Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category

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Melting glacier leaves no room for doubt

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Huge ice fields in western China’s Tian Mountains are diminishing because of global warming. Jonathan Watts went to Urumqi No1 to see how the local people are being affected.

Up close, the sound of global warming at the face of the Urumqi No1 Glacier is a simple, steady drip, drip, drip. Just 30 metres from the main wall, the flood of meltwater becomes so powerful that it cuts a tunnel under the floor of grey ice, leaving only a blotchy, wafer-thin crust on the surface. [See Guardian video here.]

Compared with the collapse of ice shelves in the Antarctic, the melting of the mountains in China’s far west is one of the less spectacular phenomena of global warming, but it is a more immediate cause of concern and hope.

There is concern because this glacier — more than almost any other in China — is a natural water regulator for millions of people downstream in the far western region of Xinjiang. In winter, it stores up snow and ice. In summer, it releases meltwater to provide drinking and irrigation supplies to one of the country’s most arid regions. It brings hope because its rapid shrinkage is helping to set off climate-change alarm bells in a country that emits more greenhouse gases than any other.

The Urumqi No1 Glacier is so named because it was the first ice field to be measured in China. Since 1953, scientists have been monitoring its thickness and length, analysing traces of pollution and tracking changes in temperature at this 3,800-metre altitude. The results leave no room for doubt that this part of the Tian (Heaven) mountain range is melting.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

‘Big Dry’ turns farms into deserts

Monday, September 1st, 2008

In the once-lush fields of South Australia, on land that borders the state’s world famous Lower Lakes, farmer Nigel Treloar rounds up the herd with the help of his off-road motorbike.

It is one of the few things that has got easier as a result of Australia’s worst drought in 100 years.

That is because he used to have 800 cows and now he only milks 250. There is not enough irrigation water from the nearby lakes to sustain a bigger herd.

Nigel took me to nearby Lake Albert, to what used to be a vast expanse of water. But now its waters have receded and much of it resembles a moonscape.

The pump and pipeline that once irrigated his land now lie in the open-air rather than underwater. He has been chasing the retreating water and has been losing the race.

“We’d be up to our waist in water here and it would be navigable,” Nigel told me, after we had walked out 100 metres from what used to be the shoreline.

“You could come out here with boats. All the fishermen would be up and down with their fishing gear and pulling in the catch.”

“But this is the middle of winter and it looks like a desert.”

There are puddles of water but they are brown-tinged and unwelcoming. The cows will not drink it. So high is the salt content that it stings and burns their mouths.

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Desertification, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Spain sweats amid ‘water wars’

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Climate experts warn that the country is suffering badly from the impact of climate change and that the Sahara is slowly creeping north – into the Spanish mainland.

Yet in Spain itself there is little consensus about what is to be done. Indeed, such is the disagreement that journalists and politicians alike are calling it “water wars”.

A farmer and politician, Angel Carcia Udon, said: “Water arouses passions because it can be used as a weapon, a political weapon, just as oil is a political weapon.”

And water in Spain has set region against region, north against south and government against opposition.

When the city of Barcelona nearly ran out of water earlier this year, the fountains were switched off and severe restrictions were introduced.

The government of Catalonia pleaded for water to be transferred from rivers like the Ebro – causing a furious row between the regions.

Instead, the city shipped in millions of litres of water from France and accelerated work on the giant desalination plant on the edge of Barcelona, which promises to provide 180,000 cubic metres of water a day.

Parched land

But Barcelona is not alone in its insatiable thirst. Apart from the far north, the entire country is suffering, especially the parched areas on the Mediterranean coast, from Catalonia, down through Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and Almeria.

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Not-So-Permafrost: Big Thaw of Arctic Soil May Unleash Runaway Warming

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

New estimates show that frozen Arctic soil contains far more potential greenhouse gas than previously recognized–and could speed climate change as it meltsDamage to buildings

“Drunken” trees listing wildly, cracked highways and sinkholes—all are visible signs of thawing Arctic permafrost. When this frozen soil warms, it releases carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases as microbes start to thrive on the organic material it contains—a potentially potent source of uncontrollable climate change.

Now new research published in Nature Geoscience shows that such frozen Arctic soil holds nearly twice as much of the organic material that gives rise to planet-warming greenhouse gases as previously estimated.

“When the air temperature rises two to three degrees, the Arctic tundra would switch from a carbon sink to a carbon source,” says soil scientist Chien-Lu Ping of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “The greater the carbon stores, the greater the impact it causes,” including even faster warming in the already changing Arctic.

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Many think it’s too late for climate, survey finds

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

– It’s not like we didn’t know.  Consider this:  ➡

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Ten per cent of New Zealanders believe it is too late to do anything about climate change, a new survey reveals.

The figure has alarmed campaigners trying to spread the message that everyone can do their bit for the environment.

Paul McElwain, strategy director of advertising company Publicis Mojo, presented the results of the online survey to a conference in Auckland yesterday.

The poll of more than 4000 household shoppers showed hundreds thought it was too late to act on climate change. One in 10 New Zealanders and about two in 10 Australians thought time had run out.

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Arctic has 90bn barrels of crude

Monday, August 4th, 2008

– I suppose this is a case of good news / bad news.

– The good news is there is oil to be pumped and used and the world sorely needs more oil.

