Gloom & doom
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And to get really back to the topic of this thread:
Hijacked by climate change?
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, exhortations that "we must get a deal" and warnings that climate change is "the greatest challenge we face as a species" are to be heard in virtually every political forum.
But if you look back to the latest definitive check on the planet's environmental health - the Global Environment Outlook (Geo-4), published by the UN two years ago - what emerges is a picture of decline that goes way, way beyond climate change.
Species are going extinct at perhaps 1,000 times the normal rate, as key habitats such as forests, wetlands and coral reefs are plundered for human infrastructure.
Aquifers are being drained and fisheries exploited at unsustainable speed. Soils are becoming saline, air quality is a huge cause of illness and premature death; the human population is bigger than our one Earth can currently sustain.
So why, you might ask, are the world's political leaders not lamenting this big picture as loudly and as often as the climate component of it?
Habitat loss, not climate change, is the biggest cause of extinction
Has climate change hijacked the wider environmental agenda? If so, why? And does it matter?
These are questions I've been able to put to a number of leading environmental thinkers for a BBC Radio Four documentary, Climate Hijack.
Mike Hulme, who led the influential UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research until recently, believes the climate issue is rather enticing for the modern leader.
"The characteristics of climate change are quite convenient for politicians to use and to deploy both at a popular level but also at a political level," he says.
He argues that climate change is seductive to politicians because it is a long-term issue - so decisive action is always posited for some time in the future, at a time that can always be made yet more distant - and someone else can always be blamed.
So Europeans used to blame the US, the US would blame China and India, and developing countries would blame the entire developed West.
"It's very easy to pass responsibility for failure somewhere else… and in the process of doing that, one is able to keep one's own credibility and record, with the appearance of being much more progressive and constructive."
According to this analysis - and in contradiction to Al Gore's famous phrase - climate change has acquired its huge profile largely because it is a far more convenient truth than poor air quality or biodiversity loss or fisheries decline, where the actions needed are more likely to be national or local - and certainly more convenient than tackling the issues that underpin everything else, the size of the human population and our unsustainable consumption of the Earth's resources.
Mindset monoculture?
"I don't think it's a competition, actually," says UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.
"We're coming to see that we've got a bit of a problem and we've got to live within the Earth's means."
In an ideal world, he would surely be right - all of these issues would receive the appropriate amount of political time and action.
But as far as the UK is concerned, there is a widespread feeling among environment groups - hard to quantify, and not always something they are willing to say on the record - that the government is only really interested in climate change.
"I think we've got to be very blunt about it; campaigning groups for the environment or anything else are in the marketplace"
And some say the balance has been tipped further by the creation of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) under Ed Miliband, which removed most climate responsibilities from Defra.
The head of one large UK environment group told me last year: "If we want to talk about climate change, we can get a meeting with the prime minister. If we want to talk about biodiversity, we can't even get a meeting with the environment secretary."
This is a picture that Hilary Benn rejects; he says his department's doors are very much open to people bringing concerns about biodiversity, or about any other issue within his remit.
Nevertheless: "Climate change is at the forefront of most politicians' minds who are concerned about the environment," says Graham Wynne, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), probably the UK's most influential conservation group.
"I would obviously wish that our most senior politicians were able to hold two environmental thoughts at the same time - but there is a political reality; climate change is sexy, so we get most traction there."
… which means this is where groups such as the RSPB are likely to focus most of their lobbying.
Former UK Environment Secretary John Gummer is clear that concern about climate impacts on the natural world is not the only reason why conservation groups are increasingly taking up the climate banner.
"I think we've got to be very blunt about it; campaigning groups for the environment or anything else are in the marketplace.
"So if you want to raise money to do something about the marine world (for example), you do it by campaigning on dolphins.
"It's exactly like a business, and in that sense we have to realise that the choice they make is with mixed motives. This is not a criticism, but they are as likely to be partial in what they choose as any business or any politician."
To a large extent, environment groups set the concerns of the environmentally aware citizen; so if they prioritise climate change, perhaps that means a loss of awareness of all the other things that people might be - or used to be - concerned about.
Earth's loss
On the global stage, loss of biodiversity - in plain speech, loss of nature - is one of the issues you will rarely hear leading politicians lamenting - despite the fact that governments pledged to do something about it as far back as the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, at exactly the same time that they were pledging to do something about climate change.
"Population raises all these issues about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world; and (people) get very uncomfortable about that"
Jonathon Porritt
How many children are enough?
Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev leads a UN-sponsored project aiming to quantify the economic costs of losing the "goods and service" that nature provides - something, he says, on which the evidence has been ignored for far too long.
"Work in this field has been going on for so long that it is a shame the idea of pulling this together and presenting it to the public and to governments as an issue wasn't done earlier."
Preliminary calculations indicate the cost of forest loss alone dwarfs the cost of the current banking crisis - a conclusion that has been met with resounding silence at the political level.
A much more comprehensive analysis is due for publication next year; but he is not holding out too much hope that it will sway minds.
"Climate change is already occupying mind space and heart space, and for biodiversity to occupy the same space is going to be a challenge."
Population concerns
Even more difficult than putting something like biodiversity loss on the agenda, says former government adviser Jonathon Porritt, is getting politicians and the wider environmental community to accept that underpinning everything are the unsustainable size of the Earth's human population and our unsustainable (and rising) hunger for the Earth's natural resources.
