Adapting to a warmer world: No going back

When Superstorm Sandy hit the US coast last month, it blew millions of New Yorkers back into the nineteenth century.

The southern part of Manhattan went black after floodwaters shorted out electrical systems. With the subway system disabled, many residents resorted to traversing the island by foot, and water supplies in some areas became contaminated with bacteria and pollutants.

The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy wreaked US$50 billion in economic losses along the US northeast coast, providing a costly reminder of how ill-prepared even the richest nations are for weather extremes. Some recent weather disasters have now been attributed, at least in part, to human activity, including the 2003 European heatwave¹ and the floods in England in 2000 (ref. 2). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), storms, floods and droughts will strike more frequently and with greater strength as the climate warms³. And if nations are struggling to cope now, how will they manage in a warmer, harsher future?

Just a decade ago, 'adaptation' was something of a dirty word in the climate arena — an insinuation that nations could continue with business as usual and deal with the mess later. But greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate and countries have failed to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. That stark reality has forced climate researchers and policy-makers to explore ways to weather some of the inevitable changes.Nature special:nature.com/kyoto

“As progress to reduce emissions has slowed in most countries, there has been a turn towards adaptation,” says Jon Barnett, a political geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Adaptation has tended to focus on hard defences, such as shoring up sea walls and building dams. But as awareness of adaptation has grown, so too has the concept. “Adaptation means different things to different people, and is extremely location specific,” says Neil Adger, an environmental and economic geographer at the University of Exeter, UK. Although residents in Bangladesh can raise their houses on stilts to survive floods, some settlements in Alaska and the Maldives must move in the face of rising sea levels. More

 

Adapting to a warmer world: No going back

When Superstorm Sandy hit the US coast last month, it blew millions of New Yorkers back into the nineteenth century.

The southern part of Manhattan went black after floodwaters shorted out electrical systems. With the subway system disabled, many residents resorted to traversing the island by foot, and water supplies in some areas became contaminated with bacteria and pollutants.

The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy wreaked US$50 billion in economic losses along the US northeast coast, providing a costly reminder of how ill-prepared even the richest nations are for weather extremes. Some recent weather disasters have now been attributed, at least in part, to human activity, including the 2003 European heatwave¹ and the floods in England in 2000 (ref. 2). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), storms, floods and droughts will strike more frequently and with greater strength as the climate warms³. And if nations are struggling to cope now, how will they manage in a warmer, harsher future?

Just a decade ago, 'adaptation' was something of a dirty word in the climate arena — an insinuation that nations could continue with business as usual and deal with the mess later. But greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate and countries have failed to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. That stark reality has forced climate researchers and policy-makers to explore ways to weather some of the inevitable changes.Nature special:nature.com/kyoto

“As progress to reduce emissions has slowed in most countries, there has been a turn towards adaptation,” says Jon Barnett, a political geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Adaptation has tended to focus on hard defences, such as shoring up sea walls and building dams. But as awareness of adaptation has grown, so too has the concept. “Adaptation means different things to different people, and is extremely location specific,” says Neil Adger, an environmental and economic geographer at the University of Exeter, UK. Although residents in Bangladesh can raise their houses on stilts to survive floods, some settlements in Alaska and the Maldives must move in the face of rising sea levels. More

 

Sea levels are rising 60 percent faster than expected

One thing that can be said categorically about Hurricane Sandy is that sea-level rise was a key factor in the damage the storm caused. New York Harbor is 15 inches higher than it was in 1880, eight of which are due directly to human-made climate change. A 2007 report suggested that by 2100 the seas could be at least seven inches higher still.

But those estimates may have been conservative. The Institute of Physics revealed today that the seas are rising 60 percent faster than expected.

While temperature rises appear to be consistent with the projections made in the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] fourth assessment report (AR4), satellite measurements show that sea-levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report. …

Satellites measure sea-level rise by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface and are much more accurate than tide gauges as they have near-global coverage; tide gauges only sample along the coast. Tide gauges also include variability that has nothing to do with changes in global sea level, but rather with how the water moves around in the oceans, such as under the influence of wind.

