

• Launch a public relations campaign disputing the evidence.
• Predict dire economic consequences and ignore the cost benefits of tackling the problem.
• Use non-peer-reviewed scientific publications or industry-funded scientists who don’t publish original peer-reviewed scientific work to support your point of view.
• Trumpet discredited scientific studies and myths supporting your point of view as scientific fact.
• Point to the substantial scientific uncertainty, and the certainty of economic loss if immediate action is taken.
• Use data from a local area to support your views, and ignore the global evidence.
• Disparage scientists, saying they are playing up uncertain predictions of doom in order to get research funding.
• Disparage environmentalists, claiming they are hyping environmental problems in order to further their ideological goals.
• Complain it is unfair to require regulatory action in your country, as it would put your nation at an economic disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.
• Claim that more research is needed before action should be taken.
• Argue that it is less expensive to live with the effects.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

What I find especially scary is the way the Internet is being used to help the manufactured doubt industry along, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. As a teacher, I constantly have to show students how to look at information on the Internet and determine whether the source is trustworthy.

Take the killer clown stories that were circulating last fall. I would continually have students tell me that killer clowns are real and that they have killed, 10, 20, 30 or more people. I would ask them how they know this and they would show me a website that reported it. I would then take the students through the process of looking at more than one website and finally pulling the truth of what is going on.

That is the problem

It often takes a lot of effort to find the truth. Almost anyone can make a website that looks professional and legitimate and then fill it full of anything they want with absolutely no regard for the truth. At first I figured only younger people like students would get caught in this web, but unless you have a lot of time on your hands to do extra research, all of us at different times can get caught.

The reality is that more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science in the major industrialized counties, have said humans are responsible for a majority of planetary warming experienced since the middle of the 20th century. There has been no debate in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for a very long time. If you have questions, www.skepticalscience.com is a great reference.

To sum it all up, all I want to say is: Think before you react, take the time to really look into a topic before making up your mind, and remember that your decisions are not just affecting your life, but the lives of countless others and generations that are hopefully still to come.

The post Doubt about global warming isn’t coming from scientists appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

What surprised me recently was the number of emails I received about the top weather events from around the world in 2016 — in particular, several from readers who accused me of leaning too heavily towards climate change or global warming events. The writers of these emails suggested that there really isn’t any global warming and these events are basically being blown out of proportion.

I’ll have to admit, if you routinely read my articles you have probably figured out that I am a firm believer in human-induced global warming/climate change. But I have never really written a full-blown article about it. In fact, I have been accused a few times of sitting on the fence a little too much on this topic.

• Read more: The top global weather stories of 2016 had a common theme

I think part of the reasoning behind my reluctance stems from call centre work I did early on in my career — a several-year stint working for AT&T doing Internet tech support. During our customer service training we were told to avoid three main topics when making small talk and to be careful with a fourth topic. Politics, religion, and sports were all taboo — it’s amazing how passionate and polarized people can be on those issues.

The final topic to be wary about was — you guessed it — the weather!

Although that seems safe enough, many people are quite passionate about the weather and perhaps even more importantly, many of our customers were American. If I talked about cold, snowy weather, it got customers asking where I was, and just like we are seeing in the U.S. today, some people didn’t like that I was a Canadian doing a job that they believed should be given to an American.

When we look at the issue of human-induced climate change, reactions are often similar to the taboo subjects I mentioned above. People tend to get quite passionate and when people get passionate about a subject, reasoning often disappears.

So before I turn off too many readers I will begin with my ending. It is often stated that we should think about future generations when making decisions, though that is easier said than done. Too many people think only about their small part of the world and how they can get the most out of it. I think we need to take a page out of many indigenous cultures where they have a history of not just thinking about the next generation, but thinking five to seven generations down the road when making big decisions.

Just imagine how our world would be if we all thought that way? When you think about it, I don’t think there is a successful farmer out there who doesn’t think like this when it comes to how to take care of the land. No farmer tries to make the most money out of their land in one or two years and to heck with the future. Yet when it comes to other natural resources, it often seems like this is the thought process.

