Remember, it is the rapidity of the melting that indicates other forcings besides just natural processes. Forcings those responsible for want you to discount so they can keep their profits. And while they divert you with emails, distractionary "debates," and fake You Tube "lawsuits," glacier melt continues to threaten over 2 billion people globally. Now what do you really think is more important?Remember, it is the rapidity of the melting that indicates other forcings besides just... more
A possible rise in sea levels by 0.5 meters by 2050 could put at risk more than $28 trillion worth of assets in the world's largest coastal cities, according to a report compiled for the insurance industry.
The value of infrastructure exposed in so-called "port mega-cities," urban conurbations with more than 10 million people, is just $3 trillion at present.
The rise in potential losses would be a result of expected greater urbanization and increased exposure of this greater population to catastrophic surge events occurring once every 100 years caused by rising sea levels and higher temperatures.
The report, released on Monday by WWF and financial services Allianz, concludes that the world's diverse regions and ecosystems are close to temperature thresholds -- or "tipping points."
To not include water as part of these negotiations will prove the parties involved are not serious about addressing the climate crisis. Water policy is central to an effective treaty as sea level rise, drought, glacier melt, and wetlands loss are all key to protection from storms, agricultural diversity, and life itself.
Just what are they thinking?To not include water as part of these negotiations will prove the parties involved are... more
About a hundred houses float on a lake in the Amsterdam neighbourhood of Ijburg --a testament to how the Dutch are trying to turn their traditional enemy, water, into an ally against overcrowding.
"There is a lot of water in the Netherlands, it is used for navigation and recreation. We want to see if it can also be inhabited," Ton van Namen, director of real estate company Monteflore, told AFP.
Monteflore built more than half the floating homes off the western shore of the Ijmeer lake, a dozen kilometres from the Amsterdam city centre.
The homes are cubic, with walls of plastic and untreated wood in neutral colours, built entirely with non-polluting materials. They take a few months to construct.
The first inhabitants of Ijburg's floating houses arrived in 2008.
"We are in the experimental phase, but this may be the beginning of the solution to residential overcrowding," said Igor Roovers, director of a grouping created by the Amsterdam city council to manage the Ijburg development -- the biggest of its kind in Europe.
The Netherlands, with 16.5 million inhabitants, is the second most densely populated country in Europe with 400 people per square kilometre (0.4 square mile).
Roovers believes floating homes may also provide the solution to another growing problem: the risk of residential flooding from rising sea levels caused by global warming.
Nine million people in the Netherlands live in inland areas directly sheltered from the sea and rivers by dykes and dunes, and 65 percent of the national production capacity lies in flood-prone areas.
The Ijburg houses rest on floating, concrete bases fixed to two solidly planted pillars to keep them stable, all the while allowing them to adjust to the water level.
They are linked to dry land by wharfs, through which they receive gas, electricity and running water.
"To live in this house gives me a sense of freedom. I have the feeling of being permanently on holiday," 43-year-old pilot Rik Uijlenhoet said of his 175 square-metre (218 square-yard) dwelling, its large windows looking out on a vast expanse of greyish lake water.
-- 'The water is my garden' --About a hundred houses float on a lake in the Amsterdam neighbourhood of Ijburg --a... more
Ion-Propelled Gradiometer GOCE must remain in stable free fall at low orbit, so an electric ion propulsion engine constantly provides small bursts of thrusts to counteract any air resistance the craft encounters.
After six months of testing and very careful calibration, the European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite is sending back its first data sets as it now begins precisely mapping tiny variations in Earth’s magnetic field. How does one go about mapping the Earth’s fundamental force? As it turns out, very, very carefully.
The Gravity field and steady state Ocean Circulation Explorer launched from Russia in March with the aim of creating a better understanding of Earth’s gravity and in turn the natural processes of our planet. Though gravity obviously exists everywhere on the planet, it is not distributed evenly across the planet’s surface. Geological differences like mountains or ocean trenches, density variations within the Earth’s crust and mantle, and the rotation of the Earth can cause slight changes to gravitational force. Knowledge of these changes is crucial to accurately measuring ocean circulation and sea levels.