The study also shows that it is very unlikely that the increased rate is down to internal variability in our climate system and also shows that non-climatic components of sea-level rise, such as water storage in reservoirs and groundwater extraction, do not have an effect on the comparisons made.

Which means that in 88 years, New York’s harbor will be at least 11 inches higher — assuming that the speed of the rise doesn’t increase still more.

in 88 years, New York’s harbor will be at least 11 inches higher

From The Guardian:

The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres — such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida — or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said.

Scientists earlier this year found sea-level rise had already doubled the annual risk of historic flooding across a widespread area of the United States. …

“The study indicates that this is going to be as bad or worse than the worst case scenarios of the IPCC so whatever you were planning from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod in terms of how you were preparing for sea-level rise — if you thought you had enough defences in place, you probably need more,” [study coauthor Grant] Foster said. More

 

Increasing Drought Stress Challenges Vulnerable Hydraulic System of Plants, Professor Finds

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2012) — The hydraulic system of trees is so finely-tuned that predicted increases in drought due to climate change may lead to catastrophic failure in many species.

A recent paper co-authored by George Washington University Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Amy Zanne finds that those systems in plants around the globe are operating at the top of their safety threshold, making forest ecosystems vulnerable to increasing environmental stress.

In the current issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Zanne and lead authors from the University of Western Sydney in Australia and Ulm University in Germany, report that the hydraulic system trees depend on is a unique but unstable mechanism that is constantly challenged.

"Drought is a major force shaping our forests," said Dr. Zanne, a faculty member within the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. "Over the last century, drought has been responsible globally for numerous large-scale forest diebacks. To make effective predictions of how forest landscapes may change in the future, we need to first understand how plants work."

The primary challenge plants face during drought is how to keep their plumbing working. Drought stress creates trapped gas emboli in the water system, which reduces the ability of plants to supply water to leaves for photosynthetic gas exchange and can ultimately result in desiccation and death.

"Vulnerability to embolism is one of the main factors determining drought effects on trees," Dr. Zanne said. "However, plants vary dramatically in their resistance to drought-induced embolism, which has made predictions of how forests might be altered under future climates more difficult."

While the research findings are alarming, plants do have a few other tricks up their sleeves. They may have some flexibility of changing their plumbing or new species of trees may replace species no longer capable of persisting in a given place.

An international team consisting of Dr. Zanne and 23 other plant scientists organized via the ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, analyzed existing measures of plant hydraulic safety thresholds in forest species around the world.

The surprising result that the group discovered is that while plants vary greatly in their embolism resistance, they are sitting at similar safety thresholds across all forest types. The team found these thresholds are largely independent of mean annual precipitation.

The findings explain why drought-induced forest decline occurs in arid as well as wet forests, which had historically not been considered at risk. More

 

Europe Changing Fast as Climate Warms

BRUSSELS, Belgium, November 26, 2012 (ENS) – Climate change is affecting all regions of Europe as glaciers melt, the Greenland ice sheet shrinks, sea levels rise, snow cover decreases and permafrost soils warm, finds a new assessment issued by the European Environment Agency.

The report by 50 authors was published in advance of the annual United Nations climate summit, which opened Monday in Doha, Qatar.

Higher average temperatures have been observed across Europe with decreasing precipitation in southern regions and increasing precipitation in northern Europe, according to the report, “Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2012.”

Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency said, “Climate change is a reality around the world, and the extent and speed of change is becoming ever more evident. This means that every part of the economy, including households, need to adapt as well as reduce emissions.”

Extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods and droughts have caused soaring damage costs across Europe in recent years.

Future climate change is expected to add to this vulnerability, as extreme weather events are expected to become more intense and frequent. If European societies do not adapt, damage costs are expected to continue rising.

While more evidence is needed to determine the part played by climate change in this trend, growing human activity in hazard-prone areas has been a key factor, according to the EEA report.

Some regions will be less able to adapt to climate change than others, in part due to economic disparities across Europe, and the effects of climate change could deepen these inequalities, the report says.

The last decade (2002–2011) was the warmest on record in Europe, with European land temperature 1.3° C warmer than the pre-industrial average. Various model projections show that Europe could be 2.5–4° C warmer in the later part of the 21st Century, compared to the 1961–1990 average.

