environment: Damoclean threat glaciers mountains
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 1: From The Roof Of The World…
One of the world’s most experienced Everest hands, Apa Sherpa, has firsthand testimony about the effects of climate change, reports the July 16th edition of The Hindu:
It was in 1985 that Apa Sherpa, who scaled Mount Everest for the 21st time in May 2011, came face to face with climate change. His entire village Thame was washed away in a massive glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) of the Dig Tsho (Tsho-lake), in the western section of the Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Khumbu Himal, on August 4, 1985.
The veteran mountaineer, who dropped out of school at 12 to work as a porter for expeditions to support his family, told The Hindu that the lake burst at 2 a.m. and he had a narrow escape. Now his worry is another glacial lake in the Everest region, Imja, which is growing bigger. “Imja Khola is a threat to the entire region and I can’t say if it is as safe as is made out to be. We have to do something before it bursts.” Imja, located in the Khumbu region close to the Everest base camp, did not exist in photographs taken in the 1950s, but now has rapidly expanded to 1.012 sq km.
When The Force offers you a good analogy, take it. Sent July 16:
The Sherpa villagers below the burgeoning Imja lake in Mount Everest’s shadow have much to teach the rest of humanity. Of all the world’s peoples, these villagers have contributed not a single iota to the CO2 emissions that have built up in our atmosphere over the past century and now threaten to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect — yet they are the ones who daily look up at a growing lake poised over their heads.
All the Earth’s peoples now face the Sherpas’ Damoclean predicament. If humanity is to endure and prosper, it is time to get to work on controlling our carbon emissions, addressing the genuine threat of climate change. The world’s political and economic leaders appear to care more for profits than people, but it’s only through a global transition to renewable energy that they, and we, will survive the coming centuries of climate chaos.
Warren Senders
environment: forests sustainability
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 31: The Word for World
The July 15 Chicago Tribune reports on a new study that includes a teensy-weensy bit of good news about the ability of forests to absorb CO2:
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The world’s forests can play an even greater role in fighting climate change than previously thought, scientists say in the most comprehensive study yet on how much carbon dioxide forests absorb from the air.
The study may also boost a U.N.-backed program that aims to create a global market in carbon credits from projects that protect tropical forests. If these forests are locking away more carbon than thought, such projects could become more valuable.
(snip)
The researchers found that in total, established forests and young regrowth forests in the tropics soaked up nearly 15 billion tonnes of CO2, or roughly half the emissions from industry, transport and other sources.
But the scientists calculated that deforestation emissions totaled 10.7 billion tonnes, underscoring that the more forests are preserved the more they can slow the pace of climate change.
A major surprise was the finding that young regrowth forests in the tropics were far better at soaking up carbon than thought, absorbing nearly 6 billion tonnes of CO2 — about the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the United States.
Maybe we should stop cutting down forests in order to make stuff to throw away? Just a thought. Sent July 15:
The societies that bear the brunt of tropical deforestation reap no benefits from their sacrifice; now it is apparent that the future of the planet as a whole may hinge on these woodlands’ continued good health. Sadly, in a non-localized global economy, those who profit from exploiting a commodity are hardly ever the ones to whom it originally belonged, and there is little motivation for careful long-term forest planning when a quick buck can be turned. How much paper do we throw away every day? How many lives, communities and ecosystems are grievously disrupted satisfying the developed West’s urgent need for disposable packaging? Our grandchildren deserve to inherit a green and bountiful world; the discovery that young-growth forests are hyperefficient absorbers of atmospheric CO2 underscores the importance of sustainable forestry everywhere on earth. Let’s take care of our forests — so that they may continue to take care of us.
Warren Senders
environment: National parks
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 30: What Would Teddy Roosevelt Say?
The Indiana Post-Tribune runs an article on the same NRDC-sponsored report on the National Park System and its vulnerability to climatic transformations:
Beach erosion, sweltering summer temperatures and fierce storms are well-known occurrences at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. But according to a new report on Great Lakes national parks climate change, these events will intensify over the next 100 years, along with loss of plant species and economic activity at the park.
According to the report, “Great Lakes National Parks in Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption,” released Wednesday by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council, temperatures at the national lakeshore are projected to rise 5 degrees by 2070, the equivalent of moving the climate of Raleigh, N.C., to Northwest Indiana. By 2100, average temperatures may rise an additional 3 degrees, bringing the climate of Gainesville, Fla., to the region.
