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 receive them.

Saying It Like It Is

Of Course, many people claim not to be convinced by this so-called climate change evidence. That is because they are shortsighted sociopathic morons who don't want to lose any money. (Bruce Sterling, 1998, quoted in Elizabeth Bear's book, Hammered, p. 99.)

Climate Model Predicts Greater Melting, Submerged Cities

Over the past 30 years, temperatures in the Arctic have been creeping up, rising half a degree Celsius with attendant increases in glacial melting and decreases in sea ice. Experts predict that at current levels of greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide alone is at 375 parts per million - the earth may warm by as much as five degrees Celsius, matching conditions roughly 130,000 years ago. Now a refined climate model is predicting, among other things, sea level rises of as much as 20 feet, according to research results published today in the journal Science.

Modeler Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona matched results from the Community Climate System Model and climate records preserved in ice cores, exposed coral reefs, fossilized pollen and the chemical makeup of shells to determine the accuracy of the computer simulation. Roughly 130,000 the Arctic enjoyed higher levels of solar radiation, leading to increased warming in the summer and the retreat of glaciers worldwide. The model correctly predicted the extent of the resulting Arctic ice melt, enough to raise sea levels by roughly nine feet.

"Getting the past climate change correct in these models gives us more confidence in their ability to predict future climate change," Otto-Bliesner says. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

But sea levels rose as much as 20 feet 130,000 years ago and Overpeck speculates that may have been the result of additional melting in Antarctica. After all, the ice there is not alllandlocked; some rests in the ocean and a little warming in sea temperatures could melt it or pry it loose. And this time around, the warming is global, rather than concentrated in the Arctic. "In the Antarctic, all you have to do is break up the ice sheet and float it away and that would raise sea level," he says. "It's just like throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a full glass of water and watching the water spill over the top."

Such a sea level rise would permanently inundate low-lying lands like New Orleans, southern Florida, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Already sea level rise has increased to an inch per decade, thanks to melting ice and warm water expansion, according to Overpeck. And evidence that the Arctic is exponentially warming continues to accumulate. Indeed, in another paper in the same issue of Science, Goran Ekstrom of Harvard University reported a marked increase in so-called glacial earthquakes (seismic events recorded throughout the world when Greenland's glaciers slip past rock) since 2002. In fact, last year alone saw twice as many quakes as in previous years, with most of that increase coming during the summer months.

"We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade," Overpeck says. "If we don't do something soon, we're committed to [13 to 20 feet] of sea level rise in the future."

(David Biello, Scientific American, March 24, 2006.)

Insurance Industry Feels the Heat of Global Warming

Neither Tim Wagner nor Mike Kreidler imagined how climate change would intrude into state insurance regulation. Wagner, the director of the Nebraska Department of Insurance, said the reality is literally pelting him.

"While you can't correlate it directly, in the Plains states we've had severe droughts," Wagner, 63, said over the telephone. "We've had fires in Texas and Oklahoma. There's a terrible drought in Arizona right now. When we get rain, we seem to get more and more severe hail. I just drove to Kansas City. My nephew is in Iraq and we went to see his family. Our brand-new car got pummeled while it was parked in north Kansas City. We didn't lose any glass, but plastic parts of the car rack and a piece of the bumper was hanging off. I don't think I remember being in a hail storm like that in my lifetime."

Kreidler, 62, the Washington State insurance commissioner, has seen his Pacific Northwest weather go from a drought emergency last winter to floods this winter. "Obviously a trigger for the threshold of getting our attention was Katrina and the number of hurricanes we've been having," Kreidler said in a phone interview. "But even in Washington the vagaries in weather patterns make you suspicious."

The suspicions moved Kreidler, a former Democratic congressman, and Wagner, a registered Republican, to form a task force for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to assess the impact of climate change on the American insurance industry. They hope to join a discussion that has been going on for years in Europe, where insurers Swiss Re and Munich Re have warned of massive financial losses from storm patterns aggravated by global warming.

"When you couple changes in climate with changes in demographics where at this point 70 percent of our population resides within 50 miles of a coastline, and the fact that property values of those areas have increased significantly, it just seemed that we had to recognize the issue," Wagner said.

Munich Re calculated that last year was the most expensive on record for natural catastrophes, with losses of over $210 billion. Windstorm destruction in just the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico cost $83 billion, most of it, of course, coming from Hurricane Katrina.