Gravity Map: GOCE's final map will look something like the one shown here, representing Earth's gravity distribution with unprecedented accuracy and spatial resolution. ESA
But precise maps call for precise measurements, and mapping the Earth’s gravitational fluctuations from nearly 160 miles up is more than challenging. Because gravity is stronger closer to Earth, GOCE needs to be as close to the surface as possible. However, because the instrumentation aboard GOCE needs to be as stable as possible to measure accurately, an environment with no aerial drag is ideal. The GOCE team compromised between these contrary conditions by creating a sleek, aerodynamic satellite boasting a unique propulsion system that orbits a mere 158 miles up, extremely low for an earth observation satellite but far enough up to eliminate most drag.
Because GOCE is so low, it’s actually riding along the fringes of the atmosphere. It’s aerodynamic design helps it cut through any remaining air there, but sleekness alone isn’t enough. The gravity measurements require the craft remain stable in free fall; any interference from air at this altitude could skew the gravity data and jeopardize the mission’s quality. So GOCE was fitted with an electric ion thruster that continuously offers tiny bursts of thrust to compensate for any drag the satellite encounters.
The calibration for such an undertaking took several months as the GOCE team commissioned the instruments and eased the satellite from its original orbit just over 170 miles up down to its current altitude of 158 miles. Both the space gradiometry and the drag reduction via ion propulsion are technologically unprecedented, and the timing couldn’t be better for GOCE’s next first: the precision mapping of the planet’s gravity. The lack of solar activity right now makes for perfect atmospheric conditions for gravity mapping, meaning the initial data coming down from GOCE is even more accurate than researchers were anticipating.
What do researchers get for all this painstaking precision? With an accurate map of Earth’s gravity in hand, scientists will be able to better measure ocean circulation and sea levels, which in turn will tell us more about climate change. In addition, data from the GOCE will hopefully shed light on some of Earth’s geological processes that take place deep within its interior, as well as for more pragmatic undertakings like surveying and leveling building projects.Ion-Propelled Gradiometer GOCE must remain in stable free fall at low orbit, so an... more
You know, at this point I say, SO WHAT? It isn't as if this Congress is even going to give us a bill that the Earth NEEDS. 17% reductions of GHGs by 2020 is PITIFUL. Dragging your feet on giving us REAL fuel emissions standards is PITIFUL when scientists have already stated we could be getting 80 miles to the gallon in our cars. And where are the subsidies for the AFFORDABLE hybrid plug- ins for the middle class? Ignoring Arctic melt because you want to secure sea routes for the resources there is PITIFUL. Ignoring the effects your cronyism in the agricultural sector are having on the environment is PITIFUL. Continuing to allow the practice of mountaintop removal is CRIMINAL.
So by all means, U.S. Congress, show the world your true colors and just how bought and sold to the coal and oil industries you really are even at a time of planetary crisis. Then go to Copenhagen hanging your heads in shame. Approving the Alberta Clipper pipeline to pipe in dirty bitumen tarsands while trying to tell the world the U.S Is ready to tackle climate change is also an insult to our intelligence. But go ahead, continue to think you can rickroll the American people with your doubletalk and ignorance. The day will come when your decades of inaction will have the full effect and your petty, selfish, politically partisan drivel will be seen for the irrelevance it is.
This also proves their level of consciousness about this is nil. It is not now a question of them having the luxury of a CHOICE as to whether they can pass this in time or not. This is a moral imperative that scientists state must be done and done right to stave off the worst effects of a crisis that will change our way of life. This in essence IS our healthcare bill, because without a sustainable planet we have nothing else, including health.
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Excerpt:
The fate of U.S. legislation capping carbon emissions weighed heavily on delegates at U.N. climate talks starting Monday in Bangkok, with the Americans saying delays in passing the bill could deter commitments from other nations.