– The bad news is that we can now get at this oil because of global warming.

– The bad news is that it isn’t clear who ‘owns’ this oil as I wrote about here in September of 2007 and this may lead to political and military confrontations.

– The bad news is that finding more oil means that we can continue to dodge the energy bullet and continue to burn oil and put more CO2 into the atmosphere.

– Perspective is always good. Here’s some:

– As of 2005, we were using 30 billion barrels of oil per year. At that rate, these new arctic supplies will last three years.

– Is this discovery significant? Yes, as of 2005, only about 4 billion barrels of new oil per year were being discovered.

– This information is from here: ➡

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The Arctic holds as much as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first governmental assessment of the region’s resources.

The report is likely to add impetus to the race among polar nations, such as Russia, the US, Denmark, Norway and Canada, for control of the region.

The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil, while 1,669,000bn cubic feet of natural gas is equivalent to 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered gas reserves.

“The extensive Arctic continental shelves may constitute the geographically largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth,” the USGS said.

Last August Russia planted its flag on the seabed 4km under the North Pole raising fears of a rush to grab the Arctic’s mineral resources, particularly its oil and gas deposits. Denmark in May called a summit of the five Arctic powers in Ilulissat, Greenland, to try to restrain competition and reiterate the countries’ joint commitment to the United Nation’s Law of the Sea Convention that governs territorial waters.

Commercial interest in exploiting the Arctic has also increased, with Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch energy group, pushing to help Russia develop gas from the Yamal region, and Total winning the right to do so at Russia’s giant Shtokman gas field.

In the US, companies are pushing ever further into the Arctic regions of Alaska, while Denmark has attracted a number of large companies interested in exploring for oil and gas off the coast of Greenland.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CounterCurrents, CrashBlogging, Peak Oil, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

When can we expect extremely high surface temperatures?

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Sure glacier melt, sea level rise, extreme drought, and species loss get all the media attention — they are the Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Barack Obama of climate impacts. But what about good old-fashioned sweltering heat? How bad will that be? Two little-noticed studies — one new, one old — spell out the grim news.

Bottom line: By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year.

The peak temperature analysis comes from a Geophysical Research Letters paper published two weeks ago that focused on the annual-maximum “once-in-a-century” temperature. Researchers looked at the case of a (mere) 700 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the A1b scenario, with total warming of about 3.5°C by century’s end. The key scientific point is that “the extremes rise faster than the means in a warming climate.”

More… (click through to see a great temperature map) ➡

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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 »

Polluter appeasement — should we question the patriotism of deniers?

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

– I have mixed feelings about some of this. I know that people of great sincerity hold beliefs on all sides of these questions. It is easy, when you are strongly on one side, to demonize folks on the other side as being intentionally evil – but, in many cases, it simply isn’t true.

– I’ll qualify this in two ways, however. First, this argument doesn’t let off the folks who run the big Oil and Coal companies that intentionally spread disinformation to confuse the public about global climate change. Once folks have reached that level of power, there is no excuse for misusing their power. With power goes responsibility.

– My other qualification is that while I agree that many good hearted and sincere folks disbelieve in global climate change, this does not give them a free ticket for the rest of their lives. All of us in democratic societies have an obligation to maintain an open mind and to challenge our own belief systems by taking a good look at what the other side is saying periodically and seriously considering it.

– If folks do not open themselves up intentionally to absorb and assimilate new information periodically, then they are badly misusing their democratic rights by accepting all the benefits of democracy and shunning the work of being an informed and thoughtful citizen.

– We have the right to our opinions, but we pull the system down if we do not work to make sure that our opinions are informed and fair opinions.

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Independence Day may be the best day to ask ourselves — what is the greatest, preventable threat to Americans’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (LLPH). The answer is simple — human-caused global warming. Certainly there are other major threats to LLPH, the gravest of which is probably terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapon, in this country.

Between Homeland Security and the Pentagon, we spend billions of dollars every month to try to prevent terrorism. Indeed, President Bush and John McCain say Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. If so, the government spends more than $20 billion a month just to fight terrorism — of which more than half is new money we were’nt spending before 9/11 (and we spend more than $50 billion a month total on military and homeland security). And those who oppose such spending are routinely labeled unpatriotic or even appeasers.

But unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are by far the greatest preventable threat to Americans’ LLPH (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction and Part 2: The Solution“). Yet the government spends virtually nothing to fight global warming — certainly no significant amount of new money has been allocated for this major threat (the Clinton Administration tried, but the Gingrich Congress reversed that effort, reducing or zeroing out every program aimed at climate mitigation or even adaptation).

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Extreme Weather Events Can Unleash A ‘Perfect Storm’ Of Infectious Diseases, Research Study Says

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

An international research team, including University of Minnesota researcher Craig Packer, has found the first clear example of how climate extremes, such as the increased frequency of droughts and floods expected with global warming, can create conditions in which diseases that are tolerated individually may converge and cause mass die-offs of livestock or wildlife.

The study, published June 25 by PloS (Public Library of Science) One, an online peer-reviewed research journal, suggests that extreme climatic conditions are capable of altering normal host-pathogen relationships and causing a “perfect storm” of multiple infectious outbreaks that could trigger epidemics with catastrophic mortality.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Pandemics, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

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