Grim outlook for poor countries in climate report

David Adam, Peter Walker and Alison Benjamin

Guardian Unlimited

Tuesday September 18 2007

The Arctic is again highlighted as being among areas most at risk. Photograph: Corbis

The effects of climate change will be felt sooner than scientists realised and the world must learn to live with the effects, experts said today.

Professor Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought.

He said vulnerable people such as the old and poor would be the worst affected, and that world leaders had not yet accepted their countries would have to adapt to the likely consequences.

The professor was speaking in London at a meeting to launch the full report on the impacts of global warming by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report – which had its executive summary released earlier this year – says hundreds of millions of people in developing nations will face natural disasters, water shortages and hunger due to the effects of climate change.

Today Professor Parry, co-chair of the IPCC working group that wrote the report, said: “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us.”

He said the international response to the problem had failed to grasp that serious consequences such as reduced crop yields and coastal flooding were now inevitable. “Mitigation has got all the attention but we cannot mitigate out of this problem. We now have a choice between a future with a damaged world or a severely damaged world.”

Countries such as Britain need to focus on helping nations in the developing world cope with the predicted impacts, by helping them to introduce irrigation and water management technology, drought resistant crops and new building techniques.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said: “Wheat production in India is already in decline, for no other reason than climate change.”

The report says that “extreme weather events” are likely to become more intense and more frequent, while higher global temperatures could affect crops and water supplies and spread disease.

The effect on ecosystems could be equally severe, with up to 30% of plant and animal species at risk of extinction if the average rise in global temperatures exceeds 1.5-2.5C.

The 1,000-page document is part of the IPCC’s fourth overall assessment of climate change, to be published in full later this year. It was put together by the so-called Working Group II, which examines global warming’s impact on the environment and people.

The experts involved warn that the consequences of rising temperatures are already being felt on every continent, and sooner than expected. It is “probably too late” to avoid some impacts in developing countries because about 1C of warming is already in the climate system, they warn. If it is not kept below 2C – which “currently looks very unlikely to be achieved” – up to 3.2 billion people will face water shortages and up to 600 million will face hunger, they have predicted.

The trade and development minister, Gareth Thomas, told the launch of the report at the Royal Geographical Society: “Failing to tackle it [climate change] will lead to floods, droughts and natural disasters which can destroy poor people’s lives as well as their livelihoods.”

Professor Parry said today that he was pessimistic about the chances of keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 2C. “And it’s evident from the work of the IPCC that even with a maximum of 2C we’re not going to avoid some major impacts at the regional level.”

In February the report of the IPCC’s first working group, which looks at the scientific background of climate change, concluded that global warming was “very likely” – a probability of 90% or greater – to have been caused by human activity.

A report in May by the IPCC’s Working Group III, which examines how climate change can be addressed, argued that devastating global warming can be avoided without excessive economic cost but only if the world begins acting immediately.

Today’s report concludes that while the impact of a warmer globe will have mixed effects – for example, it notes that crop yields could increase in northern Europe – the overall impact will be deeply negative, particularly in Africa, in the so-called “mega-deltas” of south and east Asia, and on small islands and in polar regions.

By 2020, the report warns, up to 250 million Africans may be left short of water, while access to sufficient food is “projected to be severely compromised by climate variability and change”.

“New studies confirm that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate variability and change because of multiple stresses and low adaptive capacity,” says the document.

From: The Guardian.

Move to identify climate change security hotspots

David Adam, environment correspondent

The Guardian

Tuesday September 11 2007

The Ministry of Defence has asked climate change experts to identify regions of the world where global warming could spark conflict and security threats.

The Met Office will today announce a £12m research contract with the MoD as part of an effort to map the likely impacts of increased temperatures. The research aims to identify countries where battles could break out over increasingly scarce supplies of food and water, as well as predict the likely conditions in which British troops may have to fight in future.

Roy Anderson, the MoD’s chief scientific adviser, said: “The MoD has identified climate change as a key strategic factor affecting societal stresses and the responses of communities and nations to those stresses. We have a pressing need for the best available advice on future climate change and, based on these predictions, assessments of the impacts of those changes on human societies at the regional and local scale.”