Negotiations on a new U.N. climate pact have been bogged down by a broad unwillingness to commit to firm emissions targets, and a refusal by developing countries to sign a deal until the West guarantees tens of billions of dollars in financial assistance — something rich countries have so far refused to do.
"The more specific we can be, the easier it is to press others to be equally specific," Jonathan Pershing, the chief U.S. negotiator at the talks, told The Associated Press. "We have a lot of things we want from countries. ... The less we can put on the table, the harder it is to achieve that outcome."
The two weeks of U.N. climate talks in the Thai capital are drawing some 1,500 delegates from 180 countries to boil down a 200-page draft agreement to something more manageable, aiming for a new international climate pact this year.
In June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its first bill to cap carbon emissions. The Senate, currently embroiled in debate on health care, is expected to take up the legislation as early as this week.
But Pershing said he doubted there's enough time to pass a climate bill in Congress before the year's biggest climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December, which aims to reach a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012.
end of excerptYou know, at this point I say, SO WHAT? It isn't as if this Congress is even going to... more
Seen from space these new images show us how the future of sea levels MAY rise when we realise that the IPCC has not factored in these variables into there projections to 2100.Seen from space these new images show us how the future of sea levels MAY rise when we... more
The construction of mobile floodgates aims to safeguard the 1,300-year-old island city of Venice. It's an ambitious engineering project, but some scientists say it may not be sufficient to protect Venice from rising sea levels due to climate change.
Venice rose from mudflats in the middle of a lagoon which forms the largest wetland in the Mediterranean. One of the world's most endangered cities, it has been subject to increasing flooding due to sinking land — but also to rising sea levels.
It's known as "aqua alta" — high water — and it brings city life to a standstill for several hours. Big boats can't go under low-hanging bridges, and water seeps into buildings through the sewage system. Venetians have not lived on the ground floor for decades.
The project acronym is MOSE, which is also the Italian word for Moses, recalling the biblical parting of the sea.
Once completed in 2014, there will be 78 large, mobile flood gates at the three inlets. When not in use, they will sit on the lagoon bed. When a high tide is forecast, Zambardi says, the gates will rise and shut off the sea from the lagoon.
But the project, which is 54 percent completed, has been hounded by controversy and, critics say, may already be outdated.
PHOTO: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10 in this file image released September 16, 2008. Arctic nations are promising to avoid new “Cold War” scrambles linked to climate change, but a thaw may allow new shipping routes. REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Two German ships set off on Friday on the first commercial journey from Asia to western Europe via the Arctic through the fabled Northeast Passage – a trip made possible by climate change...PHOTO: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive... more
Current data from NOAA satellites sure do look like cold, fresh water from southern Greenland ice melting is spreading clear across the North Atlantic. This is a big deal and the regular news sources aren't picking up on it. The map shown here is the temperature anomaly (current actual sea surface temperature minus long term average temperature) and the blue blob on the map is seen stretching from southern Greenland all the way to Britain. There have been cold water blobs in the past, but never this big in the summertime. You can check out the data directly at http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anomaly.html . You can watch the growth of the anomaly by downloading pictures of the "Full Global" pictures for the year and compare them to past years. Note that the big blue blob seems to be blocking the Gulf Stream big time! Why is this happening right now? Notice all the extra warm water on either side of the cold stream coming from southern Greenland. I think that this salty, warm water is being sucked below the ice in glacial streams along fjords that are below sea level, melting the ice really fast and then exiting to the ocean when the relatively low density melt water rises to the surface at another nearby fjord. I call this a "density driven pump" and I included a schematic of it in the picture attached. Regular color satellite pictures of southern Greenland show light grey water, which is meltwater with finely ground up rock suspended in it, streaming into the sea right next to deep blue water filled fjords, which is the warm salty water inlet to the pump. http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2009214/ OK, that's a bit complicated, but if it's what is really going down right now, it says that the Greenland ice sheet is dead meat and could totally collapse in a decade or two. And that means about 20 feet of sea level rise! Sell your real estate in Florida right now!Current data from NOAA satellites sure do look like cold, fresh water from southern... more
Even after all that has happened and is happening globally regarding environmental factors and climate change, Americans are still under the impression that we are not vulnerable to that which now effects the developing world. I think this ignorance is what fuels much of the inaction regarding water issues and climate change in America. It needs to change. Now.Even after all that has happened and is happening globally regarding environmental... more
FOR a few minutes David Holland forgets about his work and screams like a kid on a roller coaster. The small helicopter he's riding in is slaloming between towering cliffs of ice - the sheer sides of gigantic icebergs that had calved off Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier. "It was like in a James Bond movie," Holland says afterwards. "It's the most exciting thing I have ever done."
