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Swiss glacier retreats at a rapid clip
Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor
Hohfluh Lookout, Switzerland – Viewed from atop this lookout in the Riederalp area northeast of Geneva, the Aletsch Glacier curves through a 2,000-meter- (1.2-mile) high valley like a massive freeway of packed ice – 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) long, 900 meters deep. The Aletsch is the largest glacier in the Alps. If melted, it would provide a liter of water a day for every inhabitant of Earth for six years.
When Europeans or scientists at the recent global Live Earth program want a quick data point for global warming, the Aletsch provides an example – even if not as dramatic a one as the melt flows in Greenland or Antarctica.
“I call it the retreat of the glacier,” says Laudo Albrecht, a local director of Pronatura, an environmental group with 100,000 members in Switzerland.
The problem is not simply that the Aletsch is melting, scientists say. Glaciers have melted for 2,500 years in Europe; at one ice-age point, the Aletsch nearly covered local mountain peaks. What concerns scientists is the pace of the melt.
“Yes, it should retreat, but not so fast. The glacier is in rapid retreat, which is a fact and a clear sign of climate change,” Mr. Albrecht says.
(17 July 2007)
Climate change threatens Italy’s Po River delta
AFP
Major changes in water use will be necessary in northern Italy’s economically strategic Po River basin because of climate change, the daily Repubblica Tuesday quoted experts as saying.
Rising sea levels, reduced rainfall and lack of snow in the Alps will combine over the next few decades to render the last 100 kilometers (60 miles) of the river useless because of saltwater intrusion, the experts predicted at a meeting in Parma on Monday.
About one-third of Italy’s food production depends on freshwater from the Po River basin, according to Coldiretti, Italy’s main farmers organisation.
Some 73 percent of the 2.5 billion cubic metres of water drawn each year from the Po is used for irrigation in a pattern that experts say is not sustainable.
Farmers will have to use more efficient irrigation techniques and drastically cut back on water-thirsty crops such as rice, corn and kiwi.
(17 July 2007)
Gulf dead zone to be biggest ever
BBC
This year could see the biggest “dead zone” since records began form in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Scientists say conditions are right for the zone to exceed last summer’s 6,662 sq miles (17,255 sq km).
The dead zone is an area of water virtually devoid of oxygen which cannot support marine life.
It is caused by nutrients such as fertilisers flowing into the Gulf, stimulating the growth of algae which absorbs the available oxygen.
The volume of nutrients flowing down rivers such as the Mississippi into the Gulf has tripled over the last 50 years.
(18 July 2007)
China says climate change drying up major rivers
Reuters
Chinese scientists have warned that rising temperatures are draining wetlands at the head of the country’s two longest rivers, choking their flow and imperiling water supplies to hundreds of millions of people.
The warning occurs as millions of people along central China’s flood-ravaged Huai river, a major tributary of the Yangtze river, are bracing for more heavy rains this week.
Aerial photos and satellite images had shown wetlands on the frigid Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which feed the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, had shrunk more than 10 percent over the past four decades, the China Daily said on Monday, citing the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a key government think-tank.
“The wetlands at the origin of the Yangtze have suffered the most, contracting by 29 percent,” the paper said.
Wang Xugen, a CAS researcher, said the wetlands played a key role in regulating the flow of the rivers, which provide water for hundreds of millions of people and nearly half the country’s farmland.
(16 July 2007)
Unexamined evidence in the debate on global warming
Marcus Karr, Gold And Mean (blog)
I would like to make clear that I am not here making the argument that global warming is a hoax, or that CO2 emissions have no appreciable impact on climate change. Rather I am pointing to the fact that there exist advanced, operational capabilities to modify the atmosphere; that the United States military has expressed its desire to ‘own the weather’ – and that in light of the above, it would be imprudent not to investigate just what the scope, power, and application of such capabilities are.
Therefore I am openly inviting researchers of all stripes – independent journalists and members of the established scientific community alike – to delve into this virgin territory and discover both for themselves and the public, the actual effects of atmospheric weapons on the environment.
…Certain advanced nations have been purposefully tampering with the atmosphere for some time now. Half a century ago their method of choice was the use of atomic weapons (4), but since then their arsenal has grown in sophistication to include the ‘injection of chemical vapors and heating or charging via electromagnetic radiation or particle beams’. In a 1996 US Air Force review of the subject, it was emphasized that ‘many techniques to modify the upper atmosphere have been successfully demonstrated experimentally’ (5).
…Finally I would like to pose some obvious questions, which I am not qualified to answer but on which perhaps you may be able to shed some light.
1. What is the effect of an artificial ionosphere on climate and the weather?
2. What is the effect of deliberate chemical releases of barium ‘and more noxious gases’ into the atmosphere, on climate and the weather?
3. What is the effect of ‘electromagnetic radiation and particle beams’, on climate and the weather?
4. Are said effects likely to be negligible – that is, unworthy of study – in the study of climate and the weather?
5. If said effects are in fact not negligible, then why have these factors not been scrutinized or addressed?
(16 July 2007)
I don’t have the background to say anything about this, except to note that it sounds highly unlikely. Contributor Marcus sounds serious though. -BA