Swiss Re, in a joint report done with Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment and the United Nations Development Program, said, "Many in the business community have begun to understand the risks that lie ahead. Insurers and reinsurers find themselves on the front lines of this challenge since the very viability of their industry rests on the proper appreciation of risk."

The insurance giant AIG, estimates that both Florida and New York have nearly $2 trillion each of insured coastal property exposure. Massachusetts is in fourth place in AIG's estimates at $662 billion. AIG said last October that six of the 10 most expensive hurricanes in US history occurred in just the prior 13 months.

"People are getting the idea that there is nowhere to hide on this issue," said Andrew Logan insurance program director for the Boston-based Ceres, which promotes corporate environmentalism and has been advising Wagner, Kreidler, and NAIC. Ceres says that insured losses due to weather have grown 10 times faster than premiums since 1971, and the percentage of total economic losses from catastrophic weather has grown from a "negligible fraction in the 1950s to 25 percent in the past decade."

Wagner and Kreidler said they do not know yet what their task force will recommend. They do say that the time for Americans to hide from global warming is over. "I don't want to have to get to the point where we have to ask, 'Do you pump water for vineyards, or run water for turbines, or save it for salmon in the Columbia?'" Kreidler said.

Wagner said, "I don't know what, from a regulatory standpoint, we can do in terms of building codes being enforced and changes in land-use policy. We cannot change the weather. But it would be nice if the insurance industry played a role of some type."

He added, "I'm a financial guy, not an activist. But we heard about storm models where it would not be unheard of to have a $120 billion storm. I don't know if we're prepared to be another Netherlands. But it does seem that we are too often in the position of cleaning up after the elephants run by." (By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist, March 15, 2006.)

World Heritage Sites Threatened by
Bush's Ignorance on Climate Change

PARIS - March 17 - "Ignore the Bush Administration's apparent reckless intent to ravage the planet," says Greenpeace today as experts attend an urgently convened meeting on World Heritage and climate change. Greenpeace called on the experts to ignore a challenge from the Administration and continue with its deliberations and subsequent recommendations on protecting listed sites from the dangers posed by climate change.

Today's meeting in Paris follows the decision to hold an investigation, which was agreed at a meeting of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) last year after petitioning by campaigners and lawyers. However a recent submission from the United States suggests that it is an inappropriate discussion for World Heritage and warns that if the Committee addresses the issue of global climate change it risks "losing the unified spirit and camaraderie that has become synonymous with World Heritage."

"The United States has a history of trying to stifle the climate change debate in any and all formats and that's exactly what it is trying to do here," said Laetitia de Marez, Greenpeace France Climate & Energy Campaigner. "It also once again deploys the defunct argument that there is not enough evidence to prove that climate change is caused by humans, therefore there is no proof that humans can do anything about it under the World Heritage Convention."

Greenpeace is petitioning the World Heritage Committee, along with other organizations, to list both the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park in the United States and Canada as they are in danger due to the damage caused by climate change.

"There is no doubt that these sites and many others are being damaged by climate change to the extent that they may eventually lose the characteristics that made them Heritage sites in the first place," said De Marez. "In the Glacier National Park, for instance, only 27 glaciers remain out of 150 and those are rapidly melting."

"It is completely appropriate for World Heritage to discuss this issue and we hope that the meeting will recommend that State Parties should take responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as part of its strategy for protecting and preserving heritage sites around the world," concluded De Marez.

The World Heritage Committee will discuss the report by the expert working group in July, 2006.

Warmer Seas Creating Stronger Hurricane, Study Confirms

A rise in the world's sea surface temperatures was the primary contributor to the formation of stronger hurricanes since 1970, a new study reports.

While the question of what role, if any, humans have had in all this is still a matter of intense debate, most scientists agree that stronger storms are likely to be the norm in future hurricane seasons.

The study is detailed in the March 17 issue of the journal Science.


An alarming trend

In the 1970s, the average number of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes occurring globally was about 10 per year. Since 1990, that number has nearly doubled, averaging about 18 a year.

Category 4 hurricanes have sustained winds from 131 to 155 mph. Category 5 systems, such as Hurricane Katrina at its peak, feature winds of 156 mph or more. Wilma last year set a record as the most intense hurricane on record with winds of 175 mph.

While some scientists believe this trend is just part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, others argue that rising sea surface temperatures as a side effect of global warming is the primary culprit.

According to this scenario, warming temperatures heat up the surface of the oceans, increasing evaporation and putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. This in turn provides added fuel for storms as they travel over open oceans.