Maybe some of the denialists will wake up. Sent July 14:
The national park system is one of our country’s greatest treasures. Since its inception, Theodore Roosevelt’s visionary initiative has offered countless visitors a chance to experience nature’s richness, complexity and beauty, laying a foundation for the contemporary environmental movement. Now the parks are playing another significant role in educating us all about the dangers of climate change. Living in cities and suburbs, sheltered from extremes of weather by heated, air-conditioned dwellings, we can easily dismiss the signals of the natural world — but the suffering of a cherished park space cannot be ignored. The RMCO/NRDC report confirms that climate change is a present-day crisis, not the responsibility of future generations. Our national parks are telling us loud and clear: we must transform our national energy economy rapidly to a focus on renewables if we are to mitigate the worst effects of a century’s worth of fossil fuel consumption.
Warren Senders
environment: endangered species Michigan National parks
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 29: Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Our Lives
According to the Detroit News for July 13, the worsening climate is starting to hit a little closer to home:
Climate change is impacting some of the major national parks in the Great Lakes region, according to a report released today.
Michigan destinations such as Sleeping Bear Dunes, Pictured Rocks and Isle Royale National Park were among the five parks studied in a report that targets global warming as the cause of a host of negative impacts on the parks. Those include:
Birds dropping dead at Sleeping Bear Dunes due to outbreaks of botulism.
Declining moose population on Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
Temperature changes allowing Lyme disease-carrying ticks to show up for the first time on Isle Royale.
The deterioration of shorelines at each park resulting from decreased winter ice.
The study was put together by the conservation groups Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization.
I visited Isle Royale as a kid when I was on a cross-country trip with my family. What a beautiful place. Sent July 13:
It’s been pretty easy for most Americans to dismiss concerns about climate change. Most people have believed for decades that the effects of global warming will be felt only in distant places or in the distant future. The NRDC/RMCO report on Michigan’s National Parks irrefutably confirms both that the Arctic and the Amazon aren’t the only places feeling the heat, and that the “distant future” has already begun. We can no longer claim ignorance; climatologists have predicted the disastrous consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect for years. What is happening to our National Park System is happening to our towns and cities, to our agriculture and to our oceans, and to the other countries with whom we share this planet. There may yet be time for us to bequeath a green and bounteous prosperity to our children and our children’s children — but the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Australia carbon tax Julia Gillard
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 28: Julia!
Well, I’m writing this on July 12, after an episode of considerable stupidity a little earlier today. I entered my usual group of search terms into google and found a link to an article debunking the climategate idiocy. I leapt to the assumption that for some reason these were in the news again…so I spent about half an hour generating a letter on scientific integrity versus the right-wing noise machine. A good letter it was, too.
Then I looked at the byline on the article and had a (facepalm) moment; it was about 17 months old. How did it wind up at the top of my google results? Damned if I know. So I put that letter away and generated another piece of boilerplate on Australia’s carbon tax. This one went to the Boston Herald which ran a generic AP feed on the Australian proposal. I’m linking to it from a drive to completeness; I cannot imagine why anyone would need to read it.
The BH is a Murdoch paper. Maybe by the time this post shows up online Rupert will be in prison?
Anyway, sent on July 12 to the Boston Herald:
The Australian carbon tax is an idea whose time has come. Despite the doubts of her constituents and the hostility of the country’s big coal companies, Prime Minister Gillard is showing genuine leadership and a long-term vision that American politicians would do well to emulate. She recognizes that carbon dioxide emissions pose a long-term threat to the world’s stability. If actions today can help reduce the terrifying consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect, all of us will benefit. Conversely, apathy and inaction today will bring a perfect storm upon our descendants. Fifty years ago, we had the excuse of ignorance; now, we can no longer plead that we were unaware of the dangers of a “business as usual” approach to greenhouse gas emissions, for the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. Our politicians’ unwillingness and inability to do the right thing will resound to their, and our, eternal shame.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Australia carbon tax Julia Gillard
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 27: There’s Something About Julia
More on Australia’s carbon tax plans, from the July 10 NYT:
SYDNEY — Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia announced a plan on Sunday that would tax the carbon dioxide emissions of the country’s 500 worst polluters and create the second-biggest emissions trading program in the world, after the European Union’s.
