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Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Study commissioned following sharp rises in commodity prices on world markets and food riots in some countries

[British] Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy.

The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.

There is also evidence that some nations are stockpiling important materials, buying up key producers and land and restricting exports in an attempt to protect their own businesses from increasingly fierce global competition.

Several research projects have also warned of a pending crisis in natural resources, such as water and wildlife, which have suffered dramatic losses due to over-use, pollution, habitat loss, and, increasingly, changes caused by global warming.

- more… :arrow:

- research thanks to Tony H.

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Peak Oil, Politics - The Right Way, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Why Britain faces a bleak future of food shortages

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Britain faces a ‘perfect storm’ of water shortage and lack of food, says the government’s chief scientist, and climate change and crop and animal diseases will add to future woes. Science is now striving to find solutions.

It was an ecological disaster that occurred on the other side of the planet. Yet the drought that devastated the Australian wheat harvest last year had consequences that shook the world. It sent food prices soaring in every nation. Wheat prices across the globe soared by 130%, while shopping bills in Britain leapt by 15%.

A year later and the cost of food today has still to fall to previous levels. More alarmingly, scientists are warning that far worse lies ahead. A “perfect storm” of food shortages and water scarcity now threatens to unleash public unrest and conflict in the next 20 years, the government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, has warned.

In Britain, a global food shortage would drive up import costs and make food more expensive, just as the nation’s farmers start to feel the impact of disrupted rainfall and rising temperatures caused by climate change. “If we don’t address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move to avoid food and water shortages,” he told a conference earlier this year.

The reliable availability of food – once taken for granted – has become a major cause for alarm among politicians and scientists. Next month several of Britain’s research councils, together with the Food Standards Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for International Development – will announce a taskforce that will channel the UK’s efforts in feeding its own population and playing a full role in preventing starvation in other nations.

The problem is summed up by Professor Janet Allen, director of research at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). “We will have to grow more food on less land using less water and less fertiliser while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

No one said science was easy, of course. Nevertheless, the scale of the problem is striking. It is also unprecedented, says Professor Mike Bevan, acting director of the John Innes Centre in Norfolk. “We are going to have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as was produced over the past 5,000 years. Nothing less will do.”

More… :arrow:

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Got Gas?

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

- A good friend of mine sent me this article saying, “Interesting article on natural gas“.

- It is, indeed, an interesting article but I saw it in a different light than many perhaps do.

- My response to my friend:

—

D,

An interesting and potentially game-changing story, indeed.

But, it is a classic case of humanity’s inborn tendency to jump at the short term relief without fairly balancing it against the long-term consequences.

To see the consequences, I’d like to see someone make the assumption that ALL the fossil fuel we burn from here forward is this cleaner gas.   And, to be really fair, we can drop all considerations of the collateral damages associated with obtaining the gas that were mentioned in the article.

Just assume that the world will continue growing and producing and have more babies and all the rest of it for the next 20 to 50 years – all largely fueled by this gas.

The analysis should show what will happen to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere from consuming just this gas.  And then it should consider the consequences of this change in CO2 levels on global weather, ecosystems, environmental refugees, depleted glaciers and winter snow packs, increasing desertification, species die-offs and an entire host of follow-on consequences that will attend continued rising of global CO2 levels.

Short-term thinkers are enthusiastic about these new gas producing technologies because they allow us, for the moment, to avoid having to deal with the really tough long term questions regarding what we have to do to get into a sustainable long-term homeostatic balance with the planet’s ecosphere.

Long term, it’s really the only question that matters much.

Everything else is an avoidance or a denial that only take us further down the road wherein we do not solve this problem and cause a major crater in the Earth’s evolutionary history; killing many species, altering the weather for tens of thousands of years and killing the majority of the human beings alive and reducing the ones that survive to miserable circumstances.

Not an insignificant outcome – and all the more terrible because, difficult as it may be, we could avoid most of it if we had the grit and the will to do so.

Dennis

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Up to 10,000 boat people ready to flee

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

CANBERRA – The arrival of the biggest boatload of asylum seekers since the new wave of illegal migrants began building late last year has again set alarm bells ringing in Australia.

As the 194 people migrants were being taken into detention on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, reports emerged of as many as 10,000 more waiting in Malaysia for their chance to risk a journey that has claimed dozens of lives.

While the Opposition blames the relaxation of the harsh detention regime of the former Coalition Government for the resurgence of boat people, evidence is mounting that laws passed in Canberra have limited deterrent effect.

International agencies support Government contentions that the upsurge in illegal voyages since late last year are largely the product of wars, persecution and poverty, and reflect larger, similar, movements into other rich nations.

Further studies have shown that tough messages from Australia are often ignored, misunderstood or not received by people desperate to find safety and security in a new home, and that “shonky” migration agents encourage others.

