Researchers say the soils and sediments of the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin are able to store carbon for thousands of years, a fact they warn could portend increased rates of carbon dioxide emissions as such vulnerable regions are exposed to the effects of climate change.

Using radiocarbon dating, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) found that organic carbon can remain for 500 to 17,000 years, despite extraordinarily high rates of physical erosion and sediment transport within the basin that drains the Himalayas.

Downstream, within the Gangetic floodplain, the carbon resides from 1,500 to 3,500 years. The longer the carbon remains within the soil, the longer it is kept out of the atmosphere, said Valier Galy, a WHOI researcher and one of the authors of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

But as rising temperatures destabilize soils and “ancient” carbon stored within the Ganges basin and elsewhere in the world, this could lead to more carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere, further hastening warming.

In another new study, researchers at Rice University suggest that a massive release of methane from under the Arctic seafloor could have triggered a major climate shift 56 million years ago.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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If you are planning to move in the near future, you might want to consider not just the economic, cultural and civic advantages of your new choice, but the likelihood that it will be affected by some of the changes predicted by global warming.

Though let’s call it climate change, since that is what it really is. Not an overall warming of the globe, but isolated areas of warming or cooling, drought or increasing rainfall, and sudden sharp temperature and pressure fluctuations like the inland hurricane that swept the eastern half of the U.S. continent from Canada to North Carolina in late October.

According to UCLA economist Matthew Kahn, the changes won’t actually destroy Earth, but they will change it, significantly in some cases. And what humanity needs to do is learn to adapt. Think cities under the sand in desert climates, and houses on stilts in areas with increasingly heavy rainfall. Or imagine cereal crops (corn, wheat, rice) engineered to tolerate drought, or cloned to be perennial, thus eliminating tilling the soil (which can worsen erosion in drought conditions).

According to Kahn, urban sprawl is the primary cause of climate change. Yet, as climate changes and humans are forced to adapt, changing patterns of settlement, architectural styles, consumer culture, even urban infrastructures like drinking water, will ameliorate some of the problems.

But not without losing some notable metropolitan areas. In San Diego, California, for example (or Phoenix, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas), the influx of sunbirds that transformed each of those cities into a megalopolis will turn the paradigm on its head when summer temperatures are 13 degrees higher, drinking water runs short, and electricity to run air conditioners becomes prohibitively expensive.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. Detroit, ravaged by the recession and bereft of its auto industry, is turning into a city of vegetable gardens. In fact, one entrepreneur wants to turn it into a giant vegetable garden, so that even as new industry (largely renewable energy) emerges, the state will become a “green” spot in several senses.

In fact, when climate change drives up temperatures in the southern U.S., Detroit might become the new worker’s paradise; clean, green, cool and wet.

Meanwhile, areas like New York, coastal Alabama, Delaware, and Maryland – already perilously close to sea level – face the prospect of flooding along settled coastlines and hurricane storm surges that move ever farther inland as oceans rise, destroying more and more property and forcing people to higher ground.

The same will happen in Manhattan, Kahn says. This “island”, the financial center of New York (and the nation), is already dipping its toes in the Atlantic with a high point of 265 feet. Toward mid-century, firms will likely begin to move their operations to higher ground, possibly in Newark or even Passaic.

Kahn’s predictions are made more germane by a new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where drought specialist Aiguo Dai used computers to model a much drier U.S. as the 21^st Century moves forward.

If correct, the models indicate that the entire continent, with the exception of patches along its northern border and the Pacific Coast, will become parched, with the worst areas, surprisingly, occurring in the heartland (also known as the Grain Belt) from Indiana north into Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan, Canada, which are also preeminent grain-growing regions.

People will suffer. Bread will be more expensive. Food may have to be grown and eaten locally. As Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Earth Observatory noted recently, climate change is not just about temperature, but water. And water is an integral factor in energy.

Those who suffer most, however, will be mute. Humans can move at will, and have the technical capacity to adapt to their environment ad hoc. Plants and animals, which can’t speak for themselves or protest their fate, are able to adapt only over multiple generations. As a result, some (and perhaps many) species will be lost, and even using tools like NatureServe’s Climate Change Vulnerability Index may not enable us to pinpoint the most vulnerable before they are history.

