Global Warming

[DominO123]

I will be using this thread to post articles about global warming.

 

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UN Chronicle, Vol. 39, September-November 2002

 

 

Global warming triggers glacial lakes flood threat

 

 

We are halfway through the International Year of Mountains and the International Year of Ecotourism, intended to highlight the fragility and threats to these vital ecosystems from global warming, unsustainable tourism, pollution and other impacts, and to galvanize Governments, industry, non-governmental organizations and the public to act and protect.

 

The observances of the Year come as scientists with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) have reported the finding of at least 44 glacial lakes in the Himalayas that are filling so rapidly they could burst their banks in as little as five years' time, sending millions of gallons of deadly floodwaters swirling down valleys and putting tens of thousands of lives at risk. The lakes are rapidly filling with icy water as rising temperatures in the region accelerate the melting of glaciers and snowfields that feed them.

 

Pradeep Mool, a remote sensing expert with ICIMOD, said work is under way to lower the water levels of one critical glacial lake pinpointed by on-the-ground surveys and new satellite images. This is the Tsho Rolpa Lake that feeds the Rolwaling and Tama Koshi valleys in the Dolakha District of Nepal. Researchers have found that, as a result of the melting of a nearby glacier, the lake has grown sixfold, from an area of 0.23 square kilometres in the late 1950s to one of 1.4 square kilometres now. "A flood from this lake could cause serious damage down to the village of Tribeni, which is 108 km downstream, threatening about 10,000 human lives, thousands of livestock, agricultural land, bridges and other infrastructure", said Mr. Mool.

 

In Nepal, for example, data from 49 monitoring stations reveal a clear increase in temperature since the mid- 1970s, with highest temperatures found at higher altitudes. On average, air temperatures here are one degree Celsius higher than in the 1970s, rising by 0.06 degrees per year. It is no lust people who are at risk but many millions of dollars' worth of property, tourism facilities, trekking trails, roads, bridges and hydroelectric plants, which are the economic lifeblood of many countries in the region. Surendra Shrestha, Regional Coordinator in Asia for the UNEP Division of Early Warning and Assessment, observed that any one of twenty potentially dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal and 24 in Bhutan could burst its banks in five to ten years' time with catastrophic results for people and property hundreds of kilometres-downstream. "These are the ones we know about. Who knows how many others elsewhere in the Himalayas and across the world are in a similar critical state?"

 

A high-tech communications network of sensors and sirens has been linked from the lake to the villages at risk from floodwaters. Engineering work is under way to lower the water levels at Tsho Rolpa by 30 metres. But experts say money is needed urgently for similar work on scores of other glacial lakes. Some donor Governments are helping, but much more aid is needed. "It is a costly problem because glacial lakes are situated in remote areas which are difficult to reach", said Mr. Shrestha.

 

"Part of our work is to help the Governments of Nepal and Bhutan find and focus on potentially dangerous lakes, develop early warning systems, be able to warn communities of an impending Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), and to carry out engineering works to reduce the threats", he added.

 

GLOFs are not a new phenomenon, but there is evidence that the frequency of such events has risen over the past three decades. In August 1985, a sudden outburst flood from the Dig Tsho glacial lake in Nepal destroyed fourteen bridges and caused $1.5 million in damage to the nearly completed Namche Small Hydropower Plant.

 

The new research, announced in April 2002, began in 1999 and based on topographic maps, aerial photographs and satellite images from Landsat, Spot and IRS craft, has identified 3,252 glaciers and 2,323 glacial lakes in Nepal, and 677 glaciers and 2,674 glacial lakes in Bhutan. Of the 44 high-risk lakes identified, Bhutan's Raphstreng Tsho glacial lake in the Pho Chu River sub-basin measured 1.6 km long, 0.96 km wide and was 80 metres deep in 1986. The latest figures (1995) show the lake has swollen to be 1.94 km long, 1.13 km wide and has a depth of 107 metres. Its neighbouring glacier could generate a GLOF up to two-and-a-half times that which caused major devastation in October 1994.

 

The 43 others show similar patterns. Filling of the lakes, and the threat of their mud and debris walls being breached, are a result of rising temperatures melting the glaciers. Glaciers in Bhutan are retreating at a rate of 30 to 40 metres a year, even faster in some areas . The Tradkarding glacier, which feeds the Tsho Rolpa glacial lake in Nepal's Rolwaling Valley, is retreating at a rate of over 20 metres a year and in some years within the last decade reached 100 metres per year.

 

"Mountains were once considered indomitable, unchanging and impregnable. But we are learning that they are as vulnerable as the world's oceans, grasslands and forests to environmental threats and insensitive, unfettered, development", said Klaus Topfer. Executive Director of UNEP. "The findings from our joint studies in the Himalayas, the roof of the world, reveals the extent of a new and alarming threat. It is not just the risk to human lives, agriculture and property that should worry us. Mountains are the world's water towers feeding the rivers and lakes upon which all life depends. If the glaciers continue to retreat at the rates being seen in places like the Himalayas, then many rivers and freshwater systems could run dry, threatening drinking water supplies, as well as fisheries and wildlife. We now have another compelling reason to act to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."