Recently he raised the population issue in his blog - only to be excoriated by columnist Melanie Phillips for having a "sinister and de-humanised mindset" - which is perhaps an indicator of why other contemporary environmental thinkers are so reluctant to raise it publically, despite admitting its importance in private.
"Too controversial," he says.
"Population raises all these issues about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world; and (people) get very uncomfortable about that."
Nevertheless, he argues, the logic is undeniable.
Speaking recently at Mr Porritt's Forum for the Future, a Chinese government official described the one child per family policy as having led to "400 million births averted" - which she then converted into the greenhouse gases those extra human inhabitants would have produced, and noted that no other country had done as much to curb climate change.
But, he continues: "You don't have to accept the China route to that logic.
"You can look to all kinds of alternative ways of reducing human numbers which aren't done as coercively as the one child per family policy was done in the past.
"However, when I was director of Friends of the Earth, could I get our local groups or my colleagues to go along with that? I have to admit complete failure."
Same tune
In contrast to the 1970s, the decade of the first global attempts to look at environmental decline, population is not now on the political radar.
Neither is the question of whether stopping that decline is possible without deep reform of the world's economic system.
Biodiversity loss, desertification, unsustainable fishing… where are the spaces at the top table for these?
By singing the climate tune so loudly, have environmental groups unwittingly helped to create a situation where climate change is all that politicians and the public hear?
Has the media contributed? A couple of years ago I added up the number of articles we had written on the BBC News website within the preceding nine months about various issues.
The scores were four for deforestation, four for desertification, 17 for biodiversity - and on climate change I stopped counting when I reached 1,000.
In large part, what journalists report reflects what is going on in the big world; but have we, too, forgotten the larger messages of the UN Geo-4 report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and other audits of a society whose environmental problems run much wider and deeper than climate change?
None of the people I interviewed for the programme argue that man-made climate change is not real or not important; there is no suggestion of a swindle here.
Some believe a narrow focus on climate is justified - either because they feel it is so much more serious than every other issue, or because they feel there is real political momentum to solve it now and time enough to deal with everything else once that is done.
But others argue there is no time; that society needs, urgently, to see the wider picture of global decline in all its complexity - and that climate concerns have hijacked the broader agenda, to the detriment of us all.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Hijacked by climate change?
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, exhortations that "we must get a deal" and warnings that climate change is "the greatest challenge we face as a species" are to be heard in virtually every political forum.
But if you look back to the latest definitive check on the planet's environmental health - the Global Environment Outlook (Geo-4), published by the UN two years ago - what emerges is a picture of decline that goes way, way beyond climate change.
Species are going extinct at perhaps 1,000 times the normal rate, as key habitats such as forests, wetlands and coral reefs are plundered for human infrastructure.
Aquifers are being drained and fisheries exploited at unsustainable speed. Soils are becoming saline, air quality is a huge cause of illness and premature death; the human population is bigger than our one Earth can currently sustain.
So why, you might ask, are the world's political leaders not lamenting this big picture as loudly and as often as the climate component of it?
Habitat loss, not climate change, is the biggest cause of extinction
Has climate change hijacked the wider environmental agenda? If so, why? And does it matter?
These are questions I've been able to put to a number of leading environmental thinkers for a BBC Radio Four documentary, Climate Hijack.
Mike Hulme, who led the influential UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research until recently, believes the climate issue is rather enticing for the modern leader.
"The characteristics of climate change are quite convenient for politicians to use and to deploy both at a popular level but also at a political level," he says.
He argues that climate change is seductive to politicians because it is a long-term issue - so decisive action is always posited for some time in the future, at a time that can always be made yet more distant - and someone else can always be blamed.
So Europeans used to blame the US, the US would blame China and India, and developing countries would blame the entire developed West.
"It's very easy to pass responsibility for failure somewhere else… and in the process of doing that, one is able to keep one's own credibility and record, with the appearance of being much more progressive and constructive."
According to this analysis - and in contradiction to Al Gore's famous phrase - climate change has acquired its huge profile largely because it is a far more convenient truth than poor air quality or biodiversity loss or fisheries decline, where the actions needed are more likely to be national or local - and certainly more convenient than tackling the issues that underpin everything else, the size of the human population and our unsustainable consumption of the Earth's resources.
Mindset monoculture?
"I don't think it's a competition, actually," says UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.
"We're coming to see that we've got a bit of a problem and we've got to live within the Earth's means."
In an ideal world, he would surely be right - all of these issues would receive the appropriate amount of political time and action.
But as far as the UK is concerned, there is a widespread feeling among environment groups - hard to quantify, and not always something they are willing to say on the record - that the government is only really interested in climate change.
"I think we've got to be very blunt about it; campaigning groups for the environment or anything else are in the marketplace"
And some say the balance has been tipped further by the creation of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) under Ed Miliband, which removed most climate responsibilities from Defra.
The head of one large UK environment group told me last year: "If we want to talk about climate change, we can get a meeting with the prime minister. If we want to talk about biodiversity, we can't even get a meeting with the environment secretary."
This is a picture that Hilary Benn rejects; he says his department's doors are very much open to people bringing concerns about biodiversity, or about any other issue within his remit.
Nevertheless: "Climate change is at the forefront of most politicians' minds who are concerned about the environment," says Graham Wynne, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), probably the UK's most influential conservation group.
