EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • Dust storms spread deadly diseases worldwide

     

    The Sydney storm, which left millions of people choking on some of the worst air pollution in 70 years, was a consequence of the 10-year drought that has turned parts of Australia’s interior into a giant dust bowl, providing perfect conditions for high winds to whip loose soil into the air and carry it thousands of miles across the continent.

    It followed major dust storms this year in northern China, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, east Africa, Arizona and other arid areas. Most of the storms are also linked to droughts, but are believed to have been exacerbated by deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and climate change.

    As diplomats prepare to meet in Bangkok tomorrow for the next round of climate talks, meteorologists predict that more major dust storms can be expected, carrying minute particles of beneficial soil and nutrients as well as potentially harmful bacteria, viruses and fungal spores.

    “The numbers of major dust storms go up and down over the years,” said Andrew Goudie, geography professor at Oxford University. “In Australia and China they tailed off from the 1970s then spiked in the 1990s and at the start of this decade. At the moment they are clearly on an upward trajectory.”

    Laurence Barrie is chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system. He said: “I think the droughts [and dust storms] in Australia are a harbinger. Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution. The minute particles act like urban smog or acid rain. They can penetrate deep into the human body.”

    Saharan storms are thought to be responsible for spreading lethal meningitis spores throughout semi-arid central Africa, where up to 250,000 people, particularly children, contract the disease each year and 25,000 die. “There is evidence that the dust can mobilise meningitis in the bloodstream,” said Barrie.

    Higher temperatures and more intense storms are also linked to “valley fever”, a disease contracted from a fungus in the soil of the central valley of California. The American Academy of Microbiology estimates that about 200,000 Americans go down with valley fever each year, 200 of whom die. The number of cases in Arizona and California almost quadrupled in the decade to 2006.

    Scientists who had thought diseases were mostly transmitted by people or animals now see dust clouds as possible transmitters of influenza, Sars and foot-and-mouth, and increasingly responsible for respiratory diseases. A rise in the number of cases of asthma in children on Caribbean islands has been linked to an increase in the dust blown across the Atlantic from Africa. The asthma rate in Barbados is 17 times greater than it was in 1973, when a major African drought began, according to one major study. Researchers have also documented more hospital admissions when the dust storms are at their worst.

    “We are just beginning to accumulate the evidence of airborne dust implications on health,” said William Sprigg, a climate expert at Arizona University.

    The scale and range of some recent dust storms has surprised scientists. Japanese academics reported in July that a giant dust storm in China’s Taklimakan desert in 2007 picked up nearly 800,000 tonnes of dust which winds carried twice around the world.

    Dust from the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts is often present over the western United States in the spring and can lead to disastrous air quality in Korean, Japanese and Russian cities. It frequently contributes to the smogs over Los Angeles. Britain and northern Europe are not immune from dust storms. Dust blown from the Sahara is commonly found in Spain, Italy and Greece and the WMO says that storms deposit Saharan dust north of the Alps about once a month. Last year Britain’s Meteorological Office reported it in south Wales.

    Some scientists sought to attribute the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak to a giant storm in north Africa that carried dust and possibly spores of the animal disease as far as northern Britain only a week before the first reported cases.

    The scale and spread of the dust storms has also surprised researchers. Satellite photographs have shown some of the clouds coming out of Africa to be as big as the whole land mass of the US, with a major storm able to whip more than a million tonnes of soil into the atmosphere. Sydney was covered by an estimated 5,000 tonnes of dust last week, but the WMO says Beijing was enveloped by more than 300,000 tonnes in one storm in 2006.

    “The 2-3 billion tonnes of fine soil particles that leave Africa each year in dust storms are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and biological productivity,” said Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute research group in Washington DC. “Those big storms take millions of tonnes of soil, which takes centuries to replace.”

    Brown and Chinese scientists say the increased number of major dust storms in China is directly linked to deforestation and the massive increase in numbers of sheep and goats since the 1980s, when restrictions on herders were removed. “Goats will strip vegetation,” said Brown. “They ate everything and dust storms are now routine. If climate change leads to a reduction in rainfall, then the two trends reinforce themselves.” China is planting tens of millions of trees to act as a barrier to the advancing desert.

    However, research increasingly suggests that the dust could be mitigating climate change, both by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere and fertilising the oceans with nutrients. Iron-rich dust blown from Australia and from the Gobi and Sahara deserts is largely deposited in oceans, where it has been observed to feed phytoplankton, the microscopic marine plants that are the first link in the oceanic food chain and absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, the upper layers of the rainforest in Brazil are thought to derive much of their nutrient supply from dust transported across the Atlantic from the Sahara.

