Month: March 2015
The Most Important Thing We Can Do to Fight Climate Change Is Try.
Among our few certainties about the future are the following: climate change is here, it will get worse, and it is essentially irreversible. What’s uncertain is whether, through extraordinary effort, we will meet the crisis as we should, with a speedy exit from the Age of Fossil Fuel, or whether that age will drag on and foreclose the possibility of our choosing the least rather than the most terrible future. We are now essentially hostages to the small group of people who benefit most from the fossil-fuel industries, as well as the politicians in their pay—although remarkable victories have been won against them in recent years, from Ecuador to Nigeria to New York State.
The next few years will be crucial in steering us toward the least devastating of the futures that await us. It’s hard to see how we will get there, but it’s important to try anyway—and part of that work involves knowing that we don’t know what will happen, what kind of a world we will inhabit in 2020, let alone in 2115.
Press link for more: Rebecca Solnit | thenation.com
Chile declares forest fires alert.
Chile has declared a national alert because of wildfires in three national parks and reserves threatening trees, some a thousand years old.
Firefighters have been fighting the flames for more than a week in the southern region of Araucania hit by years of drought.
The fires are affecting a park famous for its centuries-old pines known as monkey puzzle trees.
President Michele Bachelet said the country’s drought was critical.
She announced millions of dollars of investment to improve access to underground water and to construct desalination plants to provide drinking water.
“Faced with this critical situation, there is no choice but to assume that the lack of water resources is a reality that is here to stay and that puts at risk the development of important regions of our country” President Bachelet said.
Scientists in Chile say they are expecting rainfall to drop significantly by 2050 as the country is increasingly affected by climate change.
The country has 12 desalination plants in construction already, mostly connected to mining projects.
Chile is the world’s largest producer of copper.
5 Reasons China Should Care About Climate Change.
Chinese officials don’t usually go into detail on the challenges that climate change poses for the world’s most populous and largest carbon-emitting country. But in a speech on March 23, a top meteorologist warned of the severe risks facing China, including droughts, floods, falling crop yields, vanishing water supplies, and a “serious threat” to critical infrastructure projects such as the Three Gorges Dam.
Delays in new infrastructure
Warming temperatures are bad news for some of China’s biggest energy and transportation infrastructure projects. Those include the massive Three Gorges Dam, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway (the world’s highest and built on melting permafrost), a major gas pipeline supplying Shanghai and other Chinese cities, and the mammoth South-North Water Transfer Project, which aims to sate a parched Beijing. “The safe production and operation of major strategic projects is facing a serious threat,” Zheng said.
Food insecurity
Climate change will also negatively affect China’s food security, Zheng said, particularly alarming for a country with a centuries-old concern with ensuring adequate grains for its huge population. Crop yields for wheat, corn, and soybeans are likely to fall, while river runoff will decrease or become “unstable,” he said.
Meanwhile, rice production in particular is likely to be adversely affected as temperatures rise, with eastern China among “the most vulnerable regions for reduced rice yield” in Asia (western Japan and the northern regions of South Asia are also at risk), wrote environmental journalist Joydeep Gupta, reporting on the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on website China Dialogue last March.
Press link for more: Dexter Roberts | bloomberg.com
Climate change: farmers urge Coalition to restore emissions trading scheme.
Failure to acknowledge the problem is ‘doing the industry a disservice’ and harming Australia’s international standing, says farming group.
A delegation of farmers has called for the Abbott government to act on climate change by restoring an emissions trading scheme, maintaining the current renewable energy target and spending on rail infrastructure to improve inland transport and reduce carbon emissions.
The farmers have spent two days lobbying the Coalition to start implementing a suite of policies to deal with the effects of climate change, warning of dire consequences for the agriculture sector if the threat was not addressed.
They have told the government MPs, including John Cobb and the staff of the treasurer Joe Hockey, that the Direct Action policy, which provides incentives for polluters to reduce carbon emissions, will not work to ameliorate climate change, “but if the government wants to give away money, people will keep taking it”.
The delegation said the lack of climate policies was being exacerbated by the cuts to research and development funding for applied climate science and the Bureau of Meteorology.
negotiations between the government and Labor continued over the RET, which currently requires the government to source 41,000 gigawatt hours of energy from renewables by 2020. The latest government offer to Labor is 32,000GWh.
It also follows a report by University of Melbourne researchers called Appetite for Change, which charted the detrimental effects of climate change on Australia’s food production.
Press link for more: Gabrielle Chan | theguardian.com
Drought conditions leave businesses struggling in outback Queensland towns.
Worsening drought in Queensland’s central-west is now having a severe impact in small towns, with some businesses reporting turnovers have halved in the past two years.
Longreach graziers Peter and Elizabeth Clark said records for their property ‘Leander’ go back to 1912, and this was the driest it had been.
One dam ran dry for the first time since it was built more than 60 years ago.
“We have been destocked, we have had a depleted income for the last three or four years, and we are not going to have another income for two years at least,” Mr Clark said.
“If you said that to someone who is in business in the city, they would say – you can’t survive.
“But we probably can survive, providing it rains in the next 12 months.”
Press link for more Chrissy Arthur | abc.net.au
Climate scientists have been warning farmers that climate change will make many parts of Australia hotter & dryer. Drought is the new reality. The future is likely to be even worse.
It’s time for farmers to accept the science and demand climate action from our politicians.
Florida State Employee Speaks Up after Being Ordered to Get Psych Exam for saying “Climate Change”
Catch 23.
To speak up about climate change in Rick Scott’s Florida, you’d have to be crazy.
Right?
What’s going on in the North Atlantic?
The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record – while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study (Rahmstorf et al. 2015) attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years. The whole world is warming. The whole world? …
Source: www.realclimate.org
This is a good discussion of the science. The comments are enlightening. Highly recommended.
Fishermen discuss warming waters in this lovely short film | Grist
When you are tired of talking to climate deniers, it can be a relief to hear from a fisherman instead.
“The waters are changing,” says Michigan fisherman Ed John in this short, moody video that follows a Native couple fishing the Great Lakes. “We’ve got algae, we’ve got invasive species, we got all of these pollutants we don’t know about going into the water.”
via Fishermen discuss warming waters in this lovely short film | Grist.
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