A World Mad for Coal

There's a big bright future ahead for coal and we'll pay dearly for it.

The International Energy Agency warns that, within five years, coal will rival oil as the fossil fuel energy source of choice.

Coal consumption is increasing all over the world – even in countries and regions with carbon-cutting targets – except the US, where shale gas has displaced coal, shows new research from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The decline of the fuel in the US has helped to cut prices for coal globally, which has made it more attractive, even in Europe where coal use was supposed to be discouraged by the emissions trading scheme.

Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the IEA, said: "Coal's share of the global energy mix continues to grow each year, and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade."

Coal is abundant and found in most regions of the world, unlike conventional oil and gas, and can be cheaply extracted. As a result, coal was used to meet nearly half of the rise in demand for energy globally in the past decade. According to the IEA, demand from China and India will drive world coal use in the coming five years, with India on course to overtake the US as the world's second biggest consumer. China is the biggest coal importer, and Indonesia the biggest exporter, having temporarily overtaken Australia.

The IEA report comes atop a study in Nature Climate Change that suggests we still have a chance of staying within the 2C target but that would require shutting down 65% of existing coal-fired power plants within the next 10 to 15 years.   In November the World Resources Institute reported that no fewer than 1,200 new coal-fired power plants are in planning or under development around the world, two thirds of them in India and China.

Try to Wrap Your Mind Around This

Imagine 2.4-million pounds of something, anything. Now imagine 2.4-million pounds of that something each and every second, 60 times a minute, 36-hundred times every hour; 604,800 times every week.   That's a lot of something, isn't it?

Sure it is.  It also happens to be the amount of climate changing, carbon dioxide we're unleashing into the atmosphere every second, minute, hour, week and it's steadily increasing.

A report from the Associated Press warns that the heralded 2 degree Celsius target limit has become a fantasy.

The amount of heat-trapping pollution the world spewed rose again last year by 3 percent. So scientists say it's now unlikely that global warming can be limited to a couple of degrees, which is an international goal.

...Last year, all the world's nations combined pumped nearly 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, according to new international calculations on global emissions published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. That's about a billion tons more than the previous year.

The total amounts to more than 2.4 million pounds (1.1 million kilograms) of carbon dioxide released into the air every second.

China, the country where we've created the industrial powerhouse to make the shit we buy, is the largest emitter (albeit somewhat on our behalf).   On a per capita basis, however (as the Chinese always remind us), Chinese emissions are still a modest fraction of American, Australian and Canadian emissions.   Oops, checkmate!  So that leave us with the overall emissions argument against their 1) outsourced production and 2) per capita emissions arguments.  Damn, I think they've got us 2 to 1.

Right now there are one thousand, two hundred new coal-fired power plants on the drawing boards or under construction.   The emissions from those twelve hundred new coal-powered plants are estimated to be the equivalent to China's overall emissions today.

What's that saying about how, when you're in a hole and you need to get out, the first thing you must do is stop digging?

What? Another Dire Report on Global Warming?

We used to get climate change reports once, perhaps twice a week.   Now they're flooding in daily.   That's not surprising given that scientific research papers on various aspects of anthropogenic global warming are now coming in at roughly five a day.

Today I'll pick the European Environment Agency.   A report by the EEA confirms that Europe is already reeling from the impacts of global warming and they're only going to get worse.

"...the agency says the past decade in Europe has been the warmest on record.

"It adds that the cost of damage caused by extreme weather events is rising, and the continent is set to become more vulnerable in the future. 

"'Every indicator we have in terms of giving us an early warning of climate change and increasing vulnerability is giving us a very strong signal," observed EEA executive director Jacqueline McGlade.

"'It is across the board, it is not just global temperatures," she told BBC News.

"'It is in human health aspects, in forests, sea levels, agriculture, biodiversity - the signals are coming in from right across the environment.'"

The report finds that climate change in Europe will "deepen socio-economic imbalances" among EU countries.   Some observers have speculated that global warming could drive a wedge between warming-ravaged southern Europe and the relatively advantaged northern European states including Scandinavia, the U.K., France, Germany, Holland, the Baltics and the Benelux countries.

