ApocaDocuments (6) for the "Resource Depletion" scenario from this week
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Sat, Jan 17, 2009
from Reuters:
Tibetan glacial shrink to cut water supply by 2050
Nearly 2 billion people in Asia, from coastal city dwellers to yak-herding nomads, will begin suffering water shortages in coming decades as global warming shrinks glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, experts said.
The plateau has more than 45,000 glaciers that build up during the snowy season and then drain to the major rivers in Asia, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Brahmanputra and Mekong.
Temperatures in the plateau, which some scientists call the "Third Pole" for its massive glacial ice sheets, are rising twice as fast as other parts of the world, said Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, who has collected ice cores from glaciers around the world for decades.
As glaciers melt at faster rates from the higher temperatures, a false sense of security about water supplies has developed across Asia, Thompson said on Friday.
If melting continues at current levels, two-thirds of the plateau's glaciers will likely be gone by 2050, he said at a meeting on climate change at the Asia Society in Manhattan.
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The Third Pole is trying awful hard to be Number One.
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Fri, Jan 16, 2009
from China.org.cn:
Returning to 'normal' is no longer an option
In the first half of the year, volatile commodity prices, especially for food and oil, hit the world's poorest people hard. In the second half was the global financial catastrophe.
Yet, could the crises of food, fuel and finance that we experienced last year simply be three canaries in the coal mine? What if these are just the early warning signals that our current economic system is not sustainable at a much deeper level? ... Those of us in middle age today in richer countries are the third successive generation to benefit from the natural resource bubble that our first world economy has exploited since the mid-20th century.
It is highly unlikely -- unless we make some deep, structural changes to how we manage our economy -- that our children and their children will experience the same sense of progress and wealth. ...
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A "natural resource bubble"? How absurd! House prices will always go up!
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Thu, Jan 15, 2009
from Cleantech Blog:
Peak Phosphorus?
First there was 'Peak Oil', then there was talk of 'Peak Water', but 'Peak Phosphorus' may trump them all as a sustainability issue without rival.
Fact: Phosphorus is a non-renewable resource for which there is no substitute.... The timing for Peak phosphorus may be 50 years out, or a hundred and fifty years, but as with peak oil, it's not a question of if, but when. There has already been considerable volatility in Phosphorus markets in the past year, possibly related more to volatility in the energy market and this has trickled through into food prices. ...
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So, what -- will we have phosphorus speculation soon? Phosphorus default swaps, anyone?
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Thu, Jan 15, 2009
from AFP:
Indonesia to allow trawling despite overfishing fears
Indonesia will allow trawling in selected areas for the first time in 30 years despite concerns about overfishing, an official said Thursday.
Trawling, in which boats tow long nets that scoop up everything in their path, would be permitted this year off four areas of Borneo island's east Kalimantan province, maritime ministry official Bambang Sutejo said.
He dismissed concerns about overfishing but acknowledged that illegal trawling was already rampant in the area.
"There will not be overfishing this time as we're only allowing small boats to trawl, and it's not allowed in other parts of Indonesia," he said, adding that legalising trawling would help fight illegal trawlers. ...
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Yeah -- let's burn that ecosystem to save it.
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Thu, Jan 15, 2009
from University of Wisconsin, via EurekAlert:
Nations that sow food crops for biofuels may reap less than previously thought
Global yields of most biofuels crops, including corn, rapeseed and wheat, have been overestimated by 100 to 150 percent or more, suggesting many countries need to reset their expectations of agricultural biofuels to a more realistic level.
That's according to a study led by Matt Johnston and Tracey Holloway of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and Jon Foley of University of Minnesota, which drew on actual agricultural data from nearly 240 countries to calculate the potential yields of 20 different biofuels worldwide. ...
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You mean we let all those people starve based on an overestimation?
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Tue, Jan 13, 2009
from Bloomberg News:
Food Production Chaos Looms in Africa as Soil Quality Worsens
African farmers and climate change are combining to damage soil at a rate that may plunge the continent, home to about 1 billion people, into chaos as food production declines.
“The situation is very severe and soil fertility is declining rapidly,” Jeroen Huising, a scientist who studies soils at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, said today in an interview. “Many countries like Kenya already don’t have enough food to feed their population and soil degradation is worsening an already critical situation.”
Africa, where half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plants, is hampered by a lack of information about soil conditions, Huising said. About 236 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, or one in three there, are chronically hungry, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. ...
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Meanwhile, in America, I can't even finish my portion.
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