 

Climate change and other environment and development issues, including those affecting mountains, are a special focus of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

[DominO123]

Using a camera to document global warming: 'this is a magnificent and urgent story just beginning to be told.

 

Nieman Reports, Vol. 56, Winter 2002

 

by Gary Braasch

 

 

Climate change is happening. I have seen it with my own eyes.

 

I have stood in the empty rookeries of displaced Adelie penguins and felt the chill of huge icebergs separating from a receding ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. I saw the young black spruces growing higher than ever before on boreal hillsides in Alaska and witnessed subtle changes on the tundra. I can see the ablation of glaciers near my home in the Pacific Northwest and have photographed again the 150-year-old images of great Swiss glaciers to show them wasting away. In North America I've photographed early blooming plants and migrating birds arriving sooner than expected. Along the coasts I have seen rising tides and heavy storms erode beaches and felt the anguish of native Alaskans as their village is increasingly washed away.

 

These and other observations were made beginning in 1999 as part of my photographic project, "World View of Global Warming." I wanted to move beyond the raw statistics, the charts, and the predictions that are easily dismissed. I wanted to look at the earth itself, with the eyes of a natural history photographer, and report on what changes were already underway. It seemed to me that despite the accumulating scientific evidence of the circumstances and potential consequences, awareness about this issue was largely absent from political debate, rarely written about, and seldom talked about around kitchen tables. A visual connection was needed.

 

In the years since then, I've crossed both the Antarctic and Arctic Circles, ventured above 15,000 feet in the Andes to photograph receding glaciers, dove on damaged coral reefs with scientists monitoring ocean warming, and followed scientists into the field in Europe and North America. I found that physical systems like oceans and glaciers are being altered. Animals and plants, adapted during thousands of years to strict relationships of temperature, moisture and food availability, have no choice but to respond to changes in their habitat. In remote locations and in familiar gardens and parks, scientists are devoting their careers to measure what is happening, documenting the effects of global warming, and interpreting the results.

 

What I saw and learned on my photographic journeys offers strong confirmation of the global warming predictions we have been hearing since the mid-1980's. The sources I used for guidance and documentation are hundreds of peer-reviewed studies in scientific journals and sections of the Intergoernmental Panel on Climate Change report and interviews with scientists. The scientific evidence has become a little better known in the past few years and, earlier in 2002, was acknowledged in the Environmental Protection Agency's policy paper "Climate Action Report 2002," even as President Bush persisted in opposing the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gases.

 

Photographing and reporting on these effects presents a great challenge. These changes have been unfolding for 50 years or more. Each year, the effects are incremental, small and subtle, if not literally invisible. But after more than three years visiting scientists and their research sites my photographs have accumulated incremental effects of their own. The evidence these photographic images offer has proven compelling, even to skeptics. They have been published widely, from Time, Life and Discover to textbooks, environmental Web sites, and exhibits.

 

But can any photographs "prove" that global warming is a fact? The pictures, like the natural science they depict, certainly don't render courtroom proof. Rather they offer evidence of tight correlations among, and long-term observations of, physical events. Most of these photographs require captions to make their point strongly, but with this assistance, the story line they illustrate does start to clearly emerge.

 

Photography's message is strengthened because the effects of global warming are frequently seen in earth's most beautiful and sensitive landscapes, at the poles, in the mountains, and on the edges of plant and animal ranges. Treasured and threatened ecosystems and creatures can be shown in their transitions.

 

I have come to understand that I am documenting one of the crucial, overarching events of the 21st century. As global warming exacerbates overpopulation, food crises, and coastal degradation, its consequences might affect more people than did war in the last century. Whatever the human role, there are six billion of us on the planet now, deeply interconnected and affected by environmental changes. We are going to have to live with them and reduce activities that make them worse.

 

This is a magnificent and urgent story just beginning to be told. In time, each of us will see it.

 

RELATED ARTICLE: Antarctica.

 

From the bridge of the National Science Foundation research icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer, the scene is breathtaking, even mystical. Four searchlight beams arrow down Dom above me to a vanishing point over dark water. Sea smoke sweeps in along the beams and occasionally an iceberg is illuminated. We are approaching the Antarctic Circle along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

 

This is my first trip to this southern continent, for which I have waited 40 years since I first read about it as a kid. I've come now because in those years the average temperature along the Peninsula has risen about 2.5 degrees C (~5 degrees F), by actual measurement at British science stations. The Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches 900 miles north toward South America, has a more moderate climate than the rest of the continent. Its great seasonal changes provide many benchmarks against which to measure climate shifts. Scientists are studying the effect on ice shelves, penguins, tiny plants, and the all-important plankton and krill of the Southern Ocean.

