tagged w/ Moral Will
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International Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”
“… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]…. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”
The International Energy Agency has issued yet another clarion call for urgent action on climate. Their 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] release should end once and for all any notion that delay is the rational course for the nation and the world.
The UK Guardian‘s headline captures the urgency:
World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
We must start aggressively deploying clean energy now through myriad policies, including a price on carbon. That has been the conclusion of most authoritative studies, of course, including the recent one by California’s independent state science and technology advisory panel (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“).
The IEA report deserves the label “bombshell,” though, because for most of the past two decades, the IEA was the source of bland, conservative, business-as-usual analysis. When I was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, no one at DOE paid much attention to IEA reports. And that perspective continued through most of the 2000s.
But in just the last few years they have woken up to the risks posed to peak oil — see IEA top economist warns (8/09): “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us” — and especially climate change. In releasing its 2009 WEO, the IEA warned, “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”
Now the IEA has done the calculation a different way, concluding, “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.” Those who counsel waiting for breakthrough technologies are urging us on a path that is unsustainable, irreversible, potentially catastrophic, and economically indefensible, according to the IEA.
The IEA is one of the few organizations in the world with a sophisticated enough global energy model to do credible (i.e non-hand-waving) projections of the cost of different emissions pathways and the costs of delaying efforts to achieve them. Their 2008 analysis of the 2°C warming pathway demonstrated that the total shift in investment needed to stabilize at 450 ppm is only about 1.1% of GDP per year — and that is not a “cost” or hit to GDP, because much of that investment goes towards saving expensive fuel (see “IEA report: Climate Progress has the 450-ppm solution about right“).
The new analysis shows that because of soaring emissions, we are running out of time for the “450 Scenario.” We are at risk of irreversibly “locking in” dangerous warming — a point I agree with mostly, but not entirely:
More at the linkInternational Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use... more
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The state of water in our world currently is endangered. Pollution, privatization, waste, climate change effects and lack of attention to this most crucial life crisis is bringing us to the brink as a species. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. In trying to assess in my own mind why something so basic and necessary to our lives is given such little attention it is frustrating to say the least. Especially in this age of technology when we see through our modems and other devices so much more information than ever before being shared on this and so many other global crises.
When you look at the world as a whole and realize that 3/4 of it live in poverty and that the majority of those areas also do not have access to potable water/sanitation, the corrolation is obvious. Yet, we as a species even in the 21st century are failing at even providing the basic necessities of life to ourselves and others. Why? Why is water so unimportant to so many even though they know they cannot live without it? Is it ignorance? Arrogance? Or is it because there are those who have been made to believe that we will always have what we need because money can buy you anything even at the expense of taking it from others.
Just look at the levels of pollution in our global waterways. Industry and nitrogen fertilizer rich agriculture alone have managed to kill some of the major river systems of the world and made dead zones devoid of the oxygen marinelife needs to survive. The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other destructive land uses (fracking, tarsands extraction, strip mining, mountain top removal) are culminating to push our atmosphere and water to the tipping point. We are now seeing more extreme events (storms, floods, droughts) around the world which are the results of human forcings on the natural cycles of the planet to the point where we have actually affected the hydrologic cycle. And this is now being touted as the "new normal."
This has already resulted in billions of dollars of lost agriculture to the world, most recently in Thailand where much of their rice crop has been destroyed from unprecedented floods that are also happening globally simultaneously, as well as extreme droughts on both sides of the world. This then has a domino effect regarding food prices and the ability to live. And with predictions of these events (extreme floods and droughts) becoming more severe with rainfall patterns changing, the entire way the world grows food is being challenged. And in the process more fall into poverty, illness, war and hopelessness as those with more green paper think it buys them rights to the resources of Earth that belong to all mankind.
So for me there can only be one main reason why this has happened. We have strayed from our humanity. We have allowed materialistic manmade forces to infiltrate our consciousness and perceptions of life on this Earth and those skewed perceptions are now killing us and in the process destroying this Earth for future generations.
And it is the hope of changing those perceptions and bringing a paradigm shift in thinking that is now bringing people out into the streets worldwide calling for justice and equality. Calling for accountability for those who have stripped this Earth of all that was once good in exchange for a world of their making that can sustain no one, not even themselves. The false illusion of money's worth in comparison to the limitless value of this Earth coupled with delusions of grandeur built on sand in failing to understand the true meaning of humanity and its true purpose must now be challenged. And that right now is the hope we have as a species... awareness, awakening, gnosis.
The inate instinct that tells us as humans that we are one with this planet and that to destroy her destroys us. This is the lesson we must learn. This is the perception we must impart to others. We are at the brink, but we don't have to go over. There are ways to heal her and ourselves. We can join globally with likeminded individuals who know the stakes and make this shift happen with our thoughts and our actions. We can reclaim our humanity and in the process save ourselves. It won't be easy. However, the alternative is simply not an option.
Water is life, it is our life, it is the blood of Earth.
And it is worth fighting for.The state of water in our world currently is endangered. Pollution, privatization,... more
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The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.