Jakobshavn has doubled its speed in the past 15 years, draining increasing amounts of ice from the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean, and Holland, an oceanographer at New York University, has been trying to find out why. Scientists like him are more than a little astonished at the rate at which our planet's frozen frontiers seem to be responding to global warming. The crucial question, though, is what will happen over the next few decades and centuries.
That's because the fate of the planet's ice, from relatively small ice caps in places like the Canadian Arctic, the Andes and the Himalayas, to the immense ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, will largely determine the speed and extent of sea level rise. At stake are the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, not to mention millions of square kilometres of cities and coastal land, and trillions of dollars in economic terms.
In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100, but this excluded "future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow". Crudely speaking, these estimates assume ice sheets are a bit like vast ice cubes sitting on a flat surface, which will stay in place as they slowly melt. But what if some ice sheets are more like ice cubes sitting on an upside-down bowl, which could suddenly slide off into the sea as conditions get slippery? "Larger rises cannot be excluded but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood," the IPCC report stated.
Even before it was released, the report was outdated. Researchers now know far more. And while we still don't understand the dynamics of ice sheets and glaciers well enough to make precise predictions, we are narrowing down the possibilities. The good news is that some of the scarier scenarios, such as a sudden collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, now appear less likely. The bad news is that there is a growing consensus that the IPCC estimates are wildly optimistic.
The oceans are already rising. Global average sea level rose about 17 centimetres in the 20th century, and the rate of rise is increasing. The biggest uncertainty for those trying to predict future changes is how humanity will behave. Will we start to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases sometime soon, or will we continue to pump ever more into the atmosphere?
Even if all emissions stopped today, sea level would continue to rise. "The current rate of rise would continue for centuries if temperatures are constant, and that would add about 30 centimetres per century to global sea level," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "If we burn all fossil fuels, we are likely to end up with many metres of sea level rise in the long run, very likely more than 10 metres in my view."
This might sound dramatic, but we know sea level has swung from 120 metres lower than today during ice ages to more than 70 metres higher during hot periods. There is no doubt at all that if the planet warms, the sea will rise. The key questions are, by how much and how soon?
end of excerptFOR a few minutes David Holland forgets about his work and screams like a kid on a... more
A vast swath of the coastal lands around New Orleans will be underwater by the dawn of the next century because the rate of sediment deposit in the Mississippi delta can not keep up with rising sea levels, according to a study published today.
Between 10,000 and 13,500 square kilometres of coastal lands will drown due to rising sea levels and subsidence by 2100, a far greater loss than previous estimates.
For New Orleans, and other low-lying areas of Louisiana whose vulnerability was exposed by hurricane Katrina, the findings could bring some hard choices about how to defend the coast against the future sea level rises that will be produced by climate change.
They also revive the debate about the long-term sustainability of New Orleans and other low-lying areas.
Scientists say New Orleans and the barrier islands to the south will be severely affected by climate change by the end of this century, with sea level rise and growing intensity of hurricanes. Much of the land mass of the barrier island chain sheltering New Orleans was lost in the 2005 storm.
But the extent of the land that will be lost is far greater than earlier forecasts suggest, said Dr Michael Blum and Prof Harry Roberts, the authors of the study. "When you look at the numbers you come to the conclusion that the resources are just not there to restore all the coast, and that is one of the major points of this paper," said Roberts, a professor emeritus of marine geology at Louisiana State University.