"I would obviously wish that our most senior politicians were able to hold two environmental thoughts at the same time - but there is a political reality; climate change is sexy, so we get most traction there."
… which means this is where groups such as the RSPB are likely to focus most of their lobbying.
Former UK Environment Secretary John Gummer is clear that concern about climate impacts on the natural world is not the only reason why conservation groups are increasingly taking up the climate banner.
"I think we've got to be very blunt about it; campaigning groups for the environment or anything else are in the marketplace.
"So if you want to raise money to do something about the marine world (for example), you do it by campaigning on dolphins.
"It's exactly like a business, and in that sense we have to realise that the choice they make is with mixed motives. This is not a criticism, but they are as likely to be partial in what they choose as any business or any politician."
To a large extent, environment groups set the concerns of the environmentally aware citizen; so if they prioritise climate change, perhaps that means a loss of awareness of all the other things that people might be - or used to be - concerned about.
Earth's loss
On the global stage, loss of biodiversity - in plain speech, loss of nature - is one of the issues you will rarely hear leading politicians lamenting - despite the fact that governments pledged to do something about it as far back as the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, at exactly the same time that they were pledging to do something about climate change.
"Population raises all these issues about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world; and (people) get very uncomfortable about that"
Jonathon Porritt
How many children are enough?
Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev leads a UN-sponsored project aiming to quantify the economic costs of losing the "goods and service" that nature provides - something, he says, on which the evidence has been ignored for far too long.
"Work in this field has been going on for so long that it is a shame the idea of pulling this together and presenting it to the public and to governments as an issue wasn't done earlier."
Preliminary calculations indicate the cost of forest loss alone dwarfs the cost of the current banking crisis - a conclusion that has been met with resounding silence at the political level.
A much more comprehensive analysis is due for publication next year; but he is not holding out too much hope that it will sway minds.
"Climate change is already occupying mind space and heart space, and for biodiversity to occupy the same space is going to be a challenge."
Population concerns
Even more difficult than putting something like biodiversity loss on the agenda, says former government adviser Jonathon Porritt, is getting politicians and the wider environmental community to accept that underpinning everything are the unsustainable size of the Earth's human population and our unsustainable (and rising) hunger for the Earth's natural resources.
Recently he raised the population issue in his blog - only to be excoriated by columnist Melanie Phillips for having a "sinister and de-humanised mindset" - which is perhaps an indicator of why other contemporary environmental thinkers are so reluctant to raise it publically, despite admitting its importance in private.
"Too controversial," he says.
"Population raises all these issues about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world; and (people) get very uncomfortable about that."
Nevertheless, he argues, the logic is undeniable.
Speaking recently at Mr Porritt's Forum for the Future, a Chinese government official described the one child per family policy as having led to "400 million births averted" - which she then converted into the greenhouse gases those extra human inhabitants would have produced, and noted that no other country had done as much to curb climate change.
But, he continues: "You don't have to accept the China route to that logic.
"You can look to all kinds of alternative ways of reducing human numbers which aren't done as coercively as the one child per family policy was done in the past.
"However, when I was director of Friends of the Earth, could I get our local groups or my colleagues to go along with that? I have to admit complete failure."
Same tune
In contrast to the 1970s, the decade of the first global attempts to look at environmental decline, population is not now on the political radar.
Neither is the question of whether stopping that decline is possible without deep reform of the world's economic system.
Biodiversity loss, desertification, unsustainable fishing… where are the spaces at the top table for these?
By singing the climate tune so loudly, have environmental groups unwittingly helped to create a situation where climate change is all that politicians and the public hear?
Has the media contributed? A couple of years ago I added up the number of articles we had written on the BBC News website within the preceding nine months about various issues.
The scores were four for deforestation, four for desertification, 17 for biodiversity - and on climate change I stopped counting when I reached 1,000.
In large part, what journalists report reflects what is going on in the big world; but have we, too, forgotten the larger messages of the UN Geo-4 report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and other audits of a society whose environmental problems run much wider and deeper than climate change?
None of the people I interviewed for the programme argue that man-made climate change is not real or not important; there is no suggestion of a swindle here.
Some believe a narrow focus on climate is justified - either because they feel it is so much more serious than every other issue, or because they feel there is real political momentum to solve it now and time enough to deal with everything else once that is done.
But others argue there is no time; that society needs, urgently, to see the wider picture of global decline in all its complexity - and that climate concerns have hijacked the broader agenda, to the detriment of us all.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
TimA
Guest
- Messages
- 194
- Reaction score
- 3
- Location
- Simeulue Island, Aceh, Indonesia
- # of dives
- I just don't log dives
And for some good news!!....................
No strain for Andromeda: Galaxy is cosmic cannibal
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Our nearest major galactic neighbor is a cosmic cannibal. And it's heading this way eventually. Astronomers have long suspected Andromeda of being a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighborhood and have found proof of Andromeda's sordid past: They've spotted leftovers in Andromeda's wake.
Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about half a dozen remnants of Andromeda's galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings.
"What we're seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism," said study lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. "We're finding things that have been destroyed ... partly digested remains."
Their report is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature,
Andromeda and our Milky Way are the two big dogs of our galactic neighborhood. Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to us, about 2.5 million light years away. A light year is about 5.9 trillion miles. The massive mapping of Andromeda is looking half a million light years around Andromeda.