Heat waves have increased in frequency and length, causing tens of thousands of deaths over the last decade. The projected increase in heat waves could increase the number of related deaths over the next decades, unless societies adapt, the report says. However, cold-related deaths are projected to decrease in many countries.

Climate change is projected to increase river flooding, particularly in northern Europe, as higher temperatures intensify the water cycle.

River flow droughts appear to have become more severe and frequent in southern Europe. Minimum river flows are projected to decrease in summer in southern Europe but also in many other parts of Europe. More

 

 

UN Climate Chief: Talks Are Making Slow, Steady Progress

Few jobs on the international stage are more daunting than the one held by Christiana Figueres, the woman in charge of United Nations talks aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Figueres, of Costa Rica, is executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in 1997 led to the adoption of the landmark Kyoto Protocol but that, in recent years, has been widely criticized for failing to secure a treaty imposing binding limits on emissions.

Christiana Figuere

With a new round of talks set to begin next week in Doha, Qatar, Figueres sat down with Yale Environment 360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert to assess the state of those negotiations. Figueres, whose father and brother both served as president of Costa Rica, said that contrary to public perceptions, global climate talks have actually been moving forward in a “slow but steady” manner, with a goal of securing a new accord in 2015.

In the interview, Figueres discussed the need for the United States to finally sign on to a global climate treaty, the inevitability of world economies making the transition to a low-carbon future, and the need for politicians to feel the same urgency as climate scientists about the threats posed by global warming. “There’s a huge gap between the two,” says Figueres, “and it is our very challenging task to encourage the closing of that gap.”

Yale Environment 360: It is becoming increasingly common to hear very knowledgeable people say that the possibility of holding average global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius is slipping away from us. Just the other day PricewaterhouseCoopers put out a report that said government ambition to limit warming to 2 degrees is highly unrealistic. Are these people right, and if they’re wrong, why do we keep hearing this?

Christiana Figueres: Well, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] actually has this challenge front and center in terms of drafting their Fifth Assessment report, and this is one of the main issues that they are looking at — what are the options for countries to reach the two-degree target? So the jury is still out. We will wait for the work of the IPCC and their assessment report to see what they are suggesting with respect to options. What is very clear and what no one denies is that of course the more delay there is in increasing mitigation, the more delay there is in decreasing emissions, the more the window is closed to the possibility of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.

e360: There has been a lot written over the last couple of weeks about how Hurricane Sandy really represents a wake-up call for the U.S. and maybe now we’ll see a change in the politics around the issue in this country. We’ve also heard this before. And we just had a whole presidential campaign in which this issue really didn’t get discussed. Since Sandy, do you think that there has been any change? Do you feel that this is any kind of an opportunity?

Figueres: Yes, I certainly do think that this is yet another wake-up call. I did hear President Obama say quite categorically in his acceptance speech that he is not going to have a future that is threatened by increasing warming. I also heard [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg say very clearly right after Sandy that in his view this has been a wake-up call for New York specifically, but also for the broader United States to really understand the vulnerability in particular of coastal cities to the increasing challenges being brought by climate change. And I do think that this mirrors the growing awareness in the United States. So I do think that Sandy has contributed to this. Is it the tipping point? That remains to be seen. More

 

Climate change a 'real and present danger,' Kent says

Canada's Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent thinks recent extreme weather events are forcing politicians in both Canada and the U.S. to focus on the issue of climate change, and that includes members of his Conservative government's cabinet.

Peter Kent

"It has focused minds absolutely," Kent told reporters after appearing at a parliamentary committee hearing.

In perhaps his most forceful comments on climate change to date, Kent says the recent Hurricane Sandy that devastated parts of the U.S. East Coast is putting the issue top of mind, as are recent examples of extreme weather in Canada, such as the increasing number of tornadoes to hit Ontario.

"Scientists tell us on a regular basis you can't connect individual incidents of extreme weather with climate change, but I think it's quite clear that we are seeing increased incidents of extreme weather, droughts, floods, the diminishing ice cap, ozone opening and closing over the poles, he said.

"You don't have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and we need to address it."

