The Tortoise and the Hare

Surrey, England.

The man in the silver-gray BMW diesel 320CD grimaced behind me, as I pulled away from the lights at an ordinary speed.
Aged about 55, he was clearly in a hurry,as he and his car clung to my tailgate like a limpet for a while.

I found a safe spot to let him pass, and he did so, accelerating furiously, leaving a large puff of diesel smoke behind him like a fart.

Five minutes later I caught up with him, stalled in a queue of traffic. You should have seen his face.

I looked at his clenched jaw and thought about his health, and about the state of his arteries, probably riddled with clot. And about the fact that diesel-fuel microparticulates are, everywhere, clogging up our hearts and lungs and minds like poison.

The man pulled away from the lights with his foot to the floor and yet another cloud of diesel added to the smog.

 

 

Too little oxygen.

Several weeks ago, several hundred Yellowstone Trout died in a sudden and inglorious manner in the Firehole river in Yellowstone National Park. With water temperatures rising to record levels in the heat wave that scoured the West, the oxygen in the river water became rapidly depleted and within hours the fish were dead.

It has been the largest fish kill in recorded history in Yellowstone.

Meanwhile, to the East, the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is, thankfully, a few thousand square miles smaller than had been anticipated, but an anoxic area the size of New Jersey is hardly promising.

But then, history will look back on these decades with contempt, as fragile ecosystems the world over are systematically and callously stripped of biodiversity by the onward march of ‘progress’.

Malthus wasn’t wrong. This beautiful planet cannot sustain an indefinitely spiralling population without changing beyond all recognition.

Treasure it while you can.

The Rain that Never Stopped, (for a while)

London, England

Huge parts of England are flooded and public services are struggling to cope. But the stoical nature of the British is shining like a beacon from the wet.

Tomorrow, the Journal Nature is to publish an important paper on the link between rising rainfall trends and human activities.
Much of the content of the paper has been discussed ahead of time, in what is not so much as a leak, but more of a judicious sense of timing by the editors of the Times, the Independent and the BBC amongst others.
But it is staggering to see the divisive nature of the reactions to the news. Certain self-styled experts are attacking the findings already and there is a still a large swathe of climate change denialism out there in the blogosphere and in certain scientific circles.

So why are such people so incensed by the facts? Its almost as if they are stuck in the mud of their own making and are now fighting their corner like the deranged.
Centuries ago, when the first ships from the ’West’ sailed into the waters of Tahiti and other Pacific Islands, it is said that the native islanders couldn’t see them because their brains were not able to cope with what they saw and couldn’t process the images.

Perhaps climate change deniers’ brains are wired differently and so they can’t accept the truth.

But then, as we all know, it didn’t take long for the South Sea Islanders’ brains to catch up with reality as the actualities of change were forced upon them.

So, we’ll see a furious dithering in the next few weeks as people argue their case for and against  the facts of climate change, but it will all be hot air in the end and the rain will still fall.

Desmogging the Truth

London, England

Here in England, we are today experiencing monsoon rainfall that has darkened the skies. It is a glorious sound to listen to as I sit in my office.

Imagine the ability to share water instantly like this… to share with others around the globe who need it: The parched fields of Arkansas, the stunted corn fields of America where drought is threatening the livelihoods of so many; the broadening deserts of the South West and so much more besides on this struggling planet.
It could be a sort  of ‘wireless’ water, transported in an instant to the dry.
But such sort of quantum technology is the stuff of dreams and of a future that is far to far off to help us now.

We need to grow awareness; to seek out political deviousness where it strikes deep into the hearts and minds of the corrupt; to challenge those who suavely assure us that the planet’s climate is safe in human hands.

Fifty Five years ago, London was gripped by an opaque smog, a dense low cloud of sooty foggy water vapour that reduced visibility to a few feet at best.
But within a few years the Clean Air Act was introduced which soon cleared the skies and made the smog a thing of the past.
Sadly, the key decision makers out there in the halls of power are struggling to be so decisive and, as China’s skies are darkening with pollution, it is time to reinvent the wheel.

Clear vision, clear truth, clear sight. Don’t be fooled by those out there who tell us that nothing is happening to our beautiful Earth; that its just part of a statistical blip or two.
Pay attention to the signs of change…
You’d have to be blind and deaf not to notice.