Astronomers have known for decades that galaxies consume each other, sometimes violently, sometimes just creating new mega-galaxies. But this study is different because "of the scale of the cannibalism and we've found evidence directly in front of our eyes," said co-author Mike Irwin, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge in England.
This type of galactic crash is common and the paper makes sense, said Harvard astronomer Mark Reid, who wasn't part of the Andromeda mapping team. And just because Andromeda consumes a galaxy, it doesn't make it disappear, he added.
The cannibalism often just strips stars from where they had been, rearranging the night sky. Most of a galaxy is empty space, so there is little if any crashing of stars and planets going on, Irwin said.
"It would be a beautiful night sky," he said. "It would be quite spectacular."
The once and future main victim of Andromeda is a dwarf galaxy that circles it called Triangulum.
Eventually, in about 3 billion years, Triangulam, which once came too close to Andromeda and was stripped of some stars, will spiral into Andromeda, about the same time it comes crashing into our galaxy, said study co-author John Dubinksi of the University of Toronto.
The Milky Way and Andromeda are heading toward each other at about 75 miles per second. They are so far away from each other that the big crash is a few billion years away. And even that might be nothing more than a reshuffling of the night sky or the creation of one super-sized galaxy, McConnachie said.
TimA
Guest
- Messages
- 194
- Reaction score
- 3
- Location
- Simeulue Island, Aceh, Indonesia
- # of dives
- I just don't log dives
Read this yesterday in Malaysia's (Penang) Star
Arctic warming reverse 8000-year-old trend
Article from: Agence France-Presse
September 04, 2009 08:54am
AN abrupt warming of the Arctic has reversed a cooling trend that began about 8000 ago, according to a study which shed light on the threat of rising sea levels and climate change.
Increased greenhouse gas emissions appear to have overridden the natural cooling caused by a wobble in the Earth's axis which has been gradually pulling the planet away from the Sun.
This wobble has cooled summer temperatures by an average of about 0.2C per thousand years, the study published in the journal Science found.
But Arctic temperatures began to rise at the beginning of the 20th Century even though the orbital cycle that produced the cooling continued.
The result was summer temperatures that were about 1.4C warmer than they should have been by the year 2000, according to the study which mapped Arctic temperatures for every decade of the past 2000 years.
Temperatures for four of the last five decades were among the highest on record.
"This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic's natural climate system,'' co-author David Schneider of the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research said.
"This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change.''
The Arctic tends to warm about three times faster than elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere because of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification.
When highly reflective ice and snow melt, the exposed dark land and ocean absorb more sunlight.
The warmer temperatures accelerate melting, which then accelerates warming.
"This has consequences globally because, as the Arctic warms, glacier ice will melt, contributing to (a) sea-level rise and impacting coastal communities around the globe,'' lead author Darrell Kaufman said.
"Thawing permafrost will release methane adding to the global greenhouse effect,'' Mr Kaufman added.
The researchers used glacial ice, tree rings and lake sediments to supplement a complex computer model of global climate and generate a reconstruction of temperatures for the past 2000 years.
Previous studies had only pinpointed Arctic temperatures for the past 400 years.
"Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was preceded by a long-term cooling trend,'' Mr Kaufman said.
"But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before.''
Arctic warming reverse 8000-year-old trend
Article from: Agence France-Presse
September 04, 2009 08:54am
AN abrupt warming of the Arctic has reversed a cooling trend that began about 8000 ago, according to a study which shed light on the threat of rising sea levels and climate change.
Increased greenhouse gas emissions appear to have overridden the natural cooling caused by a wobble in the Earth's axis which has been gradually pulling the planet away from the Sun.
This wobble has cooled summer temperatures by an average of about 0.2C per thousand years, the study published in the journal Science found.
But Arctic temperatures began to rise at the beginning of the 20th Century even though the orbital cycle that produced the cooling continued.
The result was summer temperatures that were about 1.4C warmer than they should have been by the year 2000, according to the study which mapped Arctic temperatures for every decade of the past 2000 years.
Temperatures for four of the last five decades were among the highest on record.
"This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic's natural climate system,'' co-author David Schneider of the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research said.
"This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change.''
The Arctic tends to warm about three times faster than elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere because of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification.
When highly reflective ice and snow melt, the exposed dark land and ocean absorb more sunlight.
The warmer temperatures accelerate melting, which then accelerates warming.
"This has consequences globally because, as the Arctic warms, glacier ice will melt, contributing to (a) sea-level rise and impacting coastal communities around the globe,'' lead author Darrell Kaufman said.
"Thawing permafrost will release methane adding to the global greenhouse effect,'' Mr Kaufman added.
The researchers used glacial ice, tree rings and lake sediments to supplement a complex computer model of global climate and generate a reconstruction of temperatures for the past 2000 years.
Previous studies had only pinpointed Arctic temperatures for the past 400 years.
"Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was preceded by a long-term cooling trend,'' Mr Kaufman said.
"But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before.''
More unhappy "Global Warming" News....
Seas 'threaten 20m in Bangladesh'
By David Shukman
BBC News, Bangladesh
Up to 20 million people in low-lying Bangladesh are at risk from rising sea levels in the coming decades, according to new research.
