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  • Southeast Drought Study Ties Water Shortage to Populaion,Not Global Warming/

    Southeast Drought Study Ties Water Shortage to Population, Not Global Warming

     

    By CORNELIA DEAN

     

    Published: October 1, 2009

    The drought that gripped the Southeast from 2005 to 2007 was not unprecedented and resulted from random weather events, not global warming, Columbia University researchers have concluded. They say its severe water shortages resulted from population growth more than rainfall patterns.

    The researchers, who report their findings in an article in Thursday’s issue of The Journal of Climate, cite census figures showing that in Georgia alone the population rose to 9.54 million in 2007 from 6.48 million in 1990.

    “At the root of the water supply problem in the Southeast is a growing population,” they wrote.

    Richard Seager, a climate expert at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led the study, said in an interview that when the drought struck, “people were wondering” whether climate change linked to a global increase in heat-trapping gases could be a cause.

    But after studying data from weather instruments, computer models and measurements of tree rings, which reflect yearly rainfall, “our conclusion was this drought was pretty normal and pretty typical by standards of what has happened in the region over the century,” Mr. Seager said.

    Similar droughts unfolded over the last thousand years, the researchers wrote. Regardless of climate change, they added, similar weather patterns can be expected regularly in the future, with similar results.

    In an interview, Douglas LeComte, a drought specialist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Weather Service, said the new report “makes sense.” Although Weather Service records suggest the 2005-7 drought was the worst in the region since the 1950s, Mr. LeComte said, “we have had worse droughts before.”

    Some climate models developed by scientists predict that the Southeast will be wetter in a warming world. But the Columbia researchers said it would be unwise to view climate change as a potential solution to future water shortages.

    As the region’s temperature rises, there may be more rain, they wrote, but evaporation will increase, possibly leaving the area drier than ever.

    Mr. LeComte said that creating greater water storage capacity — say, in reservoirs — could mitigate drought effects in areas where population was rising.

    “I am not going to criticize any governments for what they did or did not do,” he said. “But if you have more people and the same amount of water storage, you are going to increase the impact of droughts.”

    The researchers said rainfall patterns in the Southeast were linked only weakly to weather patterns like La Niña and El Niño, the oscillating warm and cold conditions in the eastern Pacific linked to precipitation rates in the Southwestern United States.

    Instead, they wrote, any variation in rainfall in the Southeast commonly “arises from internal atmospheric processes and is essentially unpredictable.”

  • Soot clouds pose threat to Himalayan glaciers.

     

    The results, to be announced this month in Kashmir, show for the first time that clouds of soot – made up of tiny particles of “black carbon” emitted from old diesel engines and from cooking with wood, crop waste or cow dung – are “unequivocally having an impact on glacial melting” in the Himalayas.

    Scientists say that, while the threat of carbon dioxide to global warming has been accepted, soot from developing countries is a largely unappreciated cause of rising temperatures. Once the black carbon lands on glaciers, it absorbs sunlight that would otherwise be reflected by the snow, leading to melting. “This is a huge problem which we are ignoring,” said Professor Syed Hasnain of the Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) in Delhi. “We are finding concentrations of black carbon in the Himalayas in what are supposed to be pristine, untouched environments.”

    The institute has set up two sensors in the Himalayas, one on the Kholai glacier that sits on the mountain range’s western flank in Kashmir and the other flowing through the eastern reaches in Sikkim. Glaciers in this region feed most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of substantial melting is severe flooding downstream.

    Hasnain says India and China produce about a third of the world’s black carbon, and both countries have been slow to act. “India is the worst. At least in China the state has moved to measure the problem. In Delhi no government agency has put any sensors on the ground. [Teri] is doing it by ourselves.”

    In August this year Yao Tandong, director of China’s Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, projected “a 43% decrease in glacial area by 2070”, adding that “more and more scientists have come to recognise the impact of black carbon in glacial melting”.

