Wetlands, understood to be an essential ecosystem in promoting biodiversity and flood control, is also another key element in slowing climate change - as wetland destruction potentially accelerates global warming.  

As reported in Science Daily, leading scientists are now meeting in Brazil at the 8th International Wetlands Conference, discussing actions to better understand, protect and manage this key global resource.

How big a deal are the wetlands?

Covering just 6% of Earth's land surface, wetlands (including marshes, peat bogs, swamps, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and river floodplains) store 10-20% of its terrestrial carbon. Wetlands slow the decay of organic material trapped and locked away over the ages in low oxygen conditions.

Deforestation is not only unabated, it's accelerating around the globe.  The problem is growing bigger, yet it is also becoming more concentrated.

Just how concentrated has the problem become?  Previously Brazil was thought to account for 27% of worldwide deforestation - per the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  Now it is understood to be a whopping 48%.

This news comes from a new study in the 7/8/08 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Matthew Hansen - as reported by Mongabay.

Put another way:

...Brazil accounts for nearly half of global deforestation, nearly four times that of the next highest country, Indonesia, which makes up about an eighth of worldwide forest clearing.

In Air travel in the tropics is worse for climate New Scientist reports on a new study that should give us all pause before booking our next winter travel plans:

As well as producing carbon dioxide and contrails, planes also produce nitrogen oxide, which triggers both the creation of the warming gas ozone, and the destruction of another greenhouse gas, methane (Journal of Geophysical Research...).

In mid-latitudes, these ozone and methane reactions cancel each other out and you get zero net warming from nitrogen oxide emissions, says Keith Shine of the University of Reading, UK.

Okay, but what about the tropics?

But the brighter sunlight in the tropics is very efficient at converting nitrogen oxide to ozone - in fact it creates ozone five times faster than in the air of mid-latitudes, according to Shine's calculations - whereas methane destruction only increases marginally. Worryingly, the warming effects of ozone are particularly strong at a plane's typical cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, he adds.

Pushed from center stage by the expected record arctic ice and permafrost melt, tropical rain forest destruction has been elbowing it's way back through the smoke and into view.      

Papua New Guinea's rain forests disappearing faster than thought is one such look:

Previously, the article states, the forest loss was estimated at 139,000 hectares per year between 1990 and 2005.  But now?

Using satellite images to reveal changes in forest cover between 1972 and 2002...Papua New Guinea (PNG) lost more than 5 million hectares of forest over the past three decades...Worse, deforestation rates may be accelerating, with the pace of forest clearing reaching 362,000 hectares (895,000 acres) per year in 2001. The study warns that at current rates 53 percent of the country's forests could be lost or seriously degraded by 2021.

That's an enormous increase.

It was heartening news from Kos that a recent poll shows Obama ahead in South Florida, thereby putting the state truly into play.   But given the utter insanity that is Florida electoral politics - not too heartening.  If we want to ensure an Obama victory in Florida we need a paradigm shift away from Cuba, away from immigration and the drug war and health care - and even energy for that matter.  Obama should clear the deck in Florida for a new "single issue".  

That issue, I dare say, will be/can be: Global Warming, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).    

I wished Obama had made a statement on the Senate floor during the debate of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill.   But with today's statement, I now understand he probably chose not to speak - because like many here, he was conflicted on the legislation.  Joe Romm over at Climate Progress has it up.   I'll clip it up here with some brief comments.  

Confused by the media's coverage of man-made global warming? (a.k.a. anthropogenic global warming or AGW.)

Are we warming or are we cooling? Is climate change simply a result of natural variability or is it really man-made?  Is the science to be trusted?  

Scientific advances have made global warming well understood.  Global warming is the existential threat of our time - greater I say, than even the threat of nuclear holocaust.   We have only a few years to understand the enormity of the crisis and successfully act, so that our children might avoid the worst effects in the following decades.  Yet doubts linger for many and are even growing in some.

Therefore ignorance of the subject should not be excused or allowed.  This post attempts to provide a short list of resources that clearly and succinctly explain global warming.    

Please read what you can.  Pass a link to this post on to those you suspect have questions or doubts about it - express your concerns and ask them to read too.

While climate change directs our attention largely to the melting poles, the most immediate and devastating effects will be felt from the melting glaciers.  From Bhutan to Peru, global warming is exacting a great toll now and will soon be getting much much worse.    The article Melting Andean Glaciers Could Leave 30 Million High and Dry describes a sobering narrative with a killer ending:

Loss of glaciers in the Andes mountain range is threatening the water supply of 30 million people, and scientists say the lower altitude glaciers could disappear in 10 years.

