The forecast is warmer and weirder 

 

Justin Gillis and Joanna M. Foster

April 1, 2012

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Crazy climate ... does science have a clue what is going on? Photo: Nick Moir

Melting Arctic sea ice is the focus of research into increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Some people call what has been happening across the northern hemisphere in the past few years ''weather weirding'' and March turned out to be a fine example. As a surreal heatwave was peaking across much of the US last week, pools and beaches drew crowds, some farmers planted their crops six weeks early and trees burst into bloom.
''The trees said, 'Aha! Let's get going!''' says Peter Purinton, a maple syrup producer in Vermont. ''Spring is here!''
Now a cold snap in the northern states has brought some of the lowest temperatures of the season, with damage to tree crops alone likely to be in the millions of dollars.

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Lurching from one weather extreme to another seems to have become routine. Parts of the US may be shivering but Scotland is setting heat records. Across Europe, hundreds of people died during a severe cold wave in the first half of February but a week later revellers in Paris were strolling on the Champs-Elysees in shirt sleeves.
Does science have a clue what is going on? The short answer appears to be: not quite.
The longer answer is that researchers are developing theories that, should they withstand scrutiny, may tie at least some of the erratic weather to global warming. Suspicion is focused on the drastic decline of Arctic sea ice, believed to be a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases.
''The question really is not whether the loss of the sea ice can be affecting the atmospheric circulation on a large scale,'' says Jennifer Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher. ''The question is, how can it not be and what are the mechanisms?''
As the planet warms, many scientists say, more energy and water vapour enter the atmosphere and are driving weather systems.
''The reason you have a clothes dryer that heats the air is that warm air can evaporate water more easily,'' says Thomas C. Peterson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A report released last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body that issues periodic updates on climate science, confirmed a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heatwaves, heavy rainfall and other precipitation and more frequent coastal flooding.
''A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events,'' it says.
US government scientists recently reported that February was the 324th consecutive month in which global temperatures exceeded their long-term average for a given month; the last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. In the US, many more record highs are being set at weather stations than record lows, a bellwether indicator of warming.
So far this year, the US has set 17 daily highs for every daily low, according to an analysis performed by the New Jersey research group Climate Central. Last year the country set nearly three highs for every low. But, while the link between heatwaves and global warming may be clear, the evidence is much thinner regarding types of weather extremes.
Scientists studying tornadoes are plagued by poor statistics that could be hiding significant trends but so far they are not seeing a long-term rise in the most damaging twisters.
And researchers studying specific events such as the Russian heatwave of 2010 have often come to conflicting conclusions about whether to blame climate change.
Scientists who dispute the importance of global warming have long ridiculed attempts to link greenhouse gases to weather extremes. John Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told the US Congress last year ''weather is very dynamic, especially at local scales, so that extreme events of one type or another will occur somewhere on the planet every year''.
Yet mainstream scientists are determined to figure out which climate extremes are being influenced by human activity and their attention is increasingly drawn to the Arctic sea ice.
Because greenhouse gases are causing the Arctic to warm more rapidly than the rest of the planet, the sea ice cap has shrunk about 40 per cent since the early 1980s: an area of the Arctic Ocean the size of Europe has become dark, open water in the summer instead of reflective ice, absorbing extra heat and releasing it to the atmosphere in autumn and early winter.
Francis, of Rutgers, has presented evidence that this is affecting the jet stream, the huge river of air that circles the northern hemisphere in a meandering fashion. Her research suggests the declining temperature contrast between the Arctic and the middle latitudes is causing kinks in the jet stream to move from west to east more slowly and that those kinks have everything to do with the weather in a particular spot.
''This means that whatever weather you have today - be it wet, hot, dry or snowy - is more likely to last longer than it used to,'' says Francis, who recently published a paper on her theory. ''If conditions hang around long enough, the chances increase for an extreme heatwave, drought or cold spell to occur.'' But the weather can change rapidly once the kink moves along.
Not all of her colleagues buy that explanation. Martin Hoerling, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher, agrees that global warming should be taken seriously but contends some researchers are in too much of a rush to attribute specific weather events to human causes. Hoerling says he has run computer analyses that failed to confirm a widespread effect outside the Arctic from declining
sea ice. ''What's happening in the Arctic is mostly staying in the Arctic,'' he says and suspects that future analyses will find the magnitude of this month's heatwave to have resulted mostly from natural causes but concedes, ''It's been a stunning March.''
That's certainly what farmers have thought. Purinton has been tapping maple trees for 46 years. This year he tapped the trees two weeks earlier than usual, a consequence of the warm winter.
But when the heatwave hit the trees budded early, which tends to ruin the syrup's taste. That forced him to stop four weeks earlier and halved his typical production.
''Is it climate change? I really don't know,'' he says. ''This was just one year out of my 46 but I have never seen anything like it.''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/the-forecast-is-warmer-and-weirder-20120331-1w50o.html#ixzz1rOusUKpx

US behind China on carbon - Turnbull 

 

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''I think we are more likely to see leadership out of China than America" ... Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

CHINA is more likely than the United States to provide global climate change leadership, the former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull believes.
The Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, cites the impact of soaring Chinese emissions as one of the ''crazy things'' about Australia's plans to reduce its emissions by 5 per cent by 2020.
In an interview with The Monthly magazine, Mr Turnbull agrees the growth in Chinese emissions is ''the big problem'' compared with the other major world emitter, the US.

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But, he says, ''the Americans are in a period of dysfunctionality on this … the Chinese are very alert to it and are introducing an emissions trading scheme. It's a trial and it's got a very small price, but the Chinese do take it seriously.
''I think we are more likely to see leadership out of China than America.'' China is trialling an emissions trading scheme in seven provinces, but was widely condemned for cruelling any chances of an international climate change deal at the 2009 United Nations meeting in Copenhagen.
Mr Turnbull said he found it astonishing that climate change denialism was now a pre-requisite for Republican presidential candidates in the US, where a ''war against science'' had been successfully waged by vested interests.
The Coalition's position is to accept the science of climate change, although Mr Abbott once famously described the idea that the scientific debate was settled as ''absolute crap''.
Mr Turnbull also said he thought there was little prospect that military action in Afghanistan would result in ''what many in the West think of as victory'', with the corruption in the Karzai government inhibiting the possibility of winning ''hearts and minds'' and any kind of peace requiring compromise with elements of the Taliban.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/us-behind-china-on-carbon--turnbull-20120403-1wast.html#ixzz1rOufNBwF

 

Which plants will survive droughts, climate change?

