[Peace-discuss] "the earth's soils harbor four times as much easily releasable carbon as resides in the atmosphere, "

[Chuck Minne]

Very scary.
   
  The page link should work, if not here is the link:  http://alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200609/harte.asp
   
                            September/October 2006  |  VOLUME 118, NO. 5                         To Cal Alumni Association Home                        -->                                                        -->              
Anne Dowie
              FEATURE STORY    Flower Power      by Peter Alsop
   
  By studying alpine lilies and sunflowers, Berkeley scientist John Harte has uncovered a serious flaw in climate change predictions. 
   
  In the end, after all the talk and worry and wringing of hands, if nothing is done it will look like this: In the Sierra, the snowpack will begin to melt earlier in the year, by March or April, and the streams that normally flow out of the mountains in the summer months-the streams that feed the rivers that feed the farms-will run dry in July, just as the crops thirst most for water. As it becomes hotter, the Central Valley and the San Joaquin Valley will parch and succumb more often to drought. The hills, too, will brown and the grasses will wither and brushfires will rage. And along the coast, the Pacific will begin a slow, inexorable rise. If it rises high enough, and topples the levees of the Sacramento Delta, saltwater will pour across fields and farmland and backyards. And if that happens, the sea will claim not just land but the drinking supply for millions of Californians and water for hundreds of thousands of acres of farms. 
   
  But all of that belongs to another time. Today it is cool and gray, a damp February afternoon, and low-slung clouds limn the Berkeley hills. On the south side of the Berkeley campus, on the third floor of Barrows Hall, an imposing modern building with an odd pagoda-like roof, John Harte sits behind a large wooden desk. His office is tucked among others in the Energy and Resources Group, an unusual interdisciplinary program at the university that studies energy, development, biological diversity, and climate change, among a host of other issues. For more than three decades, Harte has worked in this department and, since 1988, has devoted most of that time to the study of global warming. His office bears the evidence of years of research: Papers are piled on the desk, the file cabinets, the floor. The room suggests a lifetime of bookishness, but none of that is evident in Harte's appearance. He's a trim man, 66 years old, with a wiry physique and a slightly unkempt, graying
 beard. His sneakers are caked with a thin layer of mud and his eyes are framed by apostrophes of wrinkles, the product of years spent in the high-altitude summer sun. 
   
  Since 1990, Harte has been conducting climate change research in a subalpine meadow in Colorado, on the western slope of the Rockies. For 16 years, with the aid of dozens of heat lamps, he has been continuously warming a patch of earth, night and day, winter and summer. When it began, the project was one of the first attempts by anyone to mimic the effects of global warming on an ecosystem. Until Harte and his graduate students switched on the electricity in their meadow and began to slowly turn up the heat, few scientists had studied the ecological consequences of global warming. But by ignoring how, for instance, plant species respond to a warming earth, climate scientists missed a critical source of warming itself. They were looking at the sky to predict the future, but, as Harte surmised, what is happening on the ground is of nearly as much importance. 
   
  The changes that have taken place in his subalpine meadow suggest a harrowing truth: that our worst-case predictions for global warming, as bad as they are, may not be bad enough. 

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Before you call 9/11 conspiracy nuts crazy, explain what happened to 7 World Trade Center (WTC7) and how it was accomplished. (Never heard of WTC7 before, have you? – that’s not surprising, it’s the camel in the tent that everybody ignores.)
  



 		
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