It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.
Extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Marland said.
"It's a big jump," said Tom Boden, director of the Energy Department's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Lab. "From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over."
Boden said that in 2010 people were traveling, and manufacturing was back up worldwide, spurring the use of fossil fuels, the chief contributor of man-made climate change.
India and China are huge users of coal. Burning coal is the biggest carbon source worldwide and emissions from that jumped nearly 8 percent in 2010.
"The good news is that these economies are growing rapidly so everyone ought to be for that, right?" Reilly said Thursday. "Broader economic improvements in poor countries has been bringing living improvements to people. Doing it with increasing reliance on coal is imperiling the world."
In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution. Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel. Those forecast global temperatures rising between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century with the best estimate at 7.5 degrees.
Even though global warming skeptics have attacked the climate change panel as being too alarmist, scientists have generally found their predictions too conservative, Reilly said. He said his university worked on emissions scenarios, their likelihood, and what would happen. The IPCC's worst case scenario was only about in the middle of what MIT calculated are likely scenarios.
Chris Field of Stanford University, head of one of the IPCC's working groups, said the panel's emissions scenarios are intended to be more accurate in the long term and are less so in earlier years. He said the question now among scientists is whether the future is the panel's worst case scenario "or something more extreme."
"Really dismaying," Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University, said of the new figures. "We are building up a horrible legacy for our children and grandchildren."
More at the linkThe global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on... more
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Excerpt:
"In its desperate efforts to battle chronic water shortages, Jordan, one of the world's 10 driest countries, is mulling "unconventional" and "environmentally unfriendly" plans, experts say. The challenge is huge for this tiny country where desert covers 92 percent of the territory and the population of 6.3 million is growing.
Critics say the government's efforts to manage the country's limited water resources and generate new ones are being hindered by a strategy which at best is chaotic. Jordan is tapping into the ancient southern Disi aquifer, despite concerns about high levels of radiation, while studies are underway to build a controversial canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. "Unconventional projects, like Disi for example, are environmentally unfriendly," water expert Dureid Mahasneh, a former Jordan Valley Authority chief, told AFP. The 990-million-dollar project seeks to extract 100 million cubic metres (3.5 billion cubic feet) of water a year from the 300,000-year-old Disi aquifer, 325 kilometres (200 miles) south of Amman, officials say. The plan is to provide the capital Amman with water for 50 years, said water ministry official Bassam Saleh, who is in charge of the project that was launched in 2008 and is due to be completed in 2012.
A 2008 study by Duke University, in the United States, shows that Disi's water has 20times more radiation than is considered safe, with radium content that could trigger cancers. "Our research shows that the Disi aquifer is heavily contaminated with radium," according to the study done by the Durham, North Carolina team which tested 37 pumping wells in the aquifer. Mahasneh said "Disi water should not be touched." "How can you go for a non-renewable water resource that is contaminated with radiation and needs treatment?" But the government has brushed aside such concerns. "We know there is radiation in Disi because it is underground water but we will treat it by diluting it with an equal amount of water from other sources," said Saleh. Jordan University professor Elias Salameh agreed. "The radioactivity can be treated, and it is not a complicated matter."
Munqeth Mehyar, of the Jordanian-Israeli-Palestinian non-governmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), warned against abusing the water resource. "If we overpump the Disi water, we will suffer from problems like sinkholes for example. And there are no studies that tell you for sure how long the aquifer water would last," he said. Jordan has also agreed in principle to build, along with its Palestinian and Israeli neighbours, a four-billion-dollar pipeline from the Red Sea to refill the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea. But the world's lowest and saltiest body of water lies below the Red Sea and the pipeline must cross higher land in order to reach it -- a project that will entail a major pumping effort. A desalination plant would also be built to remove the salt and provide 200 million cubic metres of potable water to Jordan each year.
"This project is worrisome. It will cause indescribable damage," Mehyar warned. A feasibility study is being carried out by the World Bank but environmentalists fear that an influx of seawater could undermine the Dead Sea's fragile ecosystem. The degradation of the Dead Sea began in the 1960s when Israel, Jordan and Syria began to divert water from the Jordan River -- the Dead Sea's main supplier. Over the years 95 percent of the river's flow has been diverted by the three neighbours for agricultural and industrial use, with Israel alone diverts more than 60 percent of it, according to FoEME. The impact on the Dead Sea has been compounded by a drop in groundwater levels as rain water from surrounding mountains dissolved salt deposits that had previously plugged access to underground caverns. Industrial and tourist operations around the shores of the lake exacerbate the situation.
cont.
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"In its desperate efforts to battle chronic water shortages, Jordan,... more
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This year's theme for World Water Day is Water For Cities. More people are moving to urban areas, the majority of this migration taking place in the developing world. This is in part due to expansion of corporate landgrabs, deforestation, overpopulation and effects of biodistress that push people into urban areas looking for a way to survive as agriculture which is the main way of life is impacted greatly.
