Environment – May 9

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Global Warming: Want to see if your house will be flooded?
ManfromMiddletown, European Tribune
For most people, climate change is an abstract concept.

Reports earlier this year that the Greenland ice cap is losing its ice cap brought a brief frenzy of concern that we had reached a tipping point in which the cataclysmic consequnces of global warming were to be revealed a la Apocolypse to the world. The facts are less dramatic but not much less disturbing. Greendland’s ice cap losing much larger amounts of area during the summer melt.

…But the same rising waters that open the Northwest Passage threaten to inundate heavily populated costal regions throughout the planet. The problem with global issues like the rise in sea levels brought on by global warming is that is often very hard to illustrate how this will impact us personally.

British blog Firetree.net has created a compelling tool to demonstrate how the global issue of global warming can get very personal. As sea levels rise, it might just be your town, your house that descends below the waves. The next time that you think that reducing Carbon footprint will destroy your way of life, consider the alternative, with the wave lapping at your doorstep, and the sad knowledge that home is going to be gone forever as the waters rise.
(5 May 2006)

Climate change drives disease to new territory
Doug Struck, Washington Post
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TORONTO — Valere Rommelaere, 82, survived the D-Day invasion in Normandy, but not a mosquito bite. Six decades after the war, the hardy Saskatchewan farmer was bitten by a bug carrying a disease that has spread from the equator to Canada as temperatures have risen. Within weeks, he died from West Nile virus.

Global warming — with an accompanying rise in floods and droughts — is fueling the spread of epidemics in areas unprepared for the diseases, say many health experts worldwide. Mosquitoes, ticks, mice and other carriers are surviving warmer winters and expanding their range, bringing health threats with them.

Malaria is climbing the mountains to reach populations in higher elevations in Africa and Latin America. Cholera is growing in warmer seas. Dengue fever and Lyme disease are moving north. West Nile virus, never seen on this continent until seven years ago, has infected more than 21,000 people in the United States and Canada and killed more than 800.

The World Health Organization has identified more than 30 new or resurgent diseases in the last three decades, the sort of explosion some experts say has not happened since the Industrial Revolution brought masses of people together in cities.
(5 May 2006)

What cost climate change?
Lisa Stiffler, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
How do you put a price tag on global warming?

That’s the challenge facing a group of Washington scientists, economists, government leaders and business people who met Thursday in SeaTac. They are part of a $200,000 investigation into the economics of curbing the pollution that causes global warming and into how to respond to its effects, including less water for drinking, irrigation and power production, higher sea levels and less snow in the passes.

The news is not all gloomy. Some folks are interested in the changes as a potential moneymaker.

“Climate change is a bottom-line issue,” said Bob Doppelt, a professor at the University of Oregon and the project’s leader. “This is not just about the environment or another generation’s problem…it’s impacting us now. We’d better focus in on that.”
(5 May 2006)

House Resources Chairman Pombo outlines his plans on energy, fisheries (video, transcript)
Brian Stempeck, E&E TV
…During today’s OnPoint, House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) talks about his committee’s agenda in the coming months, including a new push for offshore oil and gas exploration, renewable energy and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Plus, Pombo discusses his effort to reauthorize federal fishing laws under the Magnuson-Stevens Act and defends his bill against criticism that it could delay the recovery of depleted fisheries.
(8 May 2006)
Related: Environmentalists Mobilize Against California Lawmaker. (Washington Post)