We are deeply indebted to Ram Dass, also known as Richard Alpert. We are indebted to him for his immense courage with psychedelics, for the deep wisdom he brought back from his journeys to the East, and especially for his enlightening concept of being in the here and the now.

This place in The Caldron is dedicated both to Ram Dass and to being in the here and the now. Let's keep it flowing, folks. Keep sending in your submissions, and we will keep posting them just as soon as we get them.

Countdown to Global Catastrophe

Climate change: report warns point of no return may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages.

The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.

The report, Meeting The Climate Challenge, is aimed at policymakers in every country, from national leaders down. It has been timed to coincide with Tony Blair's promised efforts to advance climate change policy in 2005 as chairman of both the G8 group of rich countries and the European Union.

And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming, that is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream.

The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate. But it points out that global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then, with more rises already in the pipeline - so the world has little more than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is reached.

More ominously still, it assesses the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere after which the two-degree rise will become inevitable, and says it will be 400 parts per million by volume (ppm) of CO2.

The current level is 379ppm, and rising by more than 2ppm annually - so it is likely that the vital 400ppm threshold will be crossed in just 10 years' time, or even less (although the two-degree temperature rise might take longer to come into effect).

"There is an ecological time bomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe. It was assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Centre for American Progress in the US, and The Australia Institute.The group's chief scientific adviser is Dr. Rakendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report urges all the G8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and to double their research spending on low-carbon energy technologies by 2010. It also calls on the G8 to form a climate group with leading developing nations such as India and China, which have big and growing CO2 emissions.

"What this underscores is that it's what we invest in now and in the next 20 years that will deliver a stable climate, not what we do in the middle of the century or later," said Tom Burke, a former government adviser on green issues who now advises business.

The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the threshold. "Beyond the 2 degrees C level, the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly," it says.

"It is likely, for example, that average-temperature increases larger than this will entail substantial agricultural losses, greatly increased numbers of people at risk of water shortages, and widespread adverse health impacts. [They] could also imperil a very high proportion of the world's coral reefs and cause irreversible damage to important terrestrial ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest."

It goes on: "Above the 2 degrees level, the risks of abrupt, accelerated, or runaway climate change also increase. The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 metres over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon."

(By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
(c)2005 Independent News & Media, 24 January 2005, (UK) Ltd.)

First Concrete Global Warming Proof Emerges From Ocean

The first piece of clear evidence proving that human-produced global warming exists has been unveiled by top scientists in the US this week.

Experts at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California and their colleagues claim that their study, which clearly shows that human activity has caused the world's oceans to warm up, will remove much of the uncertainty hanging over the global warming debate.

Lead researchers Tim Barnett and David Pierce used a combination of computer models and real-world "observed" data to capture signals of warming in the oceans caused by greenhouse gases.

But the results, the authors say, clearly demonstrate that the warming is caused anthropogenically, or through human activities.

For the study, warming in the world's oceans was measured over the last 40 years. In all the ocean basins, the warming signal found in the upper 700 metres predicted by the models corresponded to the measurements obtained at sea with confidence exceeding 95%.

The correspondence was particularly strong in the upper 500 metres of the water column, which led the scientists to conclude that the warming was the product of human influence.

Efforts to explain the ocean changes through naturally occurring variations in the climate or external forces, such as solar or volcanic factors, did not come close to reproducing the observed warming.

"This is perhaps the most compelling evidence yet that global warming is happening right now and it shows that we can successfully simulate its past and likely future evolution," Dr. Barnett said, adding that he was stunned by the results, which clearly showed the penetration of the warming signal in all the oceans.

"The statistical significance of these results is far too strong to be merely dismissed and should wipe out much of the uncertainty about the reality of global warming."

According to Dr. Barnett, the climate mechanisms behind the ocean study will soon produce huge changes both on land and in the atmosphere. In the decades immediately ahead, these changes will be felt not just internationally but on a regional level.

Water supplies will be impacted by accelerated glacier melting, and millions of people will be put at risk without adequate summertime water. One model also predicted that climate change would likely alter western snow pack resources in the western states of America, as well as its hydrological cycle, causing a water crisis within 20 years.

"The ocean study, taken together with the numerous validations of the same models in the atmosphere, portends far broader changes," Dr. Barnett continued. "Other parts of the world will face similar problems to those expected, and being observed now, in the western US."

He said that this breakthrough evidence must not be ignored by world leaders, especially those currently not putting climate change at the top of their agenda, like best friends to the polluting industries President Bush and Australian Premier John Howard.

"These scenarios have such a high probability of actually happening that they need to be taken very seriously by decision makers," he warned.

(By Jane Kettle, at www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=9563, 18 Feb, 2005)

Disaster Looms for Amazon
Scientists: Rain Forest Destruction Amplifies Itself

Santarem, Brazil - As the light plane banked left, the smell of smoke reached the cockpit. The landscape below was an ashen green, the sun above an orange glow behind sooty billows of grey.