Three quarters of our population is predicted to be living in cities by 2050 which will put a tremendous strain on infrastructure, water quality, water access and sanitation, which then leads to an increase in waterborne diseases.
Access to clean water is the moral challenge of our time and our right. So please, tomorrow take time to reflect upon the importance of clean water, water access and sanitation for those in our world lacking it. We take so much for granted here in America regarding water and the ability to have sanitation that leads to better health.
This site lists events globally and I will be posting about events in this thread as well as listing organizations working to provide clean water and sanitation and how you can help, as well as other entries about the importance of this most beautiful life giving resource.
Please feel free also to add poems, videos, comments, etc.about water here and make a pledge that for this and the next generation we will work to see all with clean water that revives our bodies and souls. This is one way that can lead people out of poverty and into a world of health and peace.
Thank you
http://current.com/groups/water-is-life/This year's theme for World Water Day is Water For Cities. More people are moving... more
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It's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from South Dakota all the way to Texas. It's underneath most of Nebraska's farmlands, and it provides crucial water resources for farming in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and even New Mexico. It's called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it is being pumped dry.
Without the Ogallala Aquifer, America's heartland food production collapses. No water means no irrigation for the corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops grown across these states to feed people and animals. And each year, the Ogallala Aquifer drops another few inches as it is literally being sucked dry by the tens of thousands of agricultural wells that tap into it across the heartland of America.
This problem with all this is that the Ogallala Aquifer isn't being recharged in any significant way from rainfall or rivers. This is so-called "fossil water" because once you use it, it's gone. And it's disappearing now faster than ever.
In some regions along the aquifer, the water level has dropped so far that it has effectively disappeared -- places like Happy, Texas, where a once-booming agricultural town has collapsed to a population of just 595. All the wells drilled there in the 1950's tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer and seemed to provide abundant water at the time. But today the wells have all run dry.
Happy, Texas has become a place of despair. Dead cattle. Wilted crops. Once-moist soils turned to dust. And Happy is just the beginning of this story because this same agricultural tragedy will be repeated across Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Colorado in the next few decades. That's a hydrologic fact. Water doesn't magically reappear in the Ogallala. Once it's used up, it's gone.
"There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's 1,000," says Kay Horner in a Telegraph report (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...). "Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031658_aquifer_depletion_Ogallala.html#ixzz1GLQaxFlnIt's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from... more
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Asia must prepare for millions of people to flee their homes to safer havens within countries and across borders as weather patterns become more extreme, the Asian Development Bank warns.
A draft of an ADB report obtained by AFP over the weekend and confirmed by bank officials cautioned that failure to make preparations now for vast movements of people could lead to "humanitarian crises" in the coming decades.
Governments are currently focused on mitigating climate change blamed for the weather changes, but the report said they should start laying down policies and mechanisms to deal with the projected population shifts.
"What is clear is that Asia and the Pacific will be amongst the global regions most affected by the impacts of climate change," said the report entitled "Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific".
"Such impacts include significant temperature increases, changing rainfall patterns, greater monsoon variability, sea-level rise, floods and more intense tropical cyclones," it said.
The report, expected to be released in the next few weeks, comes as flooding overwhelms parts of Asia-Pacific, most recently in Australia, where a powerful cyclone worsened the impact of weeks of record inundations.
"Asia and the Pacific is particularly vulnerable because of its high degree of exposure to environmental risks and high population density. As a result, it could experience population displacements of unprecedented scale in the next decades," said the report, primarily targeted at regional policymakers.
Research carried out for the United Nations showed that 2010 was one of the worst years on record worldwide for natural disasters.
Asians accounted for 89 percent of the 207 million people affected by disasters globally last year, according to the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).
Summer floods and landslides in China caused an estimated $18 billion dollars in damage, while floods in Pakistan cost $9.5 billion dollars, CRED’s annual study showed. Not to mention the catastrophic human cost.
"Governments are not prepared and that is why ADB is conducting this project," said Bart Edes, director of the Manila-based lending institution’s poverty reduction, gender and social development division.
"There is no international cooperation mechanism established to manage climate-induced migration. Protection and assistance schemes to help manage that flow is opaque, poorly coordinated and scattered," he told AFP.
"Policymakers need to take action now," he stressed, noting that negotiating treaties and efforts to raise funds takes time.
Last year’s natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific, including millions of people displaced in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, "give us a flavour of what to expect in the future", said Edes.
"Migration in general is not being properly addressed and the situation is going be made worse," added Edes, referring to the additional impact of climate change on migration patterns, fuelled by economic needs and armed conflicts.
"Now we have another driver of migration."
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Asia%20faces%20climate%20induced%20migration%20crisis/4231667/story.html#ixzz1DD7MgrmFAsia must prepare for millions of people to flee their homes to safer havens within... more
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Drought, flower farms, and pesticides are damaging the already shallow lake
NAIROBI, KENYA—-Flamingos are showing up on Lake Naisvasha, a freshwater vacation destination 100 kilometers northwest of Nairobi, and they worry David Kilo. Why? Because flamingos favor saltwater. When flamingos flock to freshwater lakes it’s an unmistakable signal that the natural balances of a healthy ecosystem have sustained a heavy blow.