The plan is projected to cut 159 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2020, the government said. In 2010, Australia produced 577 million tons of carbon emissions, according to the Department of Climate Change.
This is basically yesterday’s letter, rearranged and reconfigured. It’s fun to use the word “nobility” in the same paragraph with a reference to American politicians. It’s kind of like using the word “genteel” while discussing a Farrelly brothers film. Sent July 11:
Washington wants us to believe that unraveling the safety net for our most defenseless citizens in the name of deficit reduction is somehow an act of political courage, since those same citizens (unsurprisingly) don’t like the idea. But conservatives’ hypocritical posturings have always been supported by the wealthiest and most powerful forces in our economy — and with billions of dollars behind them, their casual dismissal of the needs of millions of citizens has nothing of nobility in it. By contrast, Australia’s Julia Gillard has dared to show something few of our politicians can even contemplate: visionary concern for her nation’s future. By imposing a tax on carbon pollution, she’s confronted both the powerful coal industry and the inchoate fears of her fellow citizens. Why? Because Prime Minister Gillard recognizes that the greenhouse effect and its destructive consequences will be far more expensive than any amount of deficit spending.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Australia Big Coal Julia Gillard
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 26: Up With Down Under!
Australia’s PM is doing something wonderful, reports the Boston Globe in its issue of July 10:
SYDNEY—Australia will force its 500 worst polluters to pay 23 Australian dollars ($25) for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, with the government promising to compensate households hit with higher power bills under a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unveiled Sunday.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard sought to reassure wary Australians that the deeply unpopular carbon tax will only cause a minority of households to pay more and insisted it is critical to helping the country lower its massive carbon emissions. Australia is one of the world’s worst greenhouse gas polluters, due to its heavy reliance on coal for electricity.
“We generate more carbon pollution per head than any other country in the developed world,” Gillard told reporters in Canberra as she released details of the tax, which will go into effect on July 1, 2012. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to hold our place in the race that the world is running.”
She’s right. Australia is right. And America is full of blinkered idiots, as usual.
Sent July 10:
Faced with an intractable choice between business as usual and an environmentally responsible policy on carbon emissions, Australia’s Julia Gillard showed something this country hasn’t seen in quite a while: genuine leadership. Promoting unpopular policies on deficit reduction is not the mark of political courage many of our politicians claim; there is no nobility in advocating policies that are heavily favored by deep-pocketed multinational corporations and the monied elites who reap the benefits of their success. Any world leader who ignores the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change (approaching unanimity as rapidly as the Arctic is shedding ice mass) is betting the lives of countless millions of people on a very long shot indeed. In taking on the enormous power of Australia’s coal industry, Prime Minister Gillard is doing something our politicians cannot: the right thing, both for her nation and the world.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists scientific consensus wildfires
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 25: Smoke Signals
The July 9 edition of the Summit County Voice (CO), features a good report on how scientists are studying the relationship between climate change and the wildfires that have been wreaking havoc in the American West:
Fires are one of nature’s primary carbon-cycling mechanisms, said Dr. Melita Keywood, a researcher with Australia’s national research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
A press release from CSIRO highlighted some of the questions Keywood raised in a recent presentation at a gathering of geophysicists.
“Understanding changes in the occurrence and magnitude of fires will be an important challenge for which there needs to be a clear focus on the tools and methodologies available to scientists to predict fire occurrence in a changing climate,” Keywood said.
She said the link between long-term climate change and short-term variability in fire activity is complex, with multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks.