 

By Stuart Wolpert
5 April 2012

New research by UCLA life scientists could lead to predictions of which plant species will escape extinction from climate change.
Droughts are worsening around the world, posing a great challenge to plants in all ecosystems, said Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the research. Scientists have debated for more than a century how to predict which species are most vulnerable.
Sack and two members of his laboratory have made a fundamental discovery that resolves this debate and allows for the prediction of how diverse plant species and vegetation types worldwide will tolerate drought, which is critical given the threats posed by climate change, he said.
The research is currently available in the online edition of Ecology Letters, a prestigious ecology journal, and will be published in an upcoming print edition.
Why does a sunflower wilt and dessicate quickly when the soil dries, while the native chaparral shrubs of California survive long dry seasons with their evergreen leaves? Since there are many mechanisms involved in determining the drought tolerance of plants, there has been vigorous debate among plant scientists over which trait is most important. The UCLA team, funded by the National Science Foundation, focused on a trait called "turgor loss point, which had never before been proven to predict drought tolerance across plant species and ecosystems.
A fundamental difference between plants and animals is that plant cells are enclosed by cell walls while animal cells are not. To keep their cells functional, plants depend on "turgor pressure" — pressure produced in cells by internal salty water pushing against and holding up the cell walls. When leaves open their pores, or stomata, to capture carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, they lose a considerable amount of this water to evaporation. This dehydrates the cells, inducing a loss of pressure.
During drought, the cell's water becomes harder to replace. The turgor loss point is reached when leaf cells get to a point at which their walls become flaccid; this cell-level loss of turgor causes the leaf to become limp and wilted, and the plant cannot grow, Sack said.
"Drying soil may cause a plant's cells to reach turgor loss point, and the plant will be faced with the choice of either closing its stomata and risking starvation or photosynthesizing with wilted leaves and risking damaging its cell walls and metabolic proteins," Sack said. "To be more drought-tolerant, the plant needs to change its turgor loss point so that its cells will be able to keep their turgor even when soil is dry."
The biologists showed that within ecosystems and around the world, plants that are more drought-tolerant had lower turgor loss points; they could maintain their turgor despite drier soil.
The team also resolved additional decades-old controversies, overturning the long-held assumptions of many scientists about the traits that determine turgor loss point and drought tolerance. Two traits related to plant cells have been thought to affect plants' turgor loss point and improve drought tolerance: Plants can make their cell walls stiffer or they can make their cells saltier by loading them with dissolved solutes. Many prominent scientists have leaned toward the "stiff cell wall" explanation because plants in dry zones around the globe tend to have small, tough leaves. Stiff cell walls might allow the leaf to avoid wilting and to hold onto its water during dry times, scientists reasoned. Little had been known about the saltiness of cells for plants around the world.
The UCLA team has now demonstrated conclusively that it is the saltiness of the cell sap that explains drought tolerance across species. Their first approach was mathematical; the team revisited the fundamental equations that govern wilting behavior and solved them for the first time. Their mathematical solution pointed to the importance of saltier cell sap. Saltier cell sap in each plant cell allows the plant to maintain turgor pressure during dry times and to continue photosynthesizing and growing as drought ensues. The equation showed that thick cell walls do not contribute directly to preventing wilting, although they provide indirect benefits that can be important in some cases — protection from excessive cell shrinking and from damage due to the elements or insects and mammals. […]
This new study showed that the saltiness of cells in plant leaves can explain where plants live and the kinds of plants that dominate ecosystems around the world. The team is working with collaborators at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens in Yunnan, China, to develop a new method for rapidly measuring turgor loss point across a large number of species and make possible the critical assessment of drought tolerance for thousands of species for the first time.
"We're excited to have such a powerful drought indicator that we can measure easily," Bartlett said. "We can apply this across entire ecosystems or plant families to see how plants have adapted to their environment and to develop better strategies for their conservation in the face of climate change."

Source:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/

Ice Age Next? - Bering Sea Teeming with Ice

 

Ice Age Next? - Bering Sea Teeming with Ice

Earth Observatory

© NASA image by Rob Simmon based on data from Jeff Schmaltz
Acquired March 19, 2012.

For most of the winter of 2011 - 2012, the Bering Sea has been choking with sea ice. Though ice obviously forms there every year, the cover has been unusually extensive this season. In fact, the past several months have included the second highest ice extent in the satellite record for the Bering Sea region, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The natural-color image above shows the Bering Sea and the coasts of Alaska and northeastern Siberia on March 19, 2012. The image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite. Black lines mark the coastlines, many of which have ice shelves or frozen bays extending beyond the land borders.

NSIDC data indicate that ice extent in the Bering Sea for most of this winter has been between 20 to 30 percent above the 1979 to 2000 average. February 2012 had the highest ice extent for the area since satellite records started. As of March 16, National Weather Service forecasters noted that all of the ice cover in the Bering Sea was first year ice, much of it new and thin - which is typical in the Bering Sea

The accumulation of ice this season has largely been fueled by persistent northerly winds blowing from the Arctic Ocean across the Bering Strait. The local winter weather has been dominated by low-pressure systems - with their counterclockwise circulation - that have brought extensive moisture up from the south to coastal and interior Alaska, while sending cold winds down across the sea to the west.

Those winds pushed Arctic sea ice toward the narrow, shallow strait, where it piled up and formed an ice arch that blocked the flow. As arches fail because of wind stress, large floes of sea ice can move south into the Bering Sea. Ice also has piled up on the north side of St. Lawrence Island, near the mouth of the strait.

South of the strait and the island, those same winds push cold air and cold surface waters to lower latitudes, allowing the ice to grow farther south than usual. The widespread and persistent ice cover in the Bering Sea has posed significant problems for fisherman and for supply ships in the region. The weather driving the ice also brought extreme snowfall events to many parts of Alaska this winter.

The Bering Sea stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Arctic ice cap, where sea ice extent was below average in both January and February. Ice cover was down drastically on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Arctic, including the Kara, Barents, and Laptev Seas, where air temperatures were 4 to 8 degrees Celsius (7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm.

References

• NASA Earth Observatory (2012, January 22) Sea Ice off Southwestern Alaska.


• National Snow and Ice Data Center (2012, March 6) February ice extent low in the Barents Sea, high in the Bering Sea.
  Accessed March 19, 2012.


• National Weather Service, Anchorage Forecast Office Alaska Sea Ice Forecast. Accessed March 19, 2012.

Source: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/243463-Ice-Age-Next-Bering-Sea-Teeming-with-Ice

Earth Hour

Held each year at 8:30pm on the last Saturday in March, Earth Hour is a WWF initiative which symbolises the collective power of individuals, businesses and governments to reduce our environmental impact on this one and only planet we call home.

From it's beginnings in one city in one country - Sydney - Earth Hour has grown to millions of people in over 5000 cities across 135 countries, a truly global community committed to creating a more sustainable planet.



Want to get involved?

The first step is signing up to show your support.

Next step, planning something fun for the evening! In 2012 we're encouraging communities around Australia to throw a local "Earth Hour Unplugged" event, a great way to celebrate the night and help raise funds for WWF. Click here to find out more.

Finally, don't forget to check out this year's WWF Earth Hour Awards - celebrating grassroots community action by the people for the planet.

At the end of the day, Earth Hour is not about saving an hour’s electricity, it’s about uniting people to protect the planet.  And the best thing? Each one of us can be a part of it.

Source:  http://www.wwf.org.au/earthhour/

Drought improves in Texas, worsens in western U.S.

Drought improves in Texas, worsens in western U.S.