 

On my 1999 journey south, I accompanied Hamilton College geologist Eugene Domack to the disintegrating Muller Ice Shelf--a scene that was repeated in much larger scale in 2002 when a huge part of the Larsen Ice Shelf broke apart. This part is thought to have been intact since the end of the last ice age 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

 

In papers by Domack and others, the recent regional warming is viewed as unusually rapid, though it is not the only time warmth has diminished these ice shelves. A concern of scientists is that continued warming and ice shelf destruction will lead to increased flow and melting of tidewater glaciers and continental ice streams. Unlike the melting of ice shelves that are already floating, this will add to sea level rise. My images help us visualize the scale of these events and provide a sense of proportionality to the amount of ice involved in even a tiny section of a small ice sheet in the vastness of Antarctica.

 

For Adelie penguins, the effect of warming is due to a changing relationship between the winter sea ice, the preferred rookery sites on rocky points that melt free in summer, and the krill on which they feed. Montana State University professor and ornithologist Bill Fraser has studied the Adelies near the United States Palmer Station for more than 25 years. He has seen some rookeries diminish to forlorn pebbly flats while others continue to teem. Penguins seek dry nesting sites within a short foraging range of the edge of the pack ice, beneath which the shrimp-like krill are found. Warming winter temperatures along the Peninsula reduces the pack ice, which then melts farther out in summer, too far from some rookeries. Also, according to Fraser's correlations, the warming air combined with more open water leads to increased snowfall on some nesting sites, causing breeding failure. Adelies, numbering in the millions, are not endangered as a species, but they are sensitive monitors of climate changes as their population decreases in Fraser's study area, but increases farther south.--G.B.

 

RELATED ARTICLE: The Arctic.

 

At earth's opposite pole, the Arctic is experiencing a similar heat wave. Unlike the Antarctic land mass with its two-mile thick ice cap that holds 90 percent of the world's fresh water, the northern pole is an ice-covered ocean surrounded by land. Antarctica is home to ocean mammals and penguins, but no land mammals and only two plants. The Arctic lands have vast boreal forests and tundra, which serve as habitat for many land mammals, including bears, caribou--and human beings, since seven nations claim Arctic territories, which are a source of petroleum, timber, minerals and fish.

 

The summer thaw across this ocean and landscape is a huge biologic and climatic event whose timing and scale scientists are studying intensively. Using Greenland ice cores, pollen layers in lakes, permafrost probes and tree ring coring, scientists estimate that temperature is the highest it has been in 400 years. Since 1974, warmer temperatures have contributed to a thinning of the permanent Arctic sea ice pack from nine feet to six feet and shrinkage of its overall breadth by 14 percent.

 

To document changes in Arctic ice, I flew on a NASA laser mapping plane that found that Greenland's outlet glaciers appear to be moving faster and creating more icebergs in the north Atlantic. I can photograph the melting Arctic ice, but its crucial influences on earth's weather cycles are subtle--so far. However, a theory that increasing meltwater from the Arctic will eventually disrupt the Gulf Stream might be tested sooner than expected, according to new research by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This year its research ships found the most Arctic water ever in the Labrador Sea.

 

A rise in summer temperatures might sound like good news, but its effects are ominous and beginning to show. I've witnessed insect attacks that have killed four million acres of white spruce in Kenai, Alaska. Changes correlated with temperature rise threaten all the boreal forests that ring the Arctic and comprise one-third of the world's forests. At the same time, the boreal forest and its associated shrub population are starting to migrate north, overtaking the native tundra. Geophysicist Tom Osterkamp's research shows Alaska permafrost temperature has increased up to 1.50 degrees centigrade since 1980. At his temperature site near Denali National Park, Osterkamp can show how far the once-frozen tundra has subsided. The damage from collapsing permafrost extends from the Fairbanks area north to the Arctic Ocean coast.

 

The native village of Shishmaref on the Bering Sea is losing houses rapidly to permafrost thaw and rising sea level. Such scenes are repeated around the entire Arctic shore. Some native prey animals--walrus, seabirds, caribou--are beginning to be affected. In some areas, polar bears cannot reach their prey due to diminished sea ice. Perhaps most threatening, dying forests, thawing permafrost, and drying tundra are beginning to pump a huge flux of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere in a region that once served only as a carbon absorber. This feedback loop could combine with increased absorption of solar heat by open tundra and ocean to escalate the rate of change.--G.B.

 

RELATED ARTICLE: Glaciers and sea level change.

 

When I began my project, "World View of Global Warming," glaciers presented another very visible indication of climate change. Throughout the 20th century, glaciers in the temperate and tropical zones have been shrinking. Because scientists and photographers have been attracted to glaciers since the 19th century, there is informal documentation of what this ice has looked like through the years.

 

Finding usable "before" images can be tough given the many gaps in the record of dates and circumstances of historic pictures. Locating the previous photographers' viewpoints can be very difficult: Many were not recorded or were on trails long since blasted away for highways. I first tried this in Peru in 1999. With directions from Andean glaciologist Alcides Ames of Huaraz and clutching a copy of the previous photograph in my gloved hand for constant comparison, it took long days of scrambling on rugged ridges above 15,000 feet to reach the points where other photographers apparently once stood. The change in the glaciers is very obvious even before one finds the matching view to create a set of convincing images.