“They shouldn’t be here,” Kilo told Circle of Blue in March following the United Nations’ World Water Day Conference in Kenya. “They usually gather at Nakuru, [a saltwater body], but recently they’ve started to come to Naivasha.”
“The algae, just like the flamingos, shouldn’t be there.”No one knows precisely what the threat is to Lake Naivasha, Kenya’s third largest lake. But it’s genuine, says Kilo, the chairman of an anti-poaching conservation group. Droughts prompted by the changing climate, soaring population in cities fed by the lake, and a nearly 40-year-old horticultural industry that uses the lake for irrigation and drainage have shrunk Lake Naivasha to roughly 10,700 hectares (41 sq. mi.) or half its size two decades ago.
In February, a month before a Circe of Blue reporter visited the lake, three days of heavy rains ended with more than 1000 dead fish. The lake’s water turned red. The government blamed the fish kill on low oxygen levels.
The ecosystem damage in this part of east Africa is another facet of a wave of unmistakable evidence in Africa and every other continent that climate change, population growth, and the pursuit of industrial wealth is starting to buckle the Earth’s basic biology. The principle resource most affected is available supplies of clean freshwater.
Lake Naivasha was a site visited by several journalists following the major UN conference for World Water Day in Nairobi. The lake, which is listed as protected by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, was once an incredible tourist attraction. Development around the lake has resulted in deforestation and now wildlife is disappearing. In the meantime, two of the rivers that flow into the lake, Malewa and Gilgil, are drying up and a thick algal soup develops among the papyrus groves on the lake’s margin. The algae, just like the flamingos, shouldn’t be there.
Low Oxygen, Water Levels Harm Wildlife
Kilo’s office and pier connects to a plot of land along Naivasha known as Fisherman’s Camp, a lovely green spot shaded by scores of acacia trees. The camp has a lodge with rooms to rent and space to pitch a tent on the grass. Camp managers were preparing for the weekend’s Rift Valley Festival, a three-day “musical experience in the cradle of mankind,” according to promotional flyers.
Field manager Moses Parmat said that changes in Lake Naivasha’s wildlife and water quality have affected the camp’s ability to draw international tourists. “Ninety percent of what attracts tourism has gone down,” Parmat said. Domestic visitors still come to Naivasha as a refuge from Nairobi’s congestion, but they do not bring the camp as much income as those from abroad.
Lake Naivasha’s water levels have fallen drastically in recent years, shrinking the breeding ground for microphytes—tiny organisms at the base of the food chain. The lake, which has an average depth of 5 meters, reached an all-time recorded low in December 2009. They usually cover the lake bottom, Kilo said, but an increase in the amount of sediment has reduced the population.
Kilo points from the pier 300 meters inland to show the water’s recession. The most affected area is the shallower eastern shore where the water retreated three kilometers. Now in many parts of the lake the first growth of papyrus is too far away for the birds and marine life that breed there.
The fluctuating lake levels have devastated hippopotamus pods. In addition to a shrinking lake, much of the hippos’ habitat is being converted to farmland. As a result hippos have become trapped in mud pits around the lake, stranded from a water source and left to die.
“The riparian lands have been taken for farming, so the hippos are not coming,” Parmat said. “We have seen many die. They go to trenches where people get water and die. The Kenyan Wildlife Service traps and moves them elsewhere, but it is still a big problem.”
While the disappearance of birds and hippos from the lake has been gradual, it was the death of 1000 fish three months ago that revealed just how bad lake conditions have become. The kill aggravated the debate between government officials and local activists who are trying to determine what caused oxygen levels to drop, and so many fish to die.
The Battle with Flower Farms
Coming from Naivasha town, a right turn on Moi South Lake Road takes you along the southern shore of the lake. On the left, volcanic Mt. Longonot rises over dusted plains, cacti and acacia trees. On the right, lakeshore topography gradually gives way to a line of three-meter, hedge-fronted fences that partially obscure translucent greenhouses. Every kilometer or so there is a break in the hedge with space for a gated guardhouse and a company sign: Nini Farm, Oserian Flower Company, Kenya Roses, Sher Agencies. Looking through the gates it is possible to see the depth of the compounds. The greenhouses extend hundreds of meters in the distance like perspective lines seeking a vanishing point.
Kenya is the top flower supplier to the European Union. Flower farming is lucrative business, ranking second as a source of foreign exchange behind tourism. The industry earned US$585 million in 2008, according to the Kenya Flower Council, a trade group.
The flower farms provide cut flowers for export, of which 97 percent end up in bouquets in European cities. The farms began locating around Lake Naivasha in the early 1970s, drawn there by the water supply, the high equatorial sun which ensures straight stems, favorable weather conditions for year-round growing and direct air links with Europe. Roses and carnations, which comprise the bulk of the Naivasha operations, can go from Kenyan farm to London florist in 48 hours.
Cont.
