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Warming could spur “evolution explosion”: study
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
Fast-growing weeds have evolved over a few generations to adapt to climate change, which could signal the start of an “evolution explosion” in response to global warming, scientists reported on Monday.
This means that the weeds will likely keep up with any attempts to develop crops that can adapt to global warming, said Arthur Weis, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine.
But some long-lived species — like the venerated California redwood tree, with a life-span of hundreds of years — will not have the capacity to adapt so quickly, because their life cycles are so long, Weis said in a telephone interview.
(8 Jan 2007)
How Richest Fuel Global Warming – but Poorest Suffer Most from It
Philip Thornton, Independent (UK) via Common Dreams
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have caused as much global warning as the typical Kenyan will over the whole of this year, according to a report.
The findings highlight the glaring imbalance between the rich countries that produce most of the pollution and the poor countries that suffer the consequences in the forms of drought, floods, starvation and disease.
The World Development Movement (WDM), a poverty campaign group, has drawn up a “climate calendar” showing the dates when the UK will have emitted as much CO2 gas as other countries will in a year.
Unsurprisingly, the poorest counties such as Chad, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo produce virtually no carbon emissions. Even populous countries such as India will be overtaken in its emissions by the UK in a month’s time. In fact, 164 countries in the world have a smaller carbon footprint than the UK, while just 20, mainly including the major oil producers as well as the US, have a larger one.
(9 Jan 2007)
What Al Gore Hasn’t Told You About Global Warming
David Morris, AlterNet
George Monbiot’s new book Heat picks up where Al Gore left off on global warming, offering real solutions without sugar-coating the large personal sacrifices they will require.
Al Gore is our generation’s Paul Revere. Riding hard through the country, he warns us of the impending arrival of climatic disaster. He’s proven an astonishingly effective messenger. An Inconvenient Truth may receive an Oscar for Best Documentary. Overflow crowds greet his presentations with standing ovations.
Which, come to think of it, is odd. When has someone ever delivered such an ominous message to such tumultuous applause? (Aside from those who insist we are in the end times and the rapture is near.)
In a recent speech to a standing-room-only audience at the New York University School of Law, Gore declared, “We are moving closer to several ‘tipping points’ that could — within as little as 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.” The audience cheered wildly. Presumably audiences are not cheered by the prospect of imminent catastrophe. So what is going on here?
British journalist George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Doubleday, 2006) has a theory.
“We wish our governments to pretend to act,” he writes. “We get the moral satisfaction of saying what we know to be right, without the discomfort of doing it. My fear is that the political parties in most rich nations have already recognized this. They know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets. They know that nobody ever rioted for austerity.”
Austerity? Hold on. Al Gore and the rest of the U.S. environmental movement never utter the word “austerity.” Their word of choice is “opportunity.”
(9 Jan 2007)