Kent said he talks to his U.S. counterparts on a "more than monthly basis" and there's a general consensus that it's an issue that has to be addressed. "We would ignore it at our peril."

In his first news conference after being re-elected, U.S. President Barack Obama talked about the growing number of severe weather events and the need to act on climate change for future generations.

Canada aligns with U.S.

Canada aligns its environmental policies with those of the U.S. But Canada has been roundly criticized for its continued lack of clear legislation to make so-called "large final emitters," like energy companies, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Canada has been taking a sector-by-sector approach, bringing in rules for cars and coal-fired power plants but leaving the toughest for the last.

Kent has also been raked over the coals internationally for pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change last year. That accord expires at the end of next month.

Global leaders and environment ministers are heading to Doha, Qatar for the next UN Climate Change Conference, which is set to begin Nov. 26. It's the annual conference where countries consider a new global agreement to replace Kyoto.

Canada will be in Doha, too. Even though it pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, it's still a signatory to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overall international umbrella agreement of which Kyoto is a part.

Countries are now split over whether to negotiate a second Kyoto-like agreement or follow the Copenhagen Accord. That's the non-binding agreement signed in 2009 that calls for developing nations to do more to reduce their emissions along with the rich developed ones.

Kent says increased public attention on extreme weather events is bringing added attention to next week's global conference. He says Canada is committed to getting a new agreement but warns it won't be easy. More

 

Hurricane Sandy broke the silence on climate change

 

Dust Bowl Revisited - Earth Policy Institute

On October 18, 2012, the Associated Press reported that “a massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate…forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions.”

Dust Storm Shrouds Phoenix

Farmers in the region had recently plowed fields to plant winter wheat. The bare soil—desiccated by the relentless drought that smothered nearly two-thirds of the continental United States during the summer and still persists over the Great Plains—was easily lifted by the passing strong winds, darkening skies from southern Nebraska, through Kansas, and into Oklahoma.

Observers could not help but harken back to the 1930s Dust Bowl that ultimately covered 100 million acres in western Kansas, the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, northeastern New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado. Yet when asked if that was the direction the region was headed, Oklahoma’s Secretary of Agriculture Jim Reese was unequivocal: “That will never happen again.”

In the early decades of the twentieth century, earnest settlers of the semi-arid Plains, along with opportunistic “suitcase farmers” out to make a quick dollar, plowed under millions of acres of native prairie grass. Assured that “rain follows the plow,” and lured by government incentives, railroad promises, and hopes of carving out a place for their families, these farmers embraced the newly available tractors, powerful plows, and mechanized harvesters to turn over the sod that had long sustained Native American tribes and millions of bison.

The plowing began during years of rain, and early harvests were good. High wheat prices, buoyed by demand and government guarantees during the First World War, encouraged ever more land to be turned over. But then the Great Depression hit. The price of wheat collapsed and fields were abandoned. When the drought arrived in the early 1930s, the soils blew, their fertility stolen by the relentless wind. Stripped of its living carpet, freed from the intricate matrix of perennial prairie grass roots, the earth took flight.

Clouds as tall as mountains and black as night rolled over the land. Regular dust storms pummeled the homesteaders; the big ones drew notice when they clouded the sun in New York City and Washington, DC, even sullying ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. Dunes formed and spread, burying railroad tracks, fences, and cars. “Dust pneumonia” claimed lives, often those of children. People fled the land in droves.

In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan describes the topsoil loss, how a “rich cover that had taken several thousand years to develop was disappearing day by day.” The sodbusters had quickly illuminated the dangerous hubris in the 1909 Bureau of Soils proclamation: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” The rechristened Great Plains looked like it would revert back to its original name: the Great American Desert. More

Don't miss Ken Burns's two-part documentary The Dust Bowl, premiering this Sunday and Monday, November 18 and 19, on PBS. Check your local listings.