More… :arrow:

Posted in CrashBlogging, Immigration Stress, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Valley fever blowin’ on a hotter wind

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

- I pity the American Southwest where I grew up and where my older son and his family still remain.   It is squarely in the cross hairs of Global Climate Change and one only has to look at Australia to see what the future holds.   10+ million people living in the L.A. basin on what is, at bottom, simply coastal scrub desert that would barely be able to support a few tens of thousands without the massive influx of food and water delivered there daily from elsewhere.  This story about Valley Fever, is just one of many gathering force now for the Southwest.   Can you say, “Water”?

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PHOENIX – It’s high noon, and the 112-degree summer heat – up from a decade ago – stalks Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. By late afternoon, dark clouds threaten, and monsoon winds beat the earth into a mass of swirling sand. Thick walls of surface soil blind drivers on the Interstate.

Some health experts believe new weather conditions – hotter temperatures and more intense dust storms fueled by global warming – are creating a perfect storm for the transmission of coccidioidomycosis, also known as valley fever, a fungal disease endemic to the southwestern United States.

How do cocci spores infect the body? Propelled by winds, thousands of soil particles and cocci spherules are inhaled. People – particularly those older or immune-compromised – may experience flu-like symptoms that can turn into pneumonia. If the infection disseminates, the pathogens can target any organ – mostly the nervous system, skin, bones and joints – and become life threatening.

Each year, according to the American Academy of Microbiology, about 200,000 Americans contract valley fever, and 200 of them die. But some experts believe the disease is vastly underreported. Between 1991 and 1993, healthcare costs for valley fever exceeded $66 million, according to the Pan American Center for Human Ecology and Health.

The group Physicians for Social Responsibility says global warming will multiply the incidence due to increased airborne dust and sandstorms. Higher wind speeds and drought upped Arizona’s yearly count from 33 cases of valley fever per 100,000 in 1998 to 43 per 100,000 in 2001, said Dale Griffin of the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The number of cases in Arizona more than quadrupled from 1997 to 2006, according to a Mayo Clinic study. During that same period, incidence rates in California jumped from 2.5 to 8.4 cases per 100,000 people.

More… :arrow:

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Desertification, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, Pandemics, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Climate Fears Are Driving ‘Ecomigration’ Across Globe

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Adam Fier recently sold his home, got rid of his car and pulled his twin 6-year-old girls out of elementary school in Montgomery County. He and his wife packed the family’s belongings and moved to New Zealand — a place they had never visited or seen before, and where they have no family or professional connections. Among the top reasons: global warming.

Halfway around the world, the president of Kiribati, a Pacific nation of low-lying islands, said last week that his country is exploring ways to move all its 100,000 citizens to a new homeland because of fears that a steadily rising ocean will make the islands uninhabitable.

The two men are at contrasting poles of a phenomenon that threatens to reshape economies, politics and cultures across the planet. By choice or necessity, millions of “ecomigrants” — most of them poor and desperate — are on the move in search of more habitable living space.

There were about 25 million ecomigrants in the world a little more than a decade ago, said Norman Myers, a respected British environmental researcher at Oxford University. That number is now “a good deal higher,” he added. “It’s plain that sea-level rise in the wake of climate change will inundate the homelands of huge numbers of people.”

In Bangladesh, about 12 million to 17 million people have fled their homes in recent decades because of environmental disasters — and the low-lying country is likely to experience more intense flooding in the future. In several countries in Africa’s Sahel region, bordering the Sahara, about 10 million people have been driven to move by droughts and famines.

More… :arrow:

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Desertification, Food Shortages, Immigration Stress, New Zealand, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

The fight to get aboard Lifeboat UK

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

- James Lovelock, again, tells it like it is.  What he says here is what I’ve felt for a long time without being able to articulate it nearly so well as he has.  Indeed, it is why I’ve secured the right of permanent residency in New Zealand; as a hedge against the future he’s painting.

- I see people drawing word pictures of the world around us at all levels.   The local and the mundane, the national and the global.   But most of their pictures are fragments at best; partial renderings of realities far more complex and dark than they’ve drawn or imagined.

- Lovelock paints the canvas behind all their canvases.   They are, perhaps, the projected moving pictures on the screen.  Whereas, his is the screen upon which theirs cavort.  In rings speak, ‘One vision to rule them all’.

- There are big changes, nearly unimaginably big changes, coming.   And most of us, if we are not in denial, are engaged in building sandcastles in a losing battle to stem the sea.   His analogies about 1939 are so apt.   And time is getting so late.

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Last week she played in the snow, but what will Britain be like when she grows up? James Lovelock, the Earth guru, foresees a land where blizzards are long forgotten and national survival depends on a new Winston Churchill

When someone discovers, too late, that they are suffering from a serious and probably incurable disease and may have no more than six months to live, their first response is shock and then, in denial, they angrily try any cure on offer or go to practitioners of alternative medicine. Finally, if wise, they reach a state of calm acceptance. They know death need not be feared and that no one escapes it.

Scientists who recognise the truth about the Earth’s condition advise their governments of its deadly seriousness in the manner of a physician. We are now seeing the responses. First was denial at all levels, then the desperate search for a cure. Just as we as individuals try alternative medicine, so our governments have many offers from alternative business and their lobbies of sustainable ways to “save the planet”, and from some green hospice there may come the anodyne of hope.