Thu Feb 23, 2012 1:55pm EST

* Western U.S. sees drought spread as Texas improves
* Northern Plains eyed with concern, moisture needed
By Carey Gillam
Feb 23(Reuters) - Drought kept a tight grip on large sections of the United States, but recent rains put some of the most hard-hit areas on the road to recovery, a report from climate experts said Thursday.
Recent rains and snowfall boosted soil moisture and started to replenish ground water supplies in key areas of the U.S. South that suffered historic drought in 2011.
"It's been pretty darn wet, the last 90 days ... we've seen improvements," said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska's Drought Mitigation Center. "It's been very unexpected but very welcomed."
Moisture has been especially critical for Texas, and the state's level of drought saw notable improvement over the last week, according to the Drought Monitor, a weekly report on drought throughout the country compiled by U.S. climate experts.
In Texas, the levels of exceptional drought - the highest measurement - fell to 13.93 percent of the state from 20.41 percent in the latest reporting week, ended Feb. 21. Severe or worse drought levels dropped to 67.48 percent from 76.46 percent.
Texas is trying to emerge from a year that saw records shattered for both high heat and lack of moisture. The one-year period between Nov. 1, 2010, and Oct. 31, 2011, was the driest in the state's history, and the three-month period of June to August in Texas was the hottest ever reported by any state in U.S. history, according to state and federal climate experts.
Conditions grew more dire in the west, however. California saw moderate or worse drought rise to 67.76 percent of the state, up from 59.06 percent in the latest reporting week.
Nevada had 81.80 percent of the state rated in moderate or worse drought, up from 81.59 percent the prior week. Arizona saw moderate drought rise to 86.92 percent of the state from 80.56 percent. And New Mexico also saw drought spread.
Another area of concern is the upper Midwest and Northern Plains, where spring planting of corn, soybeans and wheat is set to start soon. Soil moisture levels need boosting to ensure good production potential for the key U.S. crops.
Iowa, the largest U.S. corn and soybean producting state has about 20 percent of the state currently suffering moderate drought.
As temperatures continue to warm with the end of winter, precipitation will be needed.
"Spring is right on the doorstop, and the temperatures are going to ramp back up," said Svoboda. (Reporting by Carey Gillam)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/23/us-drought-idUSL2E8DNAN820120223

2012 minimum global sea ice area

We have a pretty accurate 2D view of the Arctic sea ice, and some clues with regards to its third dimension: thickness. It's the thickness of the ice that determines the influence of atmospheric conditions on the ice pack, and is thus a crucial factor in the amount of sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean during any given time, especially towards the end of the melting season. But also during the freezing season sea ice thickness plays an important role as an intermediary between sea surface and atmosphere. The thinner the ice is, the more heat and moisture can be transferred from one to the other, which in turn influences atmospheric patterns.

image on the top right, courtesy of NSIDC

The importance of accurate sea ice thickness measurements is not lost on the scientific community. We've had ICESat, we eagerly await the end of the calibration phase of the CryoSat-2 mission, and in the meantime another handy tool for measuring ice thickness has been devised by scientists from the University of Hamburg, using a passive microwave sensor aboard the ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite.

images retrieved from the SMOSIce wiki (with permission of L. Kaleschke)

The news was announced two months ago in an ESA press release, but has now been followed up by a research paper that has just been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters: Kaleschke, L., X. Tian-Kunze, N. Maaß, M. Mäkynen, and M. Drusch (2012), Sea ice thickness retrieval from SMOS brightness temperatures during the Arctic freeze-up period.
From the abstract:

Read More: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/

El Niño / La Niña to become more dominant in New Zealand with climate change

7 February 2012

El Niño and La Niña weather patterns will become even more dominant in New Zealand with climate change, according to research from The University of Auckland published in Nature Climate Change.

“As the world continues to warm New Zealand is likely to experience the impacts of El Niño and La Niño events with comparable intensity and frequency to what we have seen over the last three decades, and possibly more so,” says lead researcher Dr Anthony Fowler from the School of Environment. “This means that we should anticipate more extreme events, such as flooding and droughts, in the regions affected by these weather patterns.”

In New Zealand, El Niño events usually bring more cool south-westerly winds. The whole country tends to be relatively cool with associated droughts in sheltered eastern areas of both islands. The winds reverse with La Niñas. Moisture laden air from the sub tropics elevates temperatures, especially in the North Island, and brings higher rainfall to much of the country, sometimes with associated floods.

“The El Niño / La Niña phenomenon has been referred to as the heartbeat of the world,” Dr Fowler says. “After the seasonal cycle and monsoons, it’s the most important source of year-on-year climate variation. Strong events often cause incredible damage and affect hundreds of millions of people around the world. El Niños, in particular, have been responsible for some of the devastating 20th century droughts in Australian, floods in South America, and failure of the monsoons in India.”

“To date the global climate models used to ’predict’ the future have been unable to give us a clear picture of what will happen with El Niño and La Niña as the world warms,” he says. “But understanding the phenomenon is critical to learning what climate change will mean for the world’s population.”

“The premise of our work is that we know that the world has warmed over the last few centuries and we can look back to see what has happened with El Niño / La Niña over that time. By studying how the phenomenon has behaved in the past we can anticipate what might plausibly happen in the future. This should result in more informed scenarios of future regional climate change.”
The scientists studied the climate record in kauri tree rings dating back to AD 1300. “Kauri trees are quite sensitive to these weather patterns,” Dr Fowler explains. “During El Niño events they grow rapidly and have wide tree rings whereas during La Niña events they grow more slowly and have narrow rings.” The rings can be accurately dated, providing a detailed record of when El Niño and La Niña events have occurred.

"Notably wide and narrow kauri tree rings have become more frequent as the world has warmed over the last few centuries. We infer from this that El Niño and La Niña events become more frequent or intense as the world warms, or that New Zealand's climate becomes more strongly influenced by such events. Either possibility suggests that droughts and floods related to El Niños and La Niñas will continue to significantly affect New Zealand, and may well become more intense.”

Dr Fowler says that stitching data together from living trees and logged wood, to create a continuous record of the last 700 years, was a significant achievement for the research team. He notes the irony in one form of environmental damage yielding clues about another. “Kauri logging in the 19th and early 20th century devastated the landscape,” he says. “But a lot of the wood that was cut down can still be found in the weatherboards of our houses and provided important data for our research.”
The next phase of the research, which is almost complete, involves adding data from kauri trees preserved in swamps to extend the record back almost 4,000 years before present. This longer record may help to answer the outstanding question of whether the El Niño / La Niña activity in the 20th century is the most intense ever seen – as suggested by currently available records – or a return to conditions that have occurred in the past.
The current work was funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology and a Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Source:http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/news/template/news_item.jsp?cid=464089

Chile On Alert As Prison Rats Spread Hantavirus

Chile has declared a public health alert with a hantavirus outbreak killing three people and infecting 10 others.
Health Minister Jaime Manalich blames wildfires in the southern Bio Bio and Araucania regions for driving rats from their normal habitat into places where people live.
The outbreak began in the El Manzano prison, where two inmates died and 10 others are sick. Authorities learned on Sunday that two prison workers have symptoms, and a person camping outside Concepcion died of the virus.
Hantavirus is not contagious; it's spread by exposure to rat droppings and urine. Once it reaches the lungs, the chance of survival is 50 percent. The minister told Radio Cooperativa Monday this may be the start of a much wider problem.

Source: http://news.officialwire.com/main.php?action=posted_news&rid=215632

Bombshell Study: High Methane Emissions Measured Over Gas Field “May Offset Climate Benefits of Natural Gas”

Air sampling by NOAA over Colorado Finds 4% Methane Leakage, More Than Double Industry Claims

Natural-gas operations could release far more methane into the atmosphere than previously thought. [Source: Nature]

How much methane leaks during the entire lifecycle of unconventional gas has emerged as a key question in the fracking debate.  Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4).  And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned.
Even without a high-leakage rate for shale gas, we know that “Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution, Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere.”
But the leakage rate does matter.  A major 2011 study by Tom Wigley of the Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concluded:

The most important result, however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.

