JANUARY2007

AUSTRALIA : BBC WORLD NEWS
By Phil Mercer

Parts of Australia are in the grip of the worst drought in memory.

Rainfall in many eastern and southern regions has been at near record lows. On top of that, the weather has been exceptionally warm.

The parched conditions have sparked an emotional debate about global warming. Conservationists insist the "big dry" is almost certainly the result of climate change and warn that Australia is on the brink of environmental disaster. Other experts believe such reports are wildly misplaced and that the country shouldn't panic.

'A war-like scenario'

The drought in Australia has lasted for more than five years.

The worry for some is that this could be the start of a protracted period of low rainfall that could go on for decades. "The really scary thing is last time we had a drought of this intensity that lasted about five years - it could last for about 50 years," cautioned Professor Andy Pitman from Macquarie University in Sydney. "The politicians truly believe this is a five-year or six-year drought that will break sometime in 2007 or 2008. But it might not break until 2050 but we aren't thinking in those terms at this stage," Professor Pitman told the BBC.

Global warming, the drought and the future of dwindling water supplies will undoubtedly dominate talk at barbeques and dinner parties this festive season in Australia. "We're in a state of emergency," said Cate Faehrmann from the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales. "We need to treat this as a war-like scenario. The people are really worried that we are going to run out of water." She added: "I can imagine Australia being a desert in a few decades' time in some of these agricultural areas. The soil is blowing away, the rivers are drying up. "I think there will be plots of land abandoned and perhaps whole agricultural practices abandoned."

Massive losses

The drought has affected farmers worse than anyone else.

Jock Lawrie, president of the New South Wales Farmers' Association, paints a dismal picture.

"There are people out in some parts of our state that have gone to work for four or five years and haven't even earned an income. With the winter crop failing to the extent it did, there have been some massive losses. It is really hard on the emotions of people, there's no doubt about that."

Australia has some of the world's most erratic rainfall-patterns.

This vast continent has experienced very dry periods before: the "Federation Drought" of the late 1800s was a disaster for many communities.

However, some climate experts believe this drought will also pass and Australians shouldn't be too alarmed. Veteran meteorologist Bill Kinimonth insists the gradual warming of the earth is part of a natural cycle: "The climate follows patterns which we can read back from our instrument records for about 150 years, and from a lot of the proxy records they go back thousands of years. The ice cores show the fluctuations of the climate over 100,000-year cycles." He told the BBC News website: "We're presently in what we might call the optimum period, where the Earth is warmer than it has been for the last 20,000 years, and I think we should be making the most of it. The alternative is not very good - a cold, dry Australia."

The Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol insisting it would damage the economy, now believes, however, that serious environmental trouble is brewing.

Professor Andy Pitman says the drought has forced politicians to look at the bigger picture. "The Australian government has absolutely jumped on greenhouse bandwagon in the last three or four months," he said. "Although it won't sign Kyoto, it's now saying it wants to lead the drive for greenhouse gas emissions globally in a very aggressive leadership way. That's largely due to the drought and the Stern report."

January 8, 2007 -- The environmental "surge" you're not hearing anything about. http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

According to U.S. maritime industry sources, tanker captains are reporting an increase in onboard alarms from hazard sensors designed to detect hydrocarbon gas leaks and, specifically, methane leaks. However, the leaks are not emanating from cargo holds or pump rooms but from continental shelves venting increasing amounts of trapped methane into the atmosphere. With rising ocean temperatures, methane is increasingly escaping from deep ocean floors. Methane is also 21 more times capable of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

In fact, one of the major sources for increased methane venting is the Hudson Submarine Canyon, which extends 400 miles into the Atlantic from the New York-New Jersey harbor. Another location experiencing increased venting is the Santa Barbara Channel on the California coast.

Meanwhile, a strong natural gas odor was reported this morning in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, and Newark. The strong odor was also detected in Union City, Secaucus, and Hoboken. Last August, a similar unexplained gas odor sent people to the hospital in Staten Island and Queens. Although methane is odorless, natural methane venting is often accompanied by the venting of acrid hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of bacterial decomposition.

The US Coast Guard sent a message to ships and tugs in the bay and ocean south of New York requesting any reports of the odor being detected at sea. There were also an unconfirmed report of a similar strong odor being detected this morning on the Delaware coast near Lewes. This morning, the prevailing winds in New York and New Jersey were southerly at 5 to 10 miles per hour.

The latte-sipping and SUV-driving yuppies in Washington, DC are certainly taking the current weather abnormality in stride -- they almost appear ecstatic about the weather, obviously unaware that the future of our planet is hanging on a thread.

'Irreversible' global warming claims its first victims of the New Year

By Ian Herbert , excerpts
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Published: 06 January 2007

The first tangible victims of climate change emerge in the year which forecasters predicted this week would be the warmest on record.

The CJ Wild Bird Foods company near Shrewsbury has announced that the demand for its products has all but disappeared, because the mild winter had maintained an alternative supply of berries for finches, tits and other species. Some species, such as the dunlin and purple sandpiper, are disappearing from Britain as they can find enough warmth in Scandinavia.

The warmer environment is also contributing to the gradual disappearance of the vast Lake Qinghai, a holy site for Tibetans in the remote western province of Qinghai. Despite a Chinese government pledge of £442m to stop the lake shrinking, it will have vanished in two centuries, according to a report by the China Geological Survey Bureau (CGSB). Glaciers on the nearby Qinghai-Tibet plateau have also shrunk by 131.4 sq km annually in the past 30 years.

These disparate indicators of the effects of a changing climate surfaced at the end of a week in which Sir John Houghton, director general of the UK's Met Office, told a farming conference in Oxford that climate change was now irreversible. The Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, said yesterday that Britons would have to change every aspect of their lives if they are to tackle climate change.