 

Perhaps the most dramatic glacier withdrawal that can be seen in my comparative photographs is based on an 1859 photo and etching of the Rhone glacier in the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland. Back then, ice filled the valley right to the tiny crossroads of Gletch. By 2001, modern highways replaced the trail, and the glacier was nearly out of sight, 2.5 km distant and 450 meters higher. I've since found images from the 1930's that provide more details about the glacier's retreat.

 

University of Colorado glaciologist Mark Meier has published frequent reports of worldwide glacier recession and its effect on sea level rise. In 2002, he calculated that glacier melting could contribute 0.65 feet or more to the sea level during this century, and sea level is already about six inches higher than it was 100 years ago. The rate of rise is increasing as warming seawater expands. Early in this century the estimated rate of increase might be enough to inundate low-lying areas in the Pacific Islands, Bangladesh, the Everglades, and coastal zones in Florida and along the Atlantic coast. My photograph of a normal high tide on Delaware Bay shows the tiny area that remains for migrating shorebirds to forage for horseshoe crab eggs before being forced up against storm sewer outfalls near Cape May, New Jersey. This feeding situation now is added to other environmental obstacles confronting roughly one million sandpipers, red knots, and turnstones on their migratory flight from South America to the Arctic.

 

In California, marine biologist Rare Sagarin of the University of California at Santa Cruz found that some tide pool habitat had changed when he revisited a 60-year-old study at Hopkins Marine Laboratory at Monterey, California. Summer sea temperatures have risen more than one degree during that time, and his new survey showed many warm-water tide pool animals had increased while those favoring colder water had decreased. These changes in small animals are harbingers of shifts that are likely to affect coastal life, including that of humans.--G.B.

 

Gary Braasch's climate project is facilitated by 501©(3) tax status through the Blue Earth Alliance of concerned documentary photographers. The project has a Web site at www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org.

 

info@worldviewofglobalwarming.org

[DominO123]

International Wildlife, January-February 2002

 

 

THE NWF VIEW

 

Climate Solutions

 

THIS MONTH'S International Wildlife cover story provides new and disturbing evidence from the Pacific Islands of the mounting toll already being taken by climate change on some of the world's wildest places. It is one more link in the chain of evidence leading to an unquestionable verdict: The world must act now to address the climate change problem.

 

Here in America, the best place to start is at the source: our use of fossil fuels that feed global warming. The increasing urgency of the climate change problem demands an immediate shift to energy policies that embrace the most obvious source of savings--cutting waste through efficiency.

 

The last time America got serious about curbing wasteful energy use was in response to the oil price shocks of the 1970s, and we got results. We demanded that automakers squeeze greater mileage out of each gallon of gas and cut our Persian Gulf oil imports.

 

Recently, however, the Environmental Protection Agency evaluated how the new car fleet stacks up on fuel efficiency and found we're going backwards. On average, 2002 cars get slightly lower gasoline mileage than 2001 models. Sport-utility vehicles have sunk to their lowest average efficiency since 1980. Increasing federal fuel economy standards by just three miles per gallon would save a million barrels of oil a day and help to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But those savings will never be achieved given current policy directions.

 

Neither America nor the rest of the world can afford to dismiss such opportunities to reduce wasteful energy consumption and the climate- altering pollution that goes with it.

 

Measures aimed at curbing wasteful consumption and improving efficiencies can drive technological innovation. They can save consumers money, generate jobs here at home and create global opportunities for American technical leadership. By addressing threats to people, wildlife and resources worldwide, America can demonstrate its commitment to being a responsible member--and ideally, leader--of the world community. But until we make energy conservation and efficiency the centerpiece of American energy policy, we are squandering those opportunities and surrendering to the fate that climate change will bring.

 

By building awareness of what a warming climate will mean at home and around the world, the National Wildlife Federation seeks to generate public pressure on elected officials to seize these opportunities for a new and more realistic energy path before it's too late.

 

The future--for people, wildlife, the economy and our own national security--rests with strategies that lower energy demand by boosting conservation and efficiency. It's along this path that we can find solutions to the daunting challenge of global climate change.

 

Mark Van Putten

 

President & Chief Executive Officer

[DominO123]

World Watch, Vol. 15, May 2002

 

 

A warning from 100 Nobel prize winners

 

The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust.

 

It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If then we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor. The only hope for the future lies in cooperative international action, legitimized by democracy.

 

It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security, in which we seek shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world.

 

These twin goals will constitute vital components of stability as we move toward the wider degree of social justice that alone gives hope of peace.

 

Some of the needed legal instruments are already at hand, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Convention on Climate Change, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As concerned citizens, we urge all governments to commit to these goals that constitute steps on the way to replacement of war by law.

