World-News

"The signs during the past 12 months have been all around us. Little winter snow in the Alpine ski resorts, continuing droughts in Africa, mountain glaciers melting faster than at any time in the past 5,000 years, disappearing Arctic sea ice, Greenland's ice sheet sliding into the sea... 2006 will be remembered by climatologists as the year in which the potential scale of global warming came into focus," writes Steve Connor.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122906EA.shtml

by Anatol Lieven
December 28, 2006
by the International Herald Tribune (Paris)

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/28/opinion/edlieven.php?page=2

Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.

For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.

Even the relatively conservative predictions offered by the Stern report, of a drop in annual global gross domestic product of up to 20 percent by the end of this century, imply a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s; and as we know, the effects of that depression were not restricted to economics. In much of Europe, as well as Latin America and Japan, democracies collapsed and were replaced by authoritarian regimes.

As the report makes clear, however, if we continue with "business as usual" when it comes to the emission of greenhouse gases, then we will not have to wait till the end of the century to see disastrous consequences. Long before then, a combination of floods, droughts and famine will have destroyed states in many poorer parts of the earth — as has already occurred in recent decades in Somalia.

If the conservative estimates of the Stern report are correct, then already by 2050 the effects of climate change may be such as to wreck the societies of Pakistan and Bangladesh; and if these states collapse, how can India and other countries possibly insulate themselves?

At that point, not only will today's obsessive concern with terrorism appear insignificant, but all the democratizing efforts of Western states, and of private individuals and bodies like George Soros and his Open Society Institute, will be rendered completely meaningless. So, of course, will every effort directed today toward the reduction of poverty and disease.

And this is only to examine the likely medium-term consequences of climate change. For the further future, the report predicts that if we continue with business as usual, then the rise in average global temperature could well top 5 degrees Celsius. To judge by what we know of the history of the world's climate, this would almost certainly lead to the melting of the polar ice caps, and a rise in sea levels of up to 25 meters.

As pointed out by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth," this would mean the end of many of the world's greatest cities. The resulting human migration could be on such a scale as to bring modern civilization to an end.

If this comes to pass, what will our descendants make of a political and media culture that devotes little attention to this threat when compared with sports, consumer goods, leisure and a threat from terrorism that is puny by comparison? Will they remember us as great paragons of human progress and freedom? They are more likely to spit on our graves.

Underlying Western free-market democracy, and its American form in particular, is the belief that this system is of permanent value to mankind: a "New Order of the Ages," as the motto on the U.S. Great Seal has it. It is not supposed to serve only the short- term and selfish interests of existing Western populations. If our system is indeed no more than that, then it will pass from history even more utterly than Confucian China — and will deserve to do so.

© Copyright 2006 The International Herald Tribune


Informant: binstock



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=An+Inconvenient+Truth

Giant Ice Shelf Breaks Free from Canadian Arctic
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1229-02.htm

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Canada's North changing. Global warming suspected cause of huge breakup on Ellesmere Island

MARGARET MUNRO

CanWest News Service
Thursday, December 28, 2006

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=e4c99314-a71a-4418-a246-eea457e8b873&k=82636

An ancient ice shelf has cracked off northern Ellesmere Island, creating an enormous 66-square-kilometre ice island and leaving a trail of icy blocks in its wake.

"It really is incredible," said Warwick Vincent of Universite Laval, one of the few people to have laid eyes on the scene. "It's like a cruise missile has come down and hit the ice shelf."

The breakup was so powerful, earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors as the 3,000- to 4,500-year-old shelf tore away from its fjord on Ellesmere.

It broke up 16 months ago, but no one was present to see it. The scientists say they are only now making public details after piecing together what occurred using seismic monitors and Canadian and U.S. satellites.

They say the ice shelf collapse, suspected to have been caused by global warming, is the biggest in Canada in 30 years and is indicative of the transformation under way on Ellesmere, Canada's most northern land mass.

"We are seeing incredible changes," said Vincent, whose group is studying the island's disappearing ice shelves and their unique ecosystems. "People talk of endangered animals - well, these are endangered landscape features and we're losing them."

The Ayles ice shelf was one of six ice shelves left in Canada, remnants of a vast icy fringe that used to cover the top end of Ellesmere.

Scientists consider the Canadian shelves, located about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, sentinels that reflect the accelerating change in the Arctic.

In 2002, one of Vincent's graduate students, Derek Mueller, discovered that Ellesmere's Ward Hunt ice shelf had cracked in half. The researchers have also seen the sudden collapse of ice dams and the draining of
30-kilometre-long lakes into the sea.