The Amazon forest was burning, and it was more than a sign of human encroachment. It was also the sight and scent of a dangerous chemistry, of tons of carbon dioxide - transformed from wood and leaf - rising into an atmosphere already loaded with it.

Satellite reconnaissance showed that 600 fires were started in the region each day on average last year, the Brazillian government reports. The rate of destruction has almost doubled in the past decade, to 9000 square miles over 12 months in 2003-2004 - an area about the size of New Hampshire.

Forest is being destroyed by cattle ranchers, by landless peasants slashing and burning to create cropland, by illegal lumbering, and increasingly by large agribusinesses planting lucrative soybean. The fires seen everywhere from the air outside Santarem, a rough-edged town 500 miles up the Amazon from the Atlantic, were mostly set to create giant fields of soy.

The government's own plans to pave 2,100 miles of additional road through the wilderness could lead to clearing up to 70,000 square miles of forest in 30 years, it was estimated by Fearnside's Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

What might this mean in a time of climate change?

Worldwide deforestation is now believed to contribute less than 20 percent of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide, said Artaxo, of Brazil's University of San Paulo. And the Amazon forest is believed to remain a "sink" - still absorbing slightly more carbon than it emits.

But scientists say the feedback loop of a warming world might change that picture in mere decades.

For one thing, computer modeling foresees a warmer Pacific Ocean stirring more frequent and intense El Ninos, the climate phenomenon that tends to dry the eastern Amazon. Rising temperature themselves would also help dry vegetation. In addition, deforested terrain sends less moisture - via plants' "evapotranspiration" - into the air to fall as rain. Dead trees would then add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, further heightening warming in a destructive cycle.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U. N. organized science network, concluded in its latest assessment that the remaining Amazon "is threatened by the combination of human disturbance, increases in fire frequency and scale, and decreased precipitation from evapotranspiration loss, global warming and El Nino."

(Excerpts from an article by Charles J. Hanley, for the Associated Press, in the Daily Camera, Sunday, February 13, 2005)

Scientists: Administration Stifles Inquiry
They Say Proven Research Is Being Ignored by Bush

Washington - The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush Administration, with fewer scientists heard in policy discussions and money for research and advanced training being cut, according to panelist at a national science meeting.

Speakers at the national meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science expressed concern Sunday that some scientists in key federal agencies are being ignored or even pressured to change study conclusions that don't support policy positions.

The speakers also said that Bush's proposed 2005 federal budget is slashing spending for basic research and reducing investments in education designed to produce to nation's future scientists.

And there also was concern that increased restrictions and requirements for obtaining visas is diminishing the flow to the U.S. of foreign-born science students who have long been a major part of the American research community.

Rosina Bierbaum, dean of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, said the Bush administration has cut scientists out of some of the policy-making processes, particularly on environmental issues. Issues on global warming, for instance, that achieved a firm scientific consensus in earlier years and are now being questioned by Bush policy makers. Proven, widely accepted research is being ignored or disputed, she said.

Government policy papers issued prior to the Bush years moved beyond questioning the validity of global warming science and addressed ways of confronting or dealing with climate change.

Under Bush, said Bierbaum, the questioning of the proven science has become more important than finding ways to cope with climate change.

One result of such actions, said Neal Frank of Rice University, a former director of the National Science Foundation, is that "we don't really have a policy right now to deal with what everybody agrees is a serious problem. Among scientists, said Frank, "there is quite a consensus in place that the Earth is warming and that humans are responsible for a considerable part of that" through the burning of fossil fuels.

And the science is clear, he said, that without action to control fossil fuel use, the warming will get worse and there will be climate events that "our species has not experienced before."

Asked for comment, White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said, "The president makes policy decisions based on what the best policies for the country are, not politics. People who suggest otherwise are ill-informed.

Kurt Gottfried of Cornell University and the Union of Concerned Scientist said a survey of scientist in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that about 42 percent said they felt pressured to not report publicly any findings that do not agree with Bush policies on endangered species. He said almost a third of the Fish and Wildlife researchers said they were even pressured not to express within the agency any views in conflict with the Bush policies.

Federal spending for research and development is significantly reduced under the propose 2005 Bush budget, the speakers said.

"Overall, the R&D budget is bad news," said Bierbaum. She said the National Science Foundation funds for graduate students and for kindergarten through high school education have been slashed.

NASA has gotten a budget boost, but most of the new money will be going to space shuttle, space station and Bush's plan to explore the moon and Mars. What is suffering is the space agency scientific research efforts, she said. "Moon and Mars is basically going to eat everybody's lunch," she said.

Frank said that Bush's moon and Mars exploration effort has not excited the public and has no clear goals or plans. He said Bush's Moon-Mars initiative "was poorly carried out and the budget is not there to do the job, so science (at NASA) will really get hurt."

(By Paul Recer, for the Associated Press, in the Daily Camera, February 21, 2005)