 

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate, economics, 2001

 

Herbert Kroemer, Nobel laureate, physics, 2000

 

Guenter Blobel, Nobel laureate, physiology/medicine, 1999

 

Horst L. Stormer, Nobel laureate, physics, 1998

 

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Nobel laureate, physics, 1997

 

Peter C. Doherty, Nobel laureate, physiology/medicine, 1996

 

Paul J. Crutzen, Nobel laureate, chemistry, 1995

 

Bertram N. Brockhouse, Nobel laureate, physics, 1994

 

Joseph H. Taylor, Nobel laureate, physics, 1993

 

Edmond H. Fischer, Nobel laureate, physiology/medicine, 1992

 

Richard R. Ernst, Nobel laureate, chemistry, 1991

 

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Nobel laureate, peace, 1990

 

His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Nobel laureate, peace, 1989

 

Robert Huber, Nobel laureate, chemistry, 1988

 

Oscar Arias Sanchez, Nobel laureate, peace, 1987

 

Dudley R. Herschbach, Nobel laureate, chemistry, 1986

 

Klaus von Klitzing, Nobel laureate, physics, 1985

 

And 85 other Nobel prize winners including recipients from every year between 1972 and 2001. The statement was issued at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize, in Oslo, Norway.

[DominO123]

Geographical, Vol. 74, January 2002

 

Climate genie let loose: in a regular column starting this month, Dr Mark Spalding airs the issues surrounding global warming and climate change

 

 

by Mark Spalding

 

 

The genie of climate change is out of the bottle. While a few pariah scientists try to belittle this fact, the consensus is actually overwhelming. There is probably greater agreement over the fact of human-induced climate change than there is over Darwin's theory of evolution.

 

A wider public has been confused and frustrated not so much by facts, but by spin. Journalists, in their indomitable way, are heavily to blame. Stories must be built around controversy, so when a new model comes out they will only present it if they can find someone who will challenge it. Even if the two `opponents' agree on 95 per cent of the facts, the trivial elements of disagreement become the story and the public walks away uninformed.

 

Climate change may be complex and multi-faceted, but it is happening. Listening to the weather forecast is a useful analogy. We all love it when they get it wrong. We like to belittle the whole process, but we still listen. Why? Because, on average, they make a pretty good job of it. This fact is critical for governments, insurance companies, farmers and fishers. There are errors, but the general approach is accurate. The same is true with climate science, although the scale of the problem is much greater. So scientists are mostly giving us scenarios, not clear predictions of what will happen in the decades to come. Many now use probability-based statements. In this way, some scenarios are considered very likely, but even those with a much lower likelihood should not be ignored.

 

Waiting for harder facts will be our undoing. We are being bombarded by statistics of extremes -- `warmest', `wettest', `worst since' and so on. Already many spring flowers are opening earlier and low-lying islands are disappearing. The time for action is past. Now is the time for massive and concerted reaction.

 

Mark Spalding, PhD, is an ecologist for UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre and a research associate at the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit

 

 

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I just want to quote an interesting phrase.

 

There is probably greater agreement over the fact of human-induced climate change than there is over Darwin's theory of evolution.

[DominO123]

Geographical, Vol. 74, March 2002

 

 

Danger on the high seas: Dr Mark Spalding highlights the threat of rising seas -- the potentially devastating and likely impact of a global temperature rise on the world's oceans

 

 

by Chris Amodeo

 

 

Over the last 100 years, sea levels around the world have risen by about 18 centimetres. In certain parts, slow rises or falls in the Earth's crust may mask or exaggerate this change, but the fact of sea-level rise is now well documented.

 

The oceans cover seven-tenths of the planet with an average depth of over 3.7 kilometres, Imagine what it takes to make a perceptible difference to either the depth or temperature of that amount of water. As air temperatures rise so the oceans are warming, and as water warms so it expands. This 'thermal expansion' has driven about 75 per cent of the rise in sea level to date. The rest has come from ice-melt, notably from the Antarctic, but also the rapid loss of glacial ice around the world.

 

Sea levels have risen before, but then human civilisation was not a factor. Now we live in an overcrowded planet, and 39 per cent of the world's population live within 100 kilometres of the coast.

 

Many of those most at threat are in the developing world. In 1991 a cyclone in Bangladesh created a massive storm surge, breaking sea walls and killing 138,000 people. Two years ago over 1,000 people had to abandon their homes in the Duke of York Islands in Papua New Guinea as rising seas destroyed their homes, contaminated freshwater supplies and destroyed crops. Late last year the government of Tuvalu asked New Zealand to accept its entire population as environmental refugees, This island nation sits virtually at sea level and storm surges have already passed over parts of the islands several times. Although it may not happen immediately, the writing is on the wall for Tuvalu and other island nations,

 

In every case there is a more immediate cause -- an El Nino event, an earthquake or a massive storm. However, it doesn't take a genius to imagine the impact on a low-lying coastal area of an extra 30 centimetres from a high storm surge. Tuvalu may be the first nation to be literally obliterated by Western technology.

[Sip]

Fad, ever thought about making a simple web page with all these texts instead of dumping them in a discussion forum? I am not talking about anything fancy ... just a simple html index page with links to text files on different topics.

[DominO123]

Fad, ever thought about making a simple web page with all these texts instead of spaming a discussion forum with them? I am not talking about anything fancy ... just a simple html index page with links to text files on different topics.

