Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’
Geoffrey Lean and Fred Pearce, The Independent via Climater Ark
The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year.
Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.
Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.
The alarming news comes in the midst of a heatwave gripping Britain and much of Europe and the United States. Temperatures in the south of England reached a July record of 36.3C on Tuesday. And it comes hard on the heels of a warning by an international group of experts, led by the Eastern Orthodox “pope” Bartholomew, last week that the forest is rapidly approaching a “tipping point” that would lead to its total destruction.
The research carried out by the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole centre in Santarem on the Amazon river has taken even the scientists conducting it by surprise. When Dr Dan Nepstead started the experiment in 2002 by covering a chunk of rainforest the size of a football pitch with plastic panels to see how it would cope without rain he surrounded it with sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only minor changes.
The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty. In the second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find moisture, but survived. But in year three, they started dying. Beginning with the tallest the trees started to come crashing down, exposing the forest floor to the drying sun.
By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lives, helping to act as a break on global warming. Instead they began accelerating the climate change.
As we report today on pages 28 and 29, the Amazon now appears to be entering its second successive year of drought, raising the possibility that it could start dying next year. The immense forest contains 90 billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to increase the rate of global warming by 50 per cent.
Dr Nepstead expects “mega-fires” rapidly to sweep across the drying jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the rainforest could become desert.
Dr Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world’s top forest ecologists, says the research shows that “the lock has broken” on the Amazon ecosystem. She adds: the Amazon is “headed in a terrible direction”.
(28 July 2006)
Is this really how close we are to the brink? All the stories on climate, even the others on Amazon desertification, hadn’t totally prepared me for the full impact of this one, which is one of the reasons EB hasn’t been updated the last few days. I had been considering climate change as ultimately more important than Peak Oil, but considered Peak Oil a more immediately acute problem. I see now that the latter is sadly not the case. More:
-AF
Forecast puts Earth’s future under a cloud
Alok Jha, The Guardian
More than half of the world’s major forests will be lost if global temperatures rise by an average of 3C or more by the end of the century, it was claimed yesterday. The prediction comes from the most comprehensive analysis yet of the potential effects of human-made global warming.
Extreme floods, forest fires and droughts will also become more common over the next 200 years as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, according to Marko Scholze of Bristol University. Dr Scholze took 52 simulations of the world’s climate over the next century, based on 16 different climate models, grouping the results according to varying amounts of global warming they predicted by 2100: less than 2C on average, 2C-3C and more than 3C.
He then used the simulations to work out how the world’s plants would be affected over the next few hundred years. The results were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(15 Aug 2006)
How’s That Mars Exploration Going? – related links from Daily Grist.
US Suffers World’s First Climate Change Exodus: Study
Jitendra Joshi, Agence France Presse via Common Dreams
The first mass exodus of people fleeing the disastrous effects of climate change is not happening in low-lying Pacific islands but in the world’s richest country, a US study said.
“The first massive movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the Gulf Coast of the United States,” said the Earth Policy Institute, which has warned for years that climate change demands action now.
This 29 August, 2005 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite image shows Hurricane Katrina as it makes landfall. The first mass exodus of people fleeing the disastrous effects of climate change is not happening in low-lying Pacific islands but in the world’s richest country, a US study said.(AFP/NOAA-HO/File)
Institute president Lester Brown said that about a quarter of a million people who fled the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina a year ago must now be classed as “refugees”.
“Interestingly, the country to suffer the most damage from a hurricane is also primarily responsible for global warming,” he said.
The United States is the world’s largest consumer of energy, but has refused to sign up to the Kyoto pact aimed at reducing emissions of gases that scientists say are to blame for heating up the Earth.
Many environmentalists had expected the first big population shift to come somewhere like the Tuamotu islands in French Polynesia, the world’s largest chain of atolls which rise barely metres (feet) from the Pacific.
(17 Aug 2006)
Global Warming & Global Food Supply
Jason Godesky, Anthropik Network
Even Pat Robertson has seen the light on global warming now.1 We’ve long known that global climate change would have a massive effect on the fragile agricultural system we’re so utterly dependent on: our crops are fickle, catastrophe-adapted cereal grains, after all. The droughts and heat waves caused by global warming would lay waste to our grain stores. It seems that is exactly what’s happening now. Global food production was at its highest point in 2004.2 In 2005, bad weather brought stocks down; in 2006, it looks even worse…
Last month, Michael Pilarski published his case for “peak food.” Between global warming (a major, systemic, global stressor) and peak oil (a systemic loss of agriculture’s capacity to respond to stressors), Pilarski builds a case that food production, like oil production, will peak. He points out that after bad weather in 2005, 2004 remains the historic high point of global food production; the global heat waves and droughts of 2006 make it unlikely that we will beat 2004’s record this year, either.9
Of course, as we already know, human population is a function of food supply,10 so what we face here is a classic case of overshoot.11
So, is this really the time that we want to have significant portions of our dwindling food supply diverted to ethanol, even to the point where farmers are giving up one of the few nods to sustainability left in modern, industrialized agriculture—basic crop rotation?
(18 Aug 2006)