*Photo credits: Arthur Rothstein, Library of Congress, Dan L. Perlman, Eco Library

 

Chasing Ice - A Must Watch

Chasing Ice Documentary Film (2012)

Published on26 Sep 2012byDocumentariesNewsChasing Ice Documentary Film Trailer, in select theaters on November 9th, 2012. More infos here http://www.chasingice.com

Acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog was once a skeptic about climate change. But through his Extreme Ice Survey, he discovers undeniable evidence of our changing planet. In Chasing Ice, Balog deploys revolutionary time-lapse cameras to capture a multi-year record of the world's changing glaciers. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. Traveling with a team of young adventurers across the brutal Arctic, Balog risks his career and his well-being in pursuit of the biggest story facing humanity. As the debate polarizes America, and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Chasing Ice depicts a heroic photojournalist on a mission to deliver fragile hope to our carbon-powered planet.
"If there was ever a film that needed to be on the big screen, this is it!" - David Courier, Sundance senior programmer.
Chasing Ice Trailer (2012). Suscribe now to get the latest documentary films trailers and videos !

Will President Obama Seize Moment on Climate Change?

Climate change received scant attention in the election campaign. But with public concern about global warming growing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, President Obama has an unprecedented opportunity to take bold action on climate and clean energy.

by william becker

As President Barack Obama interprets what the election told him about his priorities for a second term, how much weight will he give to global climate change? On his very crowded list of pressing issues, where will climate action rank?

It should be near the top of his agenda. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, with the U.S. public increasingly accepting the stark reality of climate change, he has an unprecedented opportunity to take bold action. Although polls have placed global warming far down the list of national priorities this year, they’ve also shown that a growing bipartisan majority of Americans wants the president and Congress to confront this issue. It is an unorganized and mostly silent majority so far, but it exists, and the president has the skills to mobilize it.

President Obama sent an encouraging signal in his victory speech in Chicago when he said, “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt... that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” After a campaign in which he had largely ignored the issue, Obama’s mention of climate change at such a key moment was striking. One of the benefits of political campaigns is that our leaders learn things outside the Beltway.

 

If he follows through on his soaring election-night rhetoric, the president will find public support for action. A series of public opinion polls conducted during the campaign by the Yale Project on Climate Change.

Obama should call on the public to create a hailstorm of calls to Congress, demanding it support a new climate bill.

Communications found that 70 percent of Americans now accept that climate change is real; 54 percent acknowledge it is caused mostly by human activities; 74 percent believe it is influencing our weather; 57 percent say it is a growing threat to people in the United States; and 58 percent say they’re worried about it. The Yale polls were confirmed by similar results in October from the Pew Research Center, among others. And these polls were conducted before Hurricane Sandy, which almost certainly would have increased all of these numbers. More

 

 

Dutch government may face legal action over climate change

The Dutch government is facing the threat of legal action if it fails to take swift action on climate change.

The move, which is thought to be the first time that European human rights legislation has been used to take a government to court over climate change failures, is intended to put the spotlight on what campaigners say is a lack of action and force them to prioritise cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Urgenda, the pressure group behind the move, sent a letter to ministers calling on them to announce new initiatives on cutting emissions. Without that, the group said it would proceed to the courts.

The government of the Netherlands has not yet responded.

The Dutch campaigners believe similar laws could be used in other countries to force the hand of governments. Marjan Minnesma, of Urgenda, and one of the leaders of the action, said: "We definitely want to give a strong example to other countries. We believe we can take this to the courts and we would like organisations in other countries to look at what we are doing and consider it for themselves."

Their campaign is supported by the Nasa climate scientist Prof James Hansen. "In the climate and energy debate we need more pressure and involvement from the public, willing to defend our rights and those of our children and grandchildren using all the means of our laws to achieve justice," he said.

Wednesday's move came as governments prepared to meet for the next round of United Nations negotiations on climate change, to start at the end of this month in Doha, Qatar. This year marks the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol, and some governments – including the EU and Australia, but not the US, Japan or Canada – are expected to sign up to a continuation to 2020, with fresh commitments to cut emissions. More

 

Italy floods prompt fears for future of farming

The floods that have devastated Italy over the past week could become even more severe in the future, threatening food production and destroying the country's natural beauty, experts warn.

Romagnano, Massa, Tuscany. Riccardo Dalle Luche/EPA

Storms have battered ancient towns and left large swaths of farmland in Tuscany under water, prompting a warning from the region's governor, Enrico Rossi, that "climate change is making us get used to ever more violent flooding".