Hmmm. I thought that a thread about global warming with ressources would be interesting. Nevermind, you're probably right.

[THOTH]

Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050

 

 

By Guy Gugliotta

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A01

 

 

In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.

 

Dismayed by their results, the researchers called for "rapid implementation of technologies" to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and warned that the scale of extinctions could climb much higher because of mutually reinforcing interactions between climate change and habitat destruction caused by agriculture, invasive species and other factors.

 

"The midrange estimate is that 24 percent of plants and animals will be committed to extinction by 2050," said ecologist Chris Thomas of Britain's University of Leeds. "We're not talking about the occasional extinction -- we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a massive number."

 

The study marks the first time scientists have produced a global analysis with concrete estimates of the effect of climate change on habitat. Previous work -- much of it by the same researchers -- focused on smaller regions or limited numbers of species.

 

Thomas led a 19-member international team that surveyed habitat decline for 1,103 plant and animal species in five regions: Europe; Queensland, Australia; Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert; the Brazilian Amazon; and the Cape Floristic Region at South Africa's southern tip. The study is being published today in the journal Nature.

 

The five regions encompass 20 percent of Earth's surface and "include a fair range of terrestrial environments," Thomas said in a telephone interview from Leeds. "Obviously, it would be valuable to expand the scope, but there's no reason to think that doing so would change our results tremendously."

 

Researchers said the wide geographical scope also overcame outside factors that might affect a single region only. "A prolonged drought might cause one instance of a dieback" but be offset by changes elsewhere, acknowledged climate change biologist Lee Hannah, who worked in South Africa. "When you see the broader context, the regional blips drop out."

 

Although there is little dispute that Earth's temperature is rising, debate over the reasons and speed of change remains contentious. Still, most scientists accept that much of the warming is caused by the cumulative effects of human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" -- from power plants and other industries -- that trap and hold heat in the atmosphere.

 

One skeptic, William O'Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research "ignored species' ability to adapt to higher temperatures" and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.

 

Climatologists have developed models that describe the temperature changes that specific regions have undergone over periods of as long as 30,000 years. The Nature study used U.N. projections that world average temperatures will rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

 

The trick for the study, Thomas said, was to marry the maps of projected climate change in particular regions with maps describing the habitat -- especially the climate needs -- of plants and animals in the same area.

 

For this, "we needed to get the people together who knew where the species lived," Thomas said. These were the conservationists on the research team -- ecological experts who study extinctions by looking at traditional culprits: destruction of habitat through agriculture, industry or human settlement; invasive species shoving aside native plants and animals; and hunting and extermination of pests.

 

"Obviously, plants and animals depend on climate for survival, but we figured that if we protect them in place, they would be all right," Hannah said in a telephone interview from his home in California. "But now we realize that we have to take care of them not only where they are now, but where they might have to go."

 

The team calculated the effects of climate change on extinctions by using what ecologists J. Alan Pounds and Robert Puschendorf, in an article accompanying the study, called "one of ecology's few ironclad laws" -- that shrinking habitat supports fewer species.

 

The study considered a range of possibilities based on the ability of each species to move to a more congenial habitat to escape warming. If all species were able to move, or "disperse," the study said, only 15 percent would be irrevocably headed for extinction by 2050. If no species were able to disperse, the extinction rate could rise as high as 37 percent.

 

"Reality, of course, will fall somewhere in between," Thomas said.

 

As an example, he cited Britain's comma butterfly, a robust flier that hopscotched 160 miles north from 1982 to 1997, feeding all the way -- in its caterpillar phase -- on stinging nettles. By contrast, the silver-studded blue butterfly needs to move north but cannot, because it needs lowland heath to survive, and the gaps between patches of habitat are too large for this weak-winged flier to overcome. As a result, "it has continued to decline," Thomas said.

 

Pounds, speaking by telephone from his office in Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, called the study's results "ironclad" and "if anything, too conservative." The adverse effects of natural roadblocks would be compounded by "interaction with other changes" such as agriculture, human settlement or invasive species, he said.

 

"There are different ways you can lose area," Pounds said. "One is to have the habitat directly destroyed. Climate change does the same thing."

[bellthecat]

Apparently, a noted British scientist is about to give a speech in America in which he will state that the threat to the world from global warming is far greater than the threat from international terrorism - with the unstated but obvious implication that since America is the largest contributer to global warming, it should be treated like a terrorist state.

[Stormig]

Study warns of global warming extinctions

January 8, 2004

 

By Rick Callahan, Associated Press

 

 

Hundreds of species of land plants and animals around the globe could vanish or be on the road to extinction over the next 50 years if global warming continues, scientists warn.

 

The researchers concede that there are many uncertainties in both climate forecasts and the computer models they used. But they said their prediction could come to pass if industrial nations do not curtail emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

 

"We're already seeing biological communities respond very rapidly to climate warming," said Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of Leeds in England, and the study's lead author.

 

The findings by Thomas and 18 other researchers appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

 

They found that more than one-third of the 1,103 native species they studied could disappear or approach extinction by 2050 as climate change turns plains into deserts or alters forests.