The industry has tended kept most of the data secret while downplaying the leakage issue.  Yet I know of no independent analysis that finds a rate below 2%, including one by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the DOE’s premier fossil fuel lab.
Now, as the journal Nature reports, we finally have some actual air sampling measurements, and they appear to confirm the higher estimates put forward by Cornell professor Robert Howarth:

When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.
Led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study estimates that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere — not including additional losses in the pipeline and distribution system. This is more than double the official inventory, but roughly in line with estimates made in 2011 that have been challenged by industry. And because methane is some 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, releases of that magnitude could effectively offset the environmental edge that natural gas is said to enjoy over other fossil fuels.

Methane is 25 times  more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over 100 year — but it is 100 times more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over two decades.

Source:http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/?mobile=nc

Climate change a fundamental health risk: academic

January 31, 2012 

A leading Australian disease expert says prompt action on climate change is paramount to our survival on earth.
Epidemiologist Tony McMichael has conducted a historical study that suggests natural climate change over thousands of years has destabilised civilisations via food shortages, disease and unrest.
"We haven't really grasped the fact that a change in climate presents a quite fundamental threat to the foundations of population health," Professor McMichael, from the Australian National University, said.

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"These things have happened before in response to fairly modest changes to climate.
"Let's be aware that we really must take early action if we are going to maintain this planet as a liveable habitat for humans."
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor McMichael argued the world faced extreme climate change "without precedent" over the past 10,000 years.
"With the exception of a few downward spikes of acute cooling due to massive volcanic eruptions, most of the changes have been within a band of about plus or minus three-quarters of a degree centigrade," he said yesterday.
"Yet we are talking about the likelihood this century of going beyond 2 degrees centigrade and quite probably, on current trajectory, reaching a global average increase of 3 to 4 degrees."
Professor McMichael's paper states that the greatest recurring health risk over past millennia has been from food shortages, mostly caused by drying and drought.
Warming also leads to an increase in infectious diseases as a result of better growth conditions for bacteria and the proliferation of mosquitoes.
Drought can also result in greater contact with rodents searching for scarce food supplies.
He said that, while societies today are better equipped to defend themselves physically and technologically, they lack the flexibility smaller groups had in the past.
He said that was partly because the world was now "over populated", so there are fewer areas available to retreat to.
Populations are also increasingly packed into large cities on coastlines, which are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events.
Professor McMichael has been examining the impact of climate change on population health for 20 years and said it was not easy to raise awareness of the risk.
"Most of the attention has been of a more limited shorter-term kind relating to things around us like the economy, our property, infrastructure and risks to iconic ecosystems and species."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-change-a-fundamental-health-risk-academic-20120131-1qqyk.html#ixzz1l17DBRry

Sea cucumbers may save Great Barrier Reef

January 30, 2012

Tropical sea cucumbers and their faeces could save coral reefs from the harmful impacts of climate change, scientists have found.
Scientists at One Tree Island, the University of Sydney’s research station on the Great Barrier Reef, say sea cucumbers reduce the impact of ocean acidification on coral growth.
"When they ingest sand, the natural digestive processes in the sea cucumber's gut increases the pH levels of the water on the reef where they defecate," Tree Island director professor Maria Byrne said.

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This works to counter the negative effects of ocean acidification.
One of the by-products when sea cucumbers digest sand is also calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which is a key component of coral.
"To survive, coral reefs must accumulate CaCO3 at a rate greater than or equal to the CaCO3 that is eroded from the reef," Professor Byrne said.
"The research at One Tree Island showed that, in a healthy reef, dissolution of calcium carbonate sediment by sea cucumbers and other bioeroders appears to be an important component of the natural calcium carbonate turnover."
The ammonia waste produced when sea cucumbers digest sand also serves to fertilise the surrounding area, providing nutrients for coral growth.
Sea cucumbers are among the largest invertebrates found on tropical reefs.
About 30 species are commercially harvested by the fishery industry along the Great Barrier Reef and throughout the tropics.
"We urgently need to understand the impact of removing sea cucumbers and other invertebrates on reef health and resilience at a time when reefs face an uncertain future," Professor Byrne said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/sea-cucumbers-may-save-great-barrier-reef-20120130-1qowc.html#ixzz1l175IAJL

Killing the Great Barrier Reef for short-term profit

If it comes to pass, will the Great Barrier Reef with all its beauty, tourism and fishing, be exchanged for short-term fossil-fuel profits, royalties and the temporary balancing of budgets?
Gladstone is the world's fourth largest coal exporting port; a gas exporting facility is being developed on adjacent Curtis Island. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the increased dredging is disturbing toxic substances which cause human illness, fish deformity and deaths.
In the Gladstone Fish Health Advisory Panel's view "there is an issue of concern around the health of some species of fish in Gladstone Harbour and this is possibly caused by environmental factors".
The regulatory processes of the Queensland and Federal governments for the development, production and export of fossil fuels must be questioned once more in view of the Gladstone Port Corporation's request to remove Gladstone Harbour from the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area; presumably the proponents recognise that the two are incompatible. If incompatible, then protecting the World Heritage Area needs to be the first priority for Federal and State governments.  This would appear not be the case.
Doctors for the Environment Australia has written to Minister Burke expressing health and environmental concerns
The Federal Government was obliged to inform the World Heritage Committee in advance about the planned port expansion, and its potential to impact on the World Heritage Area. It did not, and the Committee notes "with extreme concern the approval of Liquefied Natural Gas processing and port facilities on Curtis Island".
The committee also proposes to visit to assess the impact on the World Heritage Area of Gladstone as well as six other proposed major port developments. It is a sad indictment that we needed a distinguished body from afar to draw attention to the fact that the Emperor's regulatory clothes have big holes and to recognise the importance of cumulative impacts.
The estuaries and the ports are the sewer end of the pollutions of vast onshore fossil fuel developments within the river catchments and it is the cumulative impact that is most likely to decide the future of the Reef already under stress from sediment, nutrient and pesticide run-off and a rise in sea temperature.
There are hundreds of proposals for coal and coal seam gas mining and related infrastructure which receive approval.
In 2009-10 Queensland produced about 250Mt of coal and 6 new mega mines which will be mined for 30 years will more than double this output. The use of water is prodigious and, despite precautions, some run-off which may contain heavy metals is inevitable.
This is most obvious when existing mines flood periodically; these events have government 'special discharge conditions' for discharge into rivers, but some mines remain flooded for months accumulating toxic metals before eventually being discharged into rivers
Each of the new mega mines is subject to a separate approval. Concerns are apparent which may contribute to a cumulative impact.

Mine dewatering will affect the local groundwater regime and may cause a decline in groundwater levels, alter flow patterns, and impact on discharge mechanisms beyond the limits of the site.....  This groundwater has metals and metalloids (arsenic, aluminium, iron and manganese). (Waratah)
Although it is acknowledged in isolation, each of the project's elements may impact on local groundwater resources it is unlikely that a significant cumulative impact will occur when considered as a complete project. (Kevin's Corner)

The Coal Seam Gas(CSG) mining boom has raised many questions over the use and contamination of ground water. The Senate Committee in its interim report recommended:

...that it be a requirement of all exploration or production approvals that the fluids extracted from wells after fraccing are kept isolated in secure separate storages and prior to disposal are treated to the highest standards.
..that all future CSG development approvals should be preceded by the development of... a regional-scale, multi-state and multi-layer model of the cumulative effects of multiple developments" of ground and surface water as recommended by Geoscience Australia.