The shelves are 90 per cent smaller than they were when Arctic explorer Robert Peary crossed them in 1906. And the Ayles ice shelf can be erased from Canada's maps.

"It no longer exists," Vincent said.

Laurie Weir, of the federal Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, was poring over images from the RADARSAT satellite when she noticed the shelf had broken away. She passed the information on to Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the

University of Ottawa, who led the effort to determine what had happened.

It turned out it took less than one hour for the ice shelf to calve off in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005, Copland said. Low frequency "rumbling" and tremors were picked up on earthquake monitors, and Canadian and U.S. satellites captured images of the shelf cracking and breaking away.

"If you were standing right on the edge of the shelf, there'd have been this huge 15-kilometre crack as far as you could see in both directions," Copland said.

"And then the ice drifted off."

Within an hour, the giant ice island was one kilometre offshore. It travelled west about 50 kilometres during the next few weeks and then moved east before freezing into sea ice about 15 kilometres offshore.

Copland has reconstructed what happened with Weir and Mueller, who is now at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

"We have a really good sequence of the ice shelf breaking up and then floating away," Copland said.

Vincent flew out from his base camp on northern Ellesmere by helicopter this year to have a first-hand look at the scene of the collapse.

"There was a huge amount of rubble associated with this breakup," Vincent said, explaining how the fjord is now full of ice blocks, "and then this vast ice shelf floating offshore."

The ice island is about 37 metres thick and measures roughly 15 kilometres by five kilometres. That's the size of a small city, or larger than 11,000 football fields. The island is now stuck in winter ice, but the researchers say it is only a matter of time before it is freed and floats away. They say the ice island could become a potential hazard to navigation and oil and gas extraction if it sails south toward the Beaufort Sea.

But for now, it is a monument to change.

"This is the biggest event since the '80s in terms of ice shelf loss," Copland said. He said two key factors appear to have triggered the breakup - the exceptionally warm temperatures on Ellesmere in summer last year,

3 degrees Celsius above normal, and unusually brisk winds that blew the summer pack ice offshore, exposing the Ayles shelf to waves and open water. Normally, the prevailing winds blow summer pack ice up against Ellesmere's ice shelves, where it acts as a buffer, protecting them from the sea.

The scientists say they can't prove human-induced climate change caused the Ayles shelf to break off, but they suspect global warming might be responsible.

"We can say it is consistent with the larger body of evidence indicating the climate is warming and predictions that the greatest effects are likely to take place at high latitudes," Vincent said. He noted that the Ayles disintegration is the most recent of several abrupt changes on Ellesmere.

"Suddenly, lakes that existed aren't there any more, ice dams collapse, ice shelves break up," Vincent said.

"These are big changes."

Researchers say there are many more changes in store. Last week, a Canada-U.S. team predicted that the Arctic Ocean could be devoid of summer ice as early as 2040 and possibly sooner.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2006


Informant: binstock

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ANCIENT ICE SHELF SNAPS AND BREAKS FREE FROM THE CANADIAN ARCTIC

By Steve Lillebuen
Canadian Press
December 28, 2006

http://www.breitbart.com/news/na/cp_n122847A.xml.html

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

The mass of ice broke clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole. Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and couldn't believe what he saw. "It was extraordinary," Vincent said Thursday, adding that in 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice.

"This is a piece of Canadian geography that no longer exists."

The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up tremors from it.

Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.

"We think this incident is consistent with global climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 per cent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906.

"We aren't able to connect all of the dots, but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

The ice shelf actually broke up 16 months ago, but no one witnessed the dramatic event.

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.

Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

"These ice shelves can break up really quickly, perhaps more quickly than we thought they could do in the past," he said.

"Within an hour we could see this entire ice chunk just disconnect and float away."

Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few kilometres offshore. It travelled west for 50 kilometres until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, saw that Ellesmere's Ward Hunt Ice Shelf had cracked in half in 2002. He also saw that sea ice, which creates a buffer zone around ice shelves, was approaching lower and lower levels.

"These ice shelves get weaker and weaker as the temperature rises," he said.

"And the summer of 2005 had a combination of high temperatures and strong winds that probably blew the sea ice away, making this ice shelf much more vulnerable."

The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 66 square kilometres in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.

They are packed with ancient ice that dates back over 3000 years, and scientists like Vincent treat their loss as a sign that the global climate is crossing an unprecedented threshold.

"We're seeing the tragic loss of unique features of the Canadian landscape," he said.

"There are microscopic organisms and entire ecosystems associated with this ice, so we're losing a part of Canada's natural richness."