As these reports flood in they place the cognitive dissonance of our petro-Parliamentarians in a glaring light.   Harper, Mulcair, Trudeau - they'll all admit they know the dangers global warming poses to our country and our people and then they'll all stand up on their hind legs and speak glowingly of the bright future of our insanely high-carbon oil substitute.   That's a sign of deep-seated, political/mental dysfunction, the sort of thing that should disqualify anybody from leading a political party.

There's Still a Chance

 Here's what you need to know.   Today there is 25 per cent more atmospheric CO2 than there was in 2000.

On the books right now are plans for the construction of 1,200 more coal-fired power plants that will create emissions equal to another China, today's greatest greenhouse gas emitter ahead even of the United States.

The world is straying further away from commitments to combat climate change, bringing the prospect of catastrophic global warming a step closer, a UN report said on Wednesday. The warning came as nearly 200 governments prepare to meet in Qatar for international climate negotiations starting next Monday.

The warning of increasing emissions came as fresh evidence was published showing the last decade was the warmest on record for Europe. The European Environment Agency (EEA) said all parts of the region had been affected, with higher rainfall in northern Europe and a drying out in the south, bringing flooding to northern countries including the UK, and droughts to the Mediterranean.

According to the United Nations report, drawing on research from more than 50 scientists, the widening gap between countries' plans and scientific estimates means that governments must step up their ambitions as a matter of urgency to avoid even worse effects from warming. "The transition to a low-carbon, inclusive green economy is happening far too slowly and the opportunity for meeting [scientific advice on emissions targets] is narrowing annually," said Achim Steiner, executive director of Unep.

This gap between the cuts needed and the cuts planned brings the prospect of dangerous levels of climate change - entailing more extreme weather including floods, droughts and fiercer storms, such as those witnessed this year - much closer.

Even if countries manage to change direction in time and meet the emissions-cutting targets they have committed to in the past three years, the gap will still be large - about 8 Gt by 2020. To meet scientific advice, countries would have to agree to much bigger curbs on emissions than they have yet done - and there is little chance of that happening at the next round of annual climate negotiations, which begin on Monday in Doha, Qatar. At the fortnight-long talks, ministers are expected to set out a few more details of how they will work towards their agreed plan of drawing up a new global climate change treaty by 2015, to come into effect from 2020.

Steiner put on his optimistic face and said "there's still a chance" that world governments could prevent the worst but only if governments avoid becoming "locked in" to high-carbon infrastructure (can you say Tar Sands?).

And what are Canadian leaders going to do with our remaining "chance"?   Well, from Mulcair to Trudeau to Harper, they're all going to support the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands production several times over.   They're all on the very same page when it comes to ensuring Canada is indeed "locked in" to a high-carbon economy.

America's Top Scientists Warn America's Top Generals

America's top scientific research group, the National Research Council, has warned that nation's military and intelligence agencies that global warming will be placing new strains on the way they operate around the world.

"The National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems. 

 “[Hurricane Sandy] is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.” 

...Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said. 

 ...states will fail, large populations subjected to famine, flood or disease will migrate across international borders, and national and international agencies will not have the resources to cope.

...Mr. Steinbruner said that as the need for more and better analysis is growing, government resources devoted to them are shrinking. Republicans in Congress objected to the C.I.A.’s creation of a climate change center and tried to deny money for it. The American weather satellite program is losing capability because of years of underfinancing and mismanagement, imperiling the ability to predict and monitor major storms.

That certainly has a familiar tone.   The radical Right, a.k.a. the Harper regime, shutting down resources devoted to monitoring and analysis of global warming.

Taking the Fight to Them

It's time to do what they fear most - connect the dots.   That means linking bitumen trafficking to the plight being inflicted on the poorest and most vulnerable peoples on Earth due to global warming.  It's a link that is irrefutable.

We know that the climate change the world is now enduring is anthropogenic, man-made.   We know that the rapidly changing climate results from warming of the atmosphere, global warming, through burning fossil fuels which generates atmospheric carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

We know that all fossil fuels are not created equal.   Some, such as natural gas, are less carbon-intensive than others.   Others, such as coal and bitumen, are highly carbon intensive and, as such, contribute proportionately far more to anthropogenic global warming.