Article by Jeanne Roberts, appearing courtesy Celsias.

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Often when going to the beach the common complaint is that the ocean is too cold. They appear to be warming up a bit. The upper layer of Earth’s ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal, according to a new international study co-authored by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The energy stored is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet.

“We are seeing the global ocean store more heat than it gives off,” said John Lyman, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, who led the study that analyzed nine different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008.

The team combined the estimates to assess the size and certainty of growing heat storage in the ocean. Their findings will be published in the May 20 edition of the journal Nature. The scientists are from NASA, NOAA, the Met Office Hadley Center in the United Kingdom, the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan.

“The ocean is the biggest reservoir for heat in the climate system,” said Willis. “So as the planet warms, we’re finding that 80 to 90 percent of the increased heat ends up in the ocean.”

A warming ocean is a direct cause of global sea level rise, since seawater expands and takes up more space as it heats up. The scientists say that this expansion accounts for about one-third to one-half of global sea level rise.

Combining multiple estimates of heat in the upper ocean — from the surface to about 610 meters (2,000 feet) down — the team found a strong multi-year warming trend throughout the world’s ocean. According to measurements by an array of autonomous free floating ocean floats called Argo, as well as by earlier devices called expendable bathythermographs, or XBTs, that were dropped from ships to obtain temperature data, ocean heat content has increased over the last 16 years.

The team notes that there are still some uncertainties and some biases.

Most people, when hearing or reading about a warm up of the world ocean, would naturally ask:  How much?  But to scientists who study phenomena like this, the problem is more complex. While they use ocean temperature readings taken from around the globe to conduct their studies on ocean warming, these scientists are interested in learning about the heat content of the world ocean’s enormous mass of water. Heat content is a measure of the heat energy imparted to a body such as a continent or the ocean. Scientists measure heat content in energy units known as joules.

Beginning in the 1970s, scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, started computing the annual cycle of ocean heat content. From the outset, scientists in the climate modeling community showed significant interest in the results of this work as a way to validate their general circulation models of ocean atmosphere interactions.

Article by Andy Soos appearing courtesy ENN

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As the world warms, how different societies fare in dealing with rising seas and changing weather patterns will have as much to do with political, social, and economic factors as with a changing climate.

Following the disastrous tsunami of December 2004, the government of Bangladesh embraced upgraded storm-alert systems that warn communities in a coordinated way and improved social support networks, resulting in a drastic reduction in typhoon deaths. In neighboring Myanmar, by contrast, deaths from natural disasters have risen in recent years. Indeed, the deaths that occurred there last year in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis cannot be separated from the fact that Myanmar has an authoritarian regime that prevents international assistance from reaching those in need, rendering its citizens unable to cope with extreme weather disasters – events that are expected to become more frequent with climate change.

The stark contrast between Bangladesh and Myanmar, both likely facing serious threats from rising sea levels and more intense typhoons as the world warms, is a striking example of a key measure of how different parts of the world are going to cope with climate change in the coming century: whether societies are “climate-fit” or “climate-weak.” In fact, how different societies fare as temperatures rise will have as much to do with political, social, technological, and economic factors as with a changing climate.

That global warming will exact a human toll is undisputed, but the extent of its predicted impacts is uncertain. So how can we best identify those most at risk? Applying Darwinian principles, climate change, like any other assault on our species, is about survival of the fittest. We need to recognize what makes a community “climate-fit,” and how to improve fitness in “climate-weak” populations.

If people feel they have control over their situation, they begin to work out solutions.”

Geography is important, of course — climate-fit people live in areas less vulnerable to sea level rise, for example. But it is only one factor, and the strength of a society – its resilience, ingenuity, and flexibility, as well as its governance — will have a great deal to do with how it fares in the face of climate change. People who live in countries that are well-governed, and who belong to communities that are more self-reliant and exist within the sustainable limits of the available resources, are plainly going to be better able to weather the impacts of climate change.

