Category: RT Newswire

The Christian Science Monitor Online
March 04, 2008
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0304/p13s02-bogn.html

Climate change’s most deadly threat: drought

Anthropologist Brian Fagan uses Earth’s distant
past to predict the crises that may lie in its
future.

By Todd Wilkinson

Spring is on its way back to northern latitudes.
In many locales, it will arrive earlier than
“normal,” yielding, ostensibly, a longer growing
season, a hotter summer, balmier autumn, and
future winters will lack their ferocious
post-Pleistocene bites.

While vineyards are being planned for northern
England, millions of residents around desiccated
Atlanta are praying for enough rain to flow
through their taps.

Brian Fagan believes climate is not merely a
backdrop to the ongoing drama of human
civilization, but an important stage upon which
world events turn.

As it turns out, the anecdotal evidence of
climate change in this, the 21st century, shares
much in common with a historical antecedent, the
Medieval Warm Period, circa AD 800 to 1200, that
radically shaped societies across the globe.

Continue reading

Public release date: 3-Mar-2008
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Contact: Beth King
kingb@si.edu
703-487-3774, ext.8216

Smithsonian announces Global Forest Carbon Research Initiative

Forests contain nearly 40 percent of the world’s
carbon-more than the atmosphere contains-but too
little is known about forest carbon dynamics to
predict whether anthropogenic global change will
increase or decrease forest carbon pools. Helene
Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute, announced a major
global research effort to quantify forest carbon
pools and fluxes. She announced the new effort at
the Climate Change in the Americas Symposium,
held Feb. 25-29 at the institute’s headquarters
in Panama.

Researchers from more than 70 institutions
working in a network of 25 forest study sites
currently monitor more than 3 million trees
representing approximately 8,200 species-10
percent of the world’s total tree fauna. This
Global Forest Observatory, which is coordinated
by the Center for Tropical Forest Science at
STRI, was originally set up to understand
biodiversity but has become an ideal tool for
determining the on-the-ground effects of global
change.

Continue reading

—————–
“Oppenheimer said policy-makers will have to
respond to the consequences of higher
temperatures in four main areas: access to water
and food; human health in extreme climate
conditions; ecosystems and species; and sea-level
rise from ice sheet melting. ”
————————

Science
29 February 2008

Science Policy
Scientists “Uniquely Positioned” to Assist Climate Policy-Makers

[PHOTOGRAPH] Michael Oppenheimer, Stephen
Schneider, David Goldston, and Ralph Cicerone

As governments around the world search for ways
to address rising greenhouse gas emissions,
researchers should be ready to offer expert
advice to lawmakers seeking a broad view of
global climate change and its potential
consequences, according to a distinguished panel
of science policy advisers at a recent Capitol
Hill briefing.

The panel, convened by AAAS and three other
scientific societies on 11 January, drew more
than 150 congressional staffers, think tank
representatives, university faculty, and
journalists spilling out of the briefing room in
the Rayburn House Office Building. In front of a
crowd eager for answers, the speakers discussed
how scientists can assist policy-makers in their
analysis of climate change proposals awaiting
congressional debate.

Continue reading

—————————————————————-
In using the word “adaption,” I don’t imply that
it’s a successful adaption or that adaption is
always a positive thing — while we can adapt to
the loss of a leg, or a loved one, most of us
would rather not.
Lance Olsen

———————————————-
” … one of the hundreds of thousands who in
recent years have abandoned their nomadic herding
lives for an urban existence.”

“The biggest problem is that [the warming] leads
to an increasing loss of soil moisture, which is
critical to plant growth,” Goulden said.

The average amount of precipitation has remained
steady. But rains tend to be more infrequent and
heavier when they occur.

“When you have these heavier rains, you get
greater runoff, with less of the moisture being
soaked up by the soil for the summer growth,”
Goulden said
——————————————————————-

National Geographic News: NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/NEWS

Climate Change Driving Mongolians From Steppe to Cities
Stefan Lövgren in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
for National Geographic News
February 21, 2008

Lifelong herder Namdag lives in a traditional
felt tent home-or “ger”-among some half dozen
cars in various states of disrepair, an informal
junkyard against the towering, snow-capped
mountains that surround the Mongolian capital of
Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator).

“I miss my old life,” said the 71-year-old, now a
world removed from the sweeping steppes he once
called home. “But life out there is too
difficult.”

Continue reading