 

Among the already threatened species that could go extinct are Australia's Boyd's forest dragon, a tree-dwelling lizard, and Europe's azure-winged magpie.

 

Alastair Fitter, a University of York ecologist who was not involved in the research, said climate change could hasten the effects of deforestation and the impact of invasive, nonnative species.

 

"I think this is going to be [the] third horseman in that particular apocalypse," said Fitter, who has documented how global warming already is allowing some spring flowers to bloom increasingly early in Britain.

 

The researchers assessed the habitat and distribution of plant and animal species spread across six regions that included Mexico, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and Europe.

 

They applied climate change models developed by a U.N. panel that predicted Earth's warming trend will increase average global temperatures by 2.5 degrees to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

 

Depending on the temperature increase, the researchers found that 15 percent to 37 percent of the studied species will go extinct or be on the road to extinction by 2050. A mid-range forecast of three possible global warming scenarios would claim about a quarter of the species, they found.

 

Earth has an estimated 14 million plant and animal species. Conservationists estimate 12,000 are threatened with extinction, although thousands of others are probably also on the brink.

 

 

 

Source: Associated Press

[Stormig]

Oops - I see similar has been posted already.

[Stormig]

** GLOBAL WARMING BACKGROUNDER ***

By Tom Athanasiou

 

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a briefing paper available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/03petropol/climate.html .)

 

The "climate talks" have two official faces: the Kyoto Protocol--which most newspaper-reading Americans know has been rudely rejected by the Bush administration--and the much less visible annual meetings, the "Conferences of the Parties," at which the critical negotiations take place. What most Americans do not know is that the overall legal framework here is set by the UNFCCC, and that it, rather than Kyoto, is the reason the negotiations have held together.

 

There's something else you must know about the UNFCCC--it divides the world's nations into two, establishing this division as one between "Annex 1" and "non-Annex 1" countries (the first are listed in an annex to the main treaty). In so doing, it reflects the historic division between "developed" and "developing" countries, though in an odd and imperfect way that reflects the political compromises that underlie the UNFCCC: Annex 1, for example, excludes, in spite of their wealth and high per capita emissions, the "Asian Tigers" and other relatively rich developing countries such as Israel and the Mid-East OPEC nations.

 

This division has had consequences. In the negotiations leading up to the Earth Summit, the European Union and many other countries favored the establishment of national "targets and timetables" for the reductions of greenhouse gases. But these national caps--quantified emission limits of exactly the type embodied in the subsequent Kyoto Protocol--were adamantly resisted by the U.S. and had to be thrown overboard. The result, which we've inherited, was a viable framework treaty (good), without teeth (bad).

 

Soon, however, it became quite evident that, without targets and timetables, the Annex 1 countries' commitment to reduce their emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2000 was largely symbolic. And with the scientific evidence for climate change becoming increasingly convincing, the need for binding targets had become clear. However, and herein lies the rub, the vast disparity in per-capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions (both historical and current) between the rich and poor countries meant that not all countries could be expected to take on targets. Thus, it was agreed, in a text called the "Berlin Mandate" at the first Conference of the Parties in 1995, that, initially, only the developed Annex I countries would have binding emission caps.

 

In the context of the climate negotiations, the Clinton administration had little choice but to agree to this. But at home in the U.S., where public knowledge of climate change was minimal, the fossil-fuel industry mounted a campaign to portray this mandate as "unfair" to the U.S. because it would have to pay to reduce emissions while large developing countries like India and China would not. In 1997, with the Kyoto negotiations on the horizon and the environmental community unable to effectively counter this message, the Senate voted 95-0 (the Byrd-Hagel Resolution) to assert that it would accept no treaty that did not also contain binding targets for the developing countries. In so doing, it effectively repudiated the Berlin Mandate and set the stage for an ongoing crisis in the negotiations, a crisis that is now coming to a head.

 

The U.S. response was twofold. First, Clinton and Gore lobbied hard for the inclusion in the Kyoto Protocol of "flexibility mechanisms" which would allow Annex 1 countries to reduce the cost of their emissions reductions. These include both Kyoto's emission trading provisions, which allow high-emitting countries like the U.S. to buy emissions credits from countries with surplus allowances, and the Clean Development Mechanism, by which Annex 1 countries can invest in and obtain "credits" for carbon reduction projects hosted in non-Annex 1 countries. Both of these, by the way, are very long stories indeed. Second, once Kyoto was negotiated, Clinton never submitted it for ratification to the Senate, where, of course, it would have been promptly rejected.

 

By the rules of the Protocol, it only "enters into force" after it is ratified by at least 55 countries, including enough Annex 1 countries to account for 55% of combined 1990 Annex 1 emissions. With the U.S. rejection of the Protocol and its subsequent rejection by Australia, the only way this was possible was if all other Annex 1 countries ratified. Europe, Japan, and (somewhat surprisingly) Canada all did in fact do so, and the only country whose ratification is still required is Russia. However, knowing that they have effective veto power over the treaty, the Russians have been playing hard to get, and there are evidently both conflicts in Russia over ratification and covert efforts by the U.S. to persuade them not to.

