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Major changes in the Earth’s natural systems are being driven by global warming, according to a vast analysis.

Glacier and permafrost melting, earlier spring-time, coastal erosion and animal migrations are among the observations laid at the door of man-made warming.

The research, in the journal Nature, involves many scientists who took part in last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

It links warming and natural impacts on a tighter regional scale.

Changes in the Earth’s physical and biological systems since at least 1970 are seen in regions which are known to be warming, it concludes.

The researchers assembled a database including more than 29,500 records that documented changes seen across a wide range of natural phenomena, such as:

• the earlier arrival of migratory birds in Australia
• declining krill stocks around Antarctica
• earlier break-up of river ice in Mongolia
• genetic shift in the pitcher plant mosquito in North America
• declining productivity of Lake Tanganyika
• melting Patagonian ice-fields

“Since 1970, there’s been about 0.5C, 0.6C of warming - that’s the global average,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) in New York.

“And look at all the effects this relatively low amount of warming has had.

“It reveals the sensitivity to relatively low amounts of warming in many physical and biological systems,” she told BBC News.

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- This is a favorite theme of mine and an essential part of what I call the Perfect Storm Hypothesis.   That there are many problems building up around us and that these problems potentiate and empower each other, or as the folks say, they multiply each other.

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A European Union study on the problems of global climate change, leaked to the press four days before its official launch on March 14, 2008, contained the sobering assessment that a failure to take radical action now to address global warming would create the likelihood of severe conflict over resources in the decades ahead. Two days later, on March 16, data from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reveals that the rate of shrinking of glaciers across the world - a key marker of climate change - has accelerated; this more than doubled between 2006 and 2007, and the 2007 figure was five times the average for the 1980-99 period. These two documents, taken together, present governments and citizens in the leading emissions-producing countries in particular with an unavoidable test.

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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Millions of people could face poverty, disease and hunger as a result of rising temperatures and changing rainfall expected to hit poor countries the hardest, the World Health Organization warned Monday.

Malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and floods cause an estimated 150,000 deaths annually, with Asia accounting for more than half, said regional WHO Director Shigeru Omi.

Malaria-carrying mosquitoes represent the clearest sign that global warming has begun to impact human health, he said, adding they are now found in cooler climates such as South Korea and the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Warmer weather means that mosquitoes’ breeding cycles are shortening, allowing them to multiply at a much faster rate, posing an even greater threat of disease, he told reporters in Manila.

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- This is a two part story about pollution along the Chinese coastline and rivers. If I lived in China, I’d be angry as hell and profoundly frightened.

- It is a story of what happens when everyone involved goes for the short-term gains with no thought of the long-term consequences of their individual or joint actions. Me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, now, now, now. Get the money and run.

- If the eastern idea of Karma resonates for you, here we have it in spades. Or, if you prefer, how about the western idea of “we reap what we sow“?

- Just today, here in my home town, a letter to the editor was printed by a local knuckle-dragger calling down ridicule on the idea that there’s any Global Warming or any of the other “crackpot ideas being jammed down the throats of people in Seattle and Berkeley”. I wish we could buy some of these folks a vacation along China’s coast, or up in the melting permafrost, or in a dozen other places around the world where the signs of deep problems are becoming unmistakable.

- But as long as the sun comes up tomorrow and their hair’s not on fire, they will steadfastly maintain that every thing’s fine. Yeah, right!

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Ports are being deserted, schools closed and jobs lost as pollution ravages Jiangsu and Shandong. In the first of two reports, the Southern Metropolis Daily describes the death of the local fishing industry.

To part I:

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Marine pollution is creating an ecological tragedy and may even poison our food. In the second of two reports, the Southern Metropolis Daily sees a chain of industrial zones threatening the life of China’s east coast

To part II:

- This quote, from the article referenced below, is at the core of Perfect Storm concerns:

Although many nations have been pledging steps to curb emissions for nearly a decade, the world’s output of carbon from human activities totals about 10 billion tons a year and has been steadily rising.

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The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

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As the BBC looks at the impact of rising food prices around the world, Sydney correspondent Nick Bryant reports from Australia on how the worst drought on record has slashed its exports of wheat.

Though located in a remote corner of the planet, the fields of Australia’s food bowl are central to the worldwide price of wheat.

In this part of rural New South Wales, water-starved farms and cavernous empty grain silos have the potential to create a ripple effect which spreads around the globe.

And that is precisely what is happening right now.

Low yield

After America, Australia is normally the second largest exporter of grain, and in a good year it would hope to harvest about 25 million tonnes.

But the country remains in the grip of the worst drought in a century, which is why the 2006 crop yielded only 9.8m tonnes.

Global wheat stocks are at their lowest levels since 1979, and the ongoing Australian drought is one of the reasons why.

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Anthropologist Brian Fagan uses Earth’s distant past to predict the crises that may lie in its future.

Spring is on its way back to northern latitudes. In many locales, it will arrive earlier than “normal,” yielding, ostensibly, a longer growing season, a hotter summer, balmier autumn, and future winters will lack their ferocious post-Pleistocene bites.