With the global warming induced spreading of beetles set to turn the borreal forest from a carbon sink into a huge net emitter, to the horrific news that the methane train is leaving the station, you'd think, at first blush, this report on increased volcanic activity, is a sign that nature is piling on.   Nature is starting to resemble the plagues of Egypt.  

Carolina Pagli of the University of Leeds, UK, and Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the University of Iceland have calculated the effects of the melting on the crust and magma underneath.

They say that, as the ice disappears, it relieves the pressure exerted on the rocks deep under the ice sheet, increasing the rate at which it melts into magma. An average of 1.4 cubic kilometres has been produced every century since 1890, a 10% increase on the background rate.

Methane: the other green house gas, is 20 to 25 times more potent than CO2 (depending on who you ask).    

The good news was that over the last decade methane releases have been largely flat due to reductions in man-made emissions.   Unfortunately the good news is old news.  NOAA has just released a report today titled "Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007".    

The NOAA report states:

Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase, said scientist Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory.

"We’re on the lookout for the first sign of a methane release from thawing Arctic permafrost," said Dlugokencky. "It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend."

Spiegel Online has a frightening confirmation of the peril we face with just the slightest further warming of the planet.   As I discussed previously in "The Awakening Great White Whale", look to the Siberian permafrost for the most critical planetary tipping point.

James Hansen sent off another wonderful letter today - this time addressed to Governor Jim Gibbons of Nevada.

The money quote - toward the bottom of the second page - to get us rolling:

Utilities and the fossil fuel industry must reckon with the fact that the laws of Nature and the human instinct for survival will overrule any paper agreements that may exist now or be wrangled in the near-term.  "Grandfathering" of fossil fuel plants and any ineffectual "cap and trade" scheme, should it be initiated, will necessarily be replaced by "cap and bulldoze".  Uncaptured CO2 emissions from coal must be eliminated.

As in a Coal Power Non-Proliferation Treaty.

While the world is awakening to the horrific ramifications of climate change, our progress in combating it is dangerously slow - retarded by an inertia composed of mighty fossil fuel interests, our wanton personal habits, an indifferent press and short sighted political leadership.   We await the promise of a new American administration but precious days are passing. What can be done before November, to stack the deck so that the new administration can't just do "the right thing" wink, wink - but is compelled to do everything that needs to be done?   It is as they say, a defining moment.

Many here surely know of Mr. Hansen.  

Mr. James Hansen is without a doubt the number one climate science authority in the United States government, perhaps in the world right now.   His credibility, and ultimately his power is such that even President Bush cannot or will not fire him - even though while director of Goddard, and as a private citizen, Hansen has struck out on a bold course few have dared.  

While climate change is effecting every spot on the planet and the most visible effects are the crumbling ice shelves at both poles - perhaps the most important and critical early warning signs are the borreal forests and permafrost stretching like a collar around the top of the earth.   There is new evidence of the borreal forests' warming.  

Time Magazine has a very good article "The Clean Energy Scam" by Michael Grunwald, on the terrifying connection between biofuels and the viability of the Amazon (and other tropical forests for that matter).  

A Texan sets the tone:

"It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

So they were drinking pinot grigio, not Kool-Aid.  And the locale wasn't Jonestown Guyana but Necker Island, Branson's "private getaway" between Tortola and Anegada.  The guest list wasn't social misfits from Frisco but among other luminaries, Tony Blair, William McDonough, Larry Page and Paul Allen.  
Richard Branson had invited them.  And he would ask: "So, do we really think the world is on fire?"   And they would reply: "Yes, the planet is on fire."

Andrew Revkin, NY Times go to climate guy is speaking this Tuesday evening at the University of Vermont's Campus Center Theater.  For a preview Joshua Brown of UVM spoke with Revkin on February 27th.  I've been going back and forth whether to post about this but I just need to know, does anyone else out there find this exchange peculiar?

UVM: As a reporter, you talk to a lot of experts and researchers. What do you see as the most important unanswered questions about the science of climate change?

Revkin: The big one remains the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gas build-up. We still don't know if doubling carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will lead to a one-and-a-half-degree or four-and-half-degree warming. That's a huge range with hugely different consequences.

And it's about the same range it was thirty years ago. There are many uncertainties, like what clouds do and what vapor does. It's not game over in terms of the science by any means.

He goes on after the flip..