Archive for the ‘The Perfect Storm’ Category

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DIRE WARNINGS FROM CHINA’S FIRST CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

– Someone once commented that few people will just lie down and starve quietly.China’s ability to feed itself is near an edge and it shows no signs of reigning in the population’s dreams of western style affluence.  Its water tables are falling and temperatures are rising. When the food does run short, it will uncork its vast coffers of trade-surplus money and wade into the international food markets to buy food to stave off social instability at home and this, in turn, will drive food prices beyond the reach of many in marginal nations and global stability will be well on its way down the slippery slope.

– China is a coming global train wreck, powering into the dead-end alley of more growth and more consumption with the pedal to the metal and this report is merely a small note someone tossed off the train as it passed.

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BEIJING (AFP) Temperatures in China will rise significantly in coming decades and water shortages will worsen, state media has reported, citing the government’s first national assessment of global climate change.

Greenhouse gases released due to human activity are leading to ever more serious problems in terms of climate change,” the Ministry of Science and Technology said in a statement.

Global climate change has an impact on the nation’s ability to develop further,” said the ministry, one of 12 government departments that prepared the report.

In just over a decade, global warming will start to be felt in the world’s most populous country, and it will get warmer yet over the next two or three generations.

Compared with 2000, the average temperatures will increase by between 1.3 and 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020, the China News Service reported, citing the assessment.

By the middle of the century, the annual average temperature in China will rise by as much as 3.3 degrees Celsius (more than five degrees Fahrenheit), and by 2100 it could soar by as much as six degrees Celsius, according to the news service.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, Desertification, Food Shortages, Peak Oil, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Warmer Atlantic, Climate Change Presage More, and Worse, Western Wildfires

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Historical record suggests the American West is “primed” for climate change-inspired conflagrations.

Between 1650 and 1749, fires raged across western North America from what is now British Columbia down into northern Mexico. In contrast, the following century saw scattered, sporadic wildfires. By combining tree-ring records stretching back 450 years as well as fire-scar data from more than 4,700 burned trees, scientists have now created an extended log of the climate in the western U.S. and its attendant wildfires. And this record has revealed that temperature shifts in the waters of the northern Atlantic help determine the scale and intensity of western wildfires.

Forest ecologist Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona and a team of international colleagues collected tree-ring and fire-scar data from 241 logging sites across western North America. The scars revealed the dates of at least 33,975 individual fires stretching back to 1550. “We got most of our fire-scar samples from dead trees, stumps and logs. They’re cookies,” or cross sections, Swetnam explains. “A single tree might have 10 or even 20 different scars on it.”

The researchers compared this long fire record with weather patterns: the well-known El Nino and La Nina cycles that occur every two to seven years, as well as longer cycles called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). “Fire activity correlated with–as we expect–drought, but also with these interesting oscillations in the Pacific and Atlantic,” Swetnam notes. “The North Atlantic, and warming temperatures there, have apparently had some importance in drought occurrence and fire activity.”

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Posted in Climate Change, Science, The Perfect Storm | 2 Comments »

Team Discovers Key Step In Flu Virus Replication

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

– The H5N1 Avian Flu Influenza virus is a latent plague just waiting to break out if and when it mutates into a form which can easily jump from human to human. I’ve written about this here: ➡, ➡ and ➡. So, any iinsights into how it works and how it can be subverted is great news.
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Science Daily — As public health officials around the world keep a nervous eye on the spread of avian influenza, the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) has uncovered a key step in how the influenza virus causes infection.

Yan Zhou and her team have discovered how a crucial pathway that supports the influenza A virus’s ability to reproduce itself is activated, a finding that could pave the way for new drugs and vaccines.

The paper will appear in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of General Virology and recently has been given advance on-line publication.

“The work we are doing will be applicable to all influenza viruses, including influenza A virus subtype H5N1,” said VIDO Director Lorne Babiuk.

More… ➡

Posted in Pandemics, Science, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart – 1949

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart can truly be considered to be a ‘lost book‘. An excellent piece of prescient of Science Fiction now largely forgotten, it envisions an Earth suddenly depopulated by a plague (think H5N1 Bird Flu, for example).

What amazed me more than anything else in this book, were the number of themes that Stewart touched on which were obviously known in 1949. The flammability of the forests as a result of our ‘management’, the boom and bust cycles of predator and prey, the likelihood that man’s growth would overrun the planet’s ability to sustain him, the increased probability of plagues as population density increases.

It is a wise and sad book all at once. In these days, when so many people are still in deep denial of the coming problems (see the Perfect Storm), it reminds us that the writing has been on the wall for a very long time indeed.