Scientists predict that salty water could reach far inland, making it hard to cultivate staple foods like rice.
The research comes as the government appeals for $5bn (£3bn) over five years to combat climate change.
In May, Cyclone Aila left thousands homeless, killed many and caused widespread flooding and damage.
The predictions come from the Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (Cegis) in Bangladesh.
It suggests a surprisingly small area of land will be permanently lost to the waters, but notes that vast tracts in the south-west could be inundated every monsoon season.
Food threats
Ahmadul Hassan, a senior scientist at Cegis, told the BBC that the intrusion of salt water would disrupt rice production in one of Bangladesh's poorest regions.
"These are very poor people, and vulnerable. For four months they'll have nowhere to work," he said.
"So people will migrate to the cities for jobs, because of the uncomfortable situation with sea level rise.
"We are talking about 20 million people," he adds.
According to the researchers, data from 11 Bangladeshi monitoring stations shows an average sea-level rise of 5mm per year over the last 30 years, with climate models forecasting further rises.
Of Bangladesh's total rice production, nearly half is so-called "monsoon" rice and much of that is grown in the areas most vulnerable to flooding.
In an interview with BBC News, Bangladesh's Minister of Disaster Management, Dr Muhammed Abdur Razzaque, said he wanted sea defences similar to those in Holland.
"We have to have new designs for embankments and we have to raise their height," he said.
"We are expecting $5bn over the next five years in support from the international community.
"This must be a grant, not a loan with interest," he stipulated.
"I think it is not possible to live in this country any longer, we have to move"
Asma Khatun
Gabura Island resident
Bangladesh is among a number of developing countries campaigning for finance to help adapt to the effects of climate change.
There are hopes that the richest nations will agree to massive funding at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December.
Staff from the charity Oxfam point to the damage caused by Cyclone Aila last May to highlight why Bangladesh needs help preparing for future sea-level rise.
Abdul Khaleque is managing Oxfam's emergency response in Satkhira region, where more than 20,000 people lost their homes on Gabura Island.
He said: "This place is very near to the sea and we know climate change is causing sea levels to rise.
"If the situation gets worse then these people cannot go back to their villages, so permanent arrangements to improve these embankments need to be made."
Defences breached
Four months after the cyclone, the sea defences are still breached and the island floods with every high tide.
The chairman of the Gabura Island "union" or council, Shofiul Ajam Lenin, is calling for the embankments to be far higher.
"If the current design is not changed then not only my union, but the other unions as well will not exist."
The flooding has ruined the island's freshwater supplies and hygiene in the camp is poor.
Among those living in tents on a narrow strip of high ground is Asma Khatun, a 25-year-old widow, who is now eager to leave.
"I think it is not possible to live in this country any longer. We have to move to other countries.
"We can't live here just by drinking this water. It is not possible to live here."
Seas 'threaten 20m in Bangladesh'
By David Shukman
BBC News, Bangladesh
Up to 20 million people in low-lying Bangladesh are at risk from rising sea levels in the coming decades, according to new research.
Scientists predict that salty water could reach far inland, making it hard to cultivate staple foods like rice.
The research comes as the government appeals for $5bn (£3bn) over five years to combat climate change.
In May, Cyclone Aila left thousands homeless, killed many and caused widespread flooding and damage.
The predictions come from the Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (Cegis) in Bangladesh.
It suggests a surprisingly small area of land will be permanently lost to the waters, but notes that vast tracts in the south-west could be inundated every monsoon season.
Food threats
Ahmadul Hassan, a senior scientist at Cegis, told the BBC that the intrusion of salt water would disrupt rice production in one of Bangladesh's poorest regions.
"These are very poor people, and vulnerable. For four months they'll have nowhere to work," he said.
"So people will migrate to the cities for jobs, because of the uncomfortable situation with sea level rise.
"We are talking about 20 million people," he adds.
According to the researchers, data from 11 Bangladeshi monitoring stations shows an average sea-level rise of 5mm per year over the last 30 years, with climate models forecasting further rises.
Of Bangladesh's total rice production, nearly half is so-called "monsoon" rice and much of that is grown in the areas most vulnerable to flooding.
In an interview with BBC News, Bangladesh's Minister of Disaster Management, Dr Muhammed Abdur Razzaque, said he wanted sea defences similar to those in Holland.
"We have to have new designs for embankments and we have to raise their height," he said.
"We are expecting $5bn over the next five years in support from the international community.
"This must be a grant, not a loan with interest," he stipulated.
"I think it is not possible to live in this country any longer, we have to move"
Asma Khatun
Gabura Island resident
Bangladesh is among a number of developing countries campaigning for finance to help adapt to the effects of climate change.
There are hopes that the richest nations will agree to massive funding at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December.
Staff from the charity Oxfam point to the damage caused by Cyclone Aila last May to highlight why Bangladesh needs help preparing for future sea-level rise.
Abdul Khaleque is managing Oxfam's emergency response in Satkhira region, where more than 20,000 people lost their homes on Gabura Island.
He said: "This place is very near to the sea and we know climate change is causing sea levels to rise.
"If the situation gets worse then these people cannot go back to their villages, so permanent arrangements to improve these embankments need to be made."
Defences breached
Four months after the cyclone, the sea defences are still breached and the island floods with every high tide.