Long-term concerns of some chemicals used in, or generated from, coal seams by CSG mining include hormonal system disruption and development of cancer. Such effects may not be immediately obvious, but can nevertheless occur with very low chemical exposures and have far reaching consequences.
So it must be asked, what is the cumulative flow into coastal waters over 30 years from all coal and CSG mining? Flow not only from the mining described in each EIS, but from inevitable spills, from emptying flooded mines - each flood removal approved in isolation. What is the impact on the Reef of the operation and dredging of not just one new port but of several?
This is the independent scientific impact assessment that has not been done. Deep concerns over existing regulatory processes have been expressed by Colin Hunt.
In addition we note that the scientific criticisms of an EIS are not published; there is no transparency. It is not apparent whether a human health impact assessment has been adequate. The Federal Government relies on the State process and does not provide additional independent scientific assessment.
What are the explanations for the lack of action? It would require ignorance of the World Heritage requirements, of the documented impacts of fossil fuel mining on water, of the possibility of cumulative impacts. Ominously it seems more likely that governments are going to have these developments come what may.
Some evidence for this is provided in two recent happenings. The booklet on CSG produced by the Queensland government and sent to households, contains scientific misinformation and could be seen as industry propaganda. Its 16 pages do not use the words 'health' or "illness".
The surveillance of groups concerned about fossil fuel mining requested by Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson, at the behest of energy company lobbying, is some indication of tightened industry control over government on this issue.
How would an independent jury decide on this issue if presented with the science and economics?  Would they favour royalties and the rescue of mismanaged budgets? Or sustainable tourism and agriculture? No doubt they would have a picture of West Virginia in mind and would want to bequeath a living Reef and a sustainable future to their children.
David Shearman is a medical doctor, E/Professor of Medicine (Adelaide University) and was previously on Faculty at Edinburgh and Yale Universities. See his full profile here.

Source:  http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3776784.html

Thai rescues hundreds of smuggled dogs

Friday, January 13, 2012

 

 

The Thai navy has rescued hundreds of dogs destined for Vietnamese dinner tables.

The Thai navy has rescued hundreds of dogs destined for Vietnamese dinner tables in an operation to tackle border smuggling.
Following a tip-off, they found about 750 dogs packed into cages on a truck, which were about to be loaded onto a ferry on the Mekong river in Nakhon Phanom province.
One man has been arrested but several others ran away.
And official says dogs are the third-biggest smuggling problem along the river after timber and drugs.

Source: http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Environment/2012/01/13/Thai_rescues_hundreds_of_smuggled_dogs_706791.html

Fourteen steps to reduce global warming

Nicky Phillips, SCIENCE

January 13, 2012

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REDUCING the amount of soot and methane released into the atmosphere could slow the world's warming by half a degree, save millions of lives, and dramatically improve global air quality, a study has found.
A group of international scientists claim 14 practical methods could reduce the pollutants, which not only contribute to global warming but also kill or debilitate millions of people each year, and increase global crop yields at the same time.
While much focus has been placed on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – and black soot play a role in man-made global warming and are a significant source of air pollution.

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By screening more than 400 tried-and-tested soot and methane pollution reduction processes being used on a small scale around the world, the team, led by NASA scientist Drew Shindell, came up with a list of approaches to improve air quality and reduce global warming that could be implemented on a regional and global scale.
Changes to coal mining and natural gas extraction combined with better landfill and livestock management would reduce global methane, while improvements to diesel engines, replacing wood and dung fires with modern stoves and banning agricultural burning would lower soot emissions.
To measure the impact these pollution reduction methods could have on global warming, the team added the controls to computer models using two future emissions scenarios – one based on business as usual, where carbon emissions were not constrained, and one based on a low-carbon world.
The results show global temperature could be decreased by half a degree by 2050.
And, in a low-carbon world, the soot and methane reductions would keep the world's thermostat below the danger level of 2 degrees warming.
Lower methane levels would avoid annual crop losses of between 30 million and 137 million tonnes in 2030, while soot reductions would prevent between 700,000 and 4.7 million premature deaths a year.
The cost benefits to reducing the pollutants were also significant, said the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Science.
"Methane emission reductions are valued at $700 to $5000 per metric tonne, which is well above the typical marginal abatement costs, [of about] $250," they said.
An atmospheric chemist at the CSIRO said that, scientifically, the research was "a very strong piece of work".
Melita Keywood, a principal research scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said: "The measures are the sort of things that can be done now, and can have a short-term consequence which will really appeal to policymakers."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/fourteen-steps-to-reduce-global-warming-20120113-1py4o.html#ixzz1jNqBhYN5

Europe’s Largest EV Fast-Charging Network Gets Green Light

By Gavin Hudson

Europe’s biggest network of fast-charge stations for electric cars will be built in Estonia by the end of 2012. The charging station model chosen for the project, the Terra 51 DC fast charger, can fill up an electric vehicle in 15-30 minutes. Estonia’s plan is to space these fast chargers a maximum of 50 kilometers apart along main roads to eliminate drivers’ concerns about the maximum range of their electric cars.

The growing number of electric vehicles is driving a global market opportunity for charging solutions, including sophisticated monitoring systems and software to support the electric grid. Earlier in the year, the Estonian government started its push for a better EV charging network, providing 507 Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric cars to social workers around the country. In addition, Estonia offers subsidies of up to 50 percent for private EV purchases.

“The Estonian government would like to ensure that driving an EV in Estonia is as comfortable and safe as driving any other car,” said Jarmo Tuisk, director of the Innovation and Technology Division at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, which offers more information about the Electric Mobility Programme for Estonia.

Investments in Estonia’s electric mobility are financed by the Green Investment Scheme, funded by the export credit agency KredEx as part of the national government’s plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Source: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/01/13/europe%E2%80%99s-largest-ev-fast-charging-network-gets-green-light/

Obama’s Commerce Secretary Wants Higher Energy Prices

by David Bier on January 13, 2012

In theory, environmentalism is about protecting the poor and middle class from the careless capitalists. In reality, it amounts to persistent attacks on all those groups—capitalists on down.  The Clean Water Act is commonly used to deprive families of their property without due process. The Endangered Species Act is similarly abused to violate property rights with little benefit to wildlife. Cities fine residents millions for violating their mandatory recycling programs. Energy taxes, renewable energy mandates, ethanol tariffs, cap-and-trade schemes, energy rationing, and a host of other programs raise the price of electricity and fuel, which primarily hurts the poor.
In an opinion article in today’s Washington Examiner, Iain Murray and I document how the current Commerce Secretary has repeatedly advocated not just the policies that lead to higher energy prices, but the higher prices themselves.

