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Looking ahead to a post-global warming life in California, 60 years hence
Glen Martin, SF Chronicle
The following extrapolation presents a worst-case scenario of California’s water situation in the coming decades, but not necessarily an unlikely one. It is based on a variety of sources, including interviews and conversations over the past several years with scientists and government agency staffers…
It is a sign of the flexibility of the human spirit that a certain nostalgia has begun to pervade our memories of the Great Thirst. With it immured safely 30 years in the past, we can afford such revisionism. Today, in 2062, we delight in recalling the heroic incidents it kindled, the ingenious responses to catastrophe, the shared privations. Now that we have squeezed through the bottleneck with our institutions more or less intact, we can savor the simple and glorious fact that we endured.
But as we bask in the alpenglow of our memories, we must acknowledge that the forces that almost destroyed California are still in play globally; that other people are still grappling with the crises we have weathered. They still have to get though the bottleneck.
True, we Californians have established the standard for societal response to catastrophic water shortages and supply disruption. But we had an essential advantage: We were Californians. Our state was — and is — one of the world’s great repositories of wealth, technology and talent. We had everything going for us, and we still barely squeaked through.
Nor can we claim that we emerged unscathed. Our society has changed, and not necessarily for the better. Our lives are tightly regulated now, in ways our antecedents would not have tolerated. Key components of the old economy have disappeared. The environmental disruption of the past five decades has been extreme, and much of the damage is irreparable. There are far more of us living on much less. Basic services and resources that were once considered an unalienable birthright are now privileges: Only the very wealthy have swimming pools or lawns.
(7 Jan 2007)
Surge in carbon levels raises fears of runaway warming
David Adam, Guardian
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than scientists expected, raising fears that humankind may have less time to tackle climate change than previously thought.
New figures from dozens of measuring stations across the world reveal that concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, rose at record levels during 2006 – the fourth year in the last five to show a sharp increase. Experts are puzzled because the spike, which follows decades of more modest annual rises, does not appear to match the pattern of steady increases in human emissions.
At its most far reaching, the finding could indicate that global temperatures are making forests, soils and oceans less able to absorb carbon dioxide – a shift that would make it harder to tackle global warming. Such a shift would worsen even the gloomy predictions of the Stern Review which warned that we had little over a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
UPDATE (by author David Adam)
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has now told us that the story below is based on preliminary data for December, which it should not have published. It has withdrawn the data pending further analysis. As a result, the provisional annual growth rate for 2006 displayed on the Noaa website now does not include December, which means it is now lower than the 2.6ppm we reported. Pieter Tans, the scientist in charge of the data, said: “It doesn’t affect the trend, there is definitely something there. CO2 growth in 2006 was still higher than average and four of the last five years have been higher than average.”
(19 Jan 2007)Contributor SP writes: “Another worrying sign that change might be occurring just a bit faster than anticipated?”
Landmark UN Study Backs Climate Theory
Peter Gorrie, Toronto Star via Common Dreams
A major new United Nations report shows global scientists are more convinced than ever that human activity is causing climate change, the Toronto Star has learned.
The rate of warming between now and 2030 is likely to be twice that of the previous century, it says.
And it concludes that most of the global warming since the middle of the last century has been caused by man-made greenhouse gases.
The report, to be released in Paris Feb. 2, should all but end any debate on climate change and compel governments and industries to take urgent measures to deal with it, scientists say.
(19 Jan 2007)
New Warnings on Climate Change
Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times
The main international scientific body assessing causes of climate change is closing in on its strongest statement yet linking emissions from burning fossil fuels to rising global temperatures, according to scientists involved in the process.
In fresh drafts of a summary of its next report, the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that it is more than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way.
…In its last report, published in 2001, the panel concluded that there was a 66 to 90 percent chance that human activities were driving the most recent warming.
The shift in language in the current draft, while subtle, is substantive. If it remains in the final version, scheduled for release in Paris on Feb. 2, it will largely complete a quest that lasted decades to determine if humans are nudging the earth’s thermostat in potentially momentous ways.
…Snippets of earlier drafts have leaked to some newspapers in recent months and some sections of the latest draft were first published in The Toronto Star yesterday.
Scientists involved in writing the report said the leaks were damaging and potentially misleading, mainly because the final statements are likely to go through further changes.
(20 Jan 2007)
