… agreement was finally reached in Bali. After an hours-long public standoff Saturday in which the unthinkable happened — boos and hisses at a treaty conference — the world’s nations adopted a common two-year “road map” leading to the first comprehensive update to the ailing 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.The last update, the Kyoto Protocol, only binds three dozen industrialized countries to cut emissions, and many of the adherents are not on track to hit their targets by 2012, when its terms expire. The new agreement will likely lead to a future set of limits allowing Kyoto parties to keep on capping greenhouse-gas emissions and trading carbon credits.For those not affected by Kyoto’s limits, including the two giants in the global greenhouse — the United States and China — the timetable does not lock in any binding steps to cut emissions.[source: NYT]

More details here:Climate Change Deal Reached after US U-TurnBali negotiators reach agreement after U.S. ‘U-turn.’UN Conference Adopts Global Climate Plan

Despite the best efforts of the American and Chinese representatives, the Bali Climate conference may end up being something more than a huge waste of time.

The U.S. and Europe headed toward a compromise solution Friday at the U.N. climate conference, breaking a deadlock over how ambitious the goal should be in negotiating future cutbacks in global warming gases, the German environment minister said.”I think the situation is good and the climate in the climate conference is good, and we will have success in the end,” Sigmar Gabriel told reporters, declining to give details of the talks.The outcome may help determine how high the planet’s temperatures rise for decades to come.In the final day of the two-week conference, delegates sparred over the wording of a conference final document until 2:30 a.m. Drafters then retired to craft new formulations in contentious passages – notably the European Union’s suggestion of a goal of emissions reductions from 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.Trying to break the deadlock, Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar – the conference president – later proposed revised language dropping those mid-range numbers but still reaffirming that emissions should be reduced at least by half by 2050.

[source]

The University of East Anglia and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre have released their global temperature estimates for the present year, in preliminary form.IT turns out that this is the seventh warmest year since 1850. Furthermore, the eleven warmest years since 1850 have all occurred during the last 13 years.In other words, it is now .. this year, this decade, this month, etc. … the warmest it has been since we’ve started keeping direct temperature records.Even conditions that tend to cool the atmosphere, such as the La Nina event we are currently experiencing, have not caused a weakening in this trend.You can get all the info referred to here.

Ohio State University geologists and their colleagues have uncovered evidence of when Earth may have first supported an oxygen-rich atmosphere similar to the one we breathe today.The study suggests that upheavals in the earth’s crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that cooled the world’s oceans, spawned giant plankton blooms, and sent a burst of oxygen into the atmosphere.

read the press release.

But not a lot worse. Just as we are hearing that the current hurricane season, just winding down, was not as bad as it could have been, we also have this:

More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study that largely blamed global warming.

[source]

It’s freek’n Eight Freekn’ Degrees Outside! Fahrenheit! OK, that’s all for now. I’ll be OK. It has been a warm fall and this comes as a bit of a shock. I’ll get over it. I was kinda hopin’, you know, with global warming and all, but, well, whatever.Hey, hosers, the ice is gonna be good this year, don’t ya think?

This is the seventh in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming. This installment is about sea level rise and fall, in the past. Sea level change that results from the formation and melting of glaciers not only has an enormous impact on the physical nature of the landscape, but it also would not have gone unnoticed by people living ever pretty far from the sea!With large amounts of the world’s water trapped in glaciers (mainly continental glaciers), the sea level drops. When that ice melts, the sea level rises.As you know, the earth is covered by two kinds of surface: Continents, which are relatively tall and buoyant and which have a tendency to move around, and sea floor, which is structurally different from the continents. But if you look at the oceans, you will see that they cover both sea floor and parts of the continents. The parts of the continents that are covered by sea floor are typically referred to as “continental shelf.” All this … this continental shelf … really is the edge of the continents themselves that happen at the moment to be covered with the sea. There are places, like the coast of California, where there is no shelf, and other places, like the coast of New England, much of the Caribbean and large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, that have extensive shelf. If you removed all the water from this shelf, you could fit a couple of more New England states between Boston (now on the coast) and the new coast line. Continue reading Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 07 ~ Sea Level Change →

This is the sixth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming. In the last post in this series I talked about two aspects of large scale climate change: Milankovitch orbital geometry and the cycles of glaciation this effect causes, and the role of plate tectonics and related changes in altering sea and air currents, which in turn determine a great deal about climate change as well.Now I want to have a quick look at a single glacial cycle (the most recent one of many), and one way in which the cycle is observed in the ancient record, identified, measured, and described.As discussed earlier, we know that glaciations (glacial cycles, or “ice ages”) involve the formation of large continental glaciers, which are in turn made of accumulated precipitation (snow), most of which ultimately comes from the oceans via evaporation. So as water is transferred from the oceans to the land-based glaciers, the glaciers build up and sea level goes down.Since water can be made of either lighter or heavier isotopes of oxygen, and the lighter-isotope water evaporates more easily, the glaciers are isotropically light. This means, in turn, that the oceans are isotropically heavy. This isotopic bias is preserved in the hard parts of marine organisms that use oxygen from sea water as part of their growth process. Continue reading Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 06 ~ A Glacial Cycle →

This is the fifth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming. During the 1970s and 80s, creationists had a long list of reasons to doubt evolution, and every one of those reasons was wrong. But they had so many reasons, and it was so hard to keep track of them all, each with various versions, that a creationist that was trying to not live a lie could convince themselves that they had an honest dispute with evolutionary biology. But if you sat down and looked at every detail, “creation science” could be shown to be nothing more than a big bag of falsehoods. So to continue to be a creationist you had to be willing to live that lie.Then intelligent design creationism came along. IDC does not require that you have a long list of lies. Instead, you have one single great big lie that can’t be disproved (and is utterly unrelated to science, and in fact, can’t be proven, either). Continue reading Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 05 ~ Causes of Large Scale Change →