The chairman of the Gabura Island "union" or council, Shofiul Ajam Lenin, is calling for the embankments to be far higher.
"If the current design is not changed then not only my union, but the other unions as well will not exist."
The flooding has ruined the island's freshwater supplies and hygiene in the camp is poor.
Among those living in tents on a narrow strip of high ground is Asma Khatun, a 25-year-old widow, who is now eager to leave.
"I think it is not possible to live in this country any longer. We have to move to other countries.
"We can't live here just by drinking this water. It is not possible to live here."
I was wondering if anyone has any idea (or has read/knows about articles) if the warming of our seas eventually will create new reef habitats in areas that are currently too cold to support reef building corals and if some existing reefs may disappear because of water getting too warm to support reef building corals.
I would also like to find out if zooxanthellae (the symbiotic algae that live within the hard coral polyps) may be able to adjust their temperature toleration and could possibly thrive in warmer future oceans and seas.
Any input would be much appreciated.
I would also like to find out if zooxanthellae (the symbiotic algae that live within the hard coral polyps) may be able to adjust their temperature toleration and could possibly thrive in warmer future oceans and seas.
Any input would be much appreciated.
Greenland ice loss 'accelerating'
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed.
Published in the journal Science, it has also given scientists a clearer view of why the sheet is shrinking.
The team used weather data, satellite readings and models of ice sheet behaviour to analyse the annual loss of 273 thousand million tonnes of ice.
Melting of the entire sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m (20ft).
For the period 2000-2008, melting Greenland ice raised sea levels by an average of about 0.46mm per year.
"If you multiply these numbers up it puts us well beyond the IPCC estimates for 2100"
Professor Roger Barry
Since 2006, that has increased to 0.75mm per year.
"Since 2000, there's clearly been an accelerating loss of mass [from the ice sheet]," said lead researcher Michiel van den Broeke from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
"But we've had three very warm summers, and that's enhanced the melt considerably.
"If this is going to continue, I cannot tell - but we do of course expect the climate to become warmer in the future."
In total, sea levels are rising by about 3mm per year, principally because seawater is expanding as it warms.
Sea change
Changes to the Greenland sheet and its much larger counterpart in Antarctica are subjects commanding a lot of interest within the scientific community because of the potential they have to raise sea levels to an extent that would flood many of the world's major cities.
The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report projected a sea level rise of 28-43cm during this century.
But it acknowledged this was almost certainly an underestimate because understanding of how ice behaves was not good enough to make reliable projections.
By combining different sources of data in the way it has, and by quantifying the causes of mass loss, the new study has taken a big step forwards, according to Roger Barry, director of the World Data Center for Glaciology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US.
"I think it's a very significant paper; the results in it are certainly very significant and new," he said.
"It does show that the [ice loss] trend has accelerated, and the reported contribution to sea level rise also shows a significant acceleration - so if you multiply these numbers up it puts us well beyond the IPCC estimates for 2100."
Professor Barry was an editor on the section of the IPCC report dealing with the polar regions.
On reflection
An ice sheet can lose mass because of increased melting on the surface, because glaciers flow more quickly into the ocean, or because there is less precipitation in the winter so less bulk is added inland.
The new research shows that in Greenland, about half the loss comes from faster flow to the oceans, and the other half from changes on the ice sheet itself - principally surface melting.
Another analysis of satellite data, published in September, showed that of 111 fast-moving Greenland glaciers studied, 81 were thinning at twice the rate of the slow-moving ice beside them.
This indicates that the glaciers are accelerating and taking more ice into the surrounding sea.
Melting on the ice sheet's surface acts as a feedback mechanism, Dr van den Broeke explained, because the liquid water absorbs more and reflects less of the incoming solar radiation - resulting in a heating of the ice.
"Over the last 10 years, it's quite simple; warming over Greenland has caused the melting to increase, and that's set off this albedo feedback process," he told BBC News.
"Quite likely the oceans have also warmed, and it's likely that explains the [acceleration of] outlet glaciers because they're warmed from below."
Data provided over just the last few years by the Grace satellite mission - used in this study - is giving researchers a closer view of regional variations across the territory.
Grace's twin satellites map gravity at the Earth's surface in unprecedented detail; and it is now possible to tease out from the data that most of the mass is being lost in the southeast, southwest and northwest at low elevations where the air will generally be warmer than at high altitudes.
Professor Barry cautioned that the Grace mission, which has produced valuable data about Antarctica as well as Greenland, has only a further two years to run, and that no replacement is currently scheduled.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed.
Published in the journal Science, it has also given scientists a clearer view of why the sheet is shrinking.
The team used weather data, satellite readings and models of ice sheet behaviour to analyse the annual loss of 273 thousand million tonnes of ice.
Melting of the entire sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m (20ft).
For the period 2000-2008, melting Greenland ice raised sea levels by an average of about 0.46mm per year.
"If you multiply these numbers up it puts us well beyond the IPCC estimates for 2100"
Professor Roger Barry
Since 2006, that has increased to 0.75mm per year.
"Since 2000, there's clearly been an accelerating loss of mass [from the ice sheet]," said lead researcher Michiel van den Broeke from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
"But we've had three very warm summers, and that's enhanced the melt considerably.
"If this is going to continue, I cannot tell - but we do of course expect the climate to become warmer in the future."
In total, sea levels are rising by about 3mm per year, principally because seawater is expanding as it warms.