There was a time when the Earth was Flat.

London, England

 As a huge dust storm blows across southern Arizona, we learn that the Chorabari Glacier in the Indian Himalaya has shrunk by 20% in the last 40 years. As has the Qori Kali glacier in Peru. To quote the New York Times, ‘a glacier is in effect the planet’s most sensitive organ…’ displaying signs of climate change that need to be heeded.

Of course the Flat Earth mentality of climate change deniers is a creeping disease now; a stupefying quiddity of so called scientific proof that its all not actually happening at all.

No, they are confident that such signs are nothing to be concerned about.

Well good luck to them in their complacent laboratories of proof; endlessly pouring over this paper and that paper in an effort to prove us all wrong.

But, history soon proved the Flat Earth theory a ludicrous fallacy; apart that is, for a small group of the clinically insane who still cling on to the notion in the fractured factories of their daydreams.

Listen up now; watch the signs. Be thankful for what we all take for granted,
while we can.

 

 

 

Swimming at the North Pole

London, England

Congratulations to David Gordon Pugh for his icy dip in Arctic waters. Diving into the waters at 02:00 BST on Sunday he swam briefly in waters that were nearly -2 degrees: enough to render most mortals unconscious within seconds. But David has been undergoing rigorous mind and body training and he was able to use the deep powers of his mind to raise his body temperature and survive.

Sadly, most key decision makers on this planet have no such powers and our fragile ecosystems are being butchered by pathetically short term decision making.
What will it take to bring about a sea change in attitudes?

For all the flatulent arguments out there in cyberspace about whether or not global warming is part man-made or not, you can be sure that the deniers out there will continue to fight their corner until the end of the Earth.

Look, lets face it. The global climate is changing and becoming more chaotic and unpredictable. Existing computer models of change are still struggling to adapt to such chaos.
Much that we had taken for granted- mountain glaciers, Arctic ice stability, bio-diversity, the availablity of clean fresh drinking water- all of these are set to change.

But will our decision makers take the plunge? Will ordinary human beings get wise to this?

No, not yet.

Thanks David for your admirable swim in such icy waters. Your courage is a light to us all.

The end of the Lesser Flamingo?

Lake Natron, a pristine ecosystem in East Africa is soon to be threatened by a company called Lake Natron Resources Limited, part of an Indian mega company called TATA.
Plans include the building of a coal fired power station, the introduction of a hybrid shrimp to change the Lake’s salinity
and of course, extraction of the Lake’s soda to make detergent.

A so called public enquiry or ’hearing’ is just a sham, because the company will only release information that supports its case.

Once again, there is no end to corporate greed and this is a perfect example of the money grabbing short termism of much of big business.
Well, lets face it, these sort of attitudes underpin virtually all of the Capitalist corporations that dominate our planet.

You can be confident that our descendents will one day look back upon this era in humanity’s shoddy progress towards its future
as a time when key decisions could have been made that might have benefited the planet
but which were NOT made because of sheer, bloody-minded short term thinking.

I can only hope that those who sit on the board of TATA and its dreadful little offshoot called Lake Natron Resources will roast in hell for this.

The end of the Lesser Flamingo? Probably…

Meanwhile, a web site called Ponder the Maunder offers an attempt at a dramatically assured ’unpicking’ of current global warming concerns.
The author, who by now has acheived some sort of  Webbased fame for perhaps 15 minutes, coolly takes apart just about every scientific paper on global warming she can lay hands on.
I wonder at her motives here.

To be fair, she writes in a dedicated, authoritative manner, but I wonder what she would make of TATA and its greed
as she diligently reasssures us that our planet is not going to suffer as we had thought.
Of course I wish her well in her intentions, but then, the Captain of the Titanic had very good intentions.

Flatulent Cows

London, England

Farmers in Wales in the United Kingdom are contemplating feeding garlic to their cows in a bid to reduce the production of methane gases. Of course its difficult to calculate how much methane is indeed produced by these wonderful creatures, but you can be confident
that it will take a very long time for the idea to percolate over to the USA  where there are still  too many  climate-change deniers.

Unfortuntately for these sceptics, scientists over here in Europe are now confident that global warming is exceedingly unlikely to be due to changing solar cycles.

-Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.” (Courtesy of the BBC news online)-

The sceptics have clung to this idea like limpets to a rock, as if the very thought of human activity affecting the global atmosphere is too preposterous to contemplate.

Well, the rock is sinking now, and let us hope that the human race can get down to contemplating the really serious challenges it faces, amongst which is the Mega-Drought afflicting the South Western Region of the USA.
And Florida. And Tennesse. And, And…

Will the humble garlic save the world? I sincerely doubt it, but its worth a try. So here’s a thank you to those innovative Welsh farmers and their wonderful herds of cows.

Wildfires in the West (the other three degrees)

Courtesy of Mark Lynas and the Guardian.

Six degrees to Hell (continued).

4ºC
At four degrees another tipping point is almost certain to be crossed; indeed, it could
happen much earlier. (This reinforces the determination of many environmental groups, and
indeed the entire EU, to bring us in within the two degrees target.) This moment comes as
the hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost – particularly in
Siberia – enter the melt zone, releasing globally warming methane and carbon dioxide in
immense quantities. No one knows how rapidly this might happen, or what its effect might
be on global temperatures, but this scientific uncertainty is surely cause for concern and not
complacency. The whole Arctic Ocean ice cap will also disappear, leaving the North Pole as
open water for the first time in at least three million years. Extinction for polar bears and
other ice-dependent species will now be a certainty.
The south polar ice cap may also be badly affected – the West Antarctic ice sheet could lift
loose from its bedrock and collapse as warming ocean waters nibble away at its base, much
of which is anchored below current sea levels. This would eventually add another 5m to
global sea levels – again, the timescale is uncertain, but as sea level rise accelerates
coastlines will be in a constant state of flux. Whole areas, and indeed whole island nations,
will be submerged.
In Europe, new deserts will be spreading in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey: the Sahara will
have effectively leapt the Straits of Gibraltar. In Switzerland, summer temperatures may hit
48C, more reminiscent of Baghdad than Basel. The Alps will be so denuded of snow and ice
that they resemble the rocky moonscapes of today’s High Atlas – glaciers will only persist on
the highest peaks such as Mont Blanc. The sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech
will be experienced in southern England, with summer temperatures in the home counties
reaching a searing 45C. Europe’s population may be forced into a “great trek” north.

5ºC
To find out what the planet would look like with five degrees of warming, one must largely
abandon the models and venture far back into geological time, to the beginning of a period
known as the Eocene. Fossils of sub-tropical species such as crocodiles and turtles have all
been found in the Canadian high Arctic dating from the early Eocene, 55 million years ago,
when the Earth experienced a sudden and dramatic global warming. These fossils even show
that breadfruit trees were growing on the coast of Greenland, while the Arctic Ocean saw
water temperatures of 20C within 200km of the North Pole itself. There was no ice at either
pole; forests were probably growing in central Antarctica.
The Eocene greenhouse event fascinates scientists not just because of its effects, which also
saw a major mass extinction in the seas, but also because of its likely cause: methane
hydrates. This unlikely substance, a sort of ice-like combination of methane and water that
is only stable at low temperatures and high pressure, may have burst into the atmosphere
from the seabed in an immense “ocean burp”, sparking a surge in global temperatures
(methane is even more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). Today vast
amounts of these same methane hydrates still sit on subsea continental shelves. As the
oceans warm, they could be released once more in a terrifying echo of that methane belch of
55 million years ago. In the process, moreover, the seafloor could slump as the gas is
released, sparking massive tsunamis that would further devastate the coasts.
Again, no one knows how likely this apocalyptic scenario is to unfold in today’s world. The
good news is that it could take centuries for warmer water to penetrate down to the bottom
of the oceans and release the stored methane. The bad news is that it could happen much
sooner in shallower seas that see a stronger heating effect (and contain lots of methane
hydrate) such as in the Arctic. It is also important to realise that the early Eocene greenhouse
took at least 10,000 years to come about. Today we could accomplish the same feat in less
than a century.