    Just as scientists struggle to understand how dust is affecting climate, evidence is growing that another airborne pollutant, soot, is potentially disastrous. Minute particles of carbon produced by diesel engines, forest fires and the inefficient burning of wood in stoves is being carried just like dust to the remotest regions of the world.

    A study by the United Nations Environment Programme has just concluded that the pollutant has played a major part in shrinking the Himalayan glaciers and has helped to disrupt the south Asian monsoon.

    “Soot accounts from 10% to more than 45% of the contribution to global warming,” said Achim Steiner, director of the UN’s environment programme. “It is linked to accelerated losses of glaciers in Asia because soot deposits darken ice, making it more vulnerable to melting.”

  • The Thaw at the Roof of the World

     

    Because the Tibetan Plateau and its environs shelter the largest perennial ice mass on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctica, it has come to be known as “the Third Pole.” Its snowfields and glaciers feed almost every major river system of Asia during hot, dry seasons when the monsoons cease, and their melt waters supply rivers from the Indus in the west to the Yellow in the east, with the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze Rivers in between. (The glaciers on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain contribute much of their water to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.)

    From a distance, Baishui Glacier No. 1 looks as immovable as the defiant mountain above. In reality, it is a fluid field of ice and rock in constant downward motion. Scientists speak about the reactive behavior of these glaciers as if they were almost human. The Tibetan and Naxi peoples who inhabit this region treat them, and their mountain hosts, as embodiments of deities and spirits.

    Now, a growing number of glaciers are losing their equilibrium, or their capacity to build up enough snow and ice at high altitudes to compensate for the rate of melting at lower ones. After surveying the Himalayas for many years, the respected Chinese glaciologist Yao Tandong recently warned that, given present trends, almost two-thirds of the plateau’s glaciers could well disappear within the next 40 years. With the planet having just experienced the 10 hottest years on record, the average annual melting rate of mountain glaciers seems to have doubled after the turn of the millennium from the two decades before.

    Moreover, temperatures on the Tibetan plateau are rising much faster than the global average. A good portion of the area’s existing ice fields has been lost over the past four decades, and the rate of retreat has increased in recent years.

    The slow-motion demise of Baishui Glacier No. 1 will have far-reaching consequences. In the short run, there will, of course, be an abundance of water. But in the long run there will be deficits. These will have national security consequences as countries compete for ever scarcer water resources supplied by transnational rivers with as many as two billion users.

    It was not so long ago that the Tibetan Plateau was seen as a region of little consequence, save to those few Western adventurers drawn to remote regions that the early 20th-century Swedish explorer Sven Hedin once called the “white spaces” on the map. Today, these white spaces play a crucial role in Asia’s ecology.

    Sadly, it may be too late to change the destiny of Baishui Glacier No. 1. But President Hu, by promising this week to try to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product and to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption, signaled his willingness to act. China can’t solve this problem alone, and President Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing in November presents an opportunity to forge a bilateral alliance on climate change. After all, the ice fields in the majestic arc of peaks that runs from China to Afghanistan are melting in large part because of greenhouse gases emitted thousands of miles away.

    Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on United States-China Relations, is the author of “Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La From the Himalayas to Hollywood.”

  • Climate groups dimayed at G20

    The final summit statement ageed by the leaders, however, was fairly vague.

    “We will spare no effort to reach agreement in Copenhagen through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations,” it said, without going into specifics of how the funding gap might be met.

    Hopes that the world’s leading powers would get behind measures to help poorer countries fight climate change were raised in July in L’Aquila, Italy, when G8 leaders sent their finance ministers to seek sources of cash.

    On Friday, however, the broader G20 group promised simply to “intensify our efforts” and sent the ministers back to do some more research.

    “We welcome the work of the finance ministers and direct them to report back at their next meeting with a range of possible options for climate change financing,” the final statement said.

    “This was not a breakthrough on the climate issue … but over lunch we had a very open discussion that we need to take responsibility as leaders,” said Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who chairs the European Union.

    Reinfeldt promised the leaders would seek to meet again within two weeks to take another stab at resolving the issue, but pressure groups were outraged, singling out Obama and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel for scorn.

    “This is a crisis of leadership. The rich-country G20 leaders – especially Merkel and Obama – set themselves a deadline for a climate finance proposal, and then slept right through it,” said Ben Wikler of Avaaz.

    “Until the US, EU and Japanese leaders wake up and put together a serious climate finance plan, there will be a 150 billion dollar pothole on the road to Copenhagen,” he told reporters in Pittsburgh for the summit.

    Max Lawson, senior policy adviser for the aid agency Oxfam, said: “With 72 days to Copenhagen rich countries have once again refused to put up the funds needed to deliver the deal in Copenhagen.”

    The G20 did endorse an Obama-inspired plan to reduce government subsidies on fossil fuels, a move welcomed but dismissed as not enough by campaigners, but no one was pretending the leaders made progress towards a Copenhagen deal.

    Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the summit only took up global warming in broad terms and that he simply didn’t know whether there would be a new deal to be signed in Denmark to replace the Kyoto protocol.

    “I’m not an astrologer,” Singh told a news conference dismissively.

    “There is a broad, vague agreement that any agreement in which developing countries are also required to take any national action will have to be accompanied by credible action on the part of developed countries,” he said.

    “But other than expressing a pious wish with regard to the success of the framework convention meeting in Copenhagen, the Group of 20 I think did not go into the mechanics of these things.”

    The Kyoto Protocol required rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions but the requirements expire at the end of 2012, and experts say emerging powers such as India and China must take part if a new plan is to succeed.

    AFP

  • Millions at risk of flooding as river deltas sink

     

    The researchers found that 85% of the major river deltas studied experienced severe flooding in the past decade.

    The area of deltas vulnerable to flooding will increase by half if sea levels rise by an average of 44 centimetres this century as projected.

    They studied 33 river deltas, formed by deposits of sediment where a river joins another body of water such as an ocean, by combining satellite and remote sensing data with historical maps to determine their height relative to sea level, and looked at flooding events and sediment deposits.

    They found that 26 deltas were sinking relative to sea level.

    “A delta is a dynamic system, so a natural delta is sinking anyway,” Robert Nicholls, professor of coastal engineering at the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton and one of the authors of the study, told SciDev.Net. “But every flood season, sediment is brought back in and maintains the level of the land.”

    But in many rivers, sediment upstream of the deltas is getting trapped in reservoirs and dams, and the removal of oil, gas and groundwater is compacting the sediment.

    Large areas of delta are less than two metres above sea level, making them vulnerable to flooding, particularly from tropical storm surges, which can temporarily raise sea levels by 3–10 metres.

    For example, in 2008 a 3.5-metre storm surge caused by cyclone Nargis flooded the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar, killing thousands (see Ignored warnings ‘worsened’ Myanmar cyclone disaster).

    Nicholls says that the banks of many river deltas — particularly in South and South-East Asia — are densely populated. The Pearl Delta in China and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, both home to millions, are particularly at risk of flooding.

    Many developing countries have yet to address the issue.

    “You cannot stop deltas from sinking, but you can reduce how much they sink, and developing countries need public funding and coordinated programmes [to prevent major consequences from the floodings],” says Nicholls. “But they have to start by recognising the problem.”

    • This article was shared by our content partner SciDev.net, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • China and India are leading the way.Yes, I’m optimistic

     

    Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, made specific commitments on curbing the growth in greenhouse gas emissions as China continues its extraordinary economic growth. While the president promised a reduction by a “notable margin” rather than a specific figure, there is no doubt that the cut will be significant. And the environment ministers of both China and India made important and constructive proposals for how their countries will reverse deforestation.

    This was the kind of leadership I had hoped to see at the summit – organised by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general – with developing and emerging countries showing that they can tackle climate change while continuing their efforts to reduce poverty. But we still have a long way to go before we can be sure that a strong agreement is in place for Copenhagen.

    In the next couple of years, annual emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to reach a level of 50 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. If we are to have a reasonable chance of avoiding a rise in global average temperature by more than 2C, annual emissions have to be cut to no more than 20 gigatonnes by 2050.

    That means that the 9 billion people who will be living on the planet in 2050 must be producing, on average, no more than about two tonnes of greenhouse gases per year each.

    At the moment, the rich industrialised countries of the European Union average about 10-12 tonnes per head of population, while the figure for the United States is almost 24 tonnes. China, by contrast, emits about 6 tonnes per head at present. Thus rich industrialised countries in particular must substantially reduce their emissions.

    The developed countries must now demonstrate that they have the political will to reach a strong agreement in Copenhagen. In New York, Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, outlined how his country will reduce its emissions by 25% by 2020, compared with 1990. This was a positive example that few others matched.

    President Obama has already committed to a cut of 80% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, compared with 1990. But the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House of Representatives sets an interim target for 2020 that is not considered ambitious enough by many other countries. And it is not clear when, or even if, the Senate will pass a comparable act to reduce emissions.

    It is these interim targets that should now be addressed by all countries during the coming weeks. If we are to reach the goal of reducing emissions to 20 gigatonnes by 2050, we must be at about 35 gigatonnes by the halfway point of 2030.

    That means global emissions have to peak within the next five years and be steadily falling by 2020. And while the commitments by the largest emitters already on the table for 2020 offer significant cuts relative to today’s emissions, they collectively fall 4 or 5 gigatonnes short of what is necessary if we are to be on a realistic trajectory to reach the 2030 and 2050 targets.