 

Today, after the ninth Conference of Parties in Milan, there's still widespread belief among climate experts that Russia will in fact ratify the Kyoto Protocol and that it will enter into force in the next year or so. Further, much of the climate community's effort is now going into debates over "next steps," over how to structure a post-Kyoto agreement that includes both developed and developing countries. This is an extremely important problem, and the debate is fascinating indeed, but progress has been made extremely difficult by the fact that the U.S., the world's largest polluter by far, has rejected Kyoto and is not taking any significant action to reduce its emissions. Given this, the developing countries have refused to even discuss taking on quantified emissions targets similar to those of Annex 1 countries.

 

It's widely recognized that a real solution to the climate problem will require that developing as well as developed countries reduce their emissions well below current per capita levels. It's a monumental challenge, and with the Bush administration unwilling to engage, it is not clear how it can even be approached.

 

While the U.S. has been the center of resistance, the real enemy is larger, more diffuse, and more terrifying than even the Bush administration. It needs a name and "the carbon cartel," though not ideal (it seems to imply an active, centralized conspiracy, when in fact it is far more) will do. The term, in any case, is useful to name the corporations, states, elites, institutions, and capital that are bound up with the logic and interests of not just oil, but the whole fossil sector.

 

Global warming may soon be the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. So far, unfortunately, this is not widely understood in either the U.S. (where the denialists are in power, and their allies control most of the media) or in the South (where the elites still generally consider global warming to be only a long-term problem). Nevertheless, the reality is slowly becoming clear: to the Europeans, who've just suffered a wave of killing weather, to the increasingly anxious scientists who, staring into their data sheets and simulations, are seeing a terrifying picture begin to clearly emerge, and to the activist community, which is finally finding its own way to the challenges of global warming.

 

These challenges are manifold, though for the purposes of simplicity, let's just say that we desperately need a crash global clean-energy transition, and, indeed, "just and sustainable development." Unfortunately, both remain largely rhetoric and dreams. And let's add that, for the most part, and particularly in the South, the term "development" still conjures images of development-as-usual. And that this will no longer do.

 

It isn't going to be easy to clear this up. The rich, after all, did not become so by developing "sustainably." And development, or at any rate poverty reduction, from which it still derives its legitimacy, remains the top priority of the South. Consider that, according to a recent report from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the greenhouse body count has already reached 160,000 deaths a year. (The majority of these occur in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where people are highly vulnerable to malnutrition, malaria, and diarrhea as hotter temperatures settle in and floods and droughts become more common.) It may seem a huge number, but to put it in perspective, note that the World Health Organization estimates that indoor air pollution alone causes 1.6 million deaths per year. That's an even power of ten greater than the greenhouse body count, and in this case the killer is poverty pure and simple. Poverty, and with it murderously obsolete heatin

g and cooking technologies.

 

And the Kyoto Protocol, even if the carbon cartel manages to kill it, must be seen as the first halting step in the construction of the most significant environmental and economic treaty of all time. Because as the climate regime becomes, as it must, a global regime, it will also become quite impossible for the global justice movement to proceed as if the greenhouse crisis and the climate treaty are of merely secondary importance. The challenge, now, is to find a way beyond the Kyoto Protocol, a way, eventually, to incorporate both the developing world and the U.S. into an effective and politically acceptable international climate regime. In this regard, two bits of jargon, "adequacy" and "equity," must be understood, for between them they define and contain the heart of the problem.

 

"Adequacy," in the dialects of the climate world, means facing the challenge of preventing a dangerous degree of global warming. It means that, whatever the science tells us, we cannot deny it, not even if we think that the political and social changes that will thereby be needed to stabilize the climate are "unrealistic." It means that, even though a large amount of warming is already locked in, we must at all costs avoid crossing the line into a world in which the "impacts" of global warming are no longer "tolerable."

 

"Equity," of course, means justice. It means "just transitions," in that the rich must pay to help impacted and vulnerable communities "adapt" to the impacts and changes that will soon be upon us (think flooded villages in the global South, or coal miners here in the U.S.). It means that those who are the most responsible for the warming--and this means, again, the rich--must pay to "mitigate" the emissions that cause the warming. And it means that, in a world where the oceans and the skies are clearly revealed as fragile and finite, that these "environmental spaces" must be fairly shared by all and protected as a global public good. It means that emission rights must ultimately be apportioned on the basis of equal per-capita rights.

 

(Tom Athanasiou is the Co-director of EcoEquity, the co-author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, the author of Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, and a regular contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org).)

[Azat]

Time Magazine - April 3rd Issue has fascinating articles on Global Warming. It is very very apparent that we are screwing this world over and it will not be a good place to live in 50 years(which is why I would never have a child)

 

One thing that caught my eye. China and India each in the next 10 years will produce the same amount of greenhouse gasses as the worst polluter of the last century US has done in the past 100 years.

 

Oh well after me the floods...