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West Africa’s coastline redrawn by climate change: experts
Aminu Abubakar, AFP
Rising sea levels caused by climate change will brutally redraw a 4,000-kilometre (2500-mile) stretch of west African coastline from Senegal to Cameroon by century’s end, experts were told AFP Friday.
“The cost of Guinea will cease to exist by the end of this century,” said Stefan Cramer, a marine geologist and head of German green group Heinrich Boll Stiftung’s operations in Nigeria.
“The countries most threatened by this looming environmental disaster are Gambia, Nigeria, Burkina Fasso and Ghana,” he told AFP on the sidelines of a major UN climate conference in the Ghanaian capital Accra.
Cramer said sea levels were set to rise up to two centimetres (0.8 inches) per year, enough to devastate large swathes of fragile coastline, especially in low-lying and densely populated deltas.
(22 August 2008)
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Report: climate shift could profoundly alter Md. shore
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post
Climate change could profoundly alter Maryland in the next century, swallowing 200 square miles of low-lying land, making heat waves more deadly, and allowing Southern species to colonize its woodlands and the Chesapeake Bay, according to a new state report.
The “Climate Action Plan,” released today by the state’s Commission on Climate Change, says that “Maryland is poised in a very precarious position” if temperatures continue to warm. It says the state is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise, because of its long, winding coastline.
(27 August 2008)
New Mexico: Feel the heat
Laura Paskus, Santa Fe Reporter
Behind the headlines, scientists warn that climate change is already hitting New Mexico
… “A lot of people are concerned about sea level rise in coastal areas, which is obviously a very serious and legitimate concern, but I think that the kinds of problems we’re projecting here in New Mexico, in some ways are worse-and they are going to hit us faster,” Jim Norton, director of the Environment Protection Division within the New Mexico Environment Department, says.
Norton points to scientists’ projections that the southwestern United States will experience longer droughts. Longer droughts, combined with hotter temperatures, will cause greater evaporation-from soils and reservoirs-so the effects of the droughts will also be more severe. “You can argue,” he says, “that we’re going to get hit harder and faster than the coastal areas that get so much attention.”
Hotter temperatures are already occurring in New Mexico, he says, and scientists have been predicting the likelihood of more extreme weather events. “Well, we’ve certainly seen that here in New Mexico in the last five years: droughts and floods,” Norton says, adding that scientists warning of climate change have indeed been correct. “It’s not anymore just a future worry,” he says, “It’s an issue that’s right here in front of us.”
Indeed, the effects of climate change are already visible in New Mexico: One need look no further than Santa Fe or the nearby Sangre de Cristo or Jemez Mountains to see evidence of a massive dieoff of piñon trees.
Between 2002 and 2004, millions of acres of piñon trees in the Four Corners region died. The trees, already weakened by severe drought, fell prey to an explosion in the population of bark beetles, encouraged by the warmer temperatures.
(27 August 2008)