    Black carbon’s role has only recently been recognised – it was not mentioned as a factor in the UN’s major 2007 report on climate change –but this month the UN environment programme called for cuts in black carbon output. In November it will publish a report stating that 50% of the emissions causing global warming are from non-CO2 pollutants.

    Decreasing black carbon emissions should be a relatively cheap way to significantly curb global warming. Black carbon falls from the atmosphere after just a couple of weeks, and replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could quickly end the problem. Controlling traffic in the Himalayan region should help ease the harm done by emissions from diesel engines.

    Both New Delhi and Beijing, say experts, have been reluctant to come forward with plans on black carbon because they do not want attention diverted from richer nations’ responsibility to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

    At a high-level forum on energy in Washington on Thursday, India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, rejected attempts to link black carbon to the efforts to reach an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Black carbon had no place in the Copenhagen negotiations towards a global pact on global warming, he said. “Black carbon is another issue. I know there is now a desire to bring the black carbon issue into the mainstream. I am simply not in favour of it.”

  • Arctic seas turn to acids. putting vital food chain at risk

     

    “This is extremely worrying,” Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso, of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, told an international oceanography conference last week. “We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”

    Just as an acid descaler breaks apart limescale inside a kettle, so the shells that protect molluscs and other creatures will be dissolved. “This will affect the whole food chain, including the North Atlantic salmon, which feeds on molluscs,” said Gattuso, speaking at a European commission conference, Oceans of Tomorrow, in Barcelona last week. The oceanographer told delegates that the problem of ocean acidification was worse in high latitudes, in the Arctic and around Antarctica, than it was nearer the equator.

    “More carbon dioxide can dissolve in cold water than warm,” he said. “Hence the problem of acidification is worse in the Arctic than in the tropics, though we have only recently got round to studying the problem in detail.”

    About a quarter of the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by factories, power stations and cars now ends up being absorbed by the oceans. That represents more than six million tonnes of carbon a day.

    This carbon dioxide dissolves and is turned into carbonic acid, causing the oceans to become more acidic. “We knew the Arctic would be particularly badly affected when we started our studies but I did not anticipate the extent of the problem,” said Gattuso.

    His research suggests that 10% of the Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic by 2018; 50% by 2050; and 100% ocean by 2100. “Over the whole planet, there will be a threefold increase in the average acidity of the oceans, which is unprecedented during the past 20 million years. That level of acidification will cause immense damage to the ecosystem and the food chain, particularly in the Arctic,” he added.

    The tiny mollusc Limacina helicina, which is found in Arctic waters, will be particularly vulnerable, he said. The little shellfish is eaten by baleen whales, salmon, herring and various seabirds. Its disappearance would therefore have a major impact on the entire marine food chain. The deep-water coral Lophelia pertusa would also be extremely vulnerable to rising acidity. Reefs in high latitudes are constructed by only one or two types of coral – unlike tropical coral reefs which are built by a large variety of species. The loss of Lophelia pertusa would therefore devastate reefs off Norway and the coast of Scotland, removing underwater shelters that are exploited by dozens of species of fish and other creatures.

    “Scientists have proposed all sorts of geo-engineering solutions to global warming,” said Gattuso. “For instance, they have proposed spraying the upper atmosphere with aerosol particles that would reduce sunlight reaching the Earth, mitigating the warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

    “But these ideas miss the point. They will still allow carbon dioxide emissions to continue to increase – and thus the oceans to become more and more acidic. There is only one way to stop the devastation the oceans are now facing and that is to limit carbon-dioxide emissions as a matter of urgency.”

    This was backed by other speakers at the conference. Daniel Conley, of Lund University, Sweden, said that increasing acidity levels, sea-level rises and temperature changes now threatened to bring about irreversible loss of biodiversity in the sea. Christoph Heinze, of Bergen University, Norway, said his studies, part of the EU CarboOcean project, had found that carbon from the atmosphere was being transported into the oceans’ deeper waters far more rapidly than expected and was already having a corrosive effect on life forms there.