Sea change
Changes to the Greenland sheet and its much larger counterpart in Antarctica are subjects commanding a lot of interest within the scientific community because of the potential they have to raise sea levels to an extent that would flood many of the world's major cities.
The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report projected a sea level rise of 28-43cm during this century.
But it acknowledged this was almost certainly an underestimate because understanding of how ice behaves was not good enough to make reliable projections.
By combining different sources of data in the way it has, and by quantifying the causes of mass loss, the new study has taken a big step forwards, according to Roger Barry, director of the World Data Center for Glaciology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US.
"I think it's a very significant paper; the results in it are certainly very significant and new," he said.
"It does show that the [ice loss] trend has accelerated, and the reported contribution to sea level rise also shows a significant acceleration - so if you multiply these numbers up it puts us well beyond the IPCC estimates for 2100."
Professor Barry was an editor on the section of the IPCC report dealing with the polar regions.
On reflection
An ice sheet can lose mass because of increased melting on the surface, because glaciers flow more quickly into the ocean, or because there is less precipitation in the winter so less bulk is added inland.
The new research shows that in Greenland, about half the loss comes from faster flow to the oceans, and the other half from changes on the ice sheet itself - principally surface melting.
Another analysis of satellite data, published in September, showed that of 111 fast-moving Greenland glaciers studied, 81 were thinning at twice the rate of the slow-moving ice beside them.
This indicates that the glaciers are accelerating and taking more ice into the surrounding sea.
Melting on the ice sheet's surface acts as a feedback mechanism, Dr van den Broeke explained, because the liquid water absorbs more and reflects less of the incoming solar radiation - resulting in a heating of the ice.
"Over the last 10 years, it's quite simple; warming over Greenland has caused the melting to increase, and that's set off this albedo feedback process," he told BBC News.
"Quite likely the oceans have also warmed, and it's likely that explains the [acceleration of] outlet glaciers because they're warmed from below."
Data provided over just the last few years by the Grace satellite mission - used in this study - is giving researchers a closer view of regional variations across the territory.
Grace's twin satellites map gravity at the Earth's surface in unprecedented detail; and it is now possible to tease out from the data that most of the mass is being lost in the southeast, southwest and northwest at low elevations where the air will generally be warmer than at high altitudes.
Professor Barry cautioned that the Grace mission, which has produced valuable data about Antarctica as well as Greenland, has only a further two years to run, and that no replacement is currently scheduled.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
It's getting better and better......
Earth 'heading for 6C' of warming
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Average temperatures across the world are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, according a new analysis.
Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project.
All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations.
The study comes against a backdrop of mixed messages on the chances of a new deal at next month's UN climate summit.
According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add urgency to the political discussions.
"If we want to be staying below 2C then it's true to say we've only got a few years to curb emissions"
Richard Betts, UK Met Office
Earth Watch: What's binding?
"Based on our knowledge of recent trends and the time it takes to change energy infrastructure, I think that the Copenhagen conference next month is our last chance to stabilise at 2C in a smooth and organised way," she told BBC News.
"If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it's not two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it's five or six - that's the path that we are on right now."
Professor Le Quere, who holds posts at the UK's University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, is lead author on the study that is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Rising sinks
The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is a network of scientists in academic institutions around the world.
It uses just about every source of data available, from atmospheric observations to business inventories, to build up a detailed picture of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon sinks, and trends.
Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year.
Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a ramping up in China's economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the global economy dipped towards recession.
Endorsing similar projections from the International Energy Agency, the GCP suggests emissions will fall by about 3% during 2009 before resuming their rise as the recession ends.
Concentrations in the atmosphere also show an upward trend - as monitored at stations such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii - but at a lower rate.
The team believes that carbon sinks - the oceans and plants - are probably absorbing a slightly lower proportion of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions than they were 50 years ago, although researchers admit that uncertainty about the behaviour of sinks remains high.
"In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing world's emissions"
John Finnegan, CSIRO
Industrial emissions have climbed, but those from land use change have remains constant.
As a consequence, the proportion of global emissions coming from deforestation has fallen - about 12% now compared with 20% in the 1990s.
"One implication of this low fraction is that there is only limited scope for rich nations to offset emissions by supporting avoidance of deforestation in tropical countries like Indonesia and Brazil," observed Michael Rapauch from the Australian government research agency CSIRO and co-chair of the GCP.
A mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) is due to be concluded at next month's summit.
Future plans
Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the UK Met Office and an author on the chapter of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report dealing with the effects of a changing atmosphere, suggested the report ought to be of interest to policymakers in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.
"It's an important step towards understanding what we're doing to the world's carbon budget," he said.
However, he questioned the conclusion that society is necessarily on a trajectory leading towards 6C.
The IPCC plots out a number of "scenarios" - visions of how society might develop in terms of the size of the human population, economic growth and energy use - each of which comes with projected ranges of temperature rise.
Although the GCP study suggests society is on one of the high emission (and therefore high temperature rise) pathways, Dr Betts cautioned that it was too soon to discern a long-term trend.
"Year-to-year changes in the global economy have quite an effect, and it's too early to discern longer term, robust changes," he said.
"However, if we continue to let emissions rise without mitigation, there's a strong chance we'll hit 4C and beyond.
"If we want to be staying below 2C then it's true to say we've only got a few years to curb emissions."