In the book, Stewart’s main character, Isherwood Williams, makes much of the fact that of the very few people who survived, very few of them have any talent or inclination to think beyond the immediate and they will rarely consider the future and the longer term consequences of today’s decisions.

Nothing’s changed. The evidence for and the information about the coming problems are laying out in plain sight but because they refer to things in the future and things that are far away, very few of us are interested. And like a great flock of sheep advancing upon a cliff and chewing on the grass just in front of our nose, we will go over the edge – and nearly everyone will be utterly surprised.

If you are interested in the coming problems, I recommend this book highly. You can file it in your collection of books on the coming apocalypse under ‘P’ – for poignant.

Posted in Book Reviews, Pandemics, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Polar bears could be listed as ‘endangered’

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

WASHINGTON: US President George W Bush’s administration is proposing to list the polar bear as an endangered species because of warming temperatures in the animal’s habitat, The Washington Post has reported.

The proposal, described by an Interior Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity, marks the first time the administration has identified climate change as the driving force behind the potential demise of a species, the paper said.

“We’ve reviewed all the available data that leads us to believe the sea ice the polar bear depends on has been receding,” the Interior official told the paper.

“Obviously, the sea ice is melting because the temperatures are warmer.”

The official added that US Fish and Wildlife Service officials have concluded that polar bears could be endangered within 45 years, the report said.

A spokesman for the Interior Department was not immediately available for comment.

The Bush administration has consistently rejected scientific thesis that human activity contributes to global warming and has resisted capping greenhouse gas emissions as bad for business and US workers.

More… ➡

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

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

Monday, December 25th, 2006

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands – in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati – vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta’s Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university’s School of Oceanographic Studies, says “it is only a matter of some years” before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen “vanishing islands” in India’s part of the delta. The area’s 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years’ time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, Rising Ocean Levels, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Australia ponders climate future

Monday, December 25th, 2006

Parts of Australia are in the grip of the worst drought in memory.

Rainfall in many eastern and southern regions has been at near record lows. On top of that, the weather has been exceptionally warm.

The parched conditions have sparked an emotional debate about global warming.

Conservationists insist the “big dry” is almost certainly the result of climate change and warn that Australia is on the brink of environmental disaster.

Other experts believe such hysteria is wildly misplaced and that the country shouldn’t panic.

‘A war-like scenario’

The drought in Australia has lasted for more than five years.

The worry for some is that this could be the start of a protracted period of low rainfall that could go on for decades.

“The really scary thing is last time we had a drought of this intensity that lasted about five years – it lasted for about 50 years,” cautioned Professor Andy Pitman from Macquarie University in Sydney.

“The politicians truly believe this is a five-year or six-year drought that will break sometime in 2007 or 2008. But it might not break until 2050 and we aren’t thinking in those terms at this stage,” Professor Pitman told the BBC.

Global warming, the drought and the future of dwindling water supplies will undoubtedly dominate talk at barbeques and dinner parties this festive season in Australia.

“We’re in a state of emergency,” said Cate Faehrmann from the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales. “We need to treat this as a war-like scenario. The people are really worried that we are going to run out of water.”

She added: “I can imagine Australia being a desert in a few decades’ time in some of these agricultural areas. The soil is blowing away, the rivers are drying up.

“I think there will be plots of land abandoned and perhaps whole agricultural practices abandoned.”

More… ➡

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

Free to choose?

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will

In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility for one’s actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime and conception were “freely” entered into, then social relations would be very different

More… ➡

Posted in Mental Irrationality, Science, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Flu ‘could wipe out 62 million’

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

A global flu pandemic could kill 62 million people, experts have warned.

The 1918 pandemic claimed 50 million lives, and experts in The Lancet predict the toll today would be higher than this, despite medical advances.

The world’s poorest nations would be hardest hit, fueled by factors such as HIV and malaria infections, the Harvard University researchers believe.

Yet developing countries can least afford to prepare for a pandemic, which needs to be addressed, they say.

Killer strain

Lethal global flu epidemics tend to occur three or four times a century.

Some scientists believe a new one may be imminent and could be triggered by bird flu.

So far there have been only 258 cases of the latest strain of avian flu, H5N1, recorded in humans.

But the fear is that this strain could mutate and spread quickly and easily between people, triggering a deadly pandemic.

More… ➡ and ➡

Posted in Pandemics, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Australia Facing Worst Drought for 1000 Years

Thursday, December 21st, 2006

The irony continues as those who shun action on climate change are suffering the most from climate change.

Along with the United States, Australia has suffered a major drought this year, “the worst for 1000 years.” Australia and the U.S. are the only two industrialized countries that have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

More… ➡

 

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

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