ApocaDocuments (11) matching "climate impacts" from this week
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Sun, Feb 15, 2009
from BBC (UK):
Global warming 'underestimated'
The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.
Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures "will be beyond anything" predicted.
Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.
He said warming is likely to cause more environmental damage than forecast.... "We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," he said. ...
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Underestimated?! Even by the ApocaDocs?
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Sun, Feb 15, 2009
from Desdemona Despair:
Greenland fishing villages abandoned as fish are driven to colder water
Coastal fishing villages such as Ikateq used to be home to families who relied on regular catches of Arctic char, a fish closely related to salmon. But warmer ocean temperatures in recent years have forced the char to migrate north to cooler waters, ending a way of life.
Traditional villages are now ghost towns, with dogsleds and fish-drying racks lying unused outside abandoned houses.
With no way to support themselves, villagers have been forced to move to urban centres the largest city and capital, Nuuk, has a population of about 15,000. Ms Smirk says most of the displaced have no other way to earn a living and rely on social welfare. ...
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The folks in Newfoundland learned these lessons after the Atlantic Cod were wiped out by overfishing, twenty years ago. Do we need a Northern Union of Concerned Humans, or something?
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Sat, Feb 14, 2009
from Portland Oregonian:
Climate change threatens 'rock rabbits,' environmentalists say
The tiny American pika, the "boulder bunny" that chirps at hikers high in the Western mountain ranges, may join the polar bear as a victim of climate change.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide by May whether to protect the pika under the federal Endangered Species Act in a court settlement reached today in San Francisco. Environmentalists say the animal is threatened by habitat loss due to global warming.
More than one-third of the pika population has vanished in Oregon, where it lives high in the Cascades and Eastern Oregon mountains.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice sued the government in August, saying it was dragging its heels in providing protection for the pika. The polar bear was placed last year on the endangered species list because its habitat is under assault by warming temperatures. ...
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Who was the bunny's lawyer, Harvey?
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Fri, Feb 13, 2009
from London Times:
Penguins in peril as food search turns into marathon
Penguins from the largest colony on mainland South America are being forced to swim the equivalent of two marathons farther to find food because of the effects of climate change.
The survival of the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, on the Atlantic coast of Argentina, is being threatened by the increasing distances the birds must travel to feed themselves and their chicks, research has shown.
Dee Boersma, of the University of Washington in Seattle, said that Punta Tombo penguins were now routinely swimming 25 miles farther on their foraging expeditions than they did a decade ago... The longer foraging trips have contributed to the colony's decline: penguin numbers have fallen by more than 20 per cent in the past 22 years, leaving only 200,000 breeding pairs today. ...
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Desperate feet
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Fri, Feb 13, 2009
from Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
State not ready for 'climate refugees'
"Climate refugees."
It's a term we should get used to, researchers warned on Thursday, predicting a flood of new residents driven north by heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming.
With one speaker raising the specter of a new migration on the scale of the Great Depression, state and county officials admitted they have barely started getting ready.
The warnings came at a conference of planners, scientists and government officials drilling into the results of a study released this week examining what Washington faces -- for our food supply, our forests, our drinking-water supplies and public health, among other fronts -- as the globe warms in coming decades.
"We're going to have an influx of climate refugees," said Richard Hoskins, an epidemiologist with the Washington Health Department. "This is going to have a tremendous impact on our public health (system). Local public health has a very full plate as it is."
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Smart states... will start marketing themselves now as environmental refugee destinations.
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Fri, Feb 13, 2009
from BBC:
Bleak forecast on fishery stocks
The world's fish stocks will soon suffer major upheaval due to climate change, scientists have warned.
Changing ocean temperatures and currents will force thousands of species to migrate polewards, including cod, herring, plaice and prawns.
By 2050, US fishermen may see a 50 percent reduction in Atlantic cod populations.... "The impact of climate change on marine biodiversity and fisheries is going to be huge," said lead author Dr William Cheung, of the University of East Anglia in the UK.
"We must act now to adapt our fisheries management and conservation policies to minimise harm to marine life and to our society." ...
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The fish have ... gone fishin'...