From 1979-1982, Bryson chaired California’s Public Utilities Commission where he used fixed-rate contracts to drive up electricity prices for consumers, and Bryson isn’t shy about admitting the effect of his policies. “What California has done is knowingly incur higher cents per-kilowatt-hour costs,” he boasted. “They’re substantially higher than the U.S. average in order to invest in the kind of systems we have in California …. that’s been part of the regulatory environment for the investor owned utilities as long as I’ve been close to it.” ….
Today, Bryson is still working for higher prices. In a 2008 panel discussion with author Tom Friedman and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Bryson said, “Take global warming. It’s going to cost something to deal effectively with this. Energy prices are going to have to go up.” His comments had an effect on Breyer. “We better get away from oil. That’ll help us. I hear Tom Friedman and Bryson — they are giving five reasons why. …. They said the world ‘price’ — raise the price of oil. Raise the price of oil! Raise it through the roof, and then people will look for substitutes, so I cheer,” he said smiling…
“What I hear is,” Breyer continued, “’It’s just because you make these huge salaries in the judiciary. You haven’t thought about the average person.’ But I am thinking about the average person. Isn’t that the problem, that the average person is going to have to pay too, and quite a lot? You hear these ‘terrible’ words: tax. But remember Alfred Kahn? Kahn was told by Jimmy Carter don’t refer to the word recession, so he said, ‘OK, we’re about to have a banana.’ Fine, let’s put a banana on oil,” he said laughing.

These two liberal elites laugh as they conspire against the American consumer, the middle class, and the poor. Bryson is no stranger to the “hidden tax” idea—he’s actually an advocate of doing exactly that. While speaking at UC Berkley in 2010, Bryson spoke in favor of President Obama’s cap and trade energy scheme. He said that the bill has “the advantage politically of sort of hiding the fact that you have a tax, but that’s what you’re trying to do, trying to raise prices of carbon.”
This backdoor attack on the poor was fortunately defeated, but it’s not an anomalous case for environmental policy—it’s the norm. Other environmental policies—bans on cheap light bulbs, air emission regulations, water use regulations, and others—already inflate the prices of goods and services, which hurt the poor the most. It’s unfortunate that the people who claim to care the most about the poor are the least likely to see it.

Source:http://www.globalwarming.org/2012/01/13/obamas-commerce-secretary-wants-higher-energy-prices/

Canada: Climate Criminal

Blogpost by Rex Weyler - January 4, 2012 at 20:09 13 comments

At the dawn of the 21st century a new political regime has transformed Canada from global hero – once standing up for peace, people, and nature – to global criminal, plunging into war, eroding civil rights, and destroying environments.
What happened to Canada? Oil. And not just any oil, but the world’s dirtiest, most destructive oil. Canada’s betrayal at the Durban climate talks – abandoning its Kyoto Accord commitments – is the direct effect of becoming a petro-state.
By the late 20th century, oil companies knew that the world’s conventional oil fields were in decline and oil production would soon peak, which it did in 2005. These companies, including sovereign oil powers such as PetroChina, turned their attention to low-grade hydrocarbon deposits in shale gas, deep offshore fields, and Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Simultaneously, inside Canada, oil companies began promoting the political career of the son of an Alberta oil executive, the conservative ideologue Stephen Harper.
Shell Oil opened operations in the tar sands in 2003. In 2004, the same year Canada signed the Kyoto Accord, committing to reduce carbon emissions, oil companies began to form “think tanks” and astroturf groups in Canada to establish the oil agenda and promote Harper as Conservative Party leader. Two years later, in 2006, Harper’s Conservatives formed a minority government with 36% of the popular vote and launched Canada’s petro-state era, slashing environmental regulations, joining US Middle East wars, and launching a tar sands campaign, one of the most ecologically destructive industrial projects in human history.
In Durban, in December 2011, after mocking climate science and common decency, Canada’s Environment Minister, Peter Kent announced that Canada would abandon the Kyoto deal, abrogating a legally binding international agreement, which Canada had signed seven years earlier.
The Canadian government has become the policy arm and public relations voice of the international oil industry, discarding its reputation as an ethical country. Millions of Canadians have expressed outrage at the government that abandoned them and shamed Canada on the world stage. These voices are rarely heard in Canada’s corporate media. Meanwhile, Canadians witness an erosion of free press and civil rights within their own nation. They should not be surprised.
Life as an oil resource colony
“Oil and democracy do not generally mix,” explains Terry Karl in The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Oil is a “resource
curse” for local populations, as experienced by Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. Oil rich nations attract oil industry patrons, who tend to support dictators. Petro-states often lose local economic sovereignty, suffer human rights atrocities, and see their environments devastated.
In the 1970s, the UK and Dutch economies experienced the oil curse as the North Sea oil and gas boom gave the illusion of prosperity while eroding sovereign economic capacity. Britain’s petro-state leader Margaret Thatcher used oil revenues to wage war, create banking empires, and subsidize elite society, while plundering the environment and leaving common citizens dispossessed of their own national heritage.
In 1977 The Economist magazine coined the term “Dutch disease” to describe the social and manufacturing decline caused by extreme resource exploitation. Oil revenues make a nation's currency appear stronger for a while, but this makes their exports more expensive and undermines manufacturing and local economy.
In 2011, the Montreal Macro Research Board warned that the “petrolization” of Canada had created “A severe case of Dutch Disease,” weakening Canadian business sovereignty, “hollowing out manufactured goods exporters” and making Canada “increasingly reliant” on oil and coal exports.
Like Thatcher's England Canada launched a scheme to privatise profits and socialize the costs of oil development. In the last decade, Canada has handed out over $14 billion in tax subsidies to oil, coal, and gas companies, while losing over 340,000 industrial jobs. A University of Ottawa study shows that oil colony economics is the largest factor in these job losses.
“Petro-states,” writes Terry Karl, become “unaccountable to the general population.” To impose the oil company agenda on their citizens, petro-regimes tend to centralize power, avoid transparency, and create a politics of lies and deceit.
Politics as war
Twice, in 2008 and 2009, Harper shut down the Canadian Parliament to avoid inquiries into his international deals, finances, and scandals including abusive treatment of Afghanistan detainees. Canada now ranks last among industrial nations in honouring freedom of information requests.
Harper’s perverse secrecy is typical of oil politics. “This is how petro states are made,” writes Andrew Nikiforuk in one of Canada’s best news sources, The Tyee; “with a quiet infection that eats away a nation's entire soul.”
In March 2011, as Harper ran Canada from secret cabinet meetings, 156 members of the government found Harper and his minority regime in contempt of Parliament for its refusal to share legislative information with other elected members.
In April 2011, Canadians learned that Harper’s liaison to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers had previously been convicted of defrauding two Canadian banks, a car dealer, and his own law clients, and had lobbied the Canadian government on behalf of his ex-hooker girlfriend.
The convicted felon, Bruce Carson, served as chief tar sands promoter, claiming “The economic and security value of oil sands expansion will likely outweigh the climate damage that oil sands create.” Carson also opposed “clean energy efforts in the U.S.” Canadian lobbyists undermined US low-carbon fuel standards by lobbying the US government.
In June 2011, on national television, another Harper henchman, Tom Flanagan, advocated assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “I think Assange should be assassinated,” he told Canada’s CBC. Flanagan has been one of the lead architects of Harper’s war on his own people. Before the 2011 election, in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Flanagan wrote, “An election is war by other means.” He compared an election campaign to Rome’s destruction of Carthage, whereby they “razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again.”
Alan Whitehorn of the Royal Military College of Canada wrote, “This suggests a paradigm not of civil rivalry between fellow citizens, but all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the opponent. This kind of malevolent vision and hostile tone seems antithetical to the democratic spirit.” Harper’s government is now constructing barricades around the Parliament buildings, erecting more jails, and passing tougher criminal codes. The Canadian people, who once felt proud of their democratic institutions, now feel like the “enemy” of their own government.
Canada against the world
Outside Canada, the Harper regime has dismissed the United Nations and international opinion. Canadian government officials called the UN a “corrupt organization.” Former Canadian senior UN official Carolyn McAskie wrote in Canada and Multilateralism: Missing In Action that Canada, once respected as a UN leader, is now “spurning a whole system of organizations critical to world peace, security and development.”
Economic analyst Jim Willie wrote that Canada has “followed the Goldman Sachs path to the fields of corruption and fealty… Canada followed the Bush Doctrine of fascism, embracing the war footing … and tightening the security vice. Next they will become a Chinese commercial colony.”
When citizens around the world objected to the climate impact of the tar sands, Harper’s government attempted to rebrand the notorious carbon bomb as “ethical oil,” shamelessly ignoring the facts. The tar sands crimes against humanity and nature begin with obliterating boreal forests and soils, creating massive open-pit mines, and removing two tons of sand and soil for every barrel of oil. The thick bitumen is melted with natural gas, which requires one-third of the energy in tar sands oil to remove it. The project uses about 150-million gallons of water each day from the Athabasca river and aquifers, and the black waste turns boreal lakes into sludge pits, kills birds and other wild life, and contaminates the local ground water. Pollutants from tar sands smoke stacks have caused lung disease throughout the region and a 30% increase in cancers over the last decade. Mike Mercredi from the indigenous Fort Chipewyan Cree Nation calls the impact “slow industrial genocide.”
The crime continues with pipeline oil spills and oil tankers that threaten the entire coast of North America. Meanwhile, the tar sands project emits more that 45-million tons of greenhouse gases each year. NASA climatologist James Hansen has warned that if the tar sands are fully exploited, “it is game over for the climate.”
The French Foreign Ministry called Canada’s decision to renege on its Kyoto climate commitments, “bad news for the fight against climate change.”
Representative Ian Fry from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu called Canada’s reversal “an act of sabotage ... a reckless and totally irresponsible act.”
The China news agency, Xinhua, called Canada’s decision “preposterous,” and China's Foreign Ministry urged Canada to “face up to its due responsibilities and duties... and take a positive, constructive attitude towards participating in international cooperation to respond to climate change.”
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned that Canada “has a legal obligation under the convention to reduce its emissions, and a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort.” UN Advisor on Water, Maude Barlow, called the tar sands “Canada’s Mordor.”
After Canada’s shameful showing in Durban, a Canadian businessman wrote to national newspaper, The Globe & Mail: “The pride of wearing the maple leaf on the lapel or backpack is gone. It's best hidden now. .. not one person in any country I have visited has been complimentary. Harper and his sheep will deny or ignore such facts while people like me lose business.”
Inside Canada, people are rising up, lead by The Wilderness Committee, Greenpeace, Council of Canadians, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Yinka-Dene Alliance, and others. These groups need international support to halt the tar sands crime and help Canada recover its lost reputation.

