Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletinhomepage
Scientists map CO2 emissions with Google Earth
Agence France Presse (AFP) via Yahoo!News
A team of US scientists led by Purdue University unveiled an interactive Google Earth map on Thursday showing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the United States.
The high-resolution map, available at purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/GEarth, shows carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons in residential and commercial areas by state, county or per capita.
… “This will bring emissions information into everyone’s living room as a recognizable, accessible online experience,” said Kevin Gurney, the project leader and an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue.
(19 February 2009)
Climate change to cause dark night of the shoal (fish to migrate)
AFP, ABC News (Australia)
Climate change will cause key species of fish to migrate towards the poles, badly depleting many commercial fisheries, scientists say.
“The impact of climate change on marine biodiversity and fisheries is going to be huge,” said study lead author William Cheung, of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, eastern England.
The research team used a high-powered computer model, based on knowledge of 1,066 species of fish, their habitat and climate change, to predict what might happen by 2050 according to three scenarios for global warming.
Warmer water will lead to “large-scale redistribution” of these species, with most of them moving towards the poles, shifting on average by more than 40 kilometres per decade, they said.
Arctic Norway will benefit from an increased catch, but in sub-polar regions, the tropics and semi-enclosed seas, “climate change may lead to numerous local extinction,” hitting developing countries most of all, the paper warned.
(13 February 2009)
What Does Economic “Recovery” Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
It turns out that you don’t want to be a former city dweller in rural parts of southernmost Australia, a stalk of wheat in China or Iraq, a soybean in Argentina, an almond or grape in northern California, a cow in Texas, or almost anything in parts of east Africa right now. Let me explain.
As anyone who has turned on the prime-time TV news these last weeks knows, southeastern Australia has been burning up. It’s already dry climate has been growing ever hotter. “The great drying,” Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery calls it. At its epicenter, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever this month at a sweltering 115.5 degrees, while temperatures soared even higher in the surrounding countryside. After more than a decade of drought, followed by the lowest rainfall on record, the eucalyptus forests are now burning. To be exact, they are now pouring vast quantities of stored carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas considered largely responsible for global warming, into the atmosphere.
In fact, everything’s been burning there. Huge sheets of flame, possibly aided and abetted by arsonists, tore through whole towns.
… Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.
Meanwhile, central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain. All of this represents a potential financial catastrophe for Chinese farmers at a moment when about 20 million migrant workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in the global economic meltdown.
… Recently, climatologist David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, published a study in Science magazine on the effect of extreme heat on crops. They concluded, based on recent climate models and a study of past extreme heat waves, that there was “a 90% chance that, by the end of the century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006.” According to the British Guardian, under such circumstances Battisti and Naylor believe “[h]alf of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers’ crops… Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics.”
Not surprisingly, it’s hard to imagine — perhaps I mean swallow — such an extreme world, and so most of us, the mainstream media included, don’t bother to. That means certain potentially burning questions go not just unanswered but unasked.
(17 February 2009)
Andean glaciers ‘could disappear’: World Bank
Agence France Press
Andean glaciers and the region’s permanently snow-covered peaks could disappear in 20 years if no measures are taken to tackle climate change, the World Bank warned Tuesday.
A World Bank-published report said rising temperatures due to global warming could also have a dramatic impact on water management in the Andean region, with serious knock-on effects for agriculture and energy generation.
(17 February 2009)
