Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category

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Russia to build floating Arctic nuclear stations

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

– I’ve written about this looming problem of competition for resources in the Arctic before: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, and ➡.

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Environmentalists fear pollution risk as firms try to exploit ocean’s untapped oil and gas reserves

Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists.

A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.

The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia’s biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years.

In addition, designers are known to have developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs that could allow eight wells to be drilled at a time.

Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, yesterday condemned the idea of using nuclear power to open the Arctic to oil, gas and mineral production.

“It is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants’ potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle,” said Igor Kudrik, a spokesman.

Environmentalists also fear that if additional radioactive waste is produced, it will be dumped into the sea. Russia has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste. Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors are known to have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.

More… ➡

– Hat tip to Cryptogon for this story

Posted in Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, Peak Oil, Pollution | No Comments »

Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the world is melting — and fast.

The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reported earlier this year, “The new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago.  “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” said Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography.

This is all sadly consistent with other recent research (see Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated” and AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003 and links below).

And this country isn’t being spared — see “Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early.”

But the story of the week, from the Miami Herald, is Chacaltaya, which means ”cold road” — and like our Glacier National Park, it is gonna need a new name [maybe “not-so-cold cul-de-sac”]:

If anyone needs a reminder of the on-the-ground impacts of global climate change, come to the Andes mountains in Bolivia. At 17,388 feet above sea level, Chacaltaya, an 18,000 year-old glacier that delighted thousands of visitors for decades, is gone, completely melted away as of some sad, undetermined moment early this year….

More… ➡

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

UN ‘stunned’ by scale of bail-out

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

– Yes, isn’t it amazing we’ve found ALL this money to try to fix the financial systems – when we could hardly find any to help fix the world’s environmental problems?

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The UN’s head of environment has been left “stunned” by the billions of dollars pumped into ailing companies following the global financial crisis.

Achim Steiner told the BBC One Planet programme that he had fought for years to secure much smaller sums to tackle poverty and climate change.

“We waited perhaps a decade to get $5bn ($3.3bn) to accelerate development of renewable energy,” he said.

We now see $20bn (£13.3bn) paid [to] a car company simply to keep it alive.”

He said he was surprised that such huge amounts had “suddenly been found” to tackle the crisis.

‘False story’

Vast sums of money have been spent on bank bailouts in the UK and the US alone.

Billions more has been promised in aid for struggling industries, such as automotive manufacturers.

But Mr Steiner, who is based in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, warned we are passing the bill to the next generation, and stressed that if extra investment is not found to tackle climate change, the bail-outs would be “a terrible waste of money”.

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Mental Irrationality | No Comments »

‘Safe’ climate means ‘no to coal’

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

About three-quarters of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must be left unused if society is to avoid dangerous climate change, scientists warn.

More than 100 nations support the goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C.

But the scientists say that without major curbs on fossil fuel use, 2C will probably be reached by 2050.

Writing in Nature, they say politicians should focus on limiting humanity’s total output of CO2 rather than setting a “safe” level for annual emissions.

The UN climate process focuses on stabilising annual emissions at a level that would avoid major climate impacts.

But this group of scientists says that the cumulative total provides a better measure of the likely temperature rise, and may present an easier target for policymakers.

“To avoid dangerous climate change, we will have to limit the total amount of carbon we inject into the atmosphere, not just the emission rate in any given year,” said Myles Allen from the physics department at Oxford University.

“Climate policy needs an exit strategy; as well as reducing carbon emissions now, we need a plan for phasing out net emissions entirely.”

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, The Perfect Storm, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

World’s major rivers ‘drying up’

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Water levels in some of the world’s most important rivers have declined significantly over the past 50 years, US researchers say.

They say the reduced flows are linked to climate change and will have a major impact as the human population grows.

The only area with a significant increase in water flows was the Arctic due to a greater snow and ice melting.

The study was published in the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Journal of Climate.

Rainfall patterns ‘altered’

From the Yellow river in northern China to the Ganges in India to the Colorado river in the United States – the US scientists say that the major sources of fresh water for much of the world’s population are in decline.

The researchers analysed water flows in more than 900 rivers over a 50-year period to 2004.