These temperature rises - measured against a 19th Century baseline - would be expected to occur around the end of this century or the middle of next century, said Professor Le Quere.
Border controls
One of the most intriguing findings from the study is the difference between the emissions produced directly by a given nation and the emissions generated through production of the goods and services consumed by its citizens.
Emissions from within the UK's borders, for example, fell by 5% between 1992 and 2004, says the GCP analysis.
However, emissions from goods and services consumed in the UK rose by 12% over the same period.
"The developed world has exported to the developing world the emissions it would have produced had it met its growing appetite for consumer goods itself for the last two decades," said CSIRO's John Finnegan.
"In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing world's emissions."
Another of the analyses shows that per-capita emissions across the globe are rising.
On average, each human now consumes goods and services "worth" 1.3 tonnes of carbon - up from 1.1 tonnes in 2000.
The GCP analysis suggests that constraining the global temperature rise to 2C would entail reducing per-capita emissions to 0.3 tonnes by 2050.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Earth 'heading for 6C' of warming
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Average temperatures across the world are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, according a new analysis.
Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project.
All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations.
The study comes against a backdrop of mixed messages on the chances of a new deal at next month's UN climate summit.
According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add urgency to the political discussions.
"If we want to be staying below 2C then it's true to say we've only got a few years to curb emissions"
Richard Betts, UK Met Office
Earth Watch: What's binding?
"Based on our knowledge of recent trends and the time it takes to change energy infrastructure, I think that the Copenhagen conference next month is our last chance to stabilise at 2C in a smooth and organised way," she told BBC News.
"If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it's not two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it's five or six - that's the path that we are on right now."
Professor Le Quere, who holds posts at the UK's University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, is lead author on the study that is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Rising sinks
The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is a network of scientists in academic institutions around the world.
It uses just about every source of data available, from atmospheric observations to business inventories, to build up a detailed picture of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon sinks, and trends.
Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year.
Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a ramping up in China's economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the global economy dipped towards recession.
Endorsing similar projections from the International Energy Agency, the GCP suggests emissions will fall by about 3% during 2009 before resuming their rise as the recession ends.
Concentrations in the atmosphere also show an upward trend - as monitored at stations such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii - but at a lower rate.
The team believes that carbon sinks - the oceans and plants - are probably absorbing a slightly lower proportion of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions than they were 50 years ago, although researchers admit that uncertainty about the behaviour of sinks remains high.
"In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing world's emissions"
John Finnegan, CSIRO
Industrial emissions have climbed, but those from land use change have remains constant.
As a consequence, the proportion of global emissions coming from deforestation has fallen - about 12% now compared with 20% in the 1990s.
"One implication of this low fraction is that there is only limited scope for rich nations to offset emissions by supporting avoidance of deforestation in tropical countries like Indonesia and Brazil," observed Michael Rapauch from the Australian government research agency CSIRO and co-chair of the GCP.
A mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) is due to be concluded at next month's summit.
Future plans
Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the UK Met Office and an author on the chapter of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report dealing with the effects of a changing atmosphere, suggested the report ought to be of interest to policymakers in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.
"It's an important step towards understanding what we're doing to the world's carbon budget," he said.
However, he questioned the conclusion that society is necessarily on a trajectory leading towards 6C.
The IPCC plots out a number of "scenarios" - visions of how society might develop in terms of the size of the human population, economic growth and energy use - each of which comes with projected ranges of temperature rise.
Although the GCP study suggests society is on one of the high emission (and therefore high temperature rise) pathways, Dr Betts cautioned that it was too soon to discern a long-term trend.
"Year-to-year changes in the global economy have quite an effect, and it's too early to discern longer term, robust changes," he said.
"However, if we continue to let emissions rise without mitigation, there's a strong chance we'll hit 4C and beyond.
"If we want to be staying below 2C then it's true to say we've only got a few years to curb emissions."
These temperature rises - measured against a 19th Century baseline - would be expected to occur around the end of this century or the middle of next century, said Professor Le Quere.
Border controls
One of the most intriguing findings from the study is the difference between the emissions produced directly by a given nation and the emissions generated through production of the goods and services consumed by its citizens.
Emissions from within the UK's borders, for example, fell by 5% between 1992 and 2004, says the GCP analysis.
However, emissions from goods and services consumed in the UK rose by 12% over the same period.
"The developed world has exported to the developing world the emissions it would have produced had it met its growing appetite for consumer goods itself for the last two decades," said CSIRO's John Finnegan.
"In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing world's emissions."
Another of the analyses shows that per-capita emissions across the globe are rising.
On average, each human now consumes goods and services "worth" 1.3 tonnes of carbon - up from 1.1 tonnes in 2000.
The GCP analysis suggests that constraining the global temperature rise to 2C would entail reducing per-capita emissions to 0.3 tonnes by 2050.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
lord khram
Contributor
Maybe so.
The area where I came from, Derbyshire in central uk was once a tropical sea, (I can assure you from experience that is certainly not the case with UK seas now) this is evident in the fossils which are present in the limestone there.
Also the area was about at the extent of the glacial activity during the last ice age, hence vast sand and gravel deposits in the south of the region.
I know this relates to a massive time scale, but kind of makes the current temperature fluctuation we are experiencing look like a 'drop in the ocean'.
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