Photo © Brett WaltonDrought, flower farms, and pesticides are damaging the already shallow lake... more
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Biodiversity loss. Land use. Freshwater use. Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Stratospheric ozone. Ocean acidification. Climate change. Chemical Pollution. Aerosol loading in the atmosphere.
A team of 30 scientists across the globe have determined that the nine environmental processes named above must remain within specific limits, otherwise the "safe operating space" within which humankind can exist on Earth will be threatened. Amid some controversy, the group has set numeric limits for seven of the nine so far (chemical pollution and aerosol loading are still being pinned down). And the researchers have determined that the world has already crossed the boundary in three cases: biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and climate change.
Jon Foley, director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, and a leader of the group, lays out the limits and their implications for human action in an article in Scientific American's April issue.
He also discusses the issues in a podcast with our own Steve Mirsky.
Foley's team was so moved by the research effort that it put together a compelling video (see below) dramatizing the situation, generated entirely with typography, graphics and energizing music. You can learn more about the team's work at its research site, too.
Image: Earth graphic from Foley videoBiodiversity loss. Land use. Freshwater use. Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.... more
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In assessing the urgency of climate change/global warming, our contributions to it, and its relationship to pollution, one must be cognizant of the inextricable link between them. For many naysayers however, this is not the case. They attempt to separate the two in order to demean the importance of the very real effects of global warming in relation to the pollution of our air, water, land and the biosphere as a whole. In doing so they do a great disservice not only to addressing this urgent crisis in total, but to the future generations to come must have in order to survive. This is not in line with what humans are or meant to be. We are here to be stewards of this world and prepare it for the next. This is our mission, and it encompasses so much more on so many more levels than political ideology and corporate balance sheets.
In order to have a symbiosis between planet and body, the entire global picture and our effect on it must be truthfully disclosed and understood. As indigenous cultures have relayed to us for centuries, when mankind is out of balance so is our Mother Earth, and that depletes her life force that gives life to us and all other species. If you take a look throughout history any time of peace and prosperity was also a time when the Earth was bountiful and humans were in harmony with her life rhythms. We have now not only lost touch with the Earth’s life rhythm but with our own, and that in turn is now leading us to a point where war, disease, famine and environmental calamity are commonplace and more prevalent only to become worse in the future.In assessing the urgency of climate change/global warming, our contributions to it,... more
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This is the first entry in our new feature, the Earth Care Group blog. Our first entry was written by Tommic, our co -moderator, and deals with climate change impacts. It will be posted in three parts. This part deals with glaciers and is a comprehensive review of the reality of the state of the world. There will be two more parts posted within this week and we invite serious discussion of the reality and the opportunity as humans to take action to preserve the delicate climate balance of our only home.Thank you to Tommic for this comprehensive essay.
In the future we will invite others to contribute postings to this blog on any environmental topic of their choice. We want to create a group where information is not hindered by political and ideological barriers. A place where truth can be discussed in order for solutions and actions to follow. I hope you will be a participant in this.
Thank you,
Jan
Moderator
Earth Care
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Climate Change Impacts: by Tommic
Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders. On the one hand, warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases — produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests. On the other, the technological, economic and political issues that have to be resolved before a concerted worldwide effort to reduce emissions can begin have gotten no simpler, particularly in the face of a global economic slowdown.
At the heart of the debate is a momentous tussle between rich and poor countries over who steps up first and who pays most for changed energy menus. People worldwide must come to the realization that we will have to pay now or later but we will pay in the end and the cost to the economies of the world will suffer greater the longer we wait.
96 percent of the worlds glaciers are shrinking.
The continued retreat of glaciers will have a number of different quantitative impacts. In areas that are heavily dependent on water runoff from glaciers that melt during the warmer summer months, a continuation of the current retreat will eventually deplete the glacial ice and substantially reduce or eliminate runoff. A reduction in runoff will affect the ability to irrigate crops and will reduce summer stream flows necessary to keep dams and reservoirs replenished. This situation is particularly acute for irrigation in South America, where numerous artificial lakes are filled almost exclusively by glacial melt. Central Asian countries have also been historically dependent on the seasonal glacier melt water for irrigation and drinking supplies. In Norway, the Alps, and the Pacific Northwest of North America, glacier runoff is important for hydropower.
Pine Island glacier in Antarctic is being depleted at the rate of 16 meters per year loss of ice depth Larson ice shelves a and b are already gone with Larson B being the size of Rhode Island
The recent collapse of Wordie Ice Shelf, Prince Gustav Ice Shelf, Mueller Ice Shelf, Jones Ice Shelf, Larsen-A and Larsen-B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula has raised awareness of how dynamic ice shelf systems are. Jones ice Shelf had an area of 35 km2 in the 1970s but by 2008 it had disappeared. Wordie Ice Shelf has gone from an area of 1500 square kilometers in 1950 to 140 km2 in 2000. Prince Gustav Ice Shelf has gone from an area of 1600 km2 to 11 km2 in 2008. After their loss the reduced buttressing of feeder glaciers has allowed the expected speed-up of inland ice masses after shelf ice break-up. . The Wilkins Ice Shelf is another ice shelf that has suffered substantial retreat. The ice shelf had an area of 16,000 km2 (6,200 sq mi) in 1998 when 1,000 km2 (390 sq mi) was lost.In 2007 and 2008 significant rifting developed and led to the loss of another 1,400 km2 (540 sq mi) of area.This is the first entry in our new feature, the Earth Care Group blog. Our first entry... more
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Agricultural journalist Julian Cribb forecasts a perilous destiny for the world’s river basins and food baskets, a destiny he attributes to climate change and unchecked agricultural demand for water.