Source: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/canada-climate-criminal/blog/38567/

Climate change castaways consider move to Australia

Ben Doherty in Male, Maldives

January 7, 2012

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Threat ... much of the Maldives could be lost to climate change.

THE President of what could be the first country in the world lost to climate change has urged Australia to prepare for a mass wave of climate refugees seeking a new place to live.
The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, said his government was considering Australia as a possible new home if the tiny archipelago disappears beneath rising seas.
''It is increasingly becoming difficult to sustain the islands, in the natural manner that these islands have been,'' he told the Herald in an interview in Male, the Maldives capital.

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''So … if everyone else around Australia is so poor and unable to fend for themselves and have a decent life, would that necessarily make life in Australia any better? Would that be the castle that you can defend?''
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea-level rise of up to 59 centimetres over the next century, a level that would inundate most of the Maldives' inhabited atolls. Low-lying Pacific island nations, such as Kirabati and Tuvalu, would also face being flooded.
''If nations won't do good for themselves, they really must do good for everyone around, simply in your self-interest as well,'' Mr Nasheed said.
''Not necessarily because you're so nice, and so benevolent and good that you want to provide others with things.
''But I think it's really quite necessary for Australians and for every rich country to understand that this is unlike any other thing that's happened before.''
The country has established a sovereign wealth fund, drawn from its tourist revenue, to be used to buy land overseas and finance the relocation of the country's population of 350,000.
Australia, for its climate and abundance of space, along with Sri Lanka and India, for their proximity and cultural similarities, are the three countries the President has identified as possible destinations.
''They are the talked about countries, though we haven't necessarily had official conversations with these governments,'' Mr Nasheed said.
Eighty per cent of the Maldivian land mass - a string of more than 1200 islands, 200 inhabited, running 750 kilometres north-south in the Indian Ocean - is less than a metre above sea level. The highest point in the entire country is 2.4 metres above sea level, and already, 14 islands have had to be abandoned because of massive erosion by the sea.
Mr Nasheed said Maldivians want to stay but moving was an eventuality his government had to plan for. He said he did not want his people ''living in tents'' for years, or decades, as refugees.
The Maldives is not the first nation to look to Australia as a destination for its climate change refugees. A decade ago, the government of Tuvalu, north of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean, requested immigration assistance for its population of 12,000 to move to Australia. The Australian government said its humanitarian obligations were to people who require ''assistance urgently''.
Mr Nasheed praised Australia's decision to adopt a carbon tax, describing it as a ''brave move forward''.
''That is the kind of progressive legislation we want to see from other countries,'' he said.
But other Maldivian government officials told the Herald Australia was ''destructive'' at the just-completed round of climate change talks in Durban.
Under the last-minute agreement reached in Durban, countries have agreed to begin work on a new global treaty to cut carbon emissions, to be signed in 2015, but not to come into force until 2020.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-change-castaways-consider-move-to-australia-20120106-1pobf.html#ixzz1ilTcXHvD

Maldives faces tides of change

Ben Doherty, Maldives

January 7, 2012

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Mohamed Nasheed: 'If the West stopped their emissions and China, South Africa and Brazil carried on emitting ... we would still die. The Maldives would disappear.'

MOHAMED Nasheed carries the air of a man without much time. ''How did it go? Did we win?'' he asks an aide as he sweeps, almost at a run, down the marbled corridors of the presidential office. Told yes, the vote on the reappointment of his Minister of Islamic Affairs succeeded in his country's fractious parliament, he is pleased: ''That's good, our minister keeps his job. Now, what's next?''
The West Wing Bartlet-esque manner is no mere affection. Mohamed Nasheed is a man running out of time. As President of the Maldives, the string of paradisiacal Indian Ocean islands that could become the first nation ever lost to climate change, there are not too many minutes to waste for Nasheed.
''We've already lost it in so many senses,'' he tells The Saturday Age during a rare moment of peace in a meeting room. His country is losing three inhabited islands a year, swallowed by the ocean, he says. ''People are saying, 'we can't live there any more'. For us, it is difficult not to be worried about the climate.''

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Government supporters rally against religious extremism in Male, Maldives. Photo: AP

Mohamed Nasheed is compact: 155 centimetres and leanly built, with square shoulders and a narrow waist. Maldivian humidity means jackets are usually eschewed, but the 44-year-old favours formality with silver cufflinks and ties with broad knots.
As he speaks, the clipped tones of his British public school education fight for space through the lyrical lilt of Maldivian English. As a man who lives with the consequences of climate change, and looks out his window at a rising sea every day, Nasheed brooks no argument from sceptics.
Even Male - the Maldivian capital and the most densely populated island in the world, with more than 110,000 people crammed onto 1.77 square kilometres - has needed tens of millions of dollars spent on a three-metre seawall to keep the ocean from it. ''The science here is very sorted. They say there is a window of opportunity of about seven or eight years.''

