California: Second Line Of Defense Built Against Global Warming

 

AHN Staff

Sacramento, CA (AHN) – California is going beyond the traditional methods taken by states to minimize the effects of climate change such as setting limits on tailpipe emissions and coming up with renewable energy standards.

This is keeping in line with the leadership role California has maintained in climate-change among the American states, bolstered by Los Angeles’ hosting last week of the two-day Global Climate Summit.

Among the extra measures being pushed by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are a proposal from the state Transportation Department to move a 3-mile stretch of Highway 1 in Big Sur, which hugs the ocean, up to 475 feet inland to be ahead of the tidal rise. It also includes a triage among state wildlife officials to decide species to be saved from global warming and a plan by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission to hold an international contest to create designs for edifices that are flood resilient.

The state will ask the National Academy of Sciences to gather an independent panel of experts to come up with a forecast of likely scenarios along the costs through the end of the century and recommend ways to cut damage along the coastal roads, beaches, sewage and water treatment plans, wetlands and marine life to a minimum.

One challenge facing the state, though, is the availability of funds. Nancy Skinner, who was elected recently to the state Assembly, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We’re in a terrible budget crisis, and this will be a big challenge for climate-related programs… Some of these programs (at risk) are very basic. For example, on the table will be very significant cuts to funding for public transit. This will affect greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. We need to expand transit, not cut it.”

A Journey Across the Ground Zero of Global Warming

by Johann Hari | The Huffington Post

This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we – you, me and everyone we know – are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers – gaunt, creased people – were sitting by a stagnant pond. They told me, slowly, what we have done to them.

Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.

The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.

Arita Rani, a 25-year-old, sat looking at the salt water, swaddled in a blue sari and her grief. “We couldn’t drink the water from the river, because it was suddenly full of salt and made us sick,” she said. “So I had to give my children water from this pond. I knew it was a bad idea. People wash in this pond. It’s dirty. So we all got dysentery.” She keeps staring at its surface. “I have had it for 10 years now. You feel weak all the time, and you have terrible stomach pains. You need to run to the toilet 10 times a day. My boy Shupria was seven and he had this for his whole life. He was so weak, and kept getting coughs and fevers. And then one morning…”

Her mother interrupted the trailing silence. “He died,” she said. Now Arita’s surviving three-year-old, Ashik, is sick, too. He is sprawled on his back on the floor. He keeps collapsing; his eyes are watery and distant. His distended stomach feels like a balloon pumped full of water. “Why did this happen?” Arita asked.

It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal power plant, ends here, with this. Bangladesh is a flat, low-lying land made of silt, squeezed in between the melting mountains of the Himalayas and the rising seas of the Bay of Bengal. As the world warms, the sea is swelling – and wiping Bangladesh off the map.

Deep below the ground of Munshigonj and thousands of villages like it, salt water is swelling up. It is this process – called “saline inundation” – that killed their trees and their fields and contaminated their drinking water. Some farmers have shifted from growing rice to farming shrimp – but that employs less than a quarter of the people, and it makes them dependent on a fickle export market. The scientific evidence shows that unless we change now, this salt water will keep rising and rising, until everything here is ocean.

I decided to embark on this trip when, sitting in my air-conditioned flat in London, I noticed a strange and seemingly impossible detail in a scientific report. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – whose predictions have consistently turned out to be underestimates – said that Bangladesh is on course to lose 17 per cent of its land and 30 per cent of its food production by 2050. For America, this would be equivalent to California and New York State drowning, and the entire mid-West turning salty and barren.

Surely this couldn’t be right? How could more than 20 million Bangladeshis be turned into refugees so suddenly and so silently? I dug deeper, hoping it would be disproved – and found that many climatologists think the IPCC is way too optimistic about Bangladesh. I turned to Professor James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose climate calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else’s. He believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up by his satellites today, now, suggests we are facing a 25-metre rise in sea levels this century – which would drown Bangladesh entirely. When I heard this, I knew I had to go, and see.

Read on here.

‘Inconvenient Youth’ Organize to Tackle Global Warming

By TDG Community

Like many people my age, I have become so cynical about Washington D.C. politics. Between all the partisan bickering, stalling and unkept promises, our country’s leaders have become inefficient. Left behind in the wake of this partisan paralysis is a plethora of issues that remain unaddressed, including global warming.

My frustration has only grown deeper as short-sighted slogans like “drill baby drill” have become all the rage in certain political circles. With major economic woes threatening our global economy, climate change and the search for eco-friendly energy alternatives has again taken a backseat.

So, I decided I needed to act. I found a place to turn my frustrations into something positive by joining Inconvenient Youth (ICY), an organization that believes that now is the time to come together to act in the face of climate change. ICY (www.inconvenientyouth.org) is composed of high school and college students seeking to educate and inspire their peers to become agents of change.

The program coordinates youth and young adults from all over the world, arming them with the knowledge, tactics and tools to become environmental activists in their own communities. Members are taught how to give an abridged version of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” presentation with the goal of sharing it with their peers and community members. In today’s Information Age, the world’s youth have the opportunity to communicate, coordinate and organize unlike any generation before them. By taking advantage of these opportunities, my generation can maximize the collective power of youth to generate change.