Video by Aaron Jaffe for Circle of Blue
Consider Australia’s Murray-Darling, where iconic forests of red gum trees have gone skeletal from thirst. In small towns across the basin, farmers and residents worry their livelihoods may soon share the fate of their beloved gum trees. Cribb, also a professor of science communication at the University of Technology in Sydney, thinks the time has come to manage river basins with efficiency and environmental sensitivity. Farmers, whom he cites as primary managers, must rapidly begin sharing good ideas on a global scaleAgricultural journalist Julian Cribb forecasts a perilous destiny for the... more
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Grand Rapids, Michigan is the latest U.S. city to join the effort to “Take Back The Tap.” Following New York, San Francisco and Portland, the Midwestern city has pledged to stop using bottled water in city facilities or at its events.
Take Back The Tap, the brainchild of the advocacy group Food & Water Watch, is a national two-part campaign. It convinces businesses to switch from bottled water to tap water and asks people to petition congress for a public trust fund that will finance water infrastructure.
Grand Rapids formally joined the movement Tuesday, as the city commission resolved to stop buying bottled water for use in city facilities or at city events. Jon Keesecker, a senior organizer for Food & Water Watch’s Take Back the Tap campaign, told the commission Tuesday that Grand Rapids’ resolution represented “one of the most comprehensive approaches that we’ve seen across the country,” noting the involvement of the city’s Saint Mary’s Health Care network in the movement.
“Tap water is a better choice than the bottled brands, for our health, our environment and our wallets,” Mayor George Heartwell told the Grand Rapids Press.
The city resolution notes that in 2006 Americans bought 33 billion bottles of water, which requires nearly 900,000 tons of plastic and more than 17 million barrels of oil for production.
According to the resolution, bottled water, at $1 per pint, is 2,400 times more expensive than tap water for residents. City water is less than a penny per gallon.Grand Rapids, Michigan is the latest U.S. city to join the effort to “Take Back... more
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The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescent bulbs to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with motion sensors to turn lights off in unoccupied spaces, can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent. Los Angeles, for example, is replacing its 140,000 street lights with LEDs—and cutting electricity and maintenance costs by $10 million per year.
The carbon-cutting movement is gaining momentum on many fronts. In July, the Sierra Club—coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign—announced the hundredth cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants. Despite the coal industry's $45-million annual budget to promote "clean coal," utilities are giving up on coal and starting to close plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with 11 coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install over $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its plant near Rogersville, Tennessee, along with the six oldest units out of eight in its Stevenson, Alabama, plant.
TVA is not alone. Altogether, some 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wind farms, natural gas plants, wood chip plants, or efficiency gains. Many more are likely to close as public pressure to clean up the air and to cut carbon emissions intensifies. Shifting from coal to natural gas cuts carbon emissions by roughly half. Shifting to wind, solar, and geothermal energy drops them to zero.
State governments are getting behind renewables big time. Thirty-four states have adopted renewable portfolio standards to produce a larger share of their electricity from renewable sources over the next decade or so. Among the more populous states, the renewable standard is 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Illinois, and 33 percent in California.
While coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. In 2008, a total of 102 wind farms came online, providing more than 8,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of 2009 and 57 more are under construction. More important, some 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) are awaiting access to the grid.
U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls, and factories should continue. In addition, some 15 large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are planned in California, Arizona, and Nevada. A new heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power for up to six hours past sundown helps explain this boom.
For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the huge Geysers project north of San Francisco, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity. Now the United States, with 132 geothermal power plants under development, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance.
After their century-long love-affair with the car, Americans are turning to mass transit. There is hardly a U.S. city that is not either building new light rail, subways, or express bus lines or upgrading and expanding existing ones.
As motorists turn to public transit, and also to bicycles, the U.S. car fleet is shrinking. The estimated scrappage of 14 million cars in 2009 will exceed new sales of 10 million by 4 million, shrinking the fleet 2 percent in one year. This shrinkage will likely continue for a few years.