Three people were found dead on Tuesday after their car fell from a collapsed bridge near Grosseto, while the town of Albinia was under two metres of water. As army units were called in to help locals evacuate, towns in neighbouring Umbria were also put on alert and sections of the main road linking north and south Italy were blocked by water. On Monday a 73-year-old man was drowned in his car by rising floodwaters near the walled town of Capalbio, with residents evacuated near Cortona, the setting for the novel Under the Tuscan Sun. Much of the rich farmland of the Maremma had become a lake of mud.

In Venice water levels were receding after the city's sixth-worst flooding since records began in 1872.

Leading Italian meteorologist Mario Giuliacci said: "The Mediterranean has warmed up by 1C to 1.5C in the last 20 years, meaning that Atlantic weather fronts passing over it absorb more vapour and more heat, which means more energy. And that means ever more violent storms and more rain when the fronts hit Italy.

"An average of 80mm of rain should fall in Italy in November. In the last 40 years it has gone over 100mm 11 times, seven of which are since 1999," he added.

Giuliacci said the lower pressure brought by the storms was producing stronger winds. "The Scirocco wind which blew north up the Adriatic this week prompted the unexpected high water which swamped Venice," he said. The sea level rose by 149cm in Venice on Sunday, flooding 70% of the city.

Italy is getting increasingly used to disastrous flooding. In 2010, 150,000 livestock were drowned by floods in the Veneto region. In 2009, 31 people were killed by floods and mudslides in Messina in Sicily, while six died last year when floods surged through Genoa.

Floods have also been blamed on the number of illegally built homes in Italy which block water courses and prevent natural drainage.

However, a clear pattern of climate change is emerging, and affecting Italy's agricultural output, an official from Italy's farmer's lobby, Coldiretti, said. More

 

The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fueled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians. The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning.

Katrina’s message was that we needed to face the dangers we had turned our back on when the country became obsessed with terrorism: failing infrastructure, institutional rot, racial divides, and poverty. And larger than any of these was the climate -- the heating oceans breeding stronger storms, melting the ice and raising the sea level, breaking the patterns of the weather we had always had into sharp shards: burning and dying forests, floods, droughts, heat waves in January, freak blizzards, sudden oscillations, acidifying oceans.

The third horseman came in October of 2008: it was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale -- of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up. This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy -- though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August -- it should be Climate Change. If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about it for the past 30 years is going to prove far, far more expensive than doing something would have been.

Bloomberg Businessweek just had the blunt cover headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

That is, expensive for us, for human beings, for life on Earth, if not for the carbon profiteers, the ones who are, in a way, tied to all four of these apocalyptic visitors. A reasonable estimate I heard of the cost of this disaster was $30 billion, just a tiny bit more than Chevron’s profits last year (though it might go as high as $50 billion). Except that it’s coming out of the empty wallets of single mothers in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the pensions of the elderly, and the taxes of the rest of us. Disasters cost most of us terribly, in our hearts, in our hopes for the future, and in our ability to lead a decent life. They cost some corporations as well, while leading to ever-greater profits for others. It was in no small part for the benefit of the weapons-makers and oil producers that we propped up dictators and built military bases and earned the resentment of the Muslim world. It was for the benefit of oil and other carbon producers that we did nothing about climate change, and they actively toiled to prevent any such action.

If you wanted, you could even add a fifth horseman, a fifth disaster to our list, the blowout of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010; cost-cutting on equipment ended 11 lives and contaminated a region dense with wildlife and fishing families and hundreds of thousands of others. It was as horrendous as the other four, but it took fewer lives directly and it should have but didn't produce political change. More

 

Climate Change Report Outlines Perils for U.S. Military

WASHINGTON — Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a report issued Friday.

The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems.

Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report’s lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said in an interview.

“This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.”

The study was released 10 days late: its authors had been scheduled to brief intelligence officials on their findings the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.

Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said.