We know that talk of carbon capture and sequestration remains, after decades of rambling, just that - talk, empty promises.   We know that, despite industry's abject failure to deliver on its carbon capture promise, the federal and Alberta governments are determined to facilitate the rapid and massive expansion of production and export of Athabasca bitumen, one of the world's very worst carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

We know that around the world the poor and vulnerable are being beset by climate change impacts, particularly floods and drought, that bring famine, pestilence, armed conflict, displacement and, to some, death.   And we know this is just beginning.   This is suffering of a degree and on a scale we cannot imagine.

We know that already known fossil fuel reserves exceed the amount remaining that can perhaps be safely burned by a factor of five to one.   In other words, if our civilization is to survive this century - our children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, eighty per cent of those fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground.   This utterly discredits anyone promoting the exploitation and consumption of the worst, most carbon intensive fossil fuels.   The planet has more than adequate stocks of relatively clean, conventional fossil fuels.   There is no moral case for exploiting high-carbon intensive unconventional fossil fuels.

We know that the fossil fuel industry behaves as any other corporate entity.  It serves the interests of its investors and shareholders.   It does not serve those interests by voluntarily incurring expenses that are not mandated.   Hence, until carbon capture is mandated and industry is compelled to act, it will not act.  The promise of carbon capture, advanced by industry and our governments, is a shameless hoax.

We must accept that all of this knowledge supports certain, unavoidable conclusions.   Those who promote, enable, extract, produce and transport the most carbon-intensive, filthy fossil fuels are directly responsible for the disproportionate losses and suffering these unconventional fuels create even in distant corners of the world.    It is an immoral trade from which the riches we reap are paid for by those already impoverished and imperilled elsewhere.

Afghan heroin trafficking or Colombian cocaine trafficking inflicts social and economic devastation elsewhere.   It ruins families and destroys lives and we properly condemn it.   Canadian bitumen trafficking also ruins families and destroys lives elsewhere yet we pretend not to notice even as we move to massively ramp up production and export.

To date most opposition to Tar Sands exploitation has been focused on local outcomes - tailing ponds, destruction of the boreal forest, pipeline spills, tanker catastrophes - with scant attention to what Canada is doing to the rest of the world.   It's time that changed and time that the bitumen boosters in Ottawa, Alberta and elsewhere by tied tightly to the suffering they are causing and intend to continue to inflict.   They have to be held accountable.

The Consensus is Sound. We Have Much to Do.

The conversion of UC Berkley climate skeptic, Professor Richard Muller, to global warming believer has rocked the denialist community.  Muller's project took three years to prove the IPCC wrong and, instead, proved that the UN panel actually understated both the degree of warming and the role man made emissions played in causing it.   Muller actually concluded that virtually the entire 2.5F warming since pre-industrial days was man made.

Muller's conversion has even impacted Britian's most denialist newspaper, The Telegraph.  There, science writer and comment editor, Tom Chivers, writes there's really no justification for denying the powerful consensus of the science community.

As a non-climate scientist, I have to accept certain things on authority, as I do with all expert knowledge. This is an argument from authority, but we all do it, and it's vital: if I had cancer, I'd accept the authority of the oncologist and the body of knowledge of the oncology community, rather than try to guide my own treatment with information I'd found on the internet. As Ben Goldacre said long ago in a different context, you have only two options: "you can either learn to interpret data yourself and come to your own informed conclusions; or you decide who to trust".

I've decided who to trust, and it's mainstream scientific opinion: the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC, the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries. And that gives me a possible route out of the confirmation-bias trap: I have, in advance, outsourced my judgment to expert bodies. If several of them changed their position, I would change mine. It's far from perfect, but short of becoming a climate scientist myself, it's the only option I have; otherwise my reasonable belief that the climate is changing due to human behaviour becomes an article of faith. As it is, although it is mediated through authority, it's still, I hope, based on empirical data, on the scientific method.

What I want to ask those sceptics who, like me, are not professional climate scientists is: what's your way out? You are as trapped by confirmation bias as I am. You will not be able to disinterestedly search through the torrents of information, false and true, on the internet and elsewhere: the more you look, the more you will confirm your own beliefs, because that's what we do. Since the design of the human mind makes you an unreliable judge, what evidence would it take to change your mind? Who, in short, do you trust?

