By the time I get to Phoenix, there may be no water

Lake Mead, water source for Phoenix and Las Vegas, could run out of water soon, according to this story in the New York Times (see excerpt below):

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a new study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Lake Mead, which serves as a reservoir for the Colorado River and sustains fast-growing cities in the Southwest, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, researchers say.
The lake, located in Nevada and Arizona, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, the scientists say, if the demand for water remains unchanged and if human-induced climate change follows climate scientists’ moderate forecasts, resulting in a reduction in average river flows.
Demand for Colorado River water already slightly exceeds the average annual supply when high levels of evaporation are taken into account, the researchers, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, point out. Despite an abundant snowfall in Colorado this year, scientists project that snowpacks and their runoffs will continue to dwindle. If they do, the system for delivering water across the Southwest would become increasingly unstable.
“We were really sort of stunned,” Professor Barnett said in an interview. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.” He added, “You think of what the implications are, and it’s pretty scary.”

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
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Climate Change is a Real Bummer

Turns out the old saying is true--thanks to climate change, you can't go home again--at least, you can't go home to the place you're from and experience the same weather patterns of your youth, according to an interesting article in Wired Magazine excerpted below.

Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — is how his fellow Australians are reacting.
They're getting sad.
In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.
Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"
It's also a fascinating new way to think about the impact of global warming. Everyone's worrying about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas will get flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over clean water, and we tally up the species — polar bears, whales, wading birds — that'll go extinct.
But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Climate Scientists Frustrated

Think climate change is going to be tough for other, poorer nations but a breeze for the United States? Think again, according to this article in Salon (see intro below.)

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations' prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.
In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?
Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world's top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra's warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.
Part of this is due to the IPCC's own media naiveté. It doesn't put a lot of thought into publicizing its reports; heck, it released this final synthesis on Nov. 17 -- a Saturday! -- in Valencia, Spain. Not exactly the best way to get attention from the most intransigent and important audience: Americans. How little attention? According to Technorati.com, as of Dec. 11, the synthesis report had some 265 blog reactions, where the Aug. 24 YouTube video of Miss Teen South Carolina struggling to explain why a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map had more than 5,300 blog reactions. Hmmm. Perhaps these two things are related. But I digress.
With such poor notice for a seminal document, more than 200 scientists last week took the remarkable step of issuing a plea at the United Nations climate change conference in Bali. Global greenhouse gas emissions, they declared, "must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose." The Associated Press headline on the statement was "Scientists Beg for Climate Action." What will we drive climate scientists to next? A hunger strike?

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
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Yellow River Drying Up

NPR aired a story on China's Yellow River about it's environmental problems. "For three years in the 1990s, the Yellow River — which 140 million people depend on for water — actually dried up before it reached the sea, due to overuse. And pollution on the river has reached horrific levels."
Listen to and read the story here.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
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A Waterless West?

Will climate change leave the American West a barren desert? The New York Times magazine tackles that scary topic in a long article briefly excerpted below:

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

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Climate Change II: The Return of the Scary IPCC REPORT

The IPCC released part 2 of its four-part report on climate change. This part talks about climate changes that are happening now and the projections for future climates if warming trends continue.

Perhaps the most dramatic prediction for the US is the establishment of a permanent drought in the Southwest, according to Reuters.

The U.S. Southwest, home to some of the fastest growing cities in the country, could be on a path toward permanent drought caused by greenhouse warming, a new study said.

Dry conditions rivaling the Western droughts of the 1950s and the Dust Bowl that desiccated and then blew away the soil of the Great Plains states in the 1930s could hit the region and northern Mexico as early as 2030, according to the study, published in the journal Science on Thursday.
"The 30s and 50s droughts lasted at most eight or nine years. We're talking about something here that is a drier overall climate," Richard Seager, the study's lead author, and a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, said in an interview.
"Once it's established, you're not going to be expecting precipitation to be turning back to levels we are familiar with in the later part of the 20th century."

A sudden sweeping shift to clean technologies such as wind and solar power or rapid success in burying CO2 emissions from coal plants in places like the United States, China and India could mean C02 emissions fall sooner and ease drought threats.

But that is unlikely given the infancy of such technologies. Washington predicts fossil fuels will remain the main source of energy until at least the mid-century.

"A sudden reduction in emissions would prevent the very worst from happening. But some part of this is already inevitable with the CO2 we've already put into the atmosphere," said Seager.