Should you doubt that this grim prospect is real, let me remind you of the forces now taking the Earth to the hothouse: these include the increasing abundance of greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture, including gases from natural ecosystems damaged by global heating in the Arctic and the tropics. The vast ocean ecosystems that used to pump down carbon dioxide can no longer do so because the ocean turns to desert as it warms and grows more acidic; then there is the extra absorption of the sun’s radiant heat as white reflecting snow melts and is replaced by dark ground or ocean.

Each separate increase adds heat and together they amplify the warming that we cause. The power of this combination and the inability of the Earth now to resist it is what forces me to see the efforts made to stabilise carbon dioxide and temperature as no better than planetary alternative medicine.

Do not be misled by lulls in climate change when global temperature is constant for a few years or even, as we have seen in the UK in the past week, appears to drop and people ask: where is global warming now?

However unlikely it sometimes seems, change really is happening and the Earth grows warmer year by year. But do not expect the climate to follow the smooth path of slowly but sedately rising temperatures predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where change slowly inches up and leaves plenty of time for business as usual. The real Earth changes by fits and starts, with spells of constancy, even slight decline, between the jumps to greater heat. It is ever more at risk of changing to a barren state in which few of us can survive.

The high-sounding and well-meaning visions of the European Union of “saving the planet” and developing sustainably by using only “natural” energy might have worked in 1800 when there were only a billion of us, but now they are a wholly impractical luxury we can ill afford.

More… :arrow:

- research thanks, again, to Robin S.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Biofuels, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Human Rights, Immigration Stress, Ocean Acidification, Rising Ocean Levels, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | 2 Comments »

Climate inaction ‘costing lives’

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Failure to take urgent action to curb climate change is effectively violating the human rights of people in the poorest nations, an aid charity warns.

A report by Oxfam International says emissions, primarily from developed countries, are exacerbating flooding, droughts and extreme weather events.

As a result, harvests are failing and people are losing their homes and access to water, the authors observe.

They say human rights need to be at the heart of global climate policies.

Oxfam will be submitting its report, called Climate Wrongs and Human Rights, to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Righting wrongs

“Climate change was first seen as a scientific problem, then an economic one,” explained report author Kate Raworth. “Now it is becoming a matter of international justice.

The global impacts of climate change meant that nations had to be held accountable for the consequences of their actions, Ms Raworth said.

“Litigation is seldom the best way to solve a dispute.

“That is why we need a strong UN deal in 2009 to cut emissions and support adaption,” she added, referring to next year’s key UN climate summit where a future global climate strategy is expected to be agreed.

“However, vulnerable countries do need options to protect themselves. Rich country polluters have been fully aware of their culpability for many years.”

More… :arrow:

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Human Rights, Immigration Stress, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Letter to a young idealist

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

R.,

A few more thoughts along the same lines I talked about previously.

All of humanity’s history has been a series of incremental advances along multiple paths; business, social organization, military, agriculture, technological, etc. In all of this, the thought has primarily been to advance, empower and grow.

Now, for the first time in humanity’s history, we have filled the planet and have begun to hit various unyielding limits; water, food, oil, pollution, as well as limits having to do with how much impact we can have on the biosphere without causing huge shifts in the demographics of various species and even causing their extinctions.

It is clear, if humanity wants to continue to live indefinitely on this planet, that we are going to have to shift from a growth and advance strategy in all we do to one predicated on establishing a steady-state and sustainable balance with the biosphere around us.

We cannot use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. We cannot occupy more of the planet’s surface than is consistent with allowing the rest of the planet’s biology to exist and flourish. These both imply that our population has to come down to some sustainable number and be held there. We have to come up with ways to govern ourselves that are consistent with establishing and maintaining these essential balances. Nation against nation, system against system is not compatible with long term survival. The ultimate goal and purpose of government in an enlightened world should be to secure all of our futures (we and all the rest of the planet’s biology) and maintain the balance.

We could, if we cut our population to sustainable levels and learned to live within a sustainable footprint on this planet, exist here for tens of thousands of years and maintain a decent quality of life for all those who are alive at any specific point in time. We do not have to give up comfort or technology – we just have to dial our impact on the planet back to sustainable levels and stay with in those levels.

Anything that the Gates Foundation or any other forward looking organization works on that does not include long term goals like these is likely in the big picture to just be a shuffling of our problems from one place to the other rather than a real indefinite-term planet-wide solution to how our species is going to solve the problem of learning to live here without fouling our nest for ourselves and all the other species that depend on this planet’s biosphere.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Immigration Stress, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Dead Zones, Pandemics, Peak Oil, Personal, Philosophical, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Women's Rights | No Comments »

The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

This worrisome research article has appeared in a peer reviewed journal. It’s not telling us anything that we didn’t already know, but it does catalogue the situation and help us steer clear of the hyperbole.

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed ’sceptics’ claim to be unbiased analysts combating ‘junk science’. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Immigration Stress, Ocean Dead Zones, Peak Oil, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

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