Environmental
Rising CO2 levels linked to global warming during last deglaciation
by Staff Writers
Corvallis, OR (SPX)
 The ocean circulation warms the northern hemisphere at the expense of the south, the researchers say, but when the fresh water draining off the continent at the end of the last Ice Age entered the North Atlantic, it essentially put the brakes on the current and disrupted the delivery of heat to the northern latitudes. |
Many scientists have long suspected that rising levels of carbon dioxide and the global warming that ended the last Ice Age were somehow linked, but establishing a clear cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 and global warming from the geologic record has remained difficult.
A new study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Nature, identifies this relationship and provides compelling evidence that rising CO2 caused much of the global warming.
Lead author Jeremy Shakun, who conducted much of the research as a doctoral student at Oregon State University, said the key to understanding the role of CO2 is to reconstruct globally averaged temperature changes during the end of the last Ice Age, which contrasts with previous efforts that only compared local temperatures in Antarctica to carbon dioxide levels.
“Carbon dioxide has been suspected as an important factor in ending the last Ice Age, but its exact role has always been unclear because rising temperatures reflected in Antarctic ice cores came before rising levels of CO2,” said Shakun, who is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Columbia University.
“But if you reconstruct temperatures on a global scale – and not just examine Antarctic temperatures – it becomes apparent that the CO2 change slightly preceded much of the global warming, and this means the global greenhouse effect had an important role in driving up global temperatures and bringing the planet out of the last Ice Age,” Shakun added.
Here is what the researchers think happened.
Small changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun affected the amount of sunlight striking the northern hemisphere, melting ice sheets that covered Canada and Europe.
That fresh water flowed off of the continent into the Atlantic Ocean, where it formed a lid over the sinking end of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – a part of a global network of currents that brings warm water up from the tropics and today keeps Europe temperate despite its high latitudes.
The ocean circulation warms the northern hemisphere at the expense of the south, the researchers say, but when the fresh water draining off the continent at the end of the last Ice Age entered the North Atlantic, it essentially put the brakes on the current and disrupted the delivery of heat to the northern latitudes.
“When the heat transport stops, it cools the north and heat builds up in the Southern Hemisphere,” Shakun said. “The Antarctic would have warmed rapidly, much faster than the time it takes to get CO2 out of the deep sea, where it was likely stored.
“The warming of the Southern Ocean may have shifted the winds as well as melted sea ice, and eventually drawn the CO2 out of the deep water, and released it into the atmosphere,” Shakun said. “That, in turn, would have amplified warming on a global scale.”
The researchers constructed a record of global surface temperature from 80 temperature reconstructions spanning the end of the Ice Age and found that average temperature around the Earth correlated with – and generally lagged behind – rising levels of CO2.
Peter Clark, an Oregon State University scientist and co-author on the paper, said changes in solar radiation were the likely trigger for the series of effects that followed. His 2009 study, published in Science, confirmed an earlier theory that wobble in the Earth’s axis, which changes the amount of sunlight captured by Earth, first caused melting of the large northern ice sheets.
“It has long been known that Earth’s slow wobble is caused primarily by the gravitational influences of the larger planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which pull and tug on the Earth in slightly different ways over periods of thousands of years,” said Clark, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
Shakun said there is “an enormous amount” of carbon sequestered in the deep ocean.
“The Southern Ocean is connected to all the deep ocean basins,” he pointed out, “so the most likely mechanisms to draw it out of the ocean were certainly there.”
The question now, the researchers say, is how human-generated carbon dioxide will affect the planet when there isn’t an ice age.
“CO2 was a big part of bringing the world out of the last Ice Age,” Shakun said, “and it took about 10,000 years to do it. Now CO2 levels are rising again, but this time an equivalent increase in CO2 has occurred in only about 200 years, and there are clear signs that the planet is already beginning to respond.”
“While many of the details of future climate change remain to be figured out, our study bolsters the consensus view that rising CO2 will lead to more global warming,” Shakun added.
Other authors on the study include Feng He, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Shaun Marcott, Alan Mix, and Andreas Schmittner, Oregon State University; Zhengyu Liu, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Peking University; Bette Otto-Bliesn
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Cyber Space
This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.
Step aside, AT&T and Verizon. A new privacy-protecting Internet service and telephone provider still in the planning stages could become the ACLU’s dream and the FBI’s worst nightmare .
by Declan McCullagher, National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Edouard Bard, CNRS-Universite Aix-Marseille.
Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.
Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he’s raising funds to launch a national “non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption” that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.
The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also — and in practice this is likely more important — challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.
A decade of revelations has underlined the intimate relationship between many telecommunications companies and Washington officialdom. Leading providers including AT&T and Verizon handed billions of customer telephone records to the National Security Agency; only Qwest refused to participate. Verizon turned over customer data to the FBI without court orders. An AT&T whistleblower accused the company of illegally opening its network to the NSA, a practice that the U.S. Congress retroactively made legal in 2008.
By contrast, Merrill says his ISP, to be run by a non-profit called the Calyx Institute with for-profit subsidiaries, will put customers first. “Calyx will use all legal and technical means available to protect the privacy and integrity of user data,” he says.
Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act’s expanded police powers — and win.
Nick Merrill says that “we will use all legal and technical means to resist having to hand over information, and aspire to be the partner in the telecommunications industry that ACLU and EFF have always needed but never had.”
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
In February 2004, the FBI sent Merrill a secret “national security letter” (not an actual court order signed by a judge) asking for confidential information about his customers and forbidding him from disclosing the letter’s existence. He enlisted the ACLU to fight the gag order, and won. A federal judge barred the FBI from invoking that portion of the law, ruling it was “an “unconstitutional prior restraint of speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
Merrill’s identity was kept confidential for years as the litigation continued. In 2007, the Washington Post published his anonymous op-ed which said: “I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government,” especially because “I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.” He wasn’t able to discuss his case publicly until 2010…..
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Survival / Sustainability
Pet Food Alternatives for Long-Term Emergencies
Tess Pennington
Ready Nutrition
April 2012
In a long-term emergency we want our entire family to thrive, and that includes our beloved pets. Dogs and cats will have vital roles to play during a long-term emergency and we want them on their A-game!
Cats are very skilled at trapping and will keep the rodents away from your retreat and your food supply, thus keeping diseases at bay. Dogs on the other hand, are ideal to have on a retreat because they will be a good alert system, make excellent hunting companions, protect the family and help to herd livestock. Larger breeds could even help pull small wagons to help even more around the homestead.
To keep these animals healthy, keep their needs in mind when making your emergency preparations. Due to the cost of pet food, storing dry food is preferred over storing the wet food. When storing dry goods for dogs and cats, look for dry food that does not have a lot of oils in them; as the oils can make the food go rancid more quickly.
Stockpiled pet food will only last for so long. What’s a pet owner to do when the kibble supply runs dry?
Making your own pet food is a more financially reasonable option for some. The cost is actually comparable to the price of kibble, and the nutrition content of homemade pet food is far higher.
Creating pet food is not so much about having the recipe to do so – it’s about knowing the proper ratios for optimum nutrition for your pet. The following information is geared towards healthy adult pets without special dietary needs.
Long Term Food Storage Basics – How to Pack Rice, Wheat, Beans and Dry Goods
Uploaded by TessPennington on Apr 4, 2011
More Homesteading and Preparedness Info: http://www.ReadyNutrition.com/
Fox News Report on Inflation, Higher Prices and Emergency Preparedness.
Tess Pennington of Ready Nutrition demonstrates some best practices and a multi-barrier process for packaging food for short and long term storage in mylar bags (or large food grade buckets) with oxygen absorbers, a vacuum seal, and a heat seal. With proper storage techniques the shelf life of your food preps can exceed 20 years for most dry goods like rice, wheat, sugar, beans, oats, wheat and pasta.
More Homesteading and Preparedness Info: http://www.ReadyNutrition.com/
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Activism
A naval commander for the 99% stands trial
Consider the story of Leah Bolger, the latest American hero up on trial:
She is a young female artist in the Midwest. She joins the Navy at 22, is made commander and serves two decades as an anti-submarine warfare specialist. After retiring she joins Veterans for Peace and becomes the organization’s first female president. Then, in October of 2011, she commits the crime of interrupting a public congressional hearing of the Super Committee to deliver a message from the 99 percent: End the wars and tax the rich to fix the deficit.
Because of her 45-second transgression, Commander Bolger now faces a court trial this Thursday morning, April 12, where she could receive a maximum jail sentence of six months. Bolger, 54, intends to plead guilty and use her court appearance to draw the connection between America’s deficit debacle and the three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar defense budget we, as voting taxpayers, spend as a base-mark for failed and unending military ventures overseas.
Bolger has no illusions about what Americans are up against: a corporate-run military machine that she says “is so big and complicated and intertwined with the government and Congress and the media that I don’t know where you can start unraveling the knot.” But one place to begin is with the Occupy movement, which she says has placed too little emphasis on ending America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
20-Year Veteran to Face Jail Time for Act of Civil Disobedience
Kevin Zeese, News Report:
“Retired Naval Commander Leah Bolger will appear in court Thursday, April 12th 2012 on charges stemming from her arrest on October 26th, 2011. Bolger, who is a peace activist and the President of Veterans For Peace, interrupted a public hearing of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, commonly known as the Super Committee.”
Report On UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident Finds Police Conduct ‘Objectively Unreasonable’
Adam Peck, News Report:
“Two reports commissioned by the University of California-Davis to investigate the infamous pepper spray incident from last fall have been released to the public, and they appear to verify most of the facts put forth by Occupy protesters and fly in the face of the allegations made by the university and its police department.” ….
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Articles of Interest
City of Roswell, GA, bullies Andrew Wordes to death over his backyard chickens
By Ethan A. Huff,
(NaturalNews) An innocent man who had legally been raising a few dozen chickens and other small birds in the backyard of his suburban Atlanta home is now dead, following a crusade of terror perpetrated against him by the City of Roswell in Georgia. Andrew Wordes, who died during a recent raid on his property in which county marshals tried to illegally evict him, was the obvious victim of a rogue state gone mad — and his blood is now on the hands of the Roswell City Administrator, the Roswell City…
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