This will be a quick roundup of some recent news relevant to climate change. Seems global weirding is making people pay attention - whether they want to or not.
At Marketplace, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was featured in an interview about the ongoing drought and what it is doing to America's food supply. The news is not good. Of note was the last part of the interview:
Hobson: Mr. Secretary, I want to ask you one more question before I let you go. This is -- as you said – the worst drought in decades, the first half of this year, according to the government, was the hottest in 118 years of record keeping across the country, the U.K. just had its wettest June since records began there. Is it the view of the U.S. government that this is climate change?
Vilsack: Well, I’m not an expert on climate change so it probably wouldn’t be appropriate for me to respond specifically to that question. My focus and I think the focus of the USDA and the President, right now is on making sure that we get help to these folks, making sure, for example, that people know that they got to contact their insurance agent, if they have crop insurance, that they may have a damaged crop so that they won’t lose rights under their policy, that’s our focus.
It’s not to trying to figure out, today, what may be causing this or what may be impacting it. We know it is impacting farmers and ranchers. Our hearts go out to their families and these hard working folks. We just want to be able to provide them some help and assistance.
The official administration position on Climate Change appears to be avoiding having an official position.
NPR's All Things Considered had a couple of climate related stories yesterday. A trip along the Arkansas River is a journey into misery.
Drought has set in early and hard across the Midwest, parching the Arkansas River basin. The river trickling out of the mountains is dry before it reaches some of the major agricultural uses downstream. And the drought is torching crops, sapping tourism and threatening supplies of drinking water.
Among the images at the link above is a map showing the extent of drought conditions across the U.S. Forget Red or Blue States and take a look at orange.
Meanwhile, adding iron to the ocean's diet might actually turn out to be one way to address CO2 sequestration - pulling it out of the atmosphere and sending it to the bottom of the ocean. A team of researchers found a patch in the ocean where they could do something pretty close to a controlled experiment.
Figuring out what happened took many years of analysis and calculation. But now, eight years after their experiment, the team has published its results.
They showed that adding iron really can transport substantial amounts of carbon from the surface down to the seafloor. In fact, it did so surprisingly quickly and efficiently — and apparently without harming the ecosystem.
It's too soon to start a crash program - more info is still needed.
New Scientist has more.
Eifex's success is far from a green light for iron fertilisation, though. At most, a global programme could mop up about 1 gigatonne of carbon per year, about a tenth of our current emissions, according to a modelling study by Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California (Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-010-9799-4). "It's too little to be the solution," agrees Smetacek, "but it's too much to ignore."
Fertilised patches create algal food sources but burn through ocean nutrients. This could be a boon to some threads of the food web (see "Iron fertilisation and the whales"), but it could suppress diatom formation elsewhere to the detriment of other marine species.
All those contacted by New Scientist agreed that any tests should be run as a public good, not for profit. Some firms had planned to use iron fertilisation to accrue carbon credits which they could sell on, but in 2008 the London Convention and Protocol - an international treaty - ruled that the practice should not be allowed.
(Note:
Whale poop may once have been a significant factor in getting iron to where plankton can make use of it. Hunting whales to near extinction may have had a bigger impact on the carbon cycle than we realized. Let's hope
this becomes more common.)
Off Greenland, the BBC has news of the latest big iceberg to break off a glacier.
Scientists have raised concerns in recent years about the Greenland ice shelf, saying that it is thinning extensively amid warm temperatures.
No single event of this type can be ascribed to changes in the climate.
But some experts say they are surprised by the extent of the changes to the Petermann Glacier in recent years.
"It is not a collapse but it is certainly a significant event," Eric Rignot from Nasa said in a statement.
Some other observers have gone further. "It's dramatic. It's disturbing," University of Delaware's Andreas Muenchow told the Associated Press.
"We have data for 150 years and we see changes that we have not seen before," Mr Muenchow added.
One of the major justifications of the space program is the way we can now monitor events on a global scale in near real time. It no longer takes months or years to find out big things are happening that we didn't know about because nobody important lives there.
Even Old Man River is feeling the pain. NPR took a look at what's happening as water levels fall on the Mississippi.
SIEGEL: What do you hear about the outlook for the river in the coming week or two?
MESTEMACHER: It's not optimistic. You know, we're seeing a lot of shippers, St. Louis and south, that all of a sudden can't even get the barges, the empty barges into their dock to load because of shallow areas. So we're starting to see more and more shippers that are saying don't even bring us a barge because we can't get it to our dock and we can't load the product in the barge.
We're also seeing that the towing companies, the ones that move the barges from point A to point B, they're being restricted. St. Louis and south, four weeks ago they were moving 42 barges to a tow or somewhere in that area, 42, 45 barges to a tow. Now they're down to 30 barge tows and some of them have already cut back to 25 barge tows. So a towing company that, you know, is getting paid to tow our barges, they've lost a minimum of 40 percent of their revenue. And in some cases, as much as 50 percent of their revenue they've seen disappear because they can't tow as many barges.
One of the common objections to taking action on climate change is "it would cost too much money. We can't afford it." What these people are ignoring is that
it is already costing us money - and the bill will only go higher the longer we delay. As it is, we will be facing massive economic disruption from the effects that are already locked in. The economic case for doing nothing is insupportable.
If you want a summary of of just how bad things are starting to look, Bill McKibben at Rolling Stone has the numbers.
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.
The article is a Must Read. The three numbers are: The First Number: 2° Celsius, The Second Number: 565 Gigatons, and The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons. Anyone who believes purely market based solutions can deal with climate change and what we need to do to have a hope of survival is living in a fool's paradise. What the numbers are telling us is business as usual is going to be fatal.
Read THE WHOLE THING.
The last word can go to the Gray Lady.
Mark Bittman at the NY Times has an editorial on The Endless Summer.
The climate has changed, and the only remaining questions may well be: a) how bad will things get, and b) how long will it be before we wake up to it. The only sane people who don’t see this as a problem are those whose profitability depends on the status quo, people of money and power like Romney (“we don’t know what’s causing climate change”), most of his party, and Rex Tillerson, the Exxon chairman, who called the effects of climate change “manageable.”
SNIP
The time to avoid calamitous effects has likely passed. This doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless, but the longer we wait to curb emissions, the worse and longer-lasting the effects. Climate Central’s projections show that the biggest cities in Florida, and a great deal of the Northeast coastline (including New York City), will be underwater by 2100, when almost everyone now alive will have “managed” to leave the scene. Of course, the calamities won’t be limited to North America, nor is 2100 some magical expiration date; the end isn’t in sight.
11:16 AM PT: Update: be sure to check Bill McKibbens diary currently on the rec list.
2:30 PM PT: Just a couple of minor tweaks. Enjoy - and stay cool if you can.