Blum, who was formerly at Louisiana State University, now works at Exxon. "I think every geologist that has worked on this problem realises the future does not look very bright unless we can come up with some innovative ways to get that sediment in the right spot," said Roberts. "For managers and people who are squarely in the restoration business, this is going to force them to make some very hard decisions about which areas to save and which areas you can't save."A vast swath of the coastal lands around New Orleans will be underwater by the dawn of... more
The world is abuzz with climate change – in more ways than one. Swelling waves and rising sea levels can be detected in the way the planet "hums", says an oceanographer.
Peter Bromirski, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, says that seismic listening stations provide a long-term record of how the amount of energy reaching the world's shores is changing with climate change.
Most geologists who study seismology try to eliminate background noise in their data, but a handful of researchers have started to take a closer look at it.
They have identified at least three different types of "noise", including the Earth's hum, which was first discovered in 1998. The other two are called "microseisms" – tiny earthquakes – and have slightly different acoustic properties.
snip
This may all seem academic, but bigger waves carry more energy. As a result, the century-long record of hum and microseisms can reveal how much of a pounding coasts have experienced, and could help predict how much more pounding they can expect.
"This is important from coastal erosion and shoreline change perspectives under rising sea levels," says Bromirski.The world is abuzz with climate change – in more ways than one. Swelling waves and... more
Ministers and officials from 70 nations will gather in Indonesia on Monday for talks on protecting the world's oceans and to help set the stage for climate change talks in December.
The five-day World Ocean Conference in Manado city is being touted as a first-of-a-kind meeting on the oceans' role in mitigating climate change and on the consequences of higher temperatures such as rising seas, extinctions and food shortages.
Environment, fisheries and resources ministers are expected to agree a declaration aimed at influencing the direction of the Copenhagen talks scheduled for year end, where nations will gather to hammer out the successor to the expiring Kyoto protocol.
Organisers say they hope to expand the scope of any future climate change agreement to encompass marine environments, on which hundreds of millions of people rely for their livelihoods.
"The conference will be non-binding but it is the highest political level ocean conference done so far," said Indroyono Soesilo, the Indonesian official in charge of organising the event on Sulawesi island.
"If we are able to put oceans into world climate change policies it will be a success for us because it has never happened before.
"Because of global warming we will have sea level rises that will make some island nations disappear, so let's do something about that."
The sidelines of the conference will also see the launch of an international plan to save the Coral Triangle, an underwater ecosystem in Southeast Asia that is half the size of the United States and has been compared to the Amazon rainforest in its biodiversity.
Leaders from the six Coral Triangle Initiative nations -- Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands -- will sign a joint plan to protect the region, home to more than half the world's coral reefs.
But while organisers express optimism over the meeting, scientists say knowledge about the oceans is so limited that not much is known about how they will behave under the influence of climate change or the role they can play in absorbing carbon.
The boosting of ocean research and agreements on international sharing of data are expected to be a part of any conference declaration.
"If you talk about marine carbon issues it's still a long way to go," The Nature Conservancy's Coral Triangle Centre head Abdul Halim said.
"Unless you have at least basic scientific evidence to support your argument it's really difficult for people to argue about."
The conference comes amid a slew of gloomy studies on the possible effects of global warming.
A report in the science journal Nature last month found catastrophic sea level rises of up to three metres are a "distinct possibility" within the next century.
end of excerptMinisters and officials from 70 nations will gather in Indonesia on Monday for talks... more
Using sonar technology from onboard ships, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) captured the most extensive, continuous set of images of the seafloor around the Amundsen Sea embayment ever taken. This region is a major drain point of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and considered by some scientists to be the most likely site for the initiation of major ice sheet collapse.
The sonar images reveal an ‘imprint’ of the Antarctic ice sheet as it was at the end of the last ice age around 10 thousand years ago. The extent of ice covering the continent was much larger than it is today. The seabed troughs and channels that are now exposed provide new clues about the speed and flow of the ice sheet. They indicate that the controlling mechanisms that move ice towards the coast and into the sea are more complex than previously thought.
end of excerptUsing sonar technology from onboard ships, scientists from British Antarctic Survey... more
Extensive climate change is now affecting every form of life in the Arctic, according to a major new assessment by international polar scientists.
