Humans to blame for rain changes

Human activities that spur global warming are largely to blame for changes in rainfall patterns over the last century, climate researchers reported Monday.

The report was released as record rains caused severe flooding in Britain, China and Indonesia.

Human-caused climate change has been responsible for higher air temperatures and hotter seas and is widely expected to lead to more droughts, wildfires and floods, but the authors say this is the first study to specifically link it to precipitation changes.

"For the first time, climate scientists have clearly detected the human fingerprint on changing global precipitation patterns over the past century," researchers from Environment Canada, that country's environmental agency, said in a statement.

The scientists, writing in the journal Nature, found humans contributed significantly to these changes, which include more rain and snow in northern regions that include Canada, Russia and Europe, drier conditions in the northern tropics and more rainfall in the southern tropics.

Manmade climate change has had a "detectable influence" on changes in average precipitation in these areas, and it cannot be explained by normal climate variations, they wrote.

Weather experts in Britain raised the possibility that the current rains there may be related to climate change.

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New Study Suggests Climate Change Could Be The Root Of Armed Conflicts

Climate change, and the resulting shortage of ecological resources, could be to blame for armed conflicts in the future, according to David Zhang from the University of Hong Kong and colleagues. Their research, which highlights how temperature fluctuations and reduced agricultural production explain warfare frequency in eastern China in the past, has been published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology.

Zhang and his team looked at the impact of climate change on warfare frequency over the last millennium in eastern China. The agricultural production in the region supports the majority of the Chinese population. The authors reviewed warfare data from 899 wars in eastern China between 1000 and 1911, documented in the Tabulation of Wars in Ancient China. They cross-referenced these data with Northern Hemispheric climate series temperature data for the same period.
They found that warfare frequency in eastern China, and the southern part in particular, significantly correlated with temperature oscillations. Almost all peaks of warfare and dynastic changes coincided with cold phases.

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Temperature rises 'not caused by sun'

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Claims in a controversial Channel 4 programme that recent rises in global temperatures have been caused by the sun have been disproved by scientists.
The programme, the Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed that instead of greenhouse gases from human activity being to blame for a recent surge in temperatures, a change in solar activity was responsible because it influenced the number of cosmic rays that strike the Earth.

The film presented such changes in the sun as a viable alternative explanation for rising temperatures, and was widely cited in discussions of a recent poll that showed 56% of the UK public doubted the scientific cause of climate change.


But the new analysis, to be published in a Royal Society journal on Tuesday, shows that global warming since 1985 cannot have been caused by an increase in solar radiation or by a decrease in cosmic rays.
Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, said: "It is absolutely clear that the sun is nothing to do with the recent warming.


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Analysis: Behind China's smokescreen on climate change

The Chinese government's irresponsible stance toward mitigating climate change, based on its developing country status, is increasingly untenable. China is the world's fourth largest economy and, according to a new report, is now the top emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas heating up the planet.

Global warming is an unintended consequence of the global trading system. Now is not the time for finger pointing between the developed and developing worlds: CO2 and other gases are nearing cumulative crisis levels. Culpability for shifting polluting industries from rich to poor countries goes to both sides, and demonstrates that a favorable investment environment does not promise investment favorable to the environment.

China continues to be both a beneficiary of globalization, with capital and technology inflows creating jobs for its massive population, and its benefactor, providing markets with low-cost products. This process began nearly 30 years ago when China abandoned Maoist principles in pursuit of profit as the guiding ideology for its political economy.

The policy of economic reform and opening to the outside world permitted foreign investors and hardworking individual Chinese new opportunities to generate wealth, raising the collective level of prosperity and taking hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty at the expense of the world's ecosystem.

President Hu Jintao heads a communist coterie reared in the ethos of an authoritarian one- party state, lacking accountability and with a deeply entrenched sense of entitlement to dispensation regarding global obligations. Neither view helps Hu and crew meet new challenges such as acknowledging China's role in the greenhouse gas problem and taking the lead in searching for a solution.
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Why global warming has brought the G8 to boiling point

2004, climate change did not even rate a mention in the summary of the Group of Eight (G8) summit at Sea Island, Georgia.

Today, it is the issue that may make or break the rich nations' get-together in Heiligendamm, Germany.

Summit host German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces an unenviable choice. She can insist that the summit endorse an ambitious plan for tackling greenhouse gases, although to do so would dangerously isolate President George W. Bush.

Or she can climb down and submit to a fudge that will badly damage her standing at home and across Europe.

This potential crisis has been brewing for months, driven by science and public opinion, say seasoned watchers of the climate debate.

"The public knows climate change is here, now, and is demanding political leaders to lead by example," Hans Verolme of environmental group WWF told AFP. "Expectations are high."


Here's why climate change is now such a big deal:

-- AN ESCALATING THREAT: This year, the UN's top scientific panel declared climate change was already on the march and the effects would be harsh and, for poor, vulnerable countries, potentially catastrophic.

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