In Gujarat, India, for example, I have visited drought-stricken villages, separated by less than 1 kilometer, whose approach to severe water shortages made the difference between abundance and dependence. In one village, residents have collected and stored monsoon rains for the dry season, built barriers to slow monsoon rains so they penetrate the water table and wells, and created an effective irrigation system. They harvest three bountiful crops per year. The neighboring village has not taken such steps, and it manages just one poor harvest and is reliant on government water tankers to provide drinking water for seven months of the year.

I have seen neighboring islands in the Maldives, where on one, houses have been abandoned and even washed away because of erosion exacerbated by sea-level rise, while on the other, coral and mangrove conservation have kept all the homes secure.

Where people take responsibility for their destiny, they are far more likely to employ sound practices, like traditional water management strategies. “If people feel they have control over their situation, they begin to work out practical solutions to the problem,” says Tom Crompton, of WWF, who studies the psychology of climate change. “But, as studies in Norway during glacier melt have shown, when people feel they are impotent to do anything, they employ emotional management strategies like denial, which help no one.”

Flexibility is also an important measure of climate fitness, whether it is the emotional flexibility that prepares people to make long migrations from their soon-to-be-flooded homes in the Bay of Bengal, or the flexibility that allows a Bangladeshi rice farmer to convert to shrimp farming to deal with increased salinity from rising seas.

Populations that are ‘climate-fit’ can become ‘climate-weak’ because of poor government.

Effective governance is obviously crucial to a society’s climate fitness. This includes removing the barriers that prevent people and communities from improving their lives, as well as inequalities of caste, ethnicity, religion, or tribes. The chaos of war, violence, or the complete breakdown of government — as seen in Nepal, Afghanistan, or the resource-rich Indian state of Bihar — can leave populations climate-weakened.

Populations that also are reasonably climate-fit can become climate-weak because of the poor decisions of their governments. A case in point is Laos. Climate models for the region predict a greater variability in the monsoon patterns over the coming decades in this Southeast Asian nation, which is ranked as one of the world’s least developed countries. In May, the United Nations set up a special task force to look at climate adaptation in Laos, aimed at readying the population for drought and flooding scenarios.

By any measure, villagers I met in my recent journey across Laos were poor and backward. Despite that, however, the Laotian people’s degree of self-sufficiency is so high that — for now — they are among the most climate-fit societies in the world.

Roughly 80 percent of the Laotian people are subsistence farmers and fishermen, supplementing their cultivated harvest from the natural resources that remain extraordinarily abundant in this sliver of land between Vietnam, China, Thailand, and Cambodia. Villagers collect everything from construction materials to food, including insects, herbs, fruit, nuts, and mushrooms from the forests. The Mekong and its many tributaries provide the fish that make up 80 percent of the dietary protein of the 6.3 million Lao, as well as water and a social meeting place for these strong, supportive communities.

If the people were to continue living as they currently do, then Laotians would be in a good position to cope with the impacts of climate change. But the climate fitness of the Laotian people is being threatened by their own government, which is busy selling off the country’s resources, including timber concessions and a planned series of large hydropower dams that threaten fish populations and the ability of Laotians to feed themselves, and thereby raise their vulnerability to climate change.

Good governance is not necessarily a characteristic of a Western model. “Vietnam used to have a very robust method of dealing with typhoons and hurricanes, but this all fell apart when they embraced capitalism,” says Saleem Huq, director of the climate change program at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “Generally, though, democratic countries are more robust because there is a means of challenging the powers and holding them to account. You don’t get famines in a democracy.”

The global community has a duty to confront the uncomfortable socio-political aspect of climate vulnerability.

Going hand-in-hand with good leadership is smart development policy. Indian states such as Gujarat, which are starting to wean farmers off unsustainable agriculture and into new industries, are improving the people’s climate fitness, as are policies in Kothapally in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where scientists are helping villagers to grow semi-arid crops, such as millet, in place of rice. Poor development policy, however well intended, can also weaken climate fitness. This includes government subsidies for unsustainable agriculture that promote thirsty crops, such as rice, or provide unrealistically cheap electricity for groundwater pumps.