The report's main findings are:
Land
Permafrost is warming fast and at its margins thawing. Plants are growing more vigorously and densely. In northern Alaska, temperatures have been rising since the 1970s. In Russia, the tree line has advanced up hills and mountains at 10 metres a year. Nearly all glaciers are decreasing in mass, resulting in rising sea levels as the water drains to the ocean.
Summer sea ice
The most striking change in the Arctic in recent years has been the reduction in summer sea ice in 2007. This was 23% less than the previous record low of 5.6m sq kilometres in 2005, and 39% below the 1979-2000 average. New satellite data suggests the ice is much thinner than it used to be. For the first time in existing records, both the north-west and north-east passages were ice-free in summer 2008. However, the 2008 winter ice extent was near the year long-term average.
Greenland
The Greenland ice sheet has continued to melt in the past four years with summer temperatures consistently above the long-term average since the mid 1990s. In 2007, the area experiencing melt was 60% greater than in 1998. Melting lasted 20 days longer than usual at sea level and 53 days longer at 2-3,000m heights.
Warmer waters
In 2007, some ice-free areas were as much as 5C warmer than the long-term average. Arctic waters appear to have warmed as a result of the influx of warmer waters from the Pacific and Atlantic. The loss of reflective, white sea ice also means that more solar radiation is absorbed by the dark water, heating surface layers further.
Black carbon
Black carbon, or soot, is emitted from inefficient burning such as in diesel engines or from the burning of crops. It is warming the Arctic by creating a haze which absorbs sunlight, and it is also deposited on snow, darkening the surface and causing more sunlight to be absorbed.Extensive climate change is now affecting every form of life in the Arctic, according... more
Southeast Asia will be hit particularly hard by climate change, causing the region's agriculture-dependent economies to contract by as much as 6.7 percent annually by the end of the century, according to a study released Monday.
The Asian Development Bank study identified four countries as especially vulnerable: Indonesia and the Philippines with large coastal populations facing rising sea levels, and Thailand and Vietnam where rice yields could drop 50 percent due to water shortages.
"You have to think about developing countries' capacity," ADB Senior Economist Tae Yong Jung said. "They are not really well prepared. Their capacity to handle extreme events is much lower than the developed world."
He said globally climate change would cost the equivalent of 2.6 percent of gross domestic product each year by the end of the century.
If nothing is done to combat global warming, the report said that by 2100 the four Asian countries would see temperatures rise an average of 8.6 Fahrenheit (4.8 Celsius) from the 1990 level. They would also likely suffer drops in rainfall leading to worsening droughts and more forest fires, more destructive tropical storms and flooding from rising seas that could displace millions of people and lead to the destruction of 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) of mangroves.
The economic cost, according to the report, would be 6.7 percent of gross domestic product by 2100.
The key for Southeast Asia would be protecting its remaining tropical forests which have fallen victim in recent years to widespread illegal logging and the expansion of palm oil plantations, the report found. Deforestation represents as much as 75 percent of the four country's emissions.Southeast Asia will be hit particularly hard by climate change, causing the region's... more
France's Aquitaine coast stretches north from the Spanish border to the Gironde river estuary, encompassing rocky bluffs, giant lagoons, deltas, beaches and Europe's largest dune.
Now climate change has laid siege to this natural oasis, dramatically speeding up the erosion of the 270 kilometre-long (168 miles) Atlantic coastline and threatening local communities.
A study published in 2006 by the European LIFE program identified 13 coastal communities as erosion "hotspots".
"There is a lack of sand on the beaches, because of a period of warming -- climate change," confirmed Cyril Mallet, geological engineer and project manager for the French geology and mining research agency BRGM.
Climate change means rising sea levels, more violent storms and increasing rainfall in a region already suffering from its location on the Bay of Biscay, where ocean waves carry 500,000 cubic metres (17.6 million cubic feet) -- about 200 Olympic swimming pools -- of sand southward every year.
