Author: postMigrator

  By Uncategorized

TORONTO – A United Nations report says Canada
will have to change its strategy for battling
forest fires because climate change is causing
larger, more intense blazes.

The report says this development is expected to
impact the country’s wood supply, the forest
industry and forestry-dependent communities and
alter the traditional fire fighting practices.

Experts say global warming will create ideal
conditions in Canada for forest fires, such as
warm temperatures and dry air.

A research scientist with Natural Resources
Canada says more than two million hectares of
Canada’s forest is claimed by fire every year.

Mike Flannigan says if climate change continues
at its current pace, the area claimed by fire
could double by the end of the century.

The UN report said the changes in the number,
size and intensity of fires pose an increased
threat to people and the environment and will
also cost countries millions in infrastructure
losses and fire-fighting costs.

© 2007 CTVglobemedia All Rights Reserved.

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“It doesn’t take a genius to work out that as the desert moves southwards
there is a physical limit to what [ecological] systems can sustain, and so
you get one group displacing another.”
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The Guardian UK
Saturday 23 June 2007 
     Darfur Conflict Heralds Era of Wars Triggered by Climate Change,
UN Report Warns
     By Julian Borger
     Drought and advancing desert blamed for tensions. Chad and
southern Africa also at risk from warming.

     The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and
environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of
new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage,
according to a UN report published yesterday.

     “Darfur … holds grim lessons for other countries at risk,” an
18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
concludes.

     With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara
advancing by well over a mile every year, tensions between farmers
and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes
threaten to reignite the half-century war between north and south
Sudan, held at bay by a precarious 2005 peace accord.

     The southern Nuba tribe, for example, have warned they could
“restart the war” because Arab nomads – pushed southwards into their
territory by drought – are cutting down trees to feed their camels.

     The UNEP investigation into links between climate and conflict in
Sudan predicts that the impact of climate change on stability is
likely to go far beyond its borders. It found there could be a drop
of up to 70% in crop yields in the most vulnerable areas of the
Sahel, an ecologically fragile belt stretching from Senegal to Sudan.
“It illustrates and demonstrates what is increasingly becoming a
global concern,” said Achim Steiner, UNEP’s executive director. “It
doesn’t take a genius to work out that as the desert moves southwards
there is a physical limit to what [ecological] systems can sustain,
and so you get one group displacing another.”

     He also pointed to incipient conflicts in Chad “at least in part
associated with environmental changes”, and to growing tensions in
southern Africa fuelled by droughts and flooding.

     Estimates of the dead from the Darfur conflict, which broke out
in 2003, range from 200,000 to 500,000. The immediate cause was a
regional rebellion, to which Khartoum responded by recruiting Arab
militias, the janjaweed, to wage a campaign of ethnic cleansing
against African civilians. The UNEP study suggests the true genesis
of the conflict pre-dates 2003 and is to be found in failing rains
and creeping desertification. It found that:

     * The desert in northern Sudan has advanced southwards by 60
miles over the past 40 years;

     * Rainfall has dropped by 16%-30%;

     * Climate models for the region suggest a rise of between 0.5C
and 1.5C between 2030 and 2060;

     * Yields in the local staple, sorghum, could drop by 70%.

     In the Washington Post, the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon,
argued: “Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient
military and political shorthand – an ethnic conflict pitting Arab
militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though,
and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and
political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis,
arising at least in part from climate change.”

     In turn, the Darfur conflict has exacerbated Sudan’s
environmental degradation, forcing more than two million people into
refugee camps. Deforestation has been accelerated while underground
aquifers are being drained.

     A peace deal signed last year by rebels and the Khartoum
government broke down, but this month President Omar al-Bashir said
he would accept the deployment of a joint UN and African Union force.
He has reneged on similar pledges, but UN diplomats are hopeful this
one will stick. However, the UNEP report warns that no peace will
last without sustained investment in containing environmental damage
and adapting to climate change. Mr Steiner said: “Simply to return
people to the situation there were in before is a high-risk strategy.”

     The G8 summit ended in Germany with consensus over the severity
of the climate change problem but no agreement on how it should be
contained. A common approach is supposed to be negotiated under UN
auspices at the end of the year.

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CLIMATE AND PUBLIC LANDS

  By Uncategorized

New York Times June 23, 2007 http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/opinion/23egan.html?hp

This Land Was My Land By TIMOTHY EGAN, MOUNT HOOD, OR.