Meanwhile, the spring thaw may bring another concern as the warming temperatures could release the ice shelf from its Arctic grip.

Prevailing winds could then send the ice island southwards, deep into the Beaufort Sea.

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said.

"There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."


Informant: NHNE

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Ten Simple Things You Can Do to Go Green

Laurie David, who produced Al Gore's documentary about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," says saving the planet isn't about everyone doing everything: "It's about everyone doing something."

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122806EB.shtml



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=An+Inconvenient+Truth

"When you think about the growth of human population over the last century or so, it is all too easy to imagine it merely as an increase in the number of humans," writes the New York Times. "But as we multiply, so do all the things associated with us, including our livestock. With pigs and poultry, they form a critical part of our enormous biological footprint upon this planet."

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122706ED.shtml

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The New Scientist
December 12, 2006

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn10786-cows-pigs-and-sheep-environments-greatest-threats.html

Cows, pigs and sheep: Environment's greatest threats?

By Catherine Brahic

Cows, pigs, sheep and poultry have been awarded the dubious honour of being among the world's greatest environmental threats, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The report, entitled Livestock's long shadow, says the livestock industry is degrading land, contributing to the greenhouse effect, polluting water resources, and destroying biodiversity. In summary, the sector is "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale".

The authors say the demand for meat is expected to more than double by 2050 and therefore the environmental impact of production must be halved in order to avoid worsening the harmful impacts of the industry.

Perhaps the report's most striking finding is that the livestock sector accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than transport, which emits 13.5%.

Entire cycle

The FAO's estimate of livestock emissions surpasses previous ones because this time researchers looked at the entire production cycle. This includes emissions generated by fertiliser and feed production, deforestation to open up pastures, manure management, and emissions from the livestock themselves and from transporting them and their feed.

Livestock require a lot of land, occupying 26% of Earth's ice-free land. Their pastures account for 70% of deforested areas in the Amazon, and their feed occupies one-third of global cropland.

Not only does deforestation increase greenhouse gas emissions by releasing carbon previously stored in trees, it is also a major driver in the loss of biodiversity. The report goes so far as to say that the livestock sector, which accounts for about 20% of terrestrial animal biomass, "may be a leading player in the reduction of biodiversity".

Livelihoods in livestock

Encouraging the global population to become vegans is not a viable solution, however. For starters, says the lead author of the FAO report, Henning Steinfeld, it is quite simply not an option for many of the one billion people whose livelihoods rely on livestock production.

Moreover, vegetable production is not devoid of environmental problems either. And recent studies have shown that global fish stocks are not sustainable at current levels of exploitation.

Steinfeld says the crux of the livestock problem is the sheer bulk of land the sector occupies: "We need to discourage indiscriminate deforestation for pasture, a large part of which takes place because of land speculation."

Convenient occupation

In the Amazon, where governments struggle to enforce legal systems, settlers occupy swathes of "no-man's land" and wait 15 years, after which time practice, though not law, dictates that they own the land. Using the land for pasture is simply a convenient tool to occupy the land, explains Steinfeld.

Ultimately, the authors argue, environmental services such as sustainably managed land and clean water, need to be given a price. "Most frequently, natural resources are free or underpriced, which leads to overexploitation and pollution," write the authors, concluding that "a top priority is to achieve prices and fees that reflect the full economic and environmental costs".

Steinfeld says negotiations of the next step of the Kyoto Protocol might be a good opportunity to do this.



Want to do something for the environment?
by Do not eat pigs.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/12/11/18336785.php

[Do not eat dead pigs (bacon, ham, pork chops). Below is a piece from another list about Smithfield pigs. Read it! Jean]

The current, December 14, edition of Rolling Stone magazine includes a lengthy piece, by contributor Jeff Tietz, about Smithfield pork producers. It covers the conditions the animals are kept in, and the environmental impact. The article is headed, "BossHog" and sub-headed, "America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat." (pg 89.)

The lead photo is of a huge pile of pig carcasses, with the caption, "Pork producers generate millions of tons of hog waste each year including millions of dead pigs."

The article opens: "Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pig processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year."

It tells us that hogs produce three times more excrement than humans do, and that "The best estimates put Smithfield total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year." We read, "So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came close to the same standard -- it would lose money."

It explains that the "pig shit" is so toxic because of the concentrated conditions the pigs are kept in:

"Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouselike barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty full grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens....

"The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run
24 hours a day... If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying....

"Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection..."

So they are infused with antibiotics and doused with insecticides.