Oil use and imports are both declining. This will continue as the new fuel economy standards raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. And since 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal, falling coal use means falling diesel fuel use.The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from... more
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The more I read about this crucial issue the more incensed I become about this global crisis that is totally unnecessary because we have all we need to mitigate it. I also feel disillusioned about a global community that for the most part is not treating this with the urgency it deserves. Do we have to see corpses of children who died as a result of our human behavior before we act? Do we have to actually suffer the consequences before we realize we waited too long? Even though we were warned and have what we need to fix it? If we completely waste the finite freshwater resources we have on this planet we will destroy our own species. The idea that we could actually continue to destroy ourselves by behavior we know is detrimental to our survival is to me truly illogical. We have lost touch with the importance of water, and by doing so have lost respect for it. And that is what in great part is leading us to catastrophe if we do not act boldly now to save it.
Case in point:
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore makes reference to the Aral Sea (also noted in the first chapter of his bestseller, Earth In The Balance.) The Aral Sea began shrinking in the 60's when the Soviet Union diverted the Ana Darya and Syr Darya rivers for irrigation, which was not even successful. Today the Aral Sea has shrunk 60% in surface area, and 80% in volume. It is polluted beyond recognition because of weapons testing, fertilizer runoff, and other industrial projects that have left it a bowl of toxic dust... And humans did this.
This is becoming a common tale around our world as our rapacious and wasteful behavior regarding this liquid of life is bringing us to the brink of global war over "blue gold." There is no doubt if you look across Kenya, Niger, Somalia, Sudan, and other parts of Africa, Asia, South and Central America, the Middle East (particularly Jordan, Syria, Iran, and including disputes over rights between Israel and the Palestinian territories) Mexico, and even between the U.S. and Canada and in our own country, that unless we become serious about facing this crisis which doesn't have to be a crisis, we will pass the point of no return. And regarding water we cannot and must not allow that to happen.
In my many entries on this issue, statistics regarding the current crisis, diseases suffered because of lack of sanitation or proper sanitation, desalinization, corporate privatization and its effects, and the need to declare water a human right globally without allowing it to become a commodity at the expense of the poor and sick have been discussed. I believe this issue goes to the core of who we are as human beings and so far I see that while many struggle to give hope, humanity as a whole is suffering in the moral will department and that baffles and saddens me. The climate crisis is also contributing to the shortage of water in Africa as droughts are becoming more severe and prolonged with disease, famine, and war the repercussions. And this is just the beginning of something that the world has been getting warnings about for over twenty years.
Again, much like the truth Mr. Gore and others have been trying to get out all of these years regarding our rapacious consumption of fossil fuels that is bringing us to the brink of Peak Oil, and the concentration of CO2 and other gases that are exacerbating the droughts and other effects we are now seeing by own hand, so too have the warnings about what we will reap regarding a global water shortage been viritually ignored by many governments and people who never believe it will reach the point where we will have to care. Well, we are there.
end of excerpt.The more I read about this crucial issue the more incensed I become about this global... more
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Those contributing the least to climate change doing the most to adapt to it. Quite a lesson about moral will there. We could learn much from the indigenous peoples of this world about many things regarding our Earth.
Excerpt;
Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They're building windmills.
That's wind-power turbines, to be exact — a token first try at "getting rid of this fossil fuel we're using," said Mayor Merven Gruben.
It's a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of "you people in the south," as Gruben calls the rest of us who fill the skies with greenhouse gases.
They're feeling climate change not only in this lonely corner of northwest Canada, but in a wide circle at the top of the world, stretching from Alaska through the Siberian tundra, into northern Scandinavia and Greenland, and on to Canada's eastern Arctic islands, a circle of more than 300,000 indigenous people, including Gruben and the 800 other Inuvialuit, or Inuit, of the village they know as "Tuk."
Since 1970, temperatures have risen more than 2.5 C (4.5 F) in much of the Arctic, much faster than the global average. People in Tuk say winters are less numbing, with briefer spells of minus-40 C (minus-40 F) temperatures. They sense it in other ways, too, small and large.
"The mosquitoes got bigger," the mayor's aunt, Tootsie Lugt, 48, told a visitor to her children-filled house overlooking Tuk harbor.
Her father, one-time fur trapper Eddie Gruben, spoke of more outsized interlopers from the south.
"Them killer whales, first time people seen them here in the harbor, three or four of them this summer," said the 89-year-old patriarch of Tuk's biggest family and biggest business, a contracting firm.
Plants and animals are a tip-off everywhere. In northeast Canada, the Nunatsiaq News advised readers the red-breasted birds they spotted this spring were American robins.
But the change runs deeper as well, undermining ways of life.
The later fall freeze-up, earlier spring break-up and general weakening of sea ice make snowmobile travel more perilous. A trip to the next island can end in a fatal plunge through thin ice.
The unpredictable ice and weather combine with a changing animal world to make hunting and fishing more challenging, and to crimp the traditional diet of "niqituinnaq," "real food" — of caribou, seal and other meat staples.
