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breathing is dangerous

“The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and is being officially classified as carcinogenic to humans, the World Health Organization's cancer agency said on Thursday. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cited data indicating that in 2010, 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide resulted from air pollution, and said there was also convincing evidence it increases the risk of bladder cancer.”
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“But although both the composition and levels of air pollution can vary dramatically from one location to the next, IARC said its conclusions applied to all regions of the world. "Our conclusion is that this is a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths," Dr. Christopher Wild, director of IARC, told the news briefing in Geneva.”

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the end of recurrent ice ages?

Humans solve a desperate problem which has dogged them since homo sapiens arose.

“The Earth has not seen these levels of carbon dioxide in 3 million to 5 million years, long before humans existed, when temperatures were several degrees warmer and the sea level was 20 metres to 40 metres higher than today, experts say.”

lovelock rages againt watermelons and their windmills

“Lovelock is objecting to a "medium sized" (240ft high) erection planned for his neighbourhood in North Devon by infamous windfarm operator Ecotricity. The UK currently has 3,000 onshore turbines and 6,000 are planned: this is the main reason why electricity bills are soaring out of control in order to pay for the inefficient, highly expensive windmills. Lovelock calls the runaway windmill building "industrial vandalism".

“In an objection to the planning application made to Tiverton council, Lovelock points out that one nuclear power station provides as much power as 3,200 industrial wind turbines, without the environmental damage. In fact, he seems to be understating the case: we would calculate* one nuclear powerplant as equivalent to 5,400 wind towers of the sort discussed above.”

He concludes:
“I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need to take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.”
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“The USA has cut CO2 emissions drastically over three years, thanks to the switch from coal to gas. Gas therefore provides greenhouse gas abatement at about one tenth of the cost of wind power. Scaling back the renewable energy strategy would also inject a much-needed £120bn into the economy.”

there is no global warming, ‘important’ people say so

Listen to the important persons like Christopher Booker, ‘Lord’ Lawson, ‘Senator’ Inhofe, ‘Lord’ Monckton and James Delingpole.

“They found that as temperatures warmed over the last 161 years, the date of first blooms of the season crept forward, too — about 10 days earlier than when Thoreau first visited the site. During the record-breaking years of 2010 and 2012, flowering happened a full 20 to 21 days earlier. The average spring temperature at Walden Pond has increased about 6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.4 degrees Celsius) since Thoreau's time.

“Similarly, at The Shack, as average spring temperatures rose about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 degrees Celsius) over the last eight decades, first flowering came a week early for the 23 species they studied. During the hottest years in the United States (2010 and 2012), flowering came 24 days earlier than in Leopold's time.” [Quoted from livescience.com]

“Soot created by the incomplete burning of fossil fuels and organic matter is the second most important man-made substance behind global warming and reducing its emission into the atmosphere could buy valuable time in tackling climate change, a major study has found. New estimates of how much soot, or “black carbon” as it is known by scientists, is released into the atmosphere show that it causes about twice as much warming as previously believed. Cutting emissions could help to cool the planet, scientists said.” [Quoted from independent.co.uk]

Red Ed Miliband was socialist minister for energy and climate change [2008-2010]. He dishonestly claimed the UK was on track for its emissions reduction. In fact, he was presiding over off-shoring from UK industry to China and India. There, energy is used about 5 to 10 times less efficiently. Of course, Ed Milband, being a socialist, probably believes the UK atmosphere is protected by the English Channel!

related material
anthropogenic global warming, and ocean acidity
global warming
sceptics hall of shame! [This page is useable, but not brilliant.]

west antarctica also warming faster than global average - allegedly

“A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.”

melting ice and thermal expansion

“The rate of ice sheet losses determined by the study falls within the range reported in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Researchers say, however, that their estimates are more than twice as accurate as the IPCC’s estimates because of the addition of more satellite data. Melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica contributed 0.44 inches to global sea levels since 1992. Ice sheet losses account for one-fifth of all sea level rise over the 20-year survey period. Thermal expansion of the warming ocean, melting of mountain glaciers and small Arctic ice caps and groundwater mining account for the rest.”
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“ “Both ice sheets appear to be losing more ice now than 20 years ago, but the pace of ice loss from Greenland is extraordinary, with nearly a five-fold increase since the mid-1990s,” said Erik Ivins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “In contrast, the overall loss of ice in Antarctica has remained fairly constant, with the data suggesting a 50-percent increase in Antarctic ice loss during the last decade.” ” [Quoted from thespacereporter.com]

Climate sensitivity to CO₂ increase item worth a quick scan:

“...Some responses to rising temperatures are fairly rapid, such as the loss of snow cover (which has a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back to space). Others are far more gradual. Oceans, for example, act as a giant heat sink that can slow down any warming for centuries. That makes nailing down the long-term equilibrium response very difficult. As the authors put it, "the timescales to reach this [climate] equilibrium are long, so... the forcing normally changes before equilibrium is reached."
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"Extending the analysis out to 65 million years, the authors calculate that there's about a 70 percent probability the IPCC has it right. More specifically, their 68 percent confidence range ran from 2.2 to 4.8 K; the 95 percent confidence interval was a bit broader, but it encompassed the IPCC's range.

“More disturbingly, however, they calculate that we can go back to roughly when the dinosaurs died off and not see another period like the present: "Present-day atmospheric GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations and the radiative perturbation due to anthropogenic emissions increase much faster than observed for any natural process within the Cenozoic era.” [Quoted fromarstechnica.com]

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