Cliffs are sliding into the sea, beaches are disappearing, dunes that protect forests, towns and roads are in danger, and the tourism trade is in jeopardy, local experts said.
The stakes are high.
Only 10 percent of the coast is populated, but that population is growing, and between May and September, visitors spend more than 1.4 billion euros (1.8 billion dollars) in surfing beaches, spa towns, ocean side campsites and quaint villages.
The pristine beaches are the first casualty of coastal erosion.
"Tourism is our economy," said Albery Larrousset, Mayor of Guethary, a Basque town of 1,300 whose population swells to 5,000 in the summer months. "And without beaches, we won't have tourists."
Parking lots, businesses, roads and homes are planned with the notion that beaches remain in one place.
Traditional defences like seawalls increase erosion in neighbouring areas, denying the towns easy remedies. Solutions are as varied as the communities involved, but nearly all require moving sand from one place to another.
Near the northern tip of the coast, Soulac-sur-Mer is a popular beach and camping area. A year-around population of 2,800 expands to 40,000 in summer.
The town, roads and campgrounds are in danger from erosion, and one campground clings precariously to the beachside location.
Locals do not want to hear about retreat, but the damage forces a town employee to redistribute sand over an 800-metre (yard) section every day.
-- 'This is about the safety of the people' --France's Aquitaine coast stretches north from the Spanish border to the Gironde river... more
In the summer of 2007, a large portion of Arctic Sea ice - about 40 per cent - simply vanished. That wasn't supposed to happen. At least not yet. As recent as 2004, scientists had predicted it would take another 50 to 100 years for that much ice to melt. Yet here it was happening today.
It raised the question: Had global warming suddenly pressed the gas pedal to the floor? If so, the world was in for quite a climate ride - dramatic, jarring changes in climate much sooner than expected. Climate scientists were deeply worried.
"It really caught the scientific community by surprise," Professor James Ford, a McGill University geographer and Arctic expert recalled. "The Arctic system is close to crossing the threshold beyond which we will get dramatic changes in climate."
The sudden mass melting brought an earlier ice event into new perspective. In 2005, scientists at the Canadian Ice Service, the nation's leading ice specialists, were examining satellite images when they noticed that the Ayles Ice Shelf, which is about as big as the island of Montreal, had suddenly broken free from the top of Ellesmere Island and floated away.
Vincent Warwick, an Arctic expert at Université Laval, said at the time: "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."
The ice melt of 2007 seemed to confirm Warwick's fears. Reports since then claim the Arctic ice could be gone by 2013.
We have already crossed some critical climate thresholds. The world not only has to drastically cut back its greenhouse gas emissions but also begin to take steps to deal with the inevitable changes that global warming will cause. The much-feared tipping points - which would cause massive icecap and ice shield melting, and plunge the world headlong into severe weather systems, causing broad devastation and rising seas - seem increasingly probable.
This is why, scientists say, the United Nations climate talks that began this week in Bonn, Germany, and will culminate in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December, are so important. They are a last chance for the world to come to its senses and negotiate an agreement to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists have been warning about these tipping points for decades, but few politicians have listened. Most industrialized countries led by the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe have continued to pump increased amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere despite promises to reduce emissions below 1990 levels.
Developing countries like China and India have taken no steps to curtail their emissions. With a new coal-fired power plant coming on stream every week, China is now the world's biggest GHG producer.
The atmosphere now contains 387 parts per million of carbon dioxide. This is more than the Earth has seen in the last 650,000 years. Pre-industrial levels were about 270 ppm, which remained pretty well constant over the 100,000 years mankind has walked the Earth. Scientists say that because of a delayed reaction, we have yet to experienced the full effect of what we already have put into the atmosphere. That effect will unravel in the decades to come. Meanwhile, we're adding about 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually or about 2 ppm. Last year alone, global GHGs increased three per cent.To the twelfth hour.
From the article:
In the summer of 2007, a large portion of... more