So, what does that have to do with global warming? Well, let’s say for the sake of argument, that the three per cent of scientists who do not believe in human-induced climate change are correct. The key point of those who believe in man-made climate change is that we are putting extreme amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and we need to reduce them. This means we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels as our main source of energy. This idea seems to strike fear into many Canadians as we are an oil-exporting country, but I see this as a win-win for us. The need for fossil fuels will not disappear any time soon, even if we see rapid and significant breakthroughs in alternative energy sources. We should embrace and invest in these new technologies which will then allow us to leverage our fossil fuels reserves over a much longer time frame. Anyway, I’m starting to rant, so back to global warming.

If we happen to be wrong, but we take action anyway, the worst that happens is we clean up our planet. We have to transition to new forms of energy soon as fossil fuels will not last that much longer. I’m not denying there will be some pains along the way, but think about what will happen if the 97 per cent of scientists are correct. We will continue to see a steady increase in global temperatures, and the extreme weather events that go with them.

This does not mean everyone will see warmer temperatures or that every day, month, or year. That is not how it works, yet it is the No. 1 argument I hear.

Again, you have to look at the big picture, not just your own backyard, relatively speaking. A warming planet will lead to more droughts along with extreme rain and snow events (again, not everywhere and not at once). If we look back at history, the No. 1 event that has led to massive upheavals of populations and which often results in wars or large-scale movements of refugees is climate change.

Next time we’ll continue our look into this and explore how the anti-global warming movement uses selected and sometimes “alternative facts” (sound familiar) and has used the tobacco industry’s propaganda model in the development of its own campaign.

The post Articles on climate change provoke some readers appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Some freak weather events would have happened naturally but the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said greenhouse gas emissions had raised the risks of extreme events, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more.

“We just had the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Among the worst extremes, a 2011-12 drought and famine in the Horn of Africa killed more than 250,000 people and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines killed 7,800 in 2013, the WMO said.

Superstorm Sandy caused $67 billion of damage in 2012, mostly in the United States, it said in a report issued to a meeting of almost 200 nations in Morocco tasked with implementing a 2015 global agreement to combat climate change.

The last five-year period beat 2006-10 as the warmest such period since records began in the 19th century.

The heat was accompanied by a gradual rise in sea levels spurred by melting glaciers and ice sheets. The changes “confirmed the long-term warming trend caused by greenhouse gases,” the WMO said of the report.

And the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, reached 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in records in 2015, it said.

Last year was the first in which temperatures were one degrees Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, partly because of an El Nino weather event that warmed the Pacific.

The 2015 Paris Agreement set an overriding target of limiting warming to “well below” 2 degrees C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, ideally just 1.5 (2.7F).

But pledges so far to curb greenhouse gas emissions are too weak and put the globe on target for about 3C (5.4F), U.N. data show. The Marrakesh meeting is trying to work out ways to step up actions and write rules for the Paris Agreement.

Getting on track “means a global transformation” of the world economy to cleaner energies in sectors from energy to transport, Moroccan Environment Minister Hakima El Haite told Reuters.

The post Last five years were hottest on record appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Examining long-term trends for ice floating on the ocean since the 1950s, scientists in Germany and the United States projected the ocean around the North Pole would be ice-free in summers by the mid-2040s at current levels of emissions.

In the historical records, they found that every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere meant on average the loss of three square metres of ice in September, when the ice reaches a minimum extent before expanding in winter.

That made it possible to “grasp the contribution of personal carbon dioxide emissions to the loss of Arctic sea ice,” scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote in the journal Science.

Each passenger taking a return flight from New York to Europe, or driving a gasoline car 4,000 kms, would emit about a tonne of carbon dioxide, they estimated.

A long-term retreat of Arctic sea ice is already causing profound changes, disrupting the lives of indigenous peoples while opening the region to more oil and gas exploration and shipping.

Scientists usually deal in more abstract terms such as billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases. “Here it’s more personal,” lead author Dirk Notz of the Max Planck Institute told Reuters.

Some other scientists said the study was simplistic.

“This sounds like a rather crude equation,” Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, told Reuters.

He said ice could disappear from the Arctic Ocean as early as 2017 or 2018 because of other factors triggered by man-made climate change, such as shifts in winds and rising sea temperatures.

In September 2016, sea ice shrank to an annual minimum extent of 4.14 million square kilometres (1.60 million square miles), matching 2007 as the second smallest in the satellite record behind 2012.

The study said goals set under the 2015 Paris Agreement for curbing emissions were insufficient to avert the loss of ice.

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