Mohamed Nasheed: 'For us, it is difficult not to be worried about the climate.' Photo: AFP

For some in this archipelago, that window is already closed. Fourteen of the country's 200 inhabited islands are already gone, massive coastal erosion making their seaside villages unliveable. A further 70 islands rely on desalinated drinking water because groundwater aquifers have been overcome by seawater.
About 80 per cent of the Maldivian landmass is less than a metre above sea level. The highest point in the entire archipelago is just 2.4 metres. A sea-level rise of 59 centimetres over the next century, the upper limit forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would make most of the Maldives uninhabitable.
The government is already saving money, squirrelled away from its $600 million tourism industry, to buy land in another country if theirs is lost to the ocean. Sri Lanka and India, for their proximity, and Australia, for its space, are the names that have been publicly considered.
But it's a last resort.
Maldivians whose families have spent countless generations living on 'their' island, can't bear the thought of moving to the next atoll, Nasheed says. They can't fathom abandoning the whole country.
''I said to one lady, 'Ma'am you have to move, we have to take you to another island. And at the end of this whole thing we might have to go elsewhere, all of us.' She told me, 'You can take the island people away but you can't take the sounds away, you can't take the butterflies, you can't take the colours'.
''You can migrate a people,'' Nasheed says, ''but you cannot take a culture, you cannot take a nation, you cannot take a history.''
If the Maldives moves, the Maldives is lost.
For a man whose country needs the world's co-operation to survive, Nasheed can be undiplomatic. French newspaper Le Monde recently quoted him as saying of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change: ''The current negotiation process is stupid, useless and endless.''
To The Saturday Age, he doesn't precisely own up to the incendiary language, but nor does he shy from its sentiment. ''I think this UN FCCC is silly … It's built in a form where if two countries agree and a third country comes around and says 'I don't', and then you dilute your positions to accommodate the third country. And countries take so long even to say 'I don't' … at the end of the day the process might actually come out with an agreement that means nothing.''
He wants the framework convention process - bureaucratic, leaden, and immobile without consensus - abandoned, but suggests only in replacement ''a more imaginative way of dealing with it''.
Nasheed believes developed countries, although the largest emitters, are not the only ones that must bear the burden of emissions cuts. The right of developing countries to lift their citizens' standard of living does not absolve them from their obligation to the planet.
''If the West stopped their emissions and China, South Africa and Brazil carried on emitting on the basis of business as usual, we would still die. The Maldives would disappear,'' he said during a recent European visit.
Nasheed appreciates the complexities of trying to engineer a global climate deal that has so far eluded 17 major climate change congresses over as many years. He understands his bargaining position, and the domestic pressures guiding the hands of other nations.
He realises, too, his is a nation without economic, military or diplomatic clout. Nasheed is not above a media stunt to draw attention to the plight of his country, or to the Alliance of Small Island States, of which he is totemic leader.
In 2009 Nasheed and his ministers dressed in scuba gear for the world's first ever underwater cabinet meeting. The same year he allowed a documentary crew to follow him through his negotiations at the Copenhagen climate talks. The film that emerged, The Island President, has won acclaim at film festivals around the globe.
The week The Saturday Age was in Male, Nasheed invited the country's media to watch him install a solar panel on the roof of the president's office building, part of his pledge to make the Maldives carbon neutral by 2020.
Nasheed leans forward in conversation, and speaks quickly, a man perpetually short of hours in his day. But there was a period, his recent history, when Nasheed had nothing but time.
Returning to the Maldives from Britain in the late '80s, Nasheed became an outspoken critic of the despotic, one-party rule of his predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Nasheed was jailed in 1991, the first of more than a dozen times he would be arrested and imprisoned. He was tortured by the Gayoom regime, and spent 18 months in solitary confinement in a metal shack barely 90 by 150 centimetres.
Released, he was elected to parliament in 2000, but jailed again on trumped-up charges of stealing ''unidentified government property''. His daughter Zaya was born during his second stint of solitary confinement.
Nasheed was banished to the tiny island of Angolhitheem, population 30, for six months, before being placed under house arrest. On his final release in 2003 he fled the Maldives for Sri Lanka, where he established the Maldivian Democratic Party in exile.
But he returned to his homeland, to a hero's welcome, in 2005 and in 2008, in the first ever multi-party elections held in the Maldives, beat the sitting president in a run-off vote, securing 54 per cent of the vote.
Remarkably, Nasheed has allowed the man who imprisoned him to stay in the Maldives, free from sanction or punishment.
''I have forgiven my jailers, the torturers. They were following orders … I ask people to follow my example and leave Gayoom to grow old here,'' he said upon taking office.
The elderly Maumoon remains on Male, more actively involved in the vituperative world of Maldives politics than the President's supporters would like.
Once prisoner, now President, Nasheed finds himself leading a country facing significant problems beyond the slowly rising seas. None are unique to a developing Muslim country or an island state, but they are especially acute in his tiny, diffuse homeland.
The Maldives has a massive youth bulge: 44 per cent of the country is under 14, and 62 per cent under 25, but jobs for any, especially beyond working on a tourist resort, are hard to find. In the atolls, a quarter of all young men are unemployed, half of all young women.
The country also has a serious drug problem. An epidemic of cheap heroin has swept through the archipelago, but taken root in Male in particular. The UN has estimated 40 per cent of the country's youth use hard drugs.
Nasheed, a Muslim as the Maldives constitution obliges all Maldivians to be, also faces a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. Wahhabist Islamic scholars, most schooled in madrassas in Pakistan, are radicalising Islam in the Maldives. Female circumcision is practised, and is reportedly on the increase, across the archipelago. There are calls for the return of amputation for crimes and for the banning of music and dancing. Women are flogged for having extra-marital sex.
Every effort to resist this gathering radicalisation is painted by Nasheed's political opponents as an attack on Islam. After Islamist protesters threatened on a website to ''slaughter anybody against Islam'', Nasheed was forced into confrontation: ''Kill me before you kill a fellow Maldivian.''
Financially, too, the Maldives' dependence on wealthy Western tourists has left it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global economy. The IMF this year withheld loans, declaring the Maldives at moderate risk of debt distress, and forced the country to introduce an income tax and a GST, as well as massively reduce government spending, largely through cutting the country's bloated public service.
Everywhere in the Maldives, the government's new eye for the frugal is apparent. The former Presidential Palace has become the Supreme Court (Nasheed lives in his own house), even the ornate leather thrones that were once in the meeting room where he meets with The Saturday Age have been replaced by bottom-of-the-line blue-cloth office chairs.
But climate change dominates the President's agenda. While the course of global climate action is largely in the hands of others, Mohamed Nasheed says he feels a sense of responsibility to do what he can to save his country.
''Any responsible Maldives government should be mindful of what might happen in the future, and save for that rainy day.''
His government talks of climate contingencies, of floating islands, desalination and of making a new homeland in other countries, but he believes the Maldives' only chance lies with holding back the tide. And time is running out.
''If we start seeing disasters one after the other, I think that would be … when countries would suddenly start acting. Now that might be very late in the day, but perhaps it is already very late … it's getting very, very late.''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/maldives-faces-tides-of-change-20120106-1po9r.html#ixzz1ilTUZk4s