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Friday August 25, 2006 JST

The Environment and Global [Insert type of Weather Change Here]

Just browsing the net and I came across four completely unrelated stories that fall under the realm of the Global Warming/Climate Change debate.

The first is the top story on Drudge about the always evolving glaciers.

(BBC News) Global warming could be causing some glaciers to grow, a new study claims.

Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century.

They found warmer winters and cooler summers, combined with more snow and rainfall, could be causing some mountain glaciers to increase in size.

Let’s review. Global Warming, the weather pattern that everyone should fear, is supposedly going to cause the glaciers to melt and cause world wide terror. Waterfront property is to become the new Atlantis and Ohio is to become the new waterfront property. While the rest of the world is dying from sweat burning our skin, Pakistan will become a winter wonderland?

If only there was a way to stop Global Warming or Cooling or Change or whatever….

(USATODAY) When more than two dozen countries undertook in 1989 to fix the ozone hole over Antarctica, they began replacing chloroflourocarbons in refrigerators, air conditioners and hair spray.

But they had little idea that using other gases that contain chlorine or fluorine instead also would contribute greatly to global warming.

CFCs destroy ozone, the atmospheric layer that helps protect against the sun’s most harmful rays, and trap the earth’s heat, contributing to a rise in average surface temperatures.

In theory, the ban should have helped both problems. But the countries that first signed the Montreal Protocol 17 years ago failed to recognize that CFC users would seek out the cheapest available alternative.

The chemicals that replaced CFCs are better for the ozone layer, but do little to help global warming. These chemicals, too, act as a reflective layer in the atmosphere that traps heat like a greenhouse.

That effect is at odds with the intent of a second treaty, drawn up in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 by the same countries behind the Montreal pact. In fact, the volume of greenhouse gases created as a result of the Montreal agreement’s phaseout of CFCs is two times to three times the amount of global-warming carbon dioxide the Kyoto agreement is supposed to eliminate.

This unintended consequence now haunts the nations that signed both U.N. treaties.

Big Oops! Same article:

Some of the replacement chemicals whose use has grown because of the Montreal treaty — hydrochloroflourocarbons, or HCFCs, and their byproducts, hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs — decompose faster than CFCs because they contain hydrogen.

But, like CFCs, they are considered potent greenhouse gases that harm the climate — up to 10,000 times worse than carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s like having Los Angeles’ rush hour traffic on every interstate in the country 24/7. <HONK HONK>

The Russians give us hope because they predict Global Cooling…

(Mosnews)Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian Academy of Sciences’ astronomical observatory’s report says, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.

Environmentalists and scientists warn not about the dangers of global warming provoked by man’s detrimental effect on the planet’s climate, but global cooling. Though never widely supported, it is a theory postulating an overwhelming cooling of the Earth which could involve glaciation.

“On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth’s climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate’s global warming at the start of the 22nd century,” said the head of the space research sector.

And finally a tragic story between nature and industrial pollutants…

(MSNBC) The icecap may not be the only thing shrinking in the Arctic. The genitals of polar bears in east Greenland are apparently dwindling in size due to industrial pollutants.

Scientists report this shrinkage could, in the worst case scenario, endanger polar bears there and elsewhere by spoiling their love lives and causing their numbers to diminish.

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