Other factors less important

The researchers used statistical models and techniques from a field of mathematics called information theory to determine factors contributing to hurricane strength from 1970 to 2004 in six of the world's ocean basins, including the North Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

They looked at four factors that are known to affect hurricane intensity:

Humidity in the troposphere - the part of the atmosphere stretching from surface of the Earth to about 6 miles up. Wind shear that can throttle storm formation Rising sea-surface temperatures. Large-scale air circulation patterns known as "zonal stretching deformations."

Of these factors, only rising sea surface temperatures was found to influence hurricane intensity in a statistically significant way over a long-term basis. The other factors affected hurricane activity on short time scales only.

"We found no long-term trend in things like wind shear," said study team member Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "There's a lot of year to year variability but there's no global trend. In any given year, it's different for each ocean."


An answer for the critics

The new study potentially addresses one major criticism leveled by scientists skeptical of any strong link between sea surface temperatures and hurricane strength, said Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study.

Last year, Emanuel published a study correlating the documented increase in hurricane duration and intensity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since the 1970s to rises in sea surface temperatures over the same time period.

"We were criticized by the seasonal forecasters for not including the other environmental factors, like wind shear, in our analysis," Emanuel said in an email. "[We didn't do so] because on time scales longer than 2-3 years, these do not seem to matter very much. This paper more or less proves this point."

Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), believes the new study's main finding is accurate but thinks the effects of some of the environmental factors on hurricane intensity might have been underestimated.

"The reason is they're covering a period from 1970 to 2004. 1979 is the year when satellites were introduced into the [NCEP/NCAR] Reanalysis. The quality of the analysis prior to 1979 is simply nowhere near as good," said Trenberth, who also was not involved in the study.

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis is the database the researchers drew upon for information about the effects of troposphere humidity, wind shear and zonal stretching deformation on hurricane intensity; sea surface temperature data came from a different database.

Curry acknowledged that reanalysis data prior to 1979 is of slightly lower quality than more recent data but believes this doesn't substantially change the study's main finding. Trenberth agreed: "I suspect they may well have gotten the right answer anyway," he told LiveScience.


Natural cycles?

Some scientists have explained the rising strength of hurricanes as being part of natural weather cycles in the world's oceans.

In the North Atlantic, this cycle is called the Atlantic multi-decadal mode. Every 20 to 40 years, Atlantic Ocean and atmospheric conditions conspire to produce just the right conditions to cause increased storm and hurricane activity.

The Atlantic Ocean is currently going through an active period of hurricane activity that began in 1995 and which has continued to the present. The previous active cycle lasted from the late 1920's to 1970, and peaked around 1950.

These cycles definitely do influence hurricane intensity, but they can't be the whole story, Curry said.

While scientists expect stronger hurricanes based on natural cycles alone, the researchers suspect other contributing factors, since current hurricanes are even stronger than natural cycles predict.

"We're not even at the peak of current cycle, we're only halfway up and already we're seeing activity in the North Atlantic that's 50 percent worse than what we saw during the last peak in 1950," Curry said.

Some scientists still think it's too premature to make any definitive links between sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity.

"We simply don't have enough data yet," said Thomas Huntington in of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Category 5 hurricanes don't come around very often, so you need the benefit of a much longer time series to look back and say 'Yup, there has been an increase.'"

Huntington is the author of a recent review of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies showing that although many aspects of the global water cycle - including precipitation, evaporation and sea surface temperatures - have increased or risen, the trend cannot be consistently correlated with increases in the frequency or intensity of storms or floods over the past century. Huntington's study was announced this week and is published in the current issue of the Journal of Hydrology.


Brace yourselves

Whatever the underlying cause, most scientists agree that people will need to brace themselves for stronger hurricanes and typhoons in the coming years and decades.

However, most regions around the world will not experience more storms. The only exception to this is the North Atlantic, where hurricanes have become both more numerous and longer-lasting in recent years, especially since 1995. The reasons for this regional disparity are still unclear.

The team's findings are controversial because they draw a connection between stronger hurricanes and rising sea surface temperature - a phenomenon that has itself already been linked to human-induced global warming.

The study by Curry and her colleagues therefore raises the frightening possibility that humans have inadvertently boosted the destructive power of one of Nature's most devastating and feared storms.

"If humans are increasing sea surface temperatures and if you buy this link between increases rising sea surface temperatures and increases in hurricane intensity, that's the conclusion you come to," Curry said.
(Copyright (c) 2006 SPACE.com. Published on Friday, March 17, 2006 by Space.com, written by Ker Than.)