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The Coming Meltdown
Bill McKibben, NY Review of Books
Long review of:
Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains
by Mark Bowen
Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots
by Alanna Mitchell
… Climate change somehow seems unable to emerge on the world stage for what it really is: the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we haven’t even begun to deal with. The coverage of Katrina’s aftermath, for instance, was scathing in depicting the Bush administration’s incompetence and cronyism; but the President —and his predecessors—were spared criticism for their far bigger sin of omission, the failure to do anything at all to stanch the flood of carbon that America, above all other nations, pours into the atmosphere and that is the prime cause of the great heating now underway. Though Bush has been egregious in his ignorance about climate change, the failure to do anything about it has been bipartisan; Bill Clinton and Al Gore were grandly rhetorical about the issue, but nonetheless presided over a 13 percent increase in America’s carbon emissions.
That lack of preparation and precaution dwarfs even the failure to prepare for the September 11 attacks, and its effects will be with us far longer. It’s not, of course, that America could in two decades have prevented global warming. But we could have begun taking the steps to keep it from spinning entirely out of control, steps that grow ever more difficult to take with each passing season. The books under review, though neither deals directly with the politics of global warming, help us understand some of the reasons why we’ve so far done so little.
…It is hard not to approach this year’s oncoming winter in an elegiac mood, with the testimony of Thompson’s ice cores and the Arctic sea ice data and Ehrlich’s account making the season’s natural and lovely darkness seem suddenly somber. We are forced to face the fact that a century’s carelessness is now melting away the world’s storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It’s as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color, or eradicating one note from every octave. There are almost no words for such a change: it’s no wonder that scientists have to struggle to get across the enormity of what is happening.
(12 January 2006 edition)
China’s pollution and the threat to domestic and regional stability
Nathan Nankivell, Japan Focus
China’s environment is edging closer to a condition of crisis with each passing day. Pollution and environmental degradation have already left scars and will continue to create problems as the situation worsens. While it may be possible for China to mitigate the impact of environmental damage through coordinated policies, effective spending, and sound future planning, Beijing is unable or unwilling to prescribe such measures. As an undeniable fact on the ground, it is imperative for prudent policymakers to consider the geostrategic implications of not just a superpower, but of an environmentally-ravaged China as well.
There is little disagreement that China’s environment is a mounting problem for Beijing. The country produces as many sulphur emissions as Tokyo and Los Angeles combined but with only a fraction of the vehicles; China is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities; water pollution affects as much as 70 percent of the country; air pollution is blamed for the premature death of some 400,000 Chinese annually; crop returns are steadily decreasing in quantity and quality because of polluted land and water; and solid waste production is expected to more than double over the next decade, pushing China far ahead of the U.S. as the largest producer (The Economist, August 19, 2004).
(3 January 2006)
Also republished at Znet.
Frog killer is linked to global warming
Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times
Scientists studying a fast-dwindling genus of colorful harlequin frogs on misty mountainsides in Central and South America are reporting today that global warming is combining with a spreading fungus to kill off many species.
The researchers implicate global warming, as opposed to local variations in temperature or other conditions. Their conclusion is based on their finding that patterns of fungus outbreaks and extinctions in widely dispersed patches of habitat were synchronized in a way that could not be explained by chance.
If the analysis holds up, it will be the first to link recent climate changes to the spread of a fungus lethal to frogs and salamanders and their kin. The chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has devastated amphibian communities in many parts of the world over the last several decades.
But experts on amphibian disease and ecology are divided over the finding, which is being published today in the journal Nature.
(12 January 2006)
Related articles:
Why Are These Frogs Croaking? (TIME magazine)
Climate change linked to extinction of frogs (Sunday Independent)
Study Finds Direct Link Between Global Warming and Extinctions (Voice of America)
The lungs of the planet are belching methane
Zeeya Merali, New Scientist
IT’S not just farting cows and belching sheep that spew out methane. Living plants have been disgorging millions of tonnes of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year – without anybody noticing.
The concentration of methane in the atmosphere has almost tripled since pre-industrial times. Environmental scientists thought they had identified all natural sources where bacteria convert organic plant matter to methane, such as swamps, wetlands and rice paddies. These bacteria only thrive in wet, oxygen-poor environments; they cannot survive in air.
So Frank Keppler, an environmental engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, was surprised when he saw signs of methane being emitted by plants he was examining in normal air. “If we were following the textbook, we would have ignored it as a mistake,” he says.
But Keppler and his colleagues decided to investigate further. They measured the amount of methane given off by plant debris – bits of grass and leaves from local and tropical plants – in methane-free chambers. To rule out the possibility that bacteria were at work, they bombarded the plants with gamma radiation to sterilise them.
The team saw similar levels of methane produced by both sterilised and un-sterilised leaves. “We realised that we were looking at a previously unrecognised process,” Keppler says. They still don’t know exactly what is happening, but believe that pectin, a substance contained in plant cell walls, plays a part in the methane-making mechanism (Nature, vol 439, p 187).
(12 January 2006)
Global warming to speed up as carbon levels show sharp rise
Geoffrey Lean, Independent (UK) via Common Dreams
Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Preliminary figures, exclusively obtained by The Independent on Sunday, show that levels of the gas – the main cause of climate change – have risen abruptly in the past four years. Scientists fear that warming is entering a new phase, and may accelerate further.
But a summit of the most polluting countries, convened by the Bush administration, last week refused to set targets for reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. Set up in competition to the Kyoto Protocol, the summit, held in Sydney and attended by Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea as well as the United States, instead pledged to develop cleaner technologies – which some experts believe will not arrive in time.
The climb in carbon dioxide content showed up in readings from the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken at the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The measurements have been taken regularly since 1958 in the 11,400ft peak’s pristine conditions, 2,000 miles from the nearest landmass and protected by unusual climatic conditions from the pollution of Hawaii, two miles below.
(15 January 2006)