Smoking is bad for your health. Sent July 9:
The key phrase in your report on wildfires and climate change can be found in the fifth paragraph: “the link between long-term climate change and short-term variability in fire activity is complex, with multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks.” Both parts of this sentence deserve careful attention. Climate denialists universally fail to understand that complicated phenomena are connected in complicated ways; their simplistic “analysis” reaches its most sophisticated level with “global warming can’t be real, because it’s cold outside.” And those same denialists have never been able to grasp the idea of “feedbacks,” loops of causation in which the symptoms of a problem exacerbate the problem itself (what happens when you and your partner mix up the dual controls on an electric blanket?). When a scientist uses a phrase like “multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks,” she’s giving us a very strongly worded warning: this problem has the potential to get much worse in ways we cannot yet imagine. Welcome to the future!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 24: Ditto, Ditto, Ditto…
A guy named Ken Midkiff writes a good piece on our likely future in the July 8 issue of the Columbia Tribune (MO):
There are, to be sure, a few skeptics and deniers — mostly those who rely on faux news for “information.” There was never any doubt that that more greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere would cause the planet to become warmer. But the skeptics and deniers have determined it is futile to argue that the planetary temperature is not rising — every measurement demonstrates that it is. The arguments now are about human responsibility and which areas will be affected and how.
As to the first argument, the global-warming skeptics and deniers are quite literally willing to gamble on everyone’s life. If human activities are responsible for raising the level of greenhouse gases and no contrary action is taken, the gamble fails. That is not a risk that should be taken.
At what level of certainty is a seat belt to be fastened? Even if we are just contributing to (not totally causing) global warming, we need to find non-polluting ways of doing things.
I didn’t even bother reading the comments; I just sent the following:
Ken Midkiff’s realistic assessment of the country’s next few decades is sure to demonstrate one of contemporary life’s few certainties: any published article dealing straightforwardly with the facts of climate change will attract vituperation from people who consider Rush Limbaugh a trustworthy source of information. As the scientific evidence piles up higher and higher, the climate denialists are going into overdrive. Their feverish reiterations of “hoax” and their derisive references to “algore” (Rush’s nickname for one of the few politicians to fully grasp the magnitude of the crisis) show their desperation. A sane society would properly relegate these hyperparanoid conspiracy theorists to the margins. Alas, in contemporary American culture, outright rejection of science is a virtual prerequisite for success in either politics or the media — which means that we can no longer expect our laws and opinions to bear any relationship to reality. It would be hilarious if our lives weren’t at stake.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: disaster capitalism economics floods Montana oil spills Yellowstone Park
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 23: Shaken, Not Stirred
In the July 7 L.A. Times, the brilliant and prescient Naomi Klein turns her eye to the interlocked disasters currently unfolding in the American West, in this case Montana — with floods and oil spills competing for the attention of the rescue and cleanup crews.
“We’re a disaster area,” Alexis Bonogofsky told me, “and it’s going to take a long time to get over it.”
Bonogofsky and her partner, Mike Scott, are all over the news this week, telling the world about how Montana’s Exxon Mobil pipeline spill has fouled their goat ranch and is threatening the health of their animals.
But my conversation with Bonogofsky was four full days before the pipeline began pouring oil into the Yellowstone River. And no, it’s not that she’s psychic; she was talking about this year’s historic flooding.
“It’s unbelievable,” she said. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime. It destroyed houses; people died; crops didn’t get in the fields…. We barely were able to get our hay crop in.”
Everyone agrees that the two disasters — the flooding of the Yellowstone River and the oil spill in the riverbed — are connected. According to Exxon officials, the high and fast-moving river has four times its usual flow this year, which has hampered cleanup and prevented their workers from reaching the exact source of the spill. Also thanks to the flooding, the oiled water has breached the riverbanks, inundating farmland, endangering animals, killing crops and contaminating surface water. And the rush of water appears to be carrying the oil toward North Dakota.
This letter was subsequently published by the LA Times with some editing. Yay, me.
Naomi Klein’s discussion of climate change’s repercussions in Montana leaves unaddressed the concept of “disaster capitalism,” her crucial contribution to contemporary economic analysis. As climate change’s catastrophic effects become more widespread, our already-crumbling infrastructure will no longer be up to the challenge of an adequate response; the inevitable result will be more human misery — which will in turn trigger ever-more-egregious corporate encroachments on both the lives of individuals and their communities. We can confidently expect more lenient enforcement of existing emissions and pollution law in the wake of climatic crises, along with legislative weakening of troublesome and unprofitable regulations. And let’s not forget more tax breaks to help multinational corporations (many of which facilitated global warming in the first place) reap further benefits from the havoc they’ve helped bring about. “Disaster capitalism” was bad enough already. With climate change added to the mix, it’s a poisonous recipe for humanity.
Warren Senders