We read about the huge excrement holding pens, called lagoons, which often overflow: "Major floods have transferred entire counties into pig shit bayous."

The lagoons are so toxic, workers have been overcome by them and fallen in and drowned in pig shit.

The article tells us that according to the EPA, Smithfield dumps more toxic waste into the nation's water each year than all but three other industrial facilities in America. But, "The industry has long made generous campaign contributions to politicians responsible for regulating hog farms." We read, "In 1998 corporate hog farms in North Carolina spent $1 million to help defeat state legislators who wanted to clean up open-pit lagoons."

Tietz writes, "Studies have shown that lagoons emit hundreds of different volatile gases into the atmosphere, including ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. A single lagoon releases many millions of bacteria into the air per day, some resistant to human antibiotics."

With an environmentalist, he flies in a small plane over the Smithfield area, and watches as "several farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist." He writes, "It looks like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized the shit is blown clear of the company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage."

He writes that the ascending stench can nauseate pilots at 3,000 feet, and He goes into some detail about the suffering of people whose homes are down-wind of the farms. He visits a lagoon to take a good whiff, and writes that even as he thinks about the smell he fights an urge to vomit.

We read some specifics of Smithfield's environmental impact in North Carolina. In a span of four years its lagoons have spilled: "2 million gallons of shit into Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon branch, one million gallons into the Trent River, and
200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek."

The waste kills plants and animals outright and also consumes available oxygen and suffocates fish. We read about various disastrous spills. For example: "The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000 square foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic, it burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions."

He describes dead fish covering the riverbanks, and the article includes a shocking photo of that phenomenon.

Please share this with everyone you know!


Informant: Scott Munson



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=CO2

Nach dem vertraulichen Bericht des UN-Klimarats würden die Temperaturen sogar noch ein Jahrhundert ansteigen, wenn der Ausstoß der Treibhausgase eingestellt würde.

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/24/24315/1.html

* By Vincent Morello

* December 27, 2006

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20978108-29277,00.html

FISH species on the Great Barrier Reef are starving to death because climate change is killing off their food source, an environmental study has found.

Rising sea temperatures have bleached more than 30 per cent of the world's coral reefs, a five-year study by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) has found.

As a result, smaller fish which would normally feed on live coral are dying off, which could throw the fish food chain out of balance, and consequently hinder local fishing and tourism operations.

The coral damage is predicted to double by 2030 if sea temperatures continue their warming patterns, CoECRS senior researcher Morgan Pratchett said.

The starving fish fail to breed and fail to migrate to thriving reefs.

"Fish can be very territorial and it may be hard for refugee fish, which have lost their reef, to relocate elsewhere because the locals will try to keep them out," Dr Pratchett said.

CoECRS was set up in 2005 in Townsville, Queensland, to study coral reefs over a five-year period.

It is a partnership between three Queensland universities and two marine research organisations. Dr Pratchett and his colleagues spent five years charting the collapse of coral-feeding butterfly fish on the reef following severe bleaching between 2000 and 2002.

Bleaching causes the corals to shed their natural bacteria and die.

"Ours and other studies indicate that when coral bleaching occurs, affecting up to 10 per cent of the reef, it affects the abundance of nearly two-thirds of the fish species on that reef.

"As the damage rises to 20 per cent and above, there is a marked decline in the richness of fish species on the reef and the losses can last for years."

But coral-feeding fish will return if the corals recover, Dr Pratchett said.


Informant: binstock

The last time chronic flooding forced this tiny Alaska village to relocate, sled dogs pulled the old church to its new home three miles away, far from the raging Ninglick River. That was in 1950 and life was simpler in Newtok, mostly a collection of traditional sod dwellings. Modern structures gradually took over the new site as the river again crept to the edge of the Yupik Eskimo community. Persistent erosion has eaten an average of 70 feet of bank a year, and now melting permafrost is subsiding, further subjecting the village to severe flooding from intensifying storms. So once again, Newtok must move, leaving residents and officials grappling with an unprecedented crisis that looms over scores of native villages along Alaska's increasingly battered western coast.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122606EC.shtml

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece


From Information Clearing House

Meteorologen ziehen Bilanz

Wieder geht ein Jahr voller Wetterrekorde zu Ende, inzwischen gibt es keinen Zweifel mehr, dass wir uns bereits mitten im Klimawandel befinden.

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/24/24291/1.html



Klimawandel nicht mehr zu stoppen
http://freepage.twoday.net/stories/3111390/

Der Meeresspiegel könnte in den kommenden Jahrzehnten schneller steigen als bislang erwartet.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168702ms25