Here is a link to the actual report.
Here is a link to the New York Times story with an interactive feature and links to related articles.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Let Them Drink (bottled) Water

The water industry sees climate change and drought as just another golden business opportunity, according to this article in the Financial Times.

China, Saudi Arabia and Algeria, where water shortages have become acute, are placing billions of dollars of contracts out to tender to improve water supplies for their growing populations. The trend is expected to grow, as 40 per cent of the world’s population will suffer water shortages by 2050, according to the United Nations Development Programme. Global warming is expected to exacerbate the problem.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

CO2 Emissions: 1st World vs. 3rd World

A new Climate Calendar published by the World Development Movement shows that by the end of the day on January 8, 2007, the average person in Britain will have already produced the same amount that the average person in the world's poorest countries will produce all year. While first world nations like Britain and the United States produce the vast majority of greenhouse gases that cause global climate change, those in the poorest nations suffer the most from the effects, such as drought, flooding, disease and starvation.

Check out the World Development Movement site to view the calendar.

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Climate change destroyed Mayan Civilization and Tang Dynasty

That's the conclusion of recent research--that China's Tang Dynasty and the Mayan civilization. According to an article in The Australian,

There has never been a satisfactory explanation for the fall of the Tang emperors, whose era is viewed as a high point of Chinese civilisation, while the disappearance of the Maya world perplexes scholars.
Now a team of scientists has found evidence a shift in monsoons led to drought and famine in the final century of Tang power. The weather pattern may also have spelt doom for the Maya in faraway Mexico at about the same time, they say.
Both ruling hierarchies at the start of the 10th century were victims of poor rainfall and starvation among their peoples when the harvests failed.

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Climate Change will kill 90,000/yr. by 2071

That's the dire prediction of a report for the European Commission. According to an article in the Financial Times,

The Commission will endorse the report next week and use it to back its case for action to limit the rise in the world’s average temperature to 2 degrees centigrade above 1990 levels. Ironically, those countries most committed to combating climate change, such as the UK and Sweden, would gain, with warmer temperatures bringing bigger crop yields and fewer deaths from cold.

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Climate Change: Winners and Losers?

A project to outline the "benefits" and challenges of climate change will be launched at the Oxford Farming Conference in the UK, according to the BBC news.

Meanwhile, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology is claiming that it is the country suffering the most from climate change, according to ABC News Online, while a government report in China says that the nation will likely suffer a drop in agricultural output due to climate change.

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Australia's Big Dry

Australia is in the midst of one of its worst droughts ever, and environmentalists are trying to convince the general public that it is a result of climate change. The drought has lasted for over five years, and some worry that it could continue for decades.

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Native Americans Discuss Global Warming

Representatives from 50 Native American Tribes met last week in Arizona to discuss challenges they face due to global warming, according to a story on AZCentral.com.

Tribal representatives described the natural environment as the foundation of their culture and religion. Armed with centuries of knowledge about their lands, they've noticed incremental environmental changes in recent years.And they're worried. In a bid for energy independence and economic opportunity, many tribes are now investing in renewable energy.

Read about wind power for Native Americans.
Check out projects at Native Wind.
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Breadbasket moves to Canada

At its annual general meeting in Washington yesterday, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the world’s leading network of agricultural research centers, said the steady march of global warming was driving the need to develop new crop strains that can withstand rising temperatures, drier climates and increased soil salt content, as well as “boosting agriculture’s role in removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.” Read about it in the New York Time's blog The Lede.

Climate Change Sufferers: The Future is Now

Suffering from Climate Change is not something in the far-off future for many of the world's destitute. Climate change has already altered the lives of millions. Read about it in the British publication The Independent.

New Crops needed to combat climate change

"A group of leading agricultural research institutes will on Monday launch a major drive to prepare the most vulnerable people in the world for the devastating effects of global warming.
With large parts of the world facing dramatic crop losses from rising temperatures and changed rainfall patterns, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) says action is needed immediately and at all levels."

Kenya provides Climate Change Clues

Past changes in Kenya's climate yields important information about the changes global warming will bring, according to a new study. Read about it here.

Climate Change in Africa

Weather patterns in Kenya are far different than they were a generation ago. There's less snow on the mountaintops, lakes are much lower, and the rainy season has been arriving late. And when the rain finally comes, it falls too hard and fast and sweeps away the precious topsoil that farmers need to plant their harvests

Listen to the NPR story here.