While vineyards are being planned for northern England, millions of residents around desiccated Atlanta are praying for enough rain to flow through their taps.

Brian Fagan believes climate is not merely a backdrop to the ongoing drama of human civilization, but an important stage upon which world events turn.

As it turns out, the anecdotal evidence of climate change in this, the 21st century, shares much in common with a historical antecedent, the Medieval Warm Period, circa AD 800 to 1200, that radically shaped societies across the globe.

The Medieval Warm Period was a time when the capacity of agriculture rapidly expanded and enabled people to flourish in Europe. Yet elsewhere, extended lack of rainfall, or too much of it, brought famine, plagues, and wars.

This bout of global warming was followed by the Little Ice Age that lasted roughly from AD 1300 until the middle of the 19th century and cast Europe and North America back into a big chill. Since then, mean global temperature has been slowly and steadily rising, accompanied by huge leaps in agricultural output and skyrocketing human population.

Today, climate experts tell us that over the past two decades, temperature has registered an alarming unnatural spike and is expected to keep climbing.

Despite the well-established fact that Earth is heating up, skeptics still are trying to poke holes in the assertion that it is owed to humans pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Climate change is, and always has been cyclical, they say. Or maybe, some insist, it is God who has his hand on the thermostat.

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The world must respond to climate change and other environmental challenges now while the cost is low or else pay a stiffer price later for its indecision, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Wednesday.

A new report by the 30-nation organization looks at “red light issues” in the environment, including global warming, water shortages, energy, biodiversity loss, transportation, agriculture, and fisheries.

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The U.S. West will see devastating droughts as global warming reduces the amount of mountain snow and causes the snow that does fall to melt earlier in the year, a new study says.

By storing moisture in the form of snow, mountains act as huge natural reservoirs, releasing water into rivers long into the summer dry season.

“We’re losing that reservoir,” said research leader Tim Barnett, an oceanographer and climate researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

“Spring runoff is getting earlier and earlier in the year, so you have to let water go over the dams into the ocean.”

Summers are also becoming hotter and longer. “That dries things out more and leads to fires,” Barnett added.

“Our results are not good news for those living in the western United States,” the scientists write in their report, which appears in today’s online edition of the journal Science.

Unnatural Changes

Barnett and his team used computer models to study water flow in Western rivers over the past 50 years.

The researchers found that the changes currently affecting the U.S. West have less than a one percent chance of being due to natural variability, Barnett told National Geographic News.

His team verified that by running a variety of control tests under pre-industrial conditions that mimicked known natural cycles.

(Related: “Ancient “Megadroughts” Struck U.S. West, Could Happen Again, Study Suggests” [May 24, 2007].)

What’s been occurring recently, he said, is different from natural variability and is driven by the buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.

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- I don’t know why folks have a hard time getting the point of The Perfect Storm Hypothesis. This story is a perfect example of the interdependencies the hypothesis talks about.

- Over population and poverty drives people to settle in forested land - clearing it as they go. World food shortages drive growers to grow food where previous trees stood. Less trees mean less water retention which dries the remaining forest making it less resilient. Less forest means less CO2 uptake. More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to warmer weather. Warmer weather means less winter snow pack. Less winter snow pack means less summer water. Less summer water means less ability to grow food using ‘wet agricultural methods’. Less food grown means more pressure to cut the forests to grow the food where they stood. Societies deeply dependent on diminishing oil resources and now trying to avoid the fact by promoting biofuel growing and use. Biofuels, the growth of which, takes the same fields we used to grow human food on. And as a result, we have less food and need more room to grow it and we all turn again to the land the forest stand upon.

- And around and around it goes in branching causal relationships and positive feedback cycles. And behind it all, human greed, ignorance, rapaciousness and leaders who talk but do not act. Leaders who see the truth but do not believe.

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The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction.

In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost.

Gilberto Camara, of INPE, an institute that provides satellite imaging of the area, said the rate of loss was unprecedented for the time of year.

Officials say rising commodity prices are encouraging farmers to clear more land to plant crops such as soya.

The monthly rate of deforestation saw a big rise from 243 sq km (94 sq miles) in August to 948 sq km (366 sq miles) in December.

“We’ve never before detected such a high deforestation rate at this time of year,” Mr Camara said.

His concern, outlined during a news conference in Brasilia on Wednesday, was echoed by Environment Minister Marina Silva.

Expensive soya

Ms Silva said rising prices of raw materials and commodities could be spurring the rate of forest clearing, as more and more farmers saw the Amazon as a source of cheap land.

“The economic reality of these states indicate that these activities impact, without a shadow of a doubt, on the forest,” she said.

The state of Mato Grosso was the worst affected, contributing more than half the total area of forest stripped, or 1,786 sq km (700 sq miles).

The states of Para and Rondonia were also badly affected, accounting for 17.8% and 16% of the total cleared respectively.

The situation may also be worse than reported, with the environment ministry saying the preliminary assessment of the amount of forest cleared could double as more detailed satellite images are analysed.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is due to attend an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss new measures to tackle deforestation in the Amazon.

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