Muller, as Chivers points out, still can't link his epiphany over the reality and extent of man-made global warming to specific climate change impacts sweeping the world but that's not his field.  Those findings are being researched and tested by others - biologists, botanists, hydrologists, epidemiologists, glaciologists, geologists, the list goes on and on and on.

I too accept the view of scientific authority, especially when the consensus is this widespread and powerful.   And, if you don't, you need to point to some other scientific authority that is somehow as significant or greater than that of the mainstream scientific opinion.    And you can't.   That doesn't exist.   Muller is the last straw.   This argument is over.  It is time to accept the consensus and benefit from it.   There is much, so much to do.

Lovelock the Alarmist

Earth science guru and creator of the Gia hypothesis, James Lovelock, says his take on global warming was alarmist.   And, on reading an op-ed piece Lovelock wrote for The Independent in 2006, he probably was.   In it he envisioned global warming killing off almost all of mankind by the end of the century:

"We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

Yeah, the image of mankind being reduced to "a few breeding pairs" by 2100 due to global warming is over the top.  Presumably Lovelock was out to make a point, perhaps frustrated by our inertia.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.

So has James Lovelock declared the "all clear" on climate change?

Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”

 He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role.

“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.

He said he still thought that climate change was happening, but that its effects would be felt farther in the future than he previously thought.

“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.

The scientific community, however, doesn't seem to share Lovelock's view.

 Asked to give its latest position on climate change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement that observations collected by satellites, sensors on land, in the air and seas “continue to show that the average global surface temperature is rising.”

The statement said “the impacts of a changing climate” were already being felt around the globe, with “more frequent extreme weather events of certain types (heat waves, heavy rain events); changes in precipitation patterns … longer growing seasons; shifts in the ranges of plant and animal species; sea level rise; and decreases in snow, glacier and Arctic sea ice coverage.”

NOAA reports its data in monthly U.S. and global climate reports and annual State of the Climate reports.  

Its annual climate summary for 2011 said that the combined land and ocean surface temperature for the world was 0.92 degrees above the 20th century average of 57.0 degrees, making it the 35th consecutive year since 1976 that the yearly global temperature was above average.

“All 11 years of the 21st century so far (2001-2011) rank among the 13 warmest in the 132-year period of record. Only one year during the 20th century, 1998, was warmer than 2011,” it said.

Lovelock has neatly played into the hands of the denialist industry and the fossil fuelers.   The old guy has now given them a powerful weapon to discredit climate science as "alarmist" and with the many billions of dollars at stake in the campaign to curb carbon emissions, they'll wring every once of doubt they can extract from his statement - or at least a few words of it.


Yet there have always been problems with those who take global warming in isolation, a  favourite tactic of the denialist community.  The warming is just part of man-made climate change and a host of interconnected challenges.   Many of these are tangible, indisputable, some are even visible to the naked eye from space.  Here's my list:

Desertification; deforestation; cyclical and protracted floods and drought; severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity (the insurance industry will vouch for that); the depletion of natural resources and, in particular, the freshwater crisis (multinationals like Nestle and Vivendi will vouch for that one); species extinction and migration; disease and pest migration; overpopulation and population migration; sea level rise and coastal inundation and the basket of global security challenges including terrorism, arms races, nuclear proliferation, and even widespread food insecurity.

But, James Lovelock, is unquestionably right on one point.   Global warming won't annihilate mankind.  We have long reserved that privilege to ourselves.

Update:

The denialists haven't missed a beat pouncing on Lovelock's "alarmist" statement and transforming it into proof that all climate science is bogus.   Some, like energy expert Andrew McKillop, denounce Lovelock as a total charlatan.    Yet, toward the end of his screed, even McKillop acknowledges that climate change is already here.

The next stage is on us already. The breakdown of climate into random weather events, reversing the old one-liner that "Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get". No longer being able to expect anything predictable from climate only leaves weather to bet on. And we know how that is getting mightily unpredictable, and dangerous on all continents.


Put another way, we can have a pure and absolute zero change of so-called "average global temperatures", but the world's climate can become totally disturbed, with no easy way to remediate or mitigate the change from predictable, to random. Ever-growing evidence says we are in that random state now: what you thought was your regional climate no longer exists.