They found that there was an overall decline in the amount of water flowing into the world’s oceans.

Much of the reduction has been caused by human activities such as the building of dams and the diversion of water for agriculture.

But the researchers highlighted the contribution of climate change, saying that rising temperatures were altering rainfall patterns and increasing rates of evaporation.

The authors say they are concerned that the decline in freshwater sources will continue with serious repercussions for a growing global population.

While some major rivers, including the Brahmaputra in South Asia and the Yangtze in China, have larger water flows, there is concern that the increased volume comes from the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas.

This means that in future these rivers might decline significantly as the glaciers disappear.

To the original… ➡

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

Climate Change Means Shortfalls In Colorado River Water Deliveries

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

The Colorado River system supplies water to tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland, and has never experienced a delivery shortage. But if human-caused climate change continues to make the region drier, scheduled deliveries will be missed 60-90 percent of the time by the middle of this century, according to a pair of climate researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

“All water-use planning is based on the idea that the next 100 years will be like the last 100,” said Scripps research marine physicist Tim Barnett, a co-author of the report. “We considered the question: Can the river deliver water at the levels currently scheduled if the climate changes as we expect it to. The answer is no.”

Even under conservative climate change scenarios, Barnett and Scripps climate researcher David Pierce found that reductions in the runoff that feeds the Colorado River mean that it could short the Southwest of a half-billion cubic meters (400,000 acre feet) of water per year 40 percent of the time by 2025. (An acre foot of water is typically considered adequate to meet the annual water needs of two households.) By the later part of this century, those numbers double.

The paper, “Sustainable water deliveries from the Colorado River in a changing climate,” appears in the April 20 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More… ➡

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

Oxfam warns of climate disasters

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

The number of people hit by climate-related disasters is expected to rise by about 50%, to reach 375m a year by 2015, the UK-based charity Oxfam says.

Current humanitarian systems are barely able to cope, an Oxfam study contends.

It warns agencies are in danger of being overwhelmed by events such as flooding, storms and drought.

The group called for a radical shift so that humanitarian aid is sent impartially, instead of on the basis of political or other preferences.

Oxfam’s Rob Bailey told the BBC a big increase was needed in aid spending, but that the problem was not just about the amount of money.

“We need to see that money spent in better ways,” he said.

More… ➡

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

An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

– This is a great place to start if you want to get the big overview of Global Climate Change and its consequences.   And recall that this, as big as it is, is only a part of the bigger picture that I’ve been calling The Perfect Storm.

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In this post, I will examine the key impacts we face by 2100 if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. I will focus primarily on:

  • Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 15°F over much of the United States
  • Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
  • Dust Bowls over the U.S. SW and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
  • Massive species loss on land and sea — 50% or more of all life
  • Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
  • More severe hurricanes — especially in the Gulf

Equally tragic, as a 2009 NOAA-led study found, these impacts be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

More… ➡ <== Please continue, this is well worth a good read!

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pandemics, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

Ocean Dead Zones Likely To Expand: Increasing Carbon Dioxide And Decreasing Oxygen Make It Harder For Deep-sea Animals To Breath

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

New calculations made by marine chemists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) suggest that low-oxygen “dead zones” in the ocean could expand significantly over the next century. These predictions are based on the fact that, as more and more carbon dioxide dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean, marine animals will need more oxygen to survive.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide are increasing rapidly in the Earth’s atmosphere, primarily because of human activities. About one third of the carbon dioxide that humans produce by burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the world’s oceans, gradually causing seawater to become more acidic.

However, such “ocean acidification” is not the only way that carbon dioxide can harm marine animals. In a “Perspective” published in the journal Science, Peter Brewer and Edward Peltzer combine published data on rising levels of carbon dioxide and declining levels of oxygen in the ocean in a set of new and thermodynamically rigorous calculations. They show that increases in carbon dioxide can make marine animals more susceptible to low concentrations of oxygen, and thus exacerbate the effects of low-oxygen “dead zones” in the ocean.

Brewer and Peltzer’s calculations also show that the partial pressure of dissolved carbon dioxide gas (pCO2) in low-oxygen zones will rise much higher than previously thought. This could have significant consequences for marine life in these zones.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Extinctions, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, 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… ➡

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

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