6ºC
If there is one episode in the Earth’s history that we should try above all not to repeat, it is
surely the catastrophe that befell the planet at the end of the Permian period, 251 million
years ago. By the end of this calamity, up to 95% of species were extinct. The end-Permian
wipeout is the nearest this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock
drifting through space. The precise cause remains unclear, but what is undeniable is that the
end-Permian mass extinction was associated with a super-greenhouse event. Oxygen
isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees,
perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch than happened 200 million years later in
the Eocene.
Sedimentary layers show that most of the world’s plant cover was removed in a catastrophic
bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a “fungal spike” as plants and animals rotted in situ.
Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic.
Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.
One scientific paper investigating “kill mechanisms” during the end-Permian suggests that
methane hydrate explosions “could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely”. Acting much like
today’s fuel-air explosives (or “vacuum bombs”), major oceanic methane eruptions could
release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Whatever happened back then to wipe out 95% of life on Earth must have been pretty serious.
And while it would be wrong to imagine that history will ever straightforwardly repeat itself,
we should certainly try and learn the lessons of the distant past. If they tell us one thing
above all, it is this: that we mess with the climatic thermostat of this planet at our extreme –
and growing – peril.

Wildfires in the West

London, England.
Wildfires in the West of the USA have afflicted at least ten states ranging from Idaho to New Mexico as the region swelters under a raging heat.
Meanwhile, thousands of acres of Brazilian rain forest are being burnt into charcoal.

For those of us who care about such things but who don’t have ‘time’ to read Mark Lynas’ book: ‘Six Degrees, Our Future on a Hotter Planet’, here is a summary of what we are to expect for the first three degrees of global warming. (Courtesy of Mark Lynas and the Guardian Newspaper)
—————————————————————————————————

‘Six steps to hell’ – summary of SixDegrees as published in the Guardian 23 April 07
By the end of the century, the Earth could be more than 6C hotter than it is today, according
to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We know that would be bad news – but
just how bad? How big a rise will it take for the Alps to melt, the oceans to die and desert to
conquer Europe and the Americas? Mark Lynas sifted through thousands of scientific papers
for his new book on global warming. This is what the research told him…

The following is an article by Mark Lynas based on his book Six Degrees: Our Future on a
Hotter Planet. It was published in the Guardian on 23 April 2007. The original version is
available here.
1ºC
Nebraska isn’t at the top of most tourists’ to-do lists. However, this dreary expanse of
impossibly flat plains sits in the middle of one of the most productive agricultural systems
on Earth. Beef and corn dominate the economy, and the Sand Hills region – where low, grassy
hillocks rise up from the flatlands – has some of the best cattle ranching in the whole US. But
scratch beneath the grass and you will find, as the name suggests, not soil but sand. These
innocuous-looking hills were once desert, part of an immense system of sand dunes that
spread across the Great Plains from Texas in the south to the Canadian prairies in the north.
Six thousand years ago, when temperatures were about 1C warmer than today in the US,
these deserts may have looked much as the Sahara does today. As global warming bites, the
western US could once again be plagued by perennial drought – devastating agriculture and
driving out human inhabitants on a scale far larger than the 1930s “Dustbowl” exodus.
On the other side of the Atlantic, today’s hottest desert could be seeing a wetter future in
the one-degree world. At the same time as sand dunes were blowing across the western US,
the central Sahara was a veritable Garden of Eden as rock paintings of elephants, giraffes and
buffalo, also dating from 6,000 years ago, attest. On the borders of what is today Chad,
Nigeria and Cameroon, the prehistoric Lake Mega-Chad spread over an area only slightly
smaller than the Caspian Sea does now. Could a resurgent north African monsoon drive
rainfall back into the Sahara in a one-degree world? Models suggest it could.
Also in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro will be losing the last of its snow and ice as temperatures
rise, leaving the entire continent ice-free for the first time in at least 11,000 years. The Alps,
too, will be melting, releasing deadly giant landslides as thawing permafrost removes the
“glue” that holds the peaks together. In the Arctic, temperatures will rise far higher than the
one-degree global average, continuing the rapid decline in sea ice that scientists have
already observed. This spells bad news for polar bears, walruses and ringed seals – species
that are effectively pushed off the top of the planet as warming shrinks cold areas closer and
closer to the pole.
Indeed, it is the ecological effects of warming that may be most apparent at one degree.
Critically, this temperature rise may wipe out the majority of the world’s tropical coral reefs,
devastating marine biodiversity. Most of the Great Barrier Reef will be dead.

