Plumbing the Depths

Lake Baikal, Russia

Breaking News.

Russian divers have just broken the record for the deepest freshwater dive into the abyss of Lake Baikal.
Containing more water than all of North America’s lakes put together, Lake Baikal is home to a rich, bountiful ecology, teeming with biodiversity.
It is the same team who, earlier this year, succeeded in planting a Russian Flag on the Arctic sea bed, underneath the North Pole.

Russia assures us that the Lake Baikal dive is just for ‘Scientific’ purposes. You know, they just ‘checking up’ on the largest body of fresh water on Earth, that sort of thing.

Oh, and, by the way, there’s a suggestion of possible oil and gas reserves down there.
We are told that Lake Baikal is safe and its ecology will never be damaged by oil and gas exploration.

Now sit back and wait for the sound of hollow laughter when those Russian assurances echo back from the depths of the future: when Lake Baikal is damaged beyond repair by corporate greed, by climate change and by the ever further reaching grasp of mankind.
Or, perhaps not.

Perhaps this wonder of wonders will still be safe in fifty, one hundred, perhaps five hundred years time.

But you can be sure that whenever Peak Oil hits, those sound assurances will be swiftly forgotten and the divers’ monumental achievements will be cast in stone.

The Hubris of King Canute

London, England

The Wilkin’s ice shelf in Antarctica is hanging on by a thread. Alarmingly, scientists are seeing it crumble almost daily. And its not even Summer down there. The process seems inexorable.
At the other end of the globe, Arctic Foxes are next on the list of endangered Polar species as their habitat is degraded far sooner than earlier climate models had predicted.
And, only this week, climate scientists are predicting that snowmelt patterns in the Rockies are set to change dramatically in the coming decades with catastrophic implications for water resources in much of the Western USA.
And the beat goes on.
Now that the 2 Degree tipping point not far away for the planet, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall centre argues that we “mitigate for 2°, but adapt for 4°”.
It will be ‘The beginning of the End’.
To quote Mark Lynas: ‘Adapting to 4°C of warming would be quite a challenge. With this level of temperature change, we can expect a huge increase in drought-prone zones, a mass extinction of half or more of the life on earth, hundreds of millions of refugees from areas deprived of fresh water or inundated by rising seas, and widespread starv ation due to food and water shortages.”

The complancy of the Bush Administration seems staggering, as news emerges that the USA’s  Clean Air Act legislation was bypassed in a gross cover up of the key projections of climate science.
You can picture GW sat there on his throne, down by the beach, determined to see off the tide.

But history will prove this unconscionable madness utterly wrong when the planet gasps into the last decades of the 21st century.
And all those ridiculous sceptics out there will only be remembered for the turpitude of their beliefs.

Shooting at the Sky

Beijing, China

With only a few weeks to go before the 2008 Olymics, officials in Beijing have ordered the Home Guard to fire Silver Iodide into the smoggy air above the capital in a desperate attempt to seed rain clouds.
Air Quality is so bad here that these antiquated anti-aircraft guns have been hauled out of their dust sheets to do a job that seems almost impossible.
But the problems are only just beginning for Beijing. For within a generation, Beijing will ‘cease to exist,’ according to China’s leading environmentalist Dai Qing. To quote:
“We won’t have the ancient capital any longer and the ugly modern Beijing would disappear too. Unfortunately, government officials and Beijing residents are equally unaware of how serious the water crisis is.”

Much of the available information about this pending crisis is top secret of course, but there is an underlying theme here. Available water resources will not match demand. Period.
Climate changes are upon us all, with the Far East set to become beset with water wars.
Sadly, the G8 summit is becoming an annual bureaucratic hand-squeeze, with little to offer the planet save for a mediocre resolution about halving greenhouse emissions by 2050.

Too little too late.
One can only feel sorry for the athletes who compete in Beijing this year as their lungs struggle to cope with a particulate soup that is likely to harm them. The gold medals will come with a health warning.
Mankind simply cannot continue belching out cloud-loads of effluent into the atmosphere without consequences, and seeding clouds with silver iodide will be unlikely to clear the air for long.