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Carbon dioxide levels ‘off the chart’
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
The amount of two key greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere rose sharply in 2007, and carbon dioxide levels this year are literally off the chart, the U.S. government reported on Wednesday.
In its annual index of greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found atmospheric carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global climate change, rose by 0.6 percent, or 19 billion tonnes last year.
The amount of methane increased by 0.5 percent, or 27 million tonnes, after nearly a decade of little or no change, according preliminary figures …
(23 April 2008)
Climate change ‘may put world at war’
Charles Clover, UK Telegraph
Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned.
The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in research spending, comparable to the amount spent on the Apollo space programme, will be needed if the world is to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.
A dried-up reservoir: Climate change ‘may put world at war’
Governments should be preparing for the worst
However the group said the world’s response to the threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been “slow and inadequate,” because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
“We’re preparing for a car bomb, not for 9/11,” said Nick Mabey, author of the report which comes after Lord Stern, who compiled an economic assessment of climate change for the Government, said last week that he had underestimated the possible economic consequences.
(23 April 2008)
Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping
Matthew Power, Wired
That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world’s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze – all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.
Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they’re quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest’s half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.
(21 April 2008)