2ºC
In the highly unlikely event that global warming deniers prove to be right, we will still have to
worry about carbon dioxide, because it dissolves in the oceans and makes them more acidic.
Even with relatively low emissions, large areas of the southern oceans and parts of the Pacific
will within a few decades become toxic to organisms with calcium carbonate shells, for the
simple reason that the acidic seawater will dissolve them. Many species of plankton – the
basis of the marine food chain and essential for the sustenance of higher creatures, from
mackerel to baleen whales – will be wiped out, and the more acidic seawater may be the
knockout blow for what remains of the world’s coral reefs. The oceans may become the new
deserts as the world’s temperatures reach 2C above today’s.
Two degrees may not sound like much, but it is enough to make every European summer as
hot as 2003, when 30,000 people died from heatstroke. That means extreme summers will
be much hotter still. As Middle East-style temperatures sweep across Europe, the death toll
may reach into the hundreds of thousands. The Mediterranean area can expect six more
weeks of heatwave conditions, with wildfire risk also growing. Water worries will be
aggravated as the southern Med loses a fifth of its rainfall, and the tourism industry could
collapse as people move north outside the zones of extreme heat.
Two degrees is also enough to cause the eventual complete melting of the Greenland ice
sheet, which would raise global sea levels by seven metres. Much of the ice-cap disappeared
125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were 1-2C higher than now. Because of the
sheer size of the ice sheet, no one expects this full seven metres to come before the end of
the century, but a top Nasa climate scientist, James Hansen, is warning that the mainstream
projections of sea level rise (of 50cm or so by 2100) could be dangerously conservative. As if
to underline Hansen’s warning, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has tripled since 2004.
This melting will also continue to affect the world’s mountain ranges, and in Peru all the
glaciers will disappear from the Andean peaks that currently supply Lima with water. In
California, the loss of snowpack from the Sierra Nevada – three-quarters of which could
disappear in the two-degree world – will leave cities such as Los Angeles increasingly thirsty
during the summer. Global food supplies, especially in the tropics, will also be affected but
while two degrees of warming will be survivable for most humans, a third of all species alive
today may be driven to extinction as climate change wipes out their habitat.

3ºC
Scientists estimate that we have at best 10 years to bring down global carbon emissions if we
are to stabilise world temperatures within two degrees of their present levels. The impacts of
two degrees warming are bad enough, but far worse is in store if emissions continue to rise.
Most importantly, 3C may be the “tipping point” where global warming could run out of
control, leaving us powerless to intervene as planetary temperatures soar. The centre of this
predicted disaster is the Amazon, where the tropical rainforest, which today extends over
millions of square kilometres, would burn down in a firestorm of epic proportions. Computer
model projections show worsening droughts making Amazonian trees, which have no
evolved resistance to fire, much more susceptible to burning. Once this drying trend passes
a critical threshold, any spark could light the firestorm which destroys almost the entire
rainforest ecosystem. Once the trees have gone, desert will appear and the carbon released
by the forests’ burning will be joined by still more from the world’s soils. This could boost
global temperatures by a further 1.5ºC – tippping us straight into the four-degree world.

Three degrees alone would see increasing areas of the planet being rendered essentially
uninhabitable by drought and heat. In southern Africa, a huge expanse centred on Botswana
could see a remobilisation of old sand dunes, much as is projected to happen earlier in the
US west. This would wipe out agriculture and drive tens of millions of climate refugees out of
the area. The same situation could also occur in Australia, where most of the continent will
now fall outside the belts of regular rainfall.
With extreme weather continuing to bite – hurricanes may increase in power by half a
category above today’s top-level Category Five – world food supplies will be critically
endangered. This could mean hundreds of millions – or even billions – of refugees moving
out from areas of famine and drought in the sub-tropics towards the mid-latitudes. In
Pakistan, for example, food supplies will crash as the waters of the Indus decline to a trickle
because of the melting of the Karakoram glaciers that form the river’s source. Conflicts may
erupt with neighbouring India over water use from dams on Indus tributaries that cross the
border.
In northern Europe and the UK, summer drought will alternate with extreme winter flooding
as torrential rainstorms sweep in from the Atlantic – perhaps bringing storm surge flooding
to vulnerable low-lying coastlines as sea levels continue to rise. Those areas still able to
grow crops and feed themselves, however, may become some of the most valuable real
estate on the planet, besieged by millions of climate refugees from the south.