Greenpeace urges kangaroo consumption to fight global warming. More kangaroos should be slaughtered and eaten to help save the world from global warming, environmental activists say. The controversial call to cut down on beef and serve more of the national symbol on our dinner plates follows a report on curbing greenhouse gas emissions damaging the planet. Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham urged Aussies to substitute some red meat for roo to help reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas. “It is one of the lifestyle changes we can make,” Mr Wakeham said. “Changing our meat consumption habits is a small way to make an impact.” The eat roo recommendation is contained in a report, Paths to a Low-Carbon Future, commissioned by Greenpeace and released today.

It also coincides with recent calls from climate change experts for people in rich countries to reduce red meat and switch to chicken and fish because land-clearing and burping and farting cattle and sheep were damaging the environment.

Today’s report by leading scientist Dr Mark Diesendorf, from the University of NSW, says greenhouse gas emissions need to be slashed by at least a third by 2020 to avoid a climate change catastrophe. His recommendations include: (1) Reducing beef consumption and increasing kangaroo meat production, (2) Cutting gas and coal production. (3) Halting land clearing and deforestation, (4) Shifting to renewable energy such as wind power and bioelectricity from crop residues.  “The world is currently on track to experience runaway global warming with average temperatures soon to exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, Dr Diesendorf said. “We face a catastrophe unless there is urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 30 per cent by 2020.”

A major report by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology released this month warned average temperatures will rise 1C by 2030 and could increase as much as 5C in Australia by 2070 unless global greenhouse emissions are cut dramatically.

Icecap note: Dr. Diesendorf seems to have left off two of the most important sources of hot air in the Southern Hemisphere, CSIRO and the BOM

If the Earth is heading for a new ice age, Australia may not be as affected as countries in the Northern Hemisphere, according to new research from The Australian National University published in Science.  Dr Timothy Barrows, a palaeoclimatologist at the ANU Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, says that a freak cooling at the end of the last ice age 12,900 years ago, was a phenomenon felt only in the north, not globally as previously thought.

This rapid cooling, which brought on an ice age for 1400 years, is known as the Younger Dryas event. It was caused by a disruption of ocean circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, which could occur again if the Greenland Ice Sheet were to melt.

“It was thought that climate change was always global, but our research shows that is not necessarily the case, in fact what happens in the north can be the opposite of what happens in the south. So if the Greenland Ice Sheet does melt because of global warming, triggering another ice age, Australia and New Zealand are the places to be,” Dr Barrows said. Read more here.

One subject gets Titchmarsh more worked up than accusations of blandness, though. Perhaps, coming from a man who loves nature, it’s a slightly surprising one: our obsession with global warming.

‘I wish we could grow up about it,’ he says. ‘I’m sure we are contributing to global warming, and we must do all we can to reduce that, but our climate has always changed. The Romans had vineyards in Yorkshire. We’re all on this bandwagon of ‘Ban the 4x4 in Fulham’. Why didn’t we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution? In those days you couldn’t have seen across the street for all the carbon emissions and the crap coming out of the chimneys.’ He pauses for breath, then smiles. ‘Sorry, bit of a tirade there.’

Surely he worries that global warming may threaten some of the species in his series. But this doesn’t seem to bother him too much. ‘We’ll lose some, we’ll gain others,’ he says. ‘Wildlife is remarkably tenacious. Nature always copes.’

Alan Titchmarsh, UK Naturalist

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. “Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

“Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Now suddenly it’s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge.” Post is here.

One issue that seems to have been lost or avoided in the debate over the connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and global warming is the miniscule mass of CO2 that is being blamed for so many past, present and predicted natural disasters. The mass of atmospheric CO2 is extremely small when compared to the total mass of the Earth’s atmosphere and even smaller when compared to the combined masses of the land and water features on the Earth’s surface as well.

The directly proportional relationship that exists between the mass of any object and its heat capacity is essentially axiomatic: all other factors being the same, the larger the mass of an object, the greater its ability to capture, store, transport and release heat. Since the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is so small, the notion that it is causing global warming seems to ignore this basic truth.

This discussion illustrates how the connection between global warming and the tiny mass of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has been exaggerated. The challenge, expressed here, simply asks the proponents of CO2 induced global warming to reconcile their theories with classical scientific principles and established physical data.
See paper here.