I know that it is my responsibility to act, and I can only hope that you do, too. While my generation will endure the consequences of global warming more than any generation before us, it is important that everyone act collectively.

We are certainly capable of addressing the problem. What’s missing is not the means, but the political will. Inconvenient Youth hopes that by taking matters into our own hands, we can organize a group that will be loud enough to ultimately influence public opinion, and eventually change environmental policy.

Climate change affects forest

By BRIAN NEARING | Times Union

TUPPER LAKE — What if we looked at the Adirondacks as more than just a 6-million-acre forest? What if we also viewed it as a kind of living factory in the fight against global warming, a mechanism capable of sucking up tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every day?

<!–

–>

Advertisement

In an era increasingly defined by the search for ways to control carbon, how much is the Adirondack region worth to the state, the nation or even the planet? And could that value somehow turn into cash that both protects the forest and supports the people who live there?

Those were among the questions raised at a conference last week on how climate change is altering the Adirondacks. More than 190 people crowded into The Wild Center, a natural history museum devoted to the region, to hear about both challenges and solutions.

“It is easy to get gloomy. Our landscape is at risk,” said Jerry Jenkins, a Washington County botanist who co-authored an Adirondack climate report released by the center and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

“The Adirondacks are warmer and wetter, with longer springs and falls and shorter winters. We have new birds, less snow, different seasons and colors, new diseases,” said Jenkins, who has studied climate change for more than 20 years. “Thus far, these are not threatening. If the climate models are right, the warning signs of larger changes could be very threatening.”

The Adirondacks are the southernmost outpost of a colder boreal climate found in Canada, Jenkins said. It is winter that is receding most rapidly, with average winter temperature rinsing 5 degrees over the past century — more than double the rise in spring and summer temperatures.

Frosts arriving a week later in the fall and departing a week earlier in the spring have added some two weeks to the growing season, said Tom Tucker, whose family has farmed since the 1860s in Gabriels, Franklin County, a hamlet about 20 miles north of Lake Placid.

Even if CO2 emissions are brought down now, global temperatures will rise, up to another 6 degrees by the end of the century because of a lag in climatic systems. A hotter Adirondacks might not be helpful to Tucker’s signature potato crop, which prefers cool temperatures.

Even the best scenario will bring the Adirondacks a climate more akin to the mountains of West Virginia, and lead to severe declines in classic Adirondack trees like hemlock, white pine, sugar maple and white ash, Jenkins said. During the winter, the number of days with snow cover will be cut by a third to a half.

If emissions keep climbing unchecked, temperatures could jump by 8 to 11 degrees — moving the Adirondacks into the temperature zones currently found in the North Carolina mountains, or even the highlands of northern Georgia.

That could leave only the highest Adirondack peaks with traces of snow, ending the region’s tradition of winter sports like skiing, ice climbing, snowshoeing and snowmobiling. Iconic animals like the moose and loon would retreat north, and up to half of Adirondack forest species of trees, plants, animals and insects could gradually disappear.

“We have to do all that we can to limit the change to 6 degrees or less,” Jenkins said.

Read on here.

Climate change, starfish hit Fiji reefs: study

Climate change and a starfish outbreak have shrunk coral reefs near Fiji, forcing locals to change their lifestyle.

A new study, published in Global Change Biology, has found that from 2000-2006 the size of coral reefs around Fiji’s remote Lau Islands contracted by about 50 per cent.

Dr Nick Graham from James Cook University, who took part in the study, says fishing and habitat disturbance are having a big impact.

“The area was disturbed by a crown of thorns starfish outbreak in about 2000 and then, the subsequent year, there was also a coral bleaching event associated with climate change,” Mr Graham said.

“We were pretty shocked at just how severe the impact was.”

He said so-called “bottom up” pressure from habitat changes was reducing the number of small fish, while “top down” pressure, from fishing reduced the availability of larger fish.

The local population has fallen and people have changed their diet.

“Their actual dependence on protein, on fish resources, has reduced,” Mr Graham said.

“The population size on the islands has gone down. They seem to be getting more and more involved with land-based agriculture.

“And the price of tanoa bowls, which they traditionally carve in those islands, has gone up greatly.”

Locals fishing around the five islands surveyed has been cut back by an average of about 40 per cent, he said.

Climate change hurt the reefs because warmer water stressed the coral, causing it to bleach and ultimately die, he said.

Mr Graham said it was uncertain whether the crown of thorns outbreak was a result of climate change, too, although studies had linked outbreaks to increases in nutrients in the water or overfishing of starfish predators.

He said there were lessons to be learned from the study for the management of other reefs, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“We really need to start carefully managing our reefs for both looking after habitat as well as trying to reduce fishing and that really means trying to reduce as many local stresses on the system as you can,” he said.

“Because coral bleaching is caused by global warming, which is a global threat, it quite easy to stand back and say ‘there is nothing we can do then’.

Read on here.