The Defense Department has already taken major steps to plan for and adapt to climate change and has spent billions of dollars to make ships, aircraft and vehicles more fuel-efficient. Nonetheless, the 206-page study warns in sometimes bureaucratic language, the United States is ill prepared to assess and prepare for the catastrophes that a heated planet will produce.

“It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade some climate events — including single events, conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence in particular locations, and events affecting globally integrated systems that provide for human well-being — will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global system to manage and that have global security implications serious enough to compel international response,” the report states.

In other words, states will fail, large populations subjected to famine, flood or disease will migrate across international borders, and national and international agencies will not have the resources to cope.

The report cites the simultaneous heat wave in Russia and floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010 as disparate but linked climate-related events that taxed those societies.

It also cites the Nile River watershed as a place where climate-related conflict over water and farmland could arise as the combined populations of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia approach 300 million. South Korea and Saudi Arabia have purchased fertile land in the Nile watershed to produce crops to feed their people, but local forces could decide to seize the crops for their own use, potentially leading to international conflict, the report says. More

 

North Carolina Sea Level Rise Accelerating, Researchers Report

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This summer the North Carolina Senate passed a bill banning researchers from reporting predicted increases in the rate of sea level rise. But the ocean, unbound by legislation, is rising anyway — and in North Carolina this rise is accelerating, researchers reported here yesterday (Nov. 6) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

On the coast of North Carolina and at other so-called "hotspots" along the U.S. East Coast, sea levels are rising about three times more quickly on average than they are globally, researchers reported during a session devoted to sea level rise.

That's the fastest rise in the world.

"What we're seeing here is unique," said Asbury Sallenger, an oceanographer at the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The accelerating rise

And this rise is accelerating, said Tal Ezer, a researcher at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.

His colleague, Larry Atkinson, said computer models suggest that if this acceleration continues at the same pace, the rise along the East Coast — from North Carolina to Massachusetts — could be 5.3 feet (1.6 meters) by 2100.

Sea levels on this stretch of land have climbed as much as 1.5 inches (3.7 centimeters) per decade since 1980, while globally they've risen up to 0.4 inches (1.0 cm) per decade, according to a study by Sallenger published in June.

Why is the rise accelerating? Researchers said it's due in part to the sinking of land in the mid-Atlantic, a process called subsidence. Also, warming oceans have decreased the flow rate of the Gulf Stream, a current that ferries warm water from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico northeast across the Atlantic. With a less intense Gulf Stream, water is backed up toward the shore, causing sea level rise. Differences in coastal geography, temperature and salinity (salt content) cause different rates of rise along the East Coast, Atkinson said.

Sea levels worldwide are rising due to melting of glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as expansion of water caused by heating, researchers said. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World] More

 

Maya civilization's collapse linked to climate change: study

(Reuters) - For a clue to the possible impact of climate change on modern society, a study suggests a look back at the end of classic Maya civilization, which disintegrated into famine, war and collapse as a long-term wet weather pattern shifted to drought.

An international team of researchers compiled a detailed climate record that tracks 2,000 years of wet and dry weather in present-day Belize, where Maya cities developed from the year 300 to 1000. Using data locked in stalagmites - mineral deposits left by dripping water in caves - and the rich archeological evidence created by the Maya, the team reported its findings in the journal Science on Thursday.

Unlike the current global warming trend, which is spurred by human activities including the emission of atmosphere-heating greenhouse gases, the change in the Central American climate during the collapse of the Maya civilization was due to a massive, undulating, natural weather pattern.

This weather pattern alternately brought extreme moisture, which fostered the growth of the Maya civilization, and periods of dry weather and drought on a centuries-long scale, said the study's lead author, Douglas Kennett, an anthropologist at Penn State University.

The wet periods meant expanded agriculture and growing population as Maya centers of civilization grew, Kennett said in a telephone interview. It also reinforced the power of the kings of these centers, who claimed credit for the rains that brought prosperity and performed public blood sacrifices meant to keep the weather favorable to farming.

ANALOGIES TO MODERN CIVILIZATION

When the rainy period gradually changed to dry weather around the year 660, Kennett said, the kings' power and influence collapsed, and correlated closely with an increase in wars over scarce resources.