Most Americans don’t own a summer home on Cape Cod, or a McMansion in the Rockies, but they have this birthright: an area more than four times the size of France. If you’re a citizen, you own it – about 565 million acres. The deed on a big part of this public land inheritance dates to a pair of Republican class warriors from a hundred years ago: President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service. Both were rich. Both were well-educated. Both were headstrong and quirky. Pinchot slept on a wooden pillow and had his valet wake him with ice water to the face. Teddy and G.P., as they were known, sometimes wrestled with each other, or swam naked in the Potomac. In establishing the people’s estate, they fought Gilded Age titans – railroads, timber barons, mine owners – and their enablers in the Senate. And make no mistake: these acts may have been cast as the founding deeds of the environmental movement, but they were as much about class as conservation. Pinchot had studied forestry in France, where a peasant couldn’t make a campfire without being subject to penalties. In England, he had seen how the lords of privilege had their way over the outdoors. In the United States, he and T.R. envisioned the ultimate expression of Progressive-era values: a place where a tired factory hand could be renewed – lord for a day. “In the national forests, big money was not king,” wrote Pinchot. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because “it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before.” A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house. In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line – the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death. Remember the scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Jimmy Stewart’s character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement dwellings in Pottersville? If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he’d find some of the same thing in the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all. The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse. In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than 75,000 people wrote them – 98 percent opposed to drilling. For most of the Bush years, the Interior Department was nominally run by a Stepford secretary, Gale Norton, while industry insiders like J. Steven Griles – the former coal lobbyist who pled guilty this year to obstruction of justice – ran the department. Same in the Forest Service, where an ex-timber industry insider, Mark Rey, guides administration policy. They don’t take care of these lands because they see them as one thing: a cash-out. Thus, in Bush’s budget proposal this year, he guts the Forest Service budget yet again, while floating the idea of selling thousands of acres to the highest bidder. The administration says it wants more money for national parks. But the parks are $10 billion behind on needed repairs; the proposal is a pittance. Roosevelt had his place on Oyster Bay. Pinchot had a family estate in Pennsylvania. Bush has the ranch in Crawford. Only one of them has never been able to see beyond the front porch.

Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company —

WARMING: TOO FAST FOR DETACHMENT!!

  By Uncategorized

22 June 2007 10:42 http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

The Earth today stands in imminent peril …and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Published: 19 June 2007

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming. They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”. In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world’s leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the “gravest threat” of climate change. “Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures,” the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add. The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming. The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. In their 29-page paper, “Climate Change and trace gases”, the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change. In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: “In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.” The unnatural “forcing” of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a “flip” in the climate that could “spark a cataclysm” in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write. Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now. “Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end,” the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth’s remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. “To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built,” they say. Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the “albedo flip” – when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water. The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures. ” The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse,” the scientists say. “We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less.” The latest assessment of the IPCC published earlier this year predicts little or no contribution to 21st century sea level from Greenland or Antarctica, but the six scientists dispute this interpretation. “The IPCC analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet ice sheet disintegration, ice streams and eroding ice shelves, nor are they consistent with the palaeoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernible lag between ice sheet forcing and sea-level rise,” the scientists say. Their study looked back over more than 400,000 years of climate records from deep ice cores and found evidence to suggest that rapid climate change over a period of centuries, or even decades, have in the past occurred once the world began to heat up and ice sheets started melting. It is not possible to assess the dangerous level of man-made greenhouse gases. “However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades,” the scientists say in their findings. “We conclude that a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

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WARMING: TOO FAST FOR DETACHMENT!!

  By Uncategorized

22 June 2007 10:42 http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

The Earth today stands in imminent peril …and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Published: 19 June 2007

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming. They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”. In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world’s leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the “gravest threat” of climate change. “Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures,” the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add. The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming. The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. In their 29-page paper, “Climate Change and trace gases”, the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change. In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: “In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.” The unnatural “forcing” of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a “flip” in the climate that could “spark a cataclysm” in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write. Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now. “Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end,” the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth’s remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. “To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built,” they say. Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the “albedo flip” – when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water. The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures. ” The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse,” the scientists say. “We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less.” The latest assessment of the IPCC published earlier this year predicts little or no contribution to 21st century sea level from Greenland or Antarctica, but the six scientists dispute this interpretation. “The IPCC analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet ice sheet disintegration, ice streams and eroding ice shelves, nor are they consistent with the palaeoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernible lag between ice sheet forcing and sea-level rise,” the scientists say. Their study looked back over more than 400,000 years of climate records from deep ice cores and found evidence to suggest that rapid climate change over a period of centuries, or even decades, have in the past occurred once the world began to heat up and ice sheets started melting. It is not possible to assess the dangerous level of man-made greenhouse gases. “However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades,” the scientists say in their findings. “We conclude that a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

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