Sound environmental guardianship is perhaps one of the most important traits of governments and societies that hope to improve their ability to deal with climate change. Countries such as Costa Rica, where the environment is preserved as an important part of the tourism economy, are more climate-fit than places like Indonesia, China or Madagascar, where the government allows or sponsors environmental degradation, such as widespread deforestation.

Another key component of climate fitness is the equality and empowerment of women and minority groups. Natalie Curtis, a senior press spokesman at Oxfam, said that sea level rise and an increase in extreme weather events in Bangladesh has been a “double-edged sword.” The impacts have been “horrific”, she said, but they have led to the creation of councils of women in every village “who are leading the efforts for community survival.”

Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans was also a stark example of climate weakness, as social inequality – and poor governance – led to tens of thousands of the city’s poorest residents being stranded for days.

As the atmosphere and oceans warm this century — leading, in all likelihood, to an increase in extreme weather events, sea level rise, drought, and greater political conflict — suffering and climate-related deaths need not be a fait accompli. The global community has a duty to confront the uncomfortable socio-political aspect of climate vulnerability in order to help climate-weak people tool up to climate fitness. And, importantly, to prevent climate-fit people, like the villagers in Laos, from becoming climate-weak. But it will require strong local action, good governance, and well-planned climate adaptation programs in the poor countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where the climate-weak live — and the most deaths are likely to occur.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

Photo by courtesy of Great Images in NASA.

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Is the world warming, cooling or does it matter? Most of us will say it matters, a lot, at least in public anyway. And especially if you are hoping to pay rent or retire one day with a career based around the belief that Amsterdam, New York and Dubai will no longer exist unless we cut greenhouse gases and stop the icecaps from melting. But what has happened now that the earth cooled over the past year? Not to mention former NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson’s claim last year that now that she is “no longer affiliated with any organization nor receive any funding” that she can publicly say that she “remains skeptical.” Recently the name was changed from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ – what is really going on? Or does it matter?

This blog, by the way, is not about proving or disproving global warming, global cooling, or that the earth’s warming and cooling cycles over the past 6 ice ages really were the fault of mankind. This is about the fact that it does not matter what is happening with temperatures but that reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and energy use and creating renewable energy makes complete sense even without climate change political debates.

Republican, democrat, socialist or communist, the following 3 ideas for cutting greenhouse gases without relevance to climate change are hard to argue, but if you can I welcome you to comment below:

1. Releasing black substances that cause cancer into the air in which we breath is not healthy. As if it weren’t obvious enough, the EPA finds greenhouse gases pose a danger to health. That’s for any skeptics out there that think that ‘the solution to pollution is dilution’ and that puffing on a tailpipe is good for your skin. No reference to climate change here.
2. It costs money to put these black cancerous gases into the atmosphere. It is our extreme use of carbon based fuels, oil and coal, for transportation and electricity that our money is going to instead of being used for health care, education, infrastructure and your dividend payout. Who can argue that energy efficient policy and using energy efficient products, therefore, reduces the amount of these black gases that enter the atmosphere while basically paying you to do it. More legitimate reasons with no reference to climate change.
3. Politically and financially we cannot afford to continue to use finite sources of fossil based fuels, that create greenhouse gases, to power our lives. Some believe it is the left’s fear factors that say the earth is running out of oil to push their agenda. Even if true, definitely not the whole picture by any means. Briefly, China and India’s population and need for energy is skyrocketing while oil discovery is steadily declining (left). Therefore the most simple supply/demand curve from your first economics class will explain what that means for our future cost of energy. Renewable energy that does not create pollution nor depend on other nation’s economies and that does not put gases into the air solves more than one problem without the mention of climate change.

Simple enough? So depending on your argument there is a way to curb climate change for some, put money in the pockets of others and finally if neither of those are your flavor, how about not breathing poisonous gases? By using common sense and not trying to pinpoint who is right and wrong, we can appease the masses in one way or another by decreasing energy use and turning to renewable sources of energy. If you are able to think of it, what is a way to argue climate change that does not touch on the topics of health, immediate financial benefits or protecting us from the future cost of energy?

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