"You can imagine the Maya getting lured into this trap," he said. "The idea is that they keep the rains coming, they keep everything together, and that's great when you're in a really good period ... but when things start going badly, and (the kings are) doing the ceremonies and nothing's happening, then people are going to start questioning whether or not they should really be in charge."

The political collapse of the Maya kings came around the year 900, when prolonged drought undermined their authority. But Maya populations remained for another century or so, when a severe drought lasting from the years 1000 to 1100 forced Maya to leave what used to be their biggest centers of population.

Even during the Maya heyday, humans had an impact on their environment, Kennett said, mostly byfarming more land, which in turn caused greater erosion. During the dry periods, the Maya responded with intensified agriculture.

When the climate in the area shifted toward drought, in a long-running pattern called the intertropical conversion zone, it exacerbated human impact on environment, Kennett said.

"There are some analogies to this in the modern context that we need to worry about" in Africa or Europe, he said. More

 

Will President Obama Seize the Moment for Action on Climate Change?

Superstorm Sandy changed the U.S. political zeitgeist on climate change virtually overnight.

When BusinessWeekruns a cover blazoned with "It's Global Warming Stupid" and politicians start breaking their "climate silence," you know the jig is up. President Obama acknowledged as much in his acceptance speech, when he said he wanted to "pass on a country that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet."

The question is, where we go from here. Are Americans now prepared to accelerate action to slow climate change? Or will a new fortress mentality take hold? And I mean that quite literally. One commentator recently suggested surrounding lower Manhattan with retractable walls, begging the question of where all that displaced water would go.

As the dust settles from the election, the president will come under increasing pressure to make good on his promise, through both domestic action as well as taking a more cooperative stance at the UN climate negotiations. Much will be written about this in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, he might take some inspiration from some of the many transformative solutions being put into practice elsewhere. The good news is that there are many such examples, so many that the United Nations climate agency launched an initiative to celebrate some of the most exciting, inspiring stories they could find. "Momentum for Change" is a platform for encouraging and celebrating innovative action -- designated as "lighthouse" activities -- either to reduce climate change, or to reduce its impacts.

In 2012, the initiative focused on the urban poor. To qualify as lighthouse activities, projects needed to not only address climate change, but also to improve the lives - both socially and environmentally - of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the community. They also had to demonstrate their catalytic potential for long-term transformational change, which meant that they had to be capable of being repeated elsewhere, and could be scaled up over time. More

 

Former UN official says climate report will shock nations into actio

THE next United Nations climate report will ''scare the wits out of everyone'' and should provide the impetus needed for the world to finally sign an agreement to tackle global warming, the former head of the UN negotiations said.

Yvo De Boer. Photo: Bloomberg

Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief during the 2009 Copenhagen climate change talks, said his conversations with scientists working on the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested the findings would be shocking.

"That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,'' Mr de Boer said in the only scheduled interview of his visit to Australia. "I'm confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.''

The IPCC's fifth assessment report is due to be published in late 2013 and early 2014.

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Before then is the next end-of-year UN climate meeting in Doha, Qatar. Delegates will discuss a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Last December nations agreed in South Africa to work on a binding agreement that would cover all countries. That work is expected to continue until 2015.

Mr de Boer, who is now special global advisor on climate change for KPMG, said the best prospect may be for nations to settle on targets that they write into their national laws, rather than a binding international deal.

The latter would be "almost impossible to get through the US Senate", he said, no matter whether incumbent Barack Obama or challenger Mitt Romney wins the US presidential election.

'Slipped between our fingers'

Three years on from Copenhagen, Mr de Boer said he has neither nightmares nor withdrawal symptoms from those failed talks, which included a final 12-hour marathon of discussions behind closed doors with Mr Obama, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and 23 other global leaders.

"That was such a fantastic opportunity and it slipped between our fingers," said Mr de Boer. "That's my big frustration."

He said Copenhagen's legacy had changed political attitudes to climate talks.

"Most politicians will think twice about going to a climate event, and if they go again, they will be damned sure that they'll be celebrating success rather than be associated with failure,'' he said.

Expectations of global action on climate change have diminished, but Mr de Boer said it would still be "a very, very difficult conference" for his successor, Christiana Figueres. More