One immediate and direct result of this will be crop yields and harvest totals: these cannot be expected to hold firm, as farmers battle to decide when or if to plant and when to harvest, in a vastly more complex set of changing variables - which formerly ran together and were called "climate". Rainfall and cloud cover, already changing but given the pat one-liner "Global warming", will most surely and certainly get ever less predictable, with more negative consequences than the opposite.

Now, Shut Up!

An excellent opinion piece in today's New York Times.  In it, Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting explains why you and me and all the other little people have no place challenging the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists about anthropogenic global warming.

...Nonexpert opponents of A.G.W. usually base their case on various criticisms that a small minority of climate scientists have raised against the consensus view.   But nonexperts are in no position to argue against the consensus of scientific experts.   As long as they accept the expert authority of the discipline of climate science, they have no basis for supporting the minority position.  Critics within the community of climate scientists may have a cogent case against A.G.W., but, given the overall consensus of that community, we nonexperts have no basis for concluding that this is so.  It does no good to say that we find the consensus conclusions poorly supported.  Since we are not experts on the subject, our judgment  has no standing.

...I am not arguing the absolute authority of scientific conclusions in democratic debates.  It is not a matter of replacing Plato’s philosopher-kings with scientist-kings in our polis. We the people still need to decide (perhaps through our elected representatives) which groups we accept as having cognitive authority in our policy deliberations. Nor am I denying that there may be a logical gap between established scientific results and specific policy decisions.  The fact that there is significant global warming due to human activity does not of itself imply any particular response to this fact.  There remain pressing questions, for example, about the likely long-term effects of various plans for limiting CO₂ emissions, the more immediate economic effects of such plans, and, especially, the proper balance between actual present sacrifices and probable long-term gains.  Here we still require the input of experts, but we must also make fundamental value judgments, a task that, pace Plato, we cannot turn over to experts.

The essential point, however, is that once we have accepted the authority of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its conclusions.  To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science is not a taxi-cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like.  Once we board the train of climate science, there is no alternative to taking it wherever it may go.

Professor Gutting makes a truly compelling argument.  I'd strongly urge you follow the link above and read his entire opinion piece.

"A Risk Any Sane Person Would Seek to Drastically Reduce"

That is the assessment of Lord Stern of the London School of Economics after reviewing the latest International Energy Agency figures on carbon emissions in 2010.  The report shows that the global recession had only a minimal effect on carbon emissions and that 2010 saw a record 30.6 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions, up a full 1.6 Gt over 2009.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially  "dangerous climate change  " – is likely to be just  "a nice Utopia  ", according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA.

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire.   "These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a 'business as usual' path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path ... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100  ," he said.

"Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce ."

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These "locked-in" emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

"It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking," warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

"People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide ," said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world's nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled.  "The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago ," said Birol.

The German government has announced it will abandon nuclear power generation completely by 2022.  It will be interesting to see just how Germany will make good the nuclear power deficiency.  If any country can muster the political will to launch a major renewables programme, it's probably Germany.  However Germany remains committed to coal power generation on the promise of carbon capture and sequestration technology as a solution to emissions problems.

Atmospheric CO2 Could Last A Millenium

Until recently it was thought that CO2 emitted into the atmosphere lasted maybe a century or two before it was reabsorbed either into the sea or plant life or some other sink. From McClatchey Newspapers:

David Archer, a leading climate researcher who teaches at the University of Chicago, has written a new book that looks at carbon dioxide's "long tail" and what it means for changes on Earth in the future.

If the world continues its heavy use of coal over the next couple of hundred years until it's essentially used up, it would take several centuries more for the oceans to absorb about three-quarters of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. In those centuries, there would be a "climate storm" that Archer says would be significantly worse than the forecast from now to 2100.

The remaining carbon dioxide — the long tail — would stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, leaving a warmer climate. About 10 percent of it would still be in the atmosphere in 100,000 years, Archer wrote in "The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate."

Because of the long life of CO2 from fossil fuels, the climate impacts would last for many thousands of years. Ice sheets would melt, raising seas high enough to swamp 10 percent or more of the world's agricultural land. Other climate impacts could include uncomfortable heat and drier continental interiors, Archer tells his readers. "In the long run, it could be a steep price to pay for a century or so of fossil fuel energy."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/62735.html