    The oceans’ vulnerability to climate change and rising carbon-dioxide levels has also been a key factor in the launching of the EU’s Tara Ocean project at Barcelona. The expedition, on the sailing ship Tara, will take three years to circumnavigate the globe, culminating in a voyage through the icy Northwest Passage in Canada, and will make continual and detailed samplings of seawater to study its life forms.

    A litre of seawater contains between 1bn and 10bn single-celled organisms called prokaryotes, between 10bn and 100bn viruses and a vast number of more complex, microscopic creatures known as zooplankton, said Chris Bowler, a marine biologist on Tara.

    “People think they are just swimming in water when they go for a dip in the sea,” he said. “In fact, they are bathing in a plankton soup.”

    That plankton soup is of crucial importance to the planet, he added. “As much carbon dioxide is absorbed by plankton as is absorbed by tropical rainforests. Its health is therefore of crucial importance to us all.”

    However, only 1% of the life forms found in the sea have been properly identified and studied, said Bowler. “The aim of the Tara project is to correct some of that ignorance and identify many more of these organisms while we still have the chance. Issues like ocean acidification, rising sea levels and global warming will not be concerns at the back of our minds. They will be a key focus for the work that we do while we are on our expedition.”

     

    The toll by 2100

     

    ■ The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast in 2007 that sea levels would rise by 20cm to 60cm by 2100 thanks to global warming caused by man-made carbon-dioxide emissions. This is now thought to be an underestimate, however, with most scientific bodies warning that sea levels could rise by a metre or even higher. Major inundations of vulnerable regions such as Bangladesh would ensue.

     

    ■ The planet will be hotter by 3C by 2100, most scientists now expect, though rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Deserts will spread and heatwaves will become more prevalent. Ice-caps will melt and cyclones are also likely to be triggered.

     

    ■ Weather patterns across the globe will become more unstable, numbers of devastating storms will increase dramatically while snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains.

  • India plans to cut carbon and fuel poverty wtth untested nuclear power

     

     

    “This will sharply reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and will be a major contribution to global efforts to combat climate change,” he said, adding that Asia was now seeing a huge spurt in nuclear plant building. The Indian plan, which relies on untested technology, was criticised by anti-nuclear campaigners as “a nightmare disguised as a dream”.

     

    The prime minister said a breakthrough deal with the US, sanctioned by the international community, had opened the door for the country to “think big” and meet the demands of its billion-strong population. He did not say how much the plans would cost, or how they would be paid for.

     

    The intervention comes as talks in Bangkok aimed at resolving the impasse between developing and developed countries over a new climate change deal to replace the Kyoto protocol have stalled. India, one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, has been dismayed that its pledges of action – including a dramatic expansion of nuclear power – have been met with inaction from richer nations.

     

    The prime minister’s statement also brings Delhi alongside Beijing which has long promoted atomic energy. India’s plan would see it leapfrog its northern neighbour. At present China has 11 reactors in operation producing 8,000MW but has proposed that by 2020 this output be increased 10-fold. The UK, by contrast, has an installed capacity of around 12,000MW, much of which is due to go offline and be replaced by a new fleet of reactors in the next decade.

     

    Nuclear power has been a contentious issue in India. Although the country has had a decades-old atomic programme, it was effectively blacklisted from global civilian nuclear trade after testing a nuclear device in 1974. That embargo was lifted in 2008 after negotations with Washington.

    The result has been a rush to sign deals – both to supply uranium and to build reactors. France, Russia and the United States have all sought access to the booming Indian market.

     

    India has an ambitious three-stage nuclear programme which it sees as a “silver bullet” to its dire energy shortage. At present 400m people cannot light their homes and the country imports 70% of its oil.

     

    Delhi says that it will be able to surmount these considerable problems and generate clean green power with an atomic programme that “virtuously recycles” the plutonium waste that reactors produce. This radioactive isotope takes thousands of years to be rendered safe and dealing with it is the greatest challenge facing nuclear energy’s proponents.

