Category: Archive

At the Chilean research base on King George Island, scientists told me that the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet is at risk. Like Larsen, it is a continuous sheath of floating ice, comprising nearly one-fifth of the continent.

If it broke up, sea levels could rise by six meters. Think of the effect on the coastlines and cities: New York, Mumbai and Shanghai, not to mention small island nations. It may not happen for 100 years – or it could happen in 10. We simply do not know. But when it happens, it could occur quickly, almost overnight.

It sounds like the script of a disaster movie. But this is science, not science-fiction.

Dr. Gino Casassa, a leading Chilean glaciologist with the Chilean Center for Scientific Studies and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recently shared a Nobel Prize, worries particularly about the Antarctic Peninsula – a finger of land on the northern coast that he designates as one of three global "hot spots," along with Central Asia and Greenland.

Temperatures there are rising 10 times faster than the global average, he has found. Glaciers are visibly retreating. Grasses are taking root in Antarctica’s barren soil, including one used on American golf courses. In the summer, it rains rather than snows increasingly often. A decade ago, Dr. Casassa was a skeptic on climate change. Today, he fears a calamity.

I am not scare-mongering. But I believe we are nearing a tipping point. These are signs. I saw them everywhere I visited.

In Chile, researchers told me that roughly half of the 120 glaciers they monitor are shrinking, at rates twice as fast as a decade or two ago. These include the glaciers in the mountains outside the capital, Santiago, that provide fresh water for six million residents. To the north, increasing drought threatens the country’s mining industry, a mainstay of the economy, as well as agriculture and hydroelectric power.

I spent a day in perhaps the world’s most magnificent national park, Torres del Paine. Like Antarctica, it was beautiful, pristine and majestic – and equally troubling. The snows of the Andes are also melting faster than we think. I flew over Grey glacier, a virtual ice sea framed by towering alpine peaks. In 1985, it retreated a full three kilometers in little more than two weeks. Yet another demonstration of the abrupt, unpredictable and potentially devastating Larsen effect.

I ended my travels under a great Samaumeira tree on the island of Combu, not far from Belem in the Amazon river delta. This was the heart of the fabled "lungs of the earth," the tropical rain forest prey to the de-forestation and land degradation that accounts for an estimated 21 percent of global carbon emissions.

Scientists say that climate change could turn the eastern Amazon into savannah within decades. My own itinerary had to be changed at the last moment because a tributary of the Amazon I planned to visit, near the port of Santarem, had run dry from drought.

All this might have been discouraging. Yet I left Brazil immensely heartened. Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, Brazil has transformed itself into a quiet green giant – a leader in the fight against global warming. Over the past two years, it has cut deforestation in the Amazon by half. Vast tracts of jungle have been placed under federal protection.

Aeolis Windpower/Peace River Renewable Energy Co-operative/AltaGas Bear Mountain Windpark

Australian company CBD Energy has announced plans to build a $360 million solar farm and manufacturing plant in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

CBD Energy says the first stage of the project will cost $60 million. It involves the construction of a five-megawatt solar farm on land near Raymond Terrace, north of Newcastle, which it hopes to complete by June next year.

Output will eventually be expanded to 30 megawatts, providing enough green electricity for more than 30,000 homes.

CBD executive chairman Gerry McGowan says the next stage will be building a factory to make a revolutionary new type of thin-film solar panel.

"We’ll manufacture [it] for a tenth of the cost of conventional PV technology," he said.

The federal Coalition has promised to contribute $20 million to the first stage of the project, if it is re-elected.

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, ”an Armageddon.”

One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas.

Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it.

To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.

Situation will not be quickly resolved: "I do not see this fixing itself in a hurry. One of the things that is happening in the Murray-Darling system in particular, but in irrigation areas on the east coast generally, is that dairy farmers in Victoria have been forced to cull herds due to the water shortage…the shortage of water means that as water falls due for reallocation, and because we are now on tradeable water entitlements, it is far more likely that the available water use will be taken up by people who have the potential to make the highest economic benefit per megalitre of water. That will not be dairy farmers, who rank among the lowest efficiency users of irrigation water.

Deregulation has led to decrease in WA dairy production: (Concerning expanding the Western Australian dairy industry) "…since deregulation, our own industry has contracted, but not as a result of a shortage of water…we have the capacity to double our dairy production at least, without increasing our dairy production area by a single hectare… (However), we are such a small part of the total Australian production that we will not make a huge difference to Sydney and Melbourne’s industry. Western Australia’s total production share of the Australian dairy industry is only about four per cent…(but) we have some significant capacity to make life a lot better for Western Australian dairy farmers.

Prices need to move higher: "…Everything is a function of price. We can lift production, but only if the price signals are right. We are now enjoying in the dairy industry the highest prices since deregulation. However, they are still in the order of only the mid-30c per litre – somewhere between 34c and 37c depending on the producer. Bearing in mind that prior to deregulation in 2000 a domestic entitlement milk producer was getting over 50c a litre, it is still not a terribly high price, but it is much better than what they have been getting. If we see prices moving upwards of 40c a litre and dairy farmers get a sense of confidence that those prices can be maintained, we will see an increase.

Industry would need to double if exporting considered: "For Western Australia to become an effective exporter of dairy material, however, we need to aim for a minimum production of 800 million litres per annum, and our production is well under 400 million litres. We would have to more than double our industry before we could say we were even at the entry level of being a serious dairy exporting state," said Chance.

Reference: Kim Chance, Leader of the House, Legislative Council, Western Australia, 25 October 2007.

Erisk Net, 9/11/2007