The resilient Inuit — Eskimos — of the past simply moved on to better places. But since the mid-20th century these ex-nomads have been tied to settlements, with all the buildings, utilities, roads and trouble that represents in a warming world.Those contributing the least to climate change doing the most to adapt to it. Quite a... more
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The time for thinking that only techological fixes to this crisis will solve it is coming to an end. We have dammed and diverted ourselves into this along with our own selfish consumption and rising population. The time has come for a moral fix and for us as humans to realize that unless WE consciously act to conserve what we have we won't have it anymore, and the repurcussions of that contemplation go far beyond any repurcussions of peak oil.The time for thinking that only techological fixes to this crisis will solve it is... more
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No more than one-quarter: that's the proportion of existing reserves of oil, gas and coal that we can burn if we are serious about keeping the planet from warming by 2°C or more.
These are the conclusions of the most comprehensive efforts yet to pin down just how much carbon dioxide can be emitted into the atmosphere.
If governments are to stick to their pledge to avoid "dangerous" global warming – which most politicians and many scientists take to be no more than 2°C – the models come up with roughly the same answer. Humans must not inject more than 1 trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere in total.
That, say teams led by Myles Allen of the University of Oxford and Malte Meinshausen of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, will give us a 50:50 chance of limiting global warming to 2°C.
To improve the chances that the planet remains this side of 2°C, Meinshausen's study suggests we should emit no more than 750 billion tonnes of carbon in total. The risk of exceeding 2°C would then drop from 50% to 25%.
Halfway there
Industrial activity since the mid-18th century means we have already emitted 500 billion tonnes of carbon – half of the 1-trillion-tonne budget. "At some point in the last few years, we released the 500-billionth tonne of carbon," says Allen. We can afford to dump only 250 billion tonnes more – or perhaps 500 billion tonnes, if we are willing to run the higher risk.
So how much longer have we got? Don't let past emissions fool you, says Allen. "It took 250 years to burn the first 500 billion tonnes. On current trends we'll burn the next 500 billion in less than 40 years."
Busting the budget
That means that if we continue emitting carbon at the same rate as we are now, we will exhaust what Allen calls the trillion-tonne "carbon budget for the human race" by 2040. Anything that is emitted beyond that will commit the planet to more than 2°C of CO2-induced warming.
Meinshausen and colleagues calculate that we could exhaust the carbon budget within as little as 20 years. They also find that if we were to burn all the proven reserves of fossil fuels, this would inject nearly three times the carbon budget into the atmosphere.
To have a 75% chance of keeping to the 2°C target, "we can burn less than one-quarter of known economically recoverable fossil-fuel reserves between now and 2050", says Bill Hare of the Potsdam institute. "This means that whilst a lot of the oil and natural gas can be burned, certainly not much at all of coals reserves can."
None of these figures include "unconventional" fossil fuel reserves, such as tar sands.
end of excerpt.No more than one-quarter: that's the proportion of existing reserves of oil, gas... more
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The combination of a changing climate and a strong demand for the lake’s remaining water has resulted in 100 foot drop since 2000. While that’s just 10 percent under the lake’s high water mark in 1983, Lake Mead is like a martini glass—wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. That 10 percent dip represents a loss of half Lake Mead’s water supply in nine years, from 96 percent capacity to 43 percent.
Anyone who’s gone on a diet knows this simple equation: if you burn fewer calories than you eat, you’ll gain weight. But like a cheating dieter in Superman’s Bizarro world, the Western United States has been sucking more water out of Lake Mead than the dwindling Colorado River can provide to replace it. When output is greater than input, the reservoir shrinks.
And it continues to shrink. Lake Mead’s water level fell 14 feet last year, and the Bureau of Reclamation has projected the level will drop 14 more feet this summer. That will bring it perilously close to 1,075 feet, the point at which the federal government can step in and declare a drought condition, forcing a reduction of 400,000 acre-feet drawn from Lake Mead per year. A typical Las Vegas home uses a half acre-foot of water per year, so such a reduction would be equal toturning the tap off for 800,000 households.
In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.
“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” concluded the paper’s authors. “The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region.”
snip
One of the more radical proposals involves pumping water from the eastern United States (where many regions are suffering the consequences of flooded rivers) over the Rockies to the West. In a Las Vegas Sun interview on May 1, Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said, “We’ve taken water from the West now for a hundred years, maybe it’s time to start taking water from the East, rather than from the West.” Another speculative proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there’s an ocean of water available for desalinization.
End of excerpt from article:
http://www.good.is/post/lake-mead-is-drying-up/?Gt1=48001The combination of a changing climate and a strong demand for the lake’s... more
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It wasn't a hard call to make that this bill would be watered down to suit everyone's interests over the needs of our planet. Politics simply cannot rise to the level of consciousness necessary to deal with this crisis efficiently and adequately. But yes, I will be told again that it is better than nothing. But is it? With 17% reductions by 2020 (taking the place of the original goal of 20% by 2020 that was already pathetic) put that up against the emissions percentages of deforestation alone that will occur by 2020. Now does it stack up? I don't think so. Giving more leeway to utilities and oil companies with lessened targets and free pollution permits won't get us there either. So as has been stated many times before by many people, it comes down to us. I have washed my hands of expecting anything resembling a REAL climate bill based on the science and not their own aspirations coming from this Congress.It wasn't a hard call to make that this bill would be watered down to suit... more
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