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Global warming must stay below 2C or world faces ruin, scientists declare (video and text)
Mark Henderson, UK TImes
World carbon emissions must start to decline in only six years if humanity is to stand a chance of preventing dangerous global warming, a group of 20 Nobel prize-winning scientists, economists and writers declared today.
The United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December must agree to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 to stop temperatures from increasing by more than 2C (3.6F), the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium concluded.
While even a 2C temperature rise will have adverse consequences, a bigger increase would create “unmanageable climate risks”, according to the St James’s Palace memorandum, signed today by 20 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economics, peace and literature.
(28 May 2009)
Census of Marine Life brings hope of revival to the seas
Frank Pope, UK Times
Three hundred years ago the view from the cliffs of Cornwall would have been very different. Rather than today’s lonely fishing trawlers, the scene was dominated by the glistening bulk of blue whales. Huge schools of harbour porpoise chased shoals of fish so thick they darkened the water, while common dolphins filled the inland waters. Eighteen-foot orca menaced the mammals, while schools of blue sharks harassed fishermen who ventured out to dip their nets.
The vision may seem like the stuff of legend, but by delving into ship’s logs, ancient manuscripts, tax records, legal documents and even the devoted labours of monks living in Russia’s frozen north, an international team of researchers — part of the ten-year Census of Marine Life — has revealed the teeming abundance of life that once filled the seas not just off Britain but around the world. “We hope to be able to use this data to reverse the trend that we’ve been seeing,” Poul Holm, global chairman of the History of Marine Animal Population project, told The Times. “Lots of fish management is done using only 25-30 years of data. Using the timescales gives a much more realistic picture.”
The project’s findings reveal not only how much has been lost, but how far the sea can be expected to rebound, if given a chance.
… Size as well as abundance has been affected. Using records of trophy catches in Key West, Florida, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that between 1956 and 2007 the average weight of fish fell from about 20kg to 2.3kg and that their average length shrank from nearly 2m to 35cm.
“The worst part of these ‘shifting environmental baselines’ is that we have come to accept the degraded condition of the sea as normal,” Callum Roberts, author of The Unnatural History of the Sea, said.
(25 May 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav at Peak Energy (Australia).
Agency says climate change amplifying animal disease
Agence France-Presse via Grist
Climate change is widening viral disease among farm animals, expanding the spread of some microbes that are also a known risk to humans, the world’s top agency for animal health said on Monday.
The World Animal Health Organization—known as OIE, an acronym of its name in French—said a survey of 126 of its member-states found 71 percent were “extremely concerned” about the expected impact of climate change on animal disease.
Fifty-eight percent said they had already identified at least one disease that was new to their territory or had returned to their territory, and that they associated with climate change.
(25 May 2009)
Recommended by Toban.
Adaptation Emerges As Key Part Of Any Climate Change Plan
Bruce Stutz, Yale Environment 360
Adaptation Emerges As Key Part Of Any Climate Change Plan
After years of reluctance, scientists and governments are now looking to adaptation measures as critical for confronting the consequences of climate change. And increasingly, plans are being developed to deal with rising seas, water shortages, spreading diseases, and other realities of a warming world.
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Adaptation. For many in the climate change community, the word has had a traitorous ring, implying that its proponents were giving up on the notion that the world might mitigate the threat of global warming by significantly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Adaptation was for quitters.
Not anymore.
With nations in the industrialized and developing worlds continuing to pump record levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, hopes are fading that over the next half-century atmospheric CO2 levels can be kept below 450 parts per million (ppm) and global warming held to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). Now, a new sense of urgency has arisen as to how the world will adapt to a warming planet, where carbon dioxide levels could hit 600 parts per million and global temperatures could rise by 3 to 4 degrees C (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F).
“My view is that we’ll be lucky if we can stop CO2 at 600 ppm,” says Wallace Broecker, a geoscientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “There’s no way we’re going to stop at 450. Impossible. If we’re going to double CO2, we’d better prepare what we’re going to do about it.”
If Broecker and many of his fellow climate scientists are right, the planet will experience myriad far-reaching changes to which humans, plants and animals will need to adapt: higher sea levels, the melting of glaciers that have long supplied hundreds of millions of people with water, drought-stressed agriculture, more severe storms, spreading disease, and reduced biodiversity.
Bruce Stutz writes on science, nature, and the environment. A former editor-in-chief of Natural History, he is a contributing editor to OnEarth. He has written for the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, Discover and Audubon. He is the author of Natural Lives, Modern Times and Chasing Spring, An American Journey Through a Changing Season. In a recent articles for Yale Environment 360, Stutz wrote about how planners are trying to tackle sprawl in Europe and how researchers have been discovering species at a record pace.
(26 May 2009)