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Wed, Feb 11, 2009
from New Scientist:
Eating less meat could cut climate costs
Cutting back on beefburgers and bacon could wipe $20 trillion off the cost of fighting climate change. That's the dramatic conclusion of a study that totted up the economic costs of modern meat-heavy diets.
The researchers involved say that reducing our intake of beef and pork would lead to the creation of a huge new carbon sink, as vegetation would thrive on unused farmland.
The model takes into account farmland that is used to grow extra food to make up for the lost meat, but that requires less area, so some will be abandoned. Millions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would also be saved every year due to reduced emissions from farms.
These impacts would lessen the need for expensive carbon-saving technologies, such as "clean coal" power plants, and so save huge sums, say Elke Stehfest of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and colleagues. ...
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Have it your way.
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Wed, Feb 11, 2009
from London Daily Telegraph:
Scottish ski industry could disappear due to global warming, warns Met Office
The country's five resorts are currently enjoying exceptional conditions after heavy snowfall in the Highlands, but climate change may mean they have less than 50 years of ski-ing left.
Alex Hill, chief government advisor with the Met Office, said the amount of snow in the Scottish mountains had been decreasing for the last 40 years and there was no reason for the decline to stop.
He added: "Put it this way, I will not be investing in the ski-ing industry. Will there be a ski industry in Scotland in 50 years' time? Very unlikely." ...
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Hell, my knees'll be gone by then anyway.
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Tue, Feb 10, 2009
from UC Berkeley, via EurekAlert:
Scientists document salamander decline in Central America
The decline of amphibian populations worldwide has been documented primarily in frogs, but salamander populations also appear to have plummeted, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
By comparing tropical salamander populations in Central America today with results of surveys conducted between 1969 and 1978, UC Berkeley researchers have found that populations of many of the commonest salamanders have steeply declined.
On the flanks of the Tajumulco volcano on the west coast of Guatemala, for example, two of the three commonest species 40 years ago have disappeared, while the third was nearly impossible to find.... Frog declines have been attributed to a variety of causes, ranging from habitat destruction, pesticide use and introduced fish predators to the Chytrid fungus, which causes an often fatal disease, chytridiomycosis.
These do not appear to be responsible for the decline of Central American salamanders, Wake said. Instead, because the missing salamanders tend to be those living in narrow altitude bands, Wake believes that global warming is pushing these salamanders to higher and less hospitable elevations. ...
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Aren't salamanders those critters that can grow a new life, if the old one is bitten off?
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Tue, Feb 10, 2009
from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Cedarburg native wants to make it to both poles, Everest in one year
Arctic explorer Eric Larsen, a Cedarburg native, intends to be the first person ever to reach the South and North poles and the summit of Mount Everest within one year.
The three-legged expedition to what Larsen calls "the top, bottom and roof of the world" is scheduled to begin in November in Antarctica. Travel across the Arctic to the North Pole would come second, beginning in February 2010. The push to Everest's summit - the world's highest at 29,029 feet above sea level - might start in September 2010.... Larsen plans to reach the three destinations in quick succession to draw public attention to the impact of global warming on each of these remote places. The name of the proposed expedition: Save the Poles. ...
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Mush, Eric, MUSH!
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Mon, Feb 9, 2009
from BusinessGreen:
Emergency Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen to be held in March
Climate change scientists are to hold an emergency summit in Copenhagen next month to collate the latest findings in climate science and step up pressure on the UN negotiating process to ensure any deal agreed later this year is informed by the scientific realities of global warming.
The International Scientific Congress on Climate Change will run from 10-12 March and is being organised by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), including the University of Copenhagen, Yale, UC Berkeley, Tokyo, Oxford and Cambridge.
It will feature keynotes from IPCC Chairman Dr. RK Pachauri, Lord Nicholas Stern, and President of the European Commission Jose M. Barroso, as well as a raft of the world's top climate scientists and will address the extent to which a "technological fix" to climate change is now possible, the likely costs of inaction, and the scale of the global security threat climate change presents.
In addition, the conference aims to "bridge the four year data gap left by the leading global scientific body on climate change -- the IPCC -- with its latest reports". ...
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On the one hand, Great! Informed emergency measures are required. On the other, Gaah! It is that bad!
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