     

    The Indian plan turns this waste into fuel. Using thorium, which is abundant in the country, combined with plutonium, the country aims to produce power and “breed” stockpiles of uranium.

     

    It is a technology that no other country has mastered – and many have dropped – but India still has more than 2,000 scientists working on the technical problems.

     

    Singh said the country had entered “stage two” of the programme and had completed a prototype breeder reactor in southern India.

     

    However campaigners said “if climate change is the problem, nuclear power is not the answer”. SP Udayakumar, convenor of India’s Alliance for Anti-Nuclear Movements, questioned whether the technology India was pushing would ever be ready.

     

    “The nuclear technology the prime minister talks about is not proven. If we start going ahead then the issue is the amount of carbon emitted by building, maintaining, operating and decommissioning nuclear plants means that (nuclear power) is a hugely polluting technology. If it does not work then we are left with waste that takes 24,000 years to become safe. It is a gamble we will pay for generations to come

  • India can’t play the victim on climate change

     

    President Obama simply cannot afford to advocate further austerity to Americans reeling under a recession, and Jairam Ramesh, India’s pugnaciously articulate environment minister, won’t be satisfied unless Obama does precisely that. As Ramesh explained to an American interviewer on Tuesday: “In the United States, emissions are lifestyle emissions. For [India], emissions are developmental emissions. You’re asking [India] to compromise on development … You change your lifestyle and then we’ll think of compromising on development.”

    India’s argument resonates throughout the developing world. From Brazil to Bangladesh, Obama’s sermon on shared responsibility strikes as an affront, akin to a burglar telling his victim to split the defence costs. The voluptuaries of the west may advocate, without a hint of remorse or irony, that billions of people in India and China and Africa renounce material comforts and advancement which developed nations take for granted; but developing nations seem to be firm in their conviction that, though climate change is a real threat, those who have contributed overwhelmingly to its causes – and continue to pollute the planet in the spirit of carpe diem – must also be the ones to devise and pay for solutions to curb it.

    But India has a habit of invoking the injustices of the past to suppress the failures of present. New Delhi repeatedly refers to the fact that, measured by per capita emissions, India ranks near the bottom of the list of worst polluters. This may be true, but it is a disingenuous argument. Per capita figures are meaningless (and unjust) because they are arrived at by apportioning the pollution that is principally produced in the urban centres, where wealth is concentrated, in equal measure to a billion individuals – an overwhelming majority of whom have been denied the dividends of pollution. India is adducing its poor as the reason for its intransigent stand. But its recent history is replete with instances of the state displacing the poor to create vacant lands for wealthy corporations – in effect socialising the costs of pollution while privatising its profits. Unlike corporations, the planet belongs to everyone. So concessions on emissions, if they can be worked out, must be linked to the equitable distribution of profits derived from pollution.

    Working to prevent climate change will not be enough. States must actively seek to establish contingency measures to deal with its consequences. Bangladesh’s land mass is literally shrinking. It is more than likely that India will have a colossal humanitarian crisis on its hands in the not too distant future, with Bangladeshis crossing the border into West Bengal on a scale that will make 1971 appear puny. India cannot turn them back, but it cannot conceivably bear the cost of their absorption alone. New Delhi should start pushing for a global fund from which it can draw later. As a country that has lost more lives to climate change than any other, India also has a duty to make its rich – the beneficiaries of its emissions, the inhabitants of its mini-Americas – pay the costs.

    Regardless of the results of the Copenhagen summit, India must stop playing the victim and take the lead in combatting climate change. It has already made impressive strides, and the government has announced a series of ambitious plans to produce renewable energy and substantially reduce India’s dependence on fossil fuels. According to the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, solar thermal power plants can fulfil India’s energy needs. Since sunlight is abundant, the “potential is unlimited”. India could electrify not only itself but all of Asia and Africa. In the process, it could help save humankind from extinction. This would be a fitting tribute to its founder, Pandit Nehru, who at the turbulent time of its founding dedicated India to the “larger cause of humanity”.