    Developing countries should also sharply reduce their emissions – but they must be supported, financially and through technology sharing with the rich industrialised countries. Without commitments to such support, the negotiations ahead will prove very difficult.

    Although the political leaders must devise and implement the right policies to guide national and global emissions trajectories, it is the private sector that will be the main engine in the transition to a low-carbon global economy.

    In that respect it was very encouraging that 181 investors, collectively responsible for the management of more than $13 trillion in assets globally, launched a statement in New York last week to support a global agreement on climate change. The Leadership Forum for business leaders, which ran alongside the summit, also highlighted a tremendous variety of innovative ideas from within the private sector for the low-carbon transition.

    So there are some reasons to be more optimistic about the prospects for securing a strong agreement in Copenhagen, following the New York summit. But the obstacles that remain are very big and will require an even stronger effort to overcome, starting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and continuing during the coming round of treaty negotiations in Bangkok next week.

    There must be real vision, leadership and creativity, as well as a mutual understanding of the difficulties of making and implementing domestic policies. But if we can muster the effort, we can, as a world, forge a path towards a more prosperous and sustainable future – for us, our children, and generations to follow.

  • UN climate summit: Leaders take small stps towards action on climate change.

     

    China said it would curb pollution by 2020 – but it did not say by how much. Japan reaffirmed an ambitious new target for cutting emissions and offered cash to developing nations to adopt new green technology and for small-island and low-lying states, to escape the worst ravages of climate change. It did not say how much.

    America committed itself to finding a solution – and for the first time accepted its share of the blame for climate change. France threw out an idea for an entirely new leaders’ summit in November.

    Even the Maldives, which is generally included at such gatherings as a prime casualty of climate change, offered to do its share. It would be carbon neutral by 2020, its president, Mohamed Nasheed, said.

    An outpouring of pledges of action from the world leaders was precisely what Ban intended when he said the summit was the first time such a sizeable group of world leaders had gathered to devote a full day to global warming.

    Last night he said the gathering had saved the Copenhagen negotiations from outright collapse. “I am convinced that something missing from the last few months has returned,” he said. “This ­summit has put wind in our sails.”

    The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will be the official host of the Copenhagen meeting, said the deadlock had been broken. In a ­further sign of confidence, he said he was now inclined to invite heads of state and ­government to the talks, picking up the challenge by Gordon Brown last week.

    UN officials said in advance they hoped new commitments from the big industrialised states, such as Japan and China, would prod other countries into action so that they not be seen as the spoilers of a potential deal at Copenhagen.

    Last night, they said that the offers from China and Japan, and recent shifts in position, had changed the dynamics of the negotiations. The industrialised and developing world now appeared to share a sense of common cause on climate change – rather than recrimination about who was to blame, they said.

    They also agreed it was crucial to keep heads of state and government involved because of the complexity of negotiations. The negotiation documents have on their own become a source of conflict, at 200 pages with hundreds of footnotes.

    In his most direct foray into the debate, China’s president, Hu Jintao, said climate change would be an essential factor in its economic planning. “We should make our endeavour on climate change a win-win for both developed and developing ­countries,” he said, adding that China would cut carbon emissions by a “notable margin”, which he did not specify.

    Hu also said China would step up use of renewable energy to 15% by 2020, and increase its forests.

    Environmentalists saw the pledge – though lacking in specifics – as an important move. “These announcements should sweep away the canard that China is not willing to reduce emissions,” said Dan Dudek, the director of the China programme for the Environment Defence Fund. “Is it enough to make Copenhagen a success? That will depend upon whether Hu’s new climate initiatives propel Obama and the Senate into action on controlling greenhouse gases.” Obama offered no promises on pushing through legislation before Copenhagen. The Senate has been preoccupied with healthcare reform, though Democratic leaders said this week they hope to get to energy in early October. Instead, Obama made an overture to the developing countries, acknowledging the US and other industrialised states had failed for too long to acknowledge their responsibility. “It is true that for too many years, ­mankind has been slow to respond to or even recognise the magnitude of the climate threat. It is true of my own country as well. We recognise that,” he said. “But this is a new day.”

    Though it was largely overlooked, he also showed he was committed to trying to green the US economy, announcing a project to track greenhouse gas emissions. The president promised further small-bore action at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh where he said America will propose phasing out subsidies for fossil fuel.

    Environmentalists almost uniformly agreed that the US president had missed an opportunity to commit to working with the Senate on ways to get a bill that caps America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

    Even so, the emerging focus on climate finance, with the US and Japan yesterday ready to commit funds, could help ease a contentious issue: how to help the developing world prepare for climate change.

    There are still details to be ironed out. China is pushing for the developed world to spend 1% of GDP. The state department climate change envoy, Todd Stern, called that sum “untethered to reality”. But at least, said UN officials and environmentalists, it looks as if there is a renewed willingness to engage.