The MoD project is part of a wider programme of research at the Met Office which marks a change in emphasis from whether climate change is occurring to what the likely impacts will be and what society should do about them. The environment department, Defra, has pledged £74m to help scientists provide more detailed forecasts of how UK weather is likely to shift over the coming decades.

Computer models suggest the Middle East will get much drier and hotter this century. By 2100, rainfall is predicted to decrease by 30% across Turkey, Lebanon, northern Syria, western Iran and Afghanistan. The number of days with temperatures classed as dangerously hot for soldiers to operate in is projected to increase from about 10 a year today to as many as 130 a year by the end of the century.

The MoD move marks a growing awareness in recent months that global warming could exacerbate existing conflicts across the world and trigger new flashpoints.

The environmentalist James Lovelock, who believes climate change will claim billions of lives this century, has talked of countries fighting over newly fertile farmland created in a warmer Siberia. And a report for the US government warned in March that the US must prepare to intervene in a growing number of crises across the world brought on by climate change, such as water shortages, collapses in civil order and “the implosion of one or more major cities”.

Unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions and the expected temperature rise over the coming decades could provoke social unrest in vulnerable places from Delhi and Mexico City to Lima, said the report, by Global Business Network, a consultancy group in San Francisco.

It said action may be needed soon to “forestall the worst effects of collapsing ecosystems, water systems, or radical restructuring of the global insurance industry” and warned that US policies on global warming could threaten its strategic interests abroad and weaken its bargaining power on issues such as trade and security.

Britain put climate change on the agenda at a meeting of the UN security council for the first time in April, despite protests from countries including China and the US.

When bivalves ruled the world

Paleobiologist studies how elevated

C02 affected ancient marine life

 

Before the worst mass extinction of life in Earth’s history – 252 million years ago – ocean life was diverse and clam-like organisms called brachiopods dominated. After the calamity, when little else existed, a different kind of clam-like organism, called a bivalve, took over.

What can the separate fates of these two invertebrates tell scientists about surviving an extinction event”

A lot, says UWM paleoecologist Margaret Fraiser. Her research into this particular issue not only answers the question; it also supports a relatively new theory for the cause of the massive extinctions that occurred as the Permian period ended and the Triassic period began: toxic oceans created by too much atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02).

The theory is important because it could help scientists predict what would happen in the oceans during a modern “C02 event.” And it could give them an idea of what recovery time would be.

Studying the recovering ecology is equally significant, says Fraiser. The evolution of surviving species in the aftermath of the mass extinction set the stage for dinosaurs to evolve later in the Triassic.

From air to water Fossil records suggest that trauma in the oceans actually began in the air.

“Estimates of the C02 in the atmosphere then were between six and 10 times greater than they are today,” says Fraiser, an assistant professor of geosciences. It makes sense, she says. The largest continuous volcanic eruption on Earth – known as the “Siberian Traps” – had been pumping out C02 for about a million years prior to the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.

The time scale shows the expanse of time between the Permian-Triassic mass extinction and the less severe mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Click here for more information.

The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out 70 percent of life on land and close to 95 percent in the ocean – nearly everything except for bivalves and a fewer number of gastropods (snails).

C02 is a greenhouse gas that influences global temperatures. But, says Fraiser, according to the fossil record, high levels of C02 and the correspondingly low levels of oxygen do much more than that.

The hypothesis unfolds like this: High C02 levels would have increased temperatures, resulting in global warming on a large scale. With no cold water at the poles, ocean circulation would have stagnated. The oceans would have become low in oxygen, killing off life in deeper waters where there was no opportunity for water to mix with the little oxygen in the atmosphere.

More carbon dioxide would have been created as life forms died and microbes broke them down, which also would have created poisonous hydrogen sulfide. The oceans would have become an inhabitable chemical cocktail.

Follow the CO2 In fact, there have been many CO2 events in geologic time, and they’ve literally left their mark.

“You can see where the rock turned dark,” says Fraiser, pointing out different-colored layers in a fossil samples from the period. “That is an indicator of low oxygen at the time. These are from sites that were underwater at the beginning of the Triassic period.”

Fraiser, who has just finished her first year at UWM, is one of several new faculty in geosciences and its emerging paleobiology program.

She has collected fossil samples of the marine survivors from the period in what today are China, Japan, Italy and the western United States. The similarities of the fossils from all these locations have been surprising.

“It is unexpected to see that,” says Fraiser. “It appears that these bivalves and gastropods were the only survivors worldwide.”

They had all the right characteristics to tolerate the lack of oxygen, she says. They were tiny, shallow-water dwellers, with a high metabolism and flat shape that allowed them to spread out to extract more of the limited oxygen when feeding.

Toxic conditions also inhibited marine life from producing a shell. Size suddenly mattered for mollusks, and only the very small survived, eroding the balance of the marine food chain.

Ultra-slow rebound As she sorts through the rock record from just after the Permian-Triassic extinction, Fraiser also has unearthed evidence that explains why it took so long for life to recover. The answer appears to be more of the same: C02 levels remained high long after the initial die-off.

“After other extinction events on Earth, life bounced back within 100,000 to a million years,” she says. “But with the Permian-Triassic extinction, we don’t see a recovery for 5 million years. There is very low ecological complexity and diversity for all of that time.”

Another intriguing aspect of this interval in Earth’s history, says Fraiser, is that, according to the rock record from the Triassic, it was bounded by two C02 events.

The first was the disappearance of coral reefs. “That gap sounded the alarm,” she says. “That’s what indicated that C02 levels were elevated.”

On the back end, large communities of bivalves prevailed in such large numbers that they formed their own reefs.

Fraiser’s charting of the C02 “domino effect” on Early Triassic marine life is valuable as scientists study climate change today, says UWM Geology Professor John Isbell.

“The Earth’s system doesn’t care where the C02 comes from,” Isbell says. “It’s going to respond the same way.”

From Site: http://www.eurekalert.org/

 

Time Atlas to reflect enviromental disasters

• 16:43 03 September 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Catherine Brahic

 

 

See a gallery of images depicting the changing planet.

Climate change and unregulated irrigation projects are becoming major drivers for redrawing maps, say the cartographers of a renowned atlas.

“We can literally see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes,” says Mick Ashworth, the editor-in-chief of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. “We have a real fear that, in the near future, famous geographical features will disappear forever.”

The latest edition of the atlas is published on 3 September, four years after the previous version.

The atlas’s cartographers have had to make changes to their maps because of environmental changes in the past, but “there were even more of these cases in this edition,” says Jethro Lennox, publishing editor. “Rather than just one or two, you have half a dozen major examples of how human activities are causing changes in our maps.”

Features that have changed over the past few decades include:

• the Aral Sea in Central Asia has shrunk by 75% since 1967 mostly because of uncontrolled irrigation

• Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk by 95% since 1963 because of a combination of failing monsoons and human overexploitation

• the Dead Sea is 25 metres lower than it was 50 years ago – like the Aral Sea, the shrinking is largely due to uncontrolled irrigation

Marsh expansion

One feature that has changed for the better is the outline of the Mesopotamian marshlands. More than 90% of the area was destroyed in the 1990s by the diversion of water for agricultural irrigation and deliberate draining ordered by Saddam Hussein in retaliation for the Marsh Arabs’ uprising after the first Gulf War.

But since the end of Hussein’s regime in 2003, Marsh Arabs have returned to the area and are successfully restoring the marshlands. “Now we are having to make them bigger again,” Lennox told New Scientist.

For future editions, the cartographers are preparing for imminent changes. Shishmaref is an Inupiat village built on the permafrost of Alaska. It lies on a narrow island along the Bering Strait, where the melting of the permafrost and rising sea-levels threaten the very land it stands on.

As a result, some scientists believe that the 4000-year-old settlement is likely to become the first US community to have to move due to a warming climate.

Lennox says that he and his team are keeping an eye on the community in anticipation that they may have to change their future maps of the area.

Climate Change – Want to know more about global warming: the science, impacts and political debate? Visit our continually updated special report.

Source: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12580-times-atlas-to-reflect-environmental-disasters.html

Climate warning raises long-term flood fears

Plans to protect Britain do not heed the risk of rising river levels caused by global warming, a study finds

• Steven Morris and Alok Jha
• The Guardian
• Thursday August 30 2007

Scientists have urged the government to consider the full impact of global warming when drawing up plans to protect Britain from flooding. A study from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre predicts that river levels will rise higher than anticipated because existing computer models do not take into account the effects of climate change on plant life.

In a warmer world, say scientists, less water will be drawn up by plants, causing greater flows into rivers like the Thames and the Severn, which burst their banks last month bringing chaos to large parts of England.

The study results, published today in the journal Nature, show that, if carbon dioxide emissions go unchecked, climate change and its effect on plants will have increased river flow by 13% in Europe over the course of 300 years.

“Current impact assessments will need to be reworked,” said Richard Betts, the climate scientist who led the research.

The study comes weeks after floods swept through several areas of the UK. Although the water has receded, thousands of people are homeless or living in the dirty shells of their houses.

“It’s been terrible,” said Mr Jasper, a 50-year-old decorator from Gloucester. “The insurance company has been hopeless. We’ve been living in horrible conditions while we wait for them to tell us what’s happening. It’s affecting my health and my partner is off work because of stress.” Finally this week a surveyor gave him the go-ahead to start hacking away at his walls. “At this rate it will be next Christmas, never mind this, before we are right,” Mr Jasper said.

Next door is empty. It is the home of 89-year-old Gladys Davies, now living with her daughter, Eunice Mann. It is not clear when, or if, she will be able to move back in. Like many of the most vulnerable people caught in the floods she did not have insurance. “We haven’t dared bring her back here. I don’t think she could bear to see what’s happened,” said Mrs Mann.

The death of one elderly woman in the street has already been blamed on the shock of returning to a wrecked house.

Figures seen by the Guardian show the scale of the problem as Gloucestershire and Worcestershire try to recover from the biggest floods on record. Gloucestershire county council estimates it will have a bill of between £50m-£55m. Fixing up damaged roads, footpaths and bridges will cost £25m alone, an entire year’s budget for the highways. Almost £3m will be spent on repairs to 53 schools in the area.

Private companies have also taken a hit from which many will not recover. The flooding directly affected 500 businesses and another 15,000 suffered after their water supply was turned off for a week.

There have been visits by ministers to the county but the perception is that little money is coming through. So far, £2.5m has been made available for district councils to pay for recovery from the floods and £600,000 has been handed over for schools. But the council has yet to meet the Department for Transport over the massive highways bill, and fears some roads that were seriously damaged will stay shut for the foreseeable future.

In Hull, where more than 7,000 homes were flooded and a man died in a storm drain, the council is also counting the cost of the rains, which could be as high as £200m. An interim report says the city’s drainage system was overwhelmed by the water because its flood protection plans were based on such heavy rainfall arriving only one year in every 30.

The study also highlighted problems arising from various bodies, including the Environment Agency, and councils and water companies, being responsible for different parts of the drainage system. That difficulty is likely to be replicated elsewhere. The report also urged the Environment Agency to find out whether its flood warning systems could be expanded to cover flash rainfall.

The picture in Worcestershire is also bleak and there are fears that the county’s flood bill could be in the region of £5m- £10m – a big chunk of the £15m it holds in its reserves.

Tourism has taken a huge hit in Worcestershire with two sporting attractions, Worcester Racecourse and the New Road county cricket ground, out of action for the season. The breaking news on the cricket club’s website yesterday was that grass had been seen at the site.

In the Malvern hills town of Upton upon Severn, which was cut off during the floods, riverside pubs are stricken and shopkeepers along the high street report poor business. “It has been a ghost town in these last weeks,” said Kate Harding, landlady of Ye Olde Anchor Inn, who defiantly handed out glasses of pink champagne on the first Sunday of the floods.

The village of Sandhurst, which stands on the banks of the Severn in Gloucestershire, was one of the most isolated areas during the floods, accessible only by boat or aircraft. Now, however, life is beginning to return to normal.

At Abloads Court, a mainly 17th century farmhouse, three ponies were this week grazing in the paddock. They achieved worldwide fame after the Guardian pictured them living in the Sandhurst house during the floods. Their owner, Dawn Melvin said: “The horses loved the boot room. They spent five days in there. When we moved back into the house we left the door open so they could still get back in when they wanted.”

Her neighbours, Sandra Wickenden and Dave Munn, are living in a caravan in their own garden. Will they move out? “No, that’s definitely not on the agenda,” said Mr Munn. “If it floods, it floods. You have to accept it and get on. We’re staying.”