With every new day, we've been hearing alarming new reports of the emerging devastation caused by Global Warming. In perfect timing, the dire warnings advanced by Al Gore's new movie "An Inconvenient Truth" are receiving support from numerous scientific reports. Today, Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor of the Independent, write that
Widening tropics 'will drive deserts into Europe:'
Alarming new satellite evidence of the effects of global warming comes as forecasters predict more severe hurricanes
The world's tropical zones are growing, threatening to drive the world's great deserts into southern Europe and other heavily populated areas, alarming new research suggests. The study -- based on satellite measurements over the past quarter of a century -- shows that the tropics have widened by 140 miles since 1979. Scientists suspect that global warming is to blame.
Up to now the most startling evidence that the world is heating up has come from the poles where ice sheets have disintegrated, sea ice shrunk, and glaciers started racing towards the sea. But new research published in the journal Science suggests that equally dramatic changes are under way in the hottest parts of the planet.
Global Warming Is Here! And It's "A Big Deal"
The days when we could warn people of the dire consequences of global warming in the distant future are over. It's happening here and now. And although, no one can be sure how fast if will worsen, or our bad it will get, we can already see consequences so disastrous as to be mind boggling in their implications for humankind.
"It's a big deal," says Professor Thomas Reicher of the University of Utah, one of the authors of the study. "The movement has taken place over both hemispheres, indicating that the tropics have been widening. This may be a totally new aspect of climate change."
Professor Reicher and colleagues at the University of Washington and Lanzhou University in China found that the giant jet streams 30,000-50,000 feet up in the atmosphere have shifted towards the poles, in the first direct satellite evidence that global warming is affecting the worldwide circulation of air.
The research found that the air currents have moved about one degree latitude - equivalent to 70 miles - towards the North and South Poles, making a total widening of 140 miles.
"The jet streams mark the edge of the tropics. So, if they are moving poleward, that means that the tropics are getting wider," says Professor John Wallace, of the University of Washington.
Expanding Desertification To Europe And Previous Temperate Zones
In a development that will impact agriculture and current land use patterns, the historic areas of great deserts will move north.
The famous lines on the atlas marking the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn will remain at 23.5 degrees north and south, because these mark the limits of where the sun is directly overhead at some point during the year - the official measurement of the tropics. But the study suggests that they will become irrelevant as boundaries of the tropical climatic zones.
It shows that the areas just outside the tropics, at around 30 degrees north and south - running through China, North India, the Middle East, North Africa, Florida and the US Gulf Coast, and through Australia, Southern Africa and Argentina - are warming particularly fast.
The zones immediately outside the tropics are often very dry - containing many of the world's great deserts - and these are also expected to move towards the poles as part of the tropical shift.
The scientists believe that this may explain the recent droughts in southern Europe and the south-western United States. They say that if the process continues it could move the deserts into heavily populated areas, with devastating results.
They are unable to prove that the shift is being caused by global warming, though they believe it is a likely explanation; another possible factor is the depletion of the world's ozone layer.
Many do not realize how much immobile capital investment and agriculteral infrastructure can not simply be sent north to Canada as the wheat belt move north. Family traditions of farming avocations, knowledge, and other infrastructure can not simply be picked up an moved. And even if they could, another negative finding reported elsewere in other research is that atmospheric disruption is going to lead to greater viariability in weather patterns.
This implies that the return on investment to our currently highly capital intensive forms of agriculture will drop, most likely meaning a return to more labor intensive farming. Over the last 500 years the percentage of the population of "modern societies" has dropped from 90% to less than 2% (I need to double check this statistic. I'm sure its less than 5% in the US as of the 1970s (last time I checked LOL) )
But, this trend may soon reverse itself as the struggle to avoid starvation becomes more common even in first world countries.
Rising Ocean Tempters Imply More Severe Hurricanes.
Even the Republicans are now showing signs of acceptance of the accumulating evidence that rising sea temperatures will lead to both increasing numbers and severity of hurricanes. Although, a direct link between rising atmospheric temperatures and ocean temperatures is still unproven, is seems increasingly likely.
But the evidence that global warming is causing more severe hurricanes grew stronger last week as the annual season for them opened.
Forecasters are predicting another torrid year with some 16 named tropical storms, 10 of them hurricanes. Four are expected to hit the United States. There is estimated to be a one in three chance that New Orleans will be hit again, and insurers as far north as New York are reluctant to provide cover for the storm damage.
Two new studies last week confirmed research which indicated that rising sea temperatures, caused by global warming, are increasing the strength of hurricanes. On Wednesday Jeb Bush - the Governor of Florida and the brother of the President - met some of the scientists who had conducted the research, saying that he found their information "compelling".
Conclusion and Next Steps
Al Gore has been speaking about this for years and his move, "An Inconvenient Truth" has opened this week to highly favorable reviews. I am hoping to see it this weekend. But have already read so many endorsements that I would strongly recommend it just for the intellectual content even it weren't also described as being highly entertaining.
My hope is that Al Gore will run for president in 2008, even if only to bring more attention to these critical environmental and global crises that go well beyond just global warming. The implications for global food production, lost living space, wider spread of tropically diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, displacement of agricultural capital and infrastructure and disruption of our economies and quality of life are just a few of the sad implications.
Please learn as much as you can about this. And also please join and support our excellent environmental action groups such as World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the many others that have been trying to catalyze more action in these areas.
And please help us together as many Action Steps with Action Links as we can think of in the comments. We can still make a tremendous difference in how we react to these tragic changes. And we can still apparently have a big impact on how much worse it will get. But we are going to have to make significant changes in our lifestyles. For example, we are going to have to dramatically reduce the amount fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, that we burn because they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The United States is the leading emitter of such gases to support the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. Some of our progressive allies from around the war are starting to liken our conspicuous and excessive use of SUVs to make non-vital trips as the moral equivalent of war crimes. I am not to the point, yet, and I know it seems shrill. However, we all must do a great deal more thinking and reduction of excess or non-vital CO2 emission if we are to have any hope of turning this around.
And countries, such as China which is rapidly increasing CO2 emissions as they develop their economies challenge our moral right to tell them they should not enjoy the same lifestyles as we have now. What is our moral right or credibility to do so? These are just examples of some of the deeper moral questions we all need to engage in much more global discussion about.
Exercising Moral Courage By Going To The Movies
I can think of no better way to start, than to encourage as many as possible to go out to the movies this we and watch "And Inconvenient Truth." Let's face it. When is the last time you could tell you friends and family that you are exercising you "moral duty" by going out for a fun movie? LOL
"-)
Woof, woof!
Link To An Inconvenient Truth Information
This link
A Crisis Looms
Pledge to See The Truth!
Greenpeace International Website
Sierra Club Website
Roger Ebert gives an impassioned and unequivocal review of the Al Gore global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which opens in select theaters this weekend. He writes: "You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to." Two thumbs way the hell up.
World Wildlife Fund