  • Green shoots in the desert

    Green shoots in the desert

    The Arab world no longer dismisses environmentalism as a western luxury. Abu Dhabi is leading the way in averting disaster

    The Arab world is gradually awakening to the massive environmental challenges ahead for the region.

    The environmental movement has long been regarded with suspicion in the developing world. For two centuries, the west has had a more or less free hand to pollute with impunity, deplete the planet of natural resources, exterminate most of its stock of wildlife that might pose any kind of threat to human safety and wipe out biodiversity not only in its own backyard but also across the planet.

    Given this trail of destruction and distrust, it is perhaps unsurprising that well-meaning and far-sighted eco-warriors out to protect cuddly killer cats, hug trees against the deforester’s axe and fume over emissions have often been viewed as little more than latter-day missionaries sent out to subdue the restive natives and keep them from aspiring to better things.

    This unfortunate perception was partly a coincidence of history. Although environmental campaigners in Europe and north America are as old as the industrial revolution, widespread social awareness of environmental degradation did not emerge until after the second world war, with the industrialised level of destruction wrought by that conflict and the fearful potential consequences of the nuclear age.

    At about the same time, the newly independent former colonies embarked on a postcolonial drive for rapid industrialisation and the desire and ambition to match and perhaps better western standards of living. Despite the emergence of cleaner and greener technologies, this was largely done with little regard for the environmental impact of modernisation, partly because developing countries could not afford the new technologies.

    In recent years, many developing countries, faced with massive environmental degradation and poor air and water quality, have reached a similar stage in their industrialisation cycle as Europe and the west were at in the 1950s and 1960s, with the environmental movement gradually becoming more than a fringe concern. This, coupled with the impacts already being felt by climate change and the massive upheavals ahead, means they are slowly awakening to the reality that development and the environment are not two separate entities.

    In the Arab world, although direct industrialisation has slowed down over the past three decades, modernisation has not – stressing the environment enormously. The region may be the world’s main petrol pump, but this finite resource is rapidly dwindling and dependence on it has affected air quality in large urban centres and on the coastal plains where half of the region’s population lives. Major investment in harnessing the region’s massive solar resources makes both economic and environmental sense.

    In addition, although climate change largely carries a “made in the west” label, the region is set quite literally to take the heat for it. Both temperatures and populations are expected to rise over the coming decades, causing water reserves to diminish, or at best stagnate, and desertification to accelerate. This means that scarce water will become even scarcer. Rising sea levels could also threaten major coastal population centres.

    Faced with all these emerging challenges, it is unsurprising that the latest Arab Human Development Report dedicated an entire chapter to the environment and natural resources.

    As in many other areas, Arab leaders do not always set a good example. Take King Muhammed VI of Morocco, whose enthusiasm for cars prompted him to take the outrageous step of chartering a Hercules transporter plane to fly his Aston Martin from Rabat to Britain for repairs. Before we laugh off those eccentric and peculiar Arab leaders, it is worth recalling that the US president – who travels abroad with two planes and an entire fleet of cars – has a carbon footprint estimated to be the equivalent of 2,200 energy-guzzling US households.

    A group of independent experts has produced a report dedicated to the region’s environment. The Arab Environment Future Challenges Report estimates that environmental degradation costs the region about 5% of its GDP.

    The document also identified Abu Dhabi as a trailblazer in environmental action, commending its environment strategy for 2009 to 2013 as a “model” for other countries to emulate. Environmental action in the small emirate is also reaching the grassroots and the new generation. For instance, 50 Abu Dhabi schools are in the process of “going green” and reducing their ecological footprint.

    A few weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, Beirut will play host to the 2009 conference of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development where a new report will be released and experts will debate what action needs to be taken. As occurred at Kyoto and may well happen in Copenhagen, it remains to be seen whether greater awareness of our heavy-footed environmental bootprint will translate into effective and sustained action.