2011: A Year of Unnatural Disasters

December 12, 2011

by jonbowermaster

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Scour the headlines that came out of Durban, South Africa, where thousands met to try, try, try to mediate a future for a warming planet (officially it is the “17^th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” — UNFCCC COP 17) and one key word spikes: Urgent!

Photo: Sukree Sukplang/Reuters

“Expectations low, but urgency high.” “Stormy negotiations take on urgent need.” “Chinese say agreement by 2020 is urgent.”

The meetings were opened with a statement from the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization announcing that worldwide temps in 2011 are tied for the tenth highest since records began being kept in 1850. (Thirteen of the warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997.)

In a calendar year that has seen an unnatural number of natural catastrophes rock the planet (here in the Hudson Valley, New York we were jolted by an earthquake one day, flattened by Hurricane Irene winds the next) I’m probably not alone in thinking urgency actually sounds very … yesterday. Emergency might be a substitute.

“Expectations low, but emergency high.” “Stormy negotiations take on emergency need.” “Chinese say agreement by 2020 is an emergency.”

The planet is expressing its concern as well. Durban attendees were greeted by a torrential rainfall (2.5 inches in one night), which killed eight, destroyed 700 houses, covered beaches with debris and left thousands homeless. The South Africa weather bureau reports the city has received twice as much rainfall as normal during November.

While conferees have been careful about directly linking the horrific weather pounding down all around them specifically to climate change, for many the correlation is not a hard leap to make. Durban is hardly alone in 2011 for having endured highly abnormal weather:

• Record droughts and fires have wracked Texas and America’s southwest
• The worst floods in 50 years have destroyed low-lying Thailand, filling Bangkok streets;
• Mud slides have inundated suburban Sao Paulo;
• Monsoons rains have whipped Sri Lanka;
• More and more of China is turning into desert, thanks to rainfalls in some areas that are more than 50 percent below average;
• While sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean is the second lowest since records began being kept in 1979.
• Meanwhile the global ocean is turning hot and sour, a kind of giant sink for CO2 emitted by the burning of fossil fuels, making it 30 percent more acidic than just a few years ago.

One of the most-concerned groups represented in Durban was the 43-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), led by the prominent example of Tuvalu, the fourth smallest nation in the world, which a few months ago came within a few barrels of running out of fresh water.

But big nations are hardly safe: A heat wave in Russia drove world wheat prices up by 47 percent.

And there are political consequences too. The “Arab Spring” was fueled in part by protest against high and volatile food prices due to a combination of heat and floods raising the cost of everything from transportation to produce.

According to a report out of Canada, global insurer Munich Re, which has been studying climate change for 40 years, the number of losses around the world attributable to extreme weather has tripled since 1980. Floods have gone up by a factor of three and severe windstorms doubled.

The big question I have is, Can conferences really make a difference? Last time this same group met, in Cancun, it pledged to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. That allowable limit has already been raised to as much as 4.5 degrees.

So much for urgency.

(For more of my dispatches go to Takepart.com)

Planet Shrugs, Earthquakes and Tsunamis Follow

March 15, 2011

by jonbowermaster

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Despite the incredible destruction caused by Friday’s earth-rupture and the subsequent massive waves that devastated Japan’s coastline – officially the ‘Honshu Tsunami’ – it was in many ways just another planetary flex.

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake tore a split in the ocean floor more than 200 miles long and sent thirty-foot waves towards Sendai. Experts are saying the quake was 8,000 times more powerful than the one that struck New Zealand just a few weeks ago and 7,000 times bigger than the one that crushed Haiti a year ago. One geophysical result of all that sub-ocean rumbling is that Japan is now 3.5 feet closer to the U.S. than it was a few day ago, its coastline dropped by two feet.

While the impacts on mankind are horrible and shocking earthquakes are still just the planet’s way of hitching up its pants, tectonically speaking.

Given the recent spate of powerful quakes around the world (Chile, an 8.8 magnitude temblor, the fifth strongest since 1900; the 6.0 quake that struck rural eastern Turkey) it would seem they are happening more frequently. But the truth is that the earth has always quaked; what’s different now is what’s happening above ground, not underground.

(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)

Australia’s Floodwaters Push Dugong Closer to Extinction

January 28, 2011

by jonbowermaster

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The worst flooding in the 130 years has turned eastern Australia into a giant wading pond, killing dozens of people, wiping out crops and livestock, destroying tens of thousands of homes and shutting down hundreds of towns and cities.

The torrential rains, following a decade of record drought, are proving that it’s not only man-made disasters, like oil spills, which can wreak havoc on the natural world … that nature does a pretty damn good job of mucking itself up as well.

At risk at the edge of Queensland’s shores is the nearly extinct dugong – the prehistoric marine mammals that look part sea lion, part bulldog – that feed off the sea grass that line the coast. Unfortunately the floodwaters are inundating those feeding grounds with sediment, topsoil, rubbish and all sorts of debris on top of toxic industrial and agricultural run-off.

Environmental officials are concerned the floods will similarly destroy wetlands and marine parks along Australia’s coast. To investigate the damage they’ve launched a robotic underwater glider shaped like a torpedo and armed with sensors to monitor the ecosystems off Brisbane.

(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)