BIKE: As the TxDOT road-building orgy continues...

[Roger Baker]

I know the science below may be troubling to some. But, hey, looking on 
the bright side and over the next few decades, there are lots of clever 
ways to make terrific money on road contracting, air conditioning 
plays, survivalist stuff, etc. Tribal apes clearly weren't designed to 
last for very long. After the great heat wave, the surviving life forms 
will probably re-evolve into other kinds of sentient beings, cuddly and 
otherwise. That might take a few hundred million years, and one is 
entitled to imagine this interesting cycle can repeat a bunch of times 
before the sun burns out.  Meanwhile, do Vegas, enjoy the ride, etc. -- 
Roger

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Global warming approaching point of no return, warns leading climate 
expert
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=603752>
23 January 2005

Global warning has already hit the danger point that international
attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top
climate watchdog.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference
attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally
believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous
concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for
immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to 
"survive".

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to
slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon,
the major oil company most opposed to international action on global
warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the 
issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically
asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief
scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The
Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr
Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag
our feet" candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a
British-born naturalised American, who had repeatedly called for urgent
action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the
Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata
Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations
officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small
window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a
moment to lose."

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of
coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to
the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid
had already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water
temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly white.
Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been
destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the
Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its
ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is
expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was
speaking parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with
temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.

He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent
on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of
global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting
that climate change may be accelerating out of control.

He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural
systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution
emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the
increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He
concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive."