ApocaDocuments (14) for the "Climate Chaos" scenario from this week
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Sun, Oct 19, 2008
from Sacramento Bee:
Yosemite glacier on thin ice
...As signals of climate change begin to come into focus in the Sierra Nevada, its melting glaciers spell trouble in bold font. Not only are they in-your-face barometers of global warming, they also reflect what scientists are beginning to uncover: that the Sierra snowpack -- the source of 65 percent of California's water -- is dwindling, too.
More of the Sierra's precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, studies show, and the snow that blankets the range in winter is running off earlier in the spring. And snow in the Sierra touches everything. Take it away and droughts deepen, ski areas go bust and fire seasons rage longer. ...
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God forbid the ski areas would go bust.
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Sun, Oct 19, 2008
from Los Angeles Times:
Migrating Alaskan pollock are creating the potential for a new dispute with Russia
America's biggest catch lands here and at nearby ports every year: more than 2 billion pounds of Alaskan pollock to feed a global appetite for fish sticks, fast-food sandwiches and imitation crabmeat.... Yet the careful management that helped make Alaskan pollock a billion-dollar industry could unravel as the planet warms. Pollock and other fish in the Bering Sea are moving to higher latitudes as winter ice retreats and water temperatures rise. Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock, swimming across an international boundary in search of food and setting off what could become a geopolitical dispute.
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Traitors.
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Sun, Oct 19, 2008
from New York Times:
Candidates Agree on Need to Address Global Warming
Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama part company on many issues, but they agree that the Bush administration's policies on global warming were far too weak.
Both candidates say that human-caused climate change is real and urgent, and that they would sharply diverge from President Bush's course by proposing legislation requiring sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury. ...
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Too bad we lost eight valuable years.
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Sat, Oct 18, 2008
from Christian Science Monitor:
Climate change's most deadly threat: drought
...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... In his new book, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Fagan ... makes an original contribution ... by summoning attention to what he calls "the silent elephant in the room": drought. As polar icecaps melt and glaciers disappear, thus causing seas to rise, low-lying coastal areas may indeed be inundated, creating millions of environmental refugees. But it is the inland agricultural breadbasket regions that feed the world that stand to suffer the greatest upheaval if reliable precipitation patterns vanish.
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The breadbasket will become a basketcase!
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Sat, Oct 18, 2008
from SciDev.net:
Himalayan pollution 'could impact monsoon cycle'
Researchers have shown that pollution from China, India, Nepal and Pakistan can reach altitudes of over 5,000 metres in the Himalayas, contributing to the warming of the atmosphere and potentially affecting the South-East Asian monsoon cycle. They also found that new aerosol particles -- ultrafine particles suspended in the atmosphere -- can form at these heights.... "This study is remarkable as it can explain the phenomenon of the melting of glaciers that we have started to observe in the Himalayas," says Ngamindra Dahal, a hydrometeorologist at the National Trust for Nature Conservation, Nepal. ...
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Are those the winds of change blowing way up there?
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Fri, Oct 17, 2008
from NOAA, via Mongabay:
NOAA offers 'dramatic evidence' of Arctic warming
Fall air temperatures 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) above normal, the second lowest-ever extent of summer sea ice, and the melting of surface ice in Greenland are signs of continued warming in the Arctic, according to the Arctic Report Card, an annual review of Arctic conditions by U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its partners. "Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect from multiple causes more clearly than in other regions," said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle and a lead author of the report. "It's a sensitive system and often reflects changes in relatively fast and dramatic ways."
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I wish I could transfer the icy chill I'm feeling in my spine to the Arctic.
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Fri, Oct 17, 2008
from Guardian (UK):
US climate change activists go on trial
Eleven climate change activists are due in court today on criminal charges after they blockaded a planned $1.8bn coal-fired power plant, providing an American echo of the Kingsnorth Six trial.
The activists were arrested last month in rural Wise County, Virginia, at the gates of a power plant being built by Dominion, the No 2 utility in the US. The 11 chained themselves to steel barrels that held aloft a banner, lit by solar panels, challenging the utility to provide cleaner energy for a region ravaged by abusive coal mining. ...
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Can such creativity be illegal?
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Fri, Oct 17, 2008
from Concord Monitor:
No frost yet isn't good
Global climatic change has its short-term upside. It's not instant gloom and doom. And, sure, a 70-degree October day has weather explanations. By itself its not indicative of climate change.
Unfortunately, the climate is changing. The frosts and the winter are later. We'd expect a frost around Labor Day. Now it's more than a month later, and still not close. October is more like September. November is more like October.
People used to bet on the day of ice out on the big lakes, like Winnipesaukee and Champlain. Now they may not be totally frozen over at all. Two winters ago I kayaked on a still unfrozen Mountain View Lake at the foot of Mount Sunapee around Jan. 1. ...
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We're starting to see it on the ground -- or not see it.
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Thu, Oct 16, 2008
from Mansfield News Journal:
Ohio average temperatures up 2 degrees
Climate change has sent the region's average temperature up 2° since 2000, according to a new report. Things are heating up across Ohio, the report from the Environment Ohio Research and Policy Center in Columbus showed, leading environmentalists to call for more efforts to combat global warming. ...
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It can't help to have all this attention on the hot race for the presidency focused on Ohio.
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Wed, Oct 15, 2008
from George Monbiot, The Guardian:
This stock collapse is petty when compared to the nature crunch
This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what's coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.... As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone.... The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. ...
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Can't we just borrow some more Nature from somebody?
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Tue, Oct 14, 2008
from Discovery News:
Ozone Pollution to Worsen Under Climate Change
Surface-level ozone, a poisonous gas that claims tens of thousands of lives annually, could get much worse thanks to the effects of climate change, according to new research... "It's the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane," David Fowler of the National Environmental Research Council in the United Kingdom said. "But it's not the biggest one, and it's not the biggest threat to human health -- particulates in the atmosphere are worse. So it's a sort of Cinderella gas that has been mostly ignored." ...
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If only we could find some giant slipper to capture and sequester this ozone.
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Tue, Oct 14, 2008
from CBC News (Canada):
Methane hydrates: Energy's most dangerous game
All the energy America needs for the next 100 years lies under the sea off the coast of South Carolina. One problem: Digging it out could cause a global climate disaster.
Welcome to the final frontier in fossil fuels, the wild card in climate change theories and the dark horse in the scramble to secure access to clean energy. Meet methane hydrates, the world's most promising and perilous energy resource.... In other words, the extraction process, if done improperly, could cause sudden disruptions on the ocean floor, reducing ocean pressure rates and releasing methane gas from hydrates. A mass release of methane into the sea and atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences on the pace of climate change. More than 50 million years ago, undersea landslides resulted in the release of methane gas from methane hydrate, which contributed to global warming that lasted tens of thousands of years. ...
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Exxon: Heck, we'll be careful, don't worry.
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Mon, Oct 13, 2008
from Toledo Blade:
Climate change called certain and most predictions are bad
Agriculture could become more difficult, with crop yields harder to maintain because of drier soils and more insects -- and too much rain at the wrong times.... The frequency of thunderstorms could be doubled, yet soil is expected to be drier and more prone to drought because of the increased rate of evaporation.... Expect more sneezing from pollen and ragweed, plus a variety of other health issues from more mushroom spores, mold, and poison ivy, he said.
Portions of North America are now being affected by dust clouds emanating as far away as Africa's expanding deserts. ...
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More poison ivy? Now it's really getting serious.
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Want more context?
Try reading our book FREE online:
Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies!
More fun than a barrel of jellyfish!
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Mon, Oct 13, 2008
from Telegraph.co.uk:
Climate change targets could end farming as we know it -- NFU
New targets to cut the UK's greenhouse emissions by at least 80 per cent will cripple agriculture in the UK, according to farmers.... The [National Farmers Union] said it would be "nigh on impossible" for farming to make the cuts without a massive reduction in livestock farming -- which produces methane, and cultivating the land -- which produces nitrous oxide.... "We simply do not know how to produce the current volume of food produced using 80 per cent less greenhouse gases," he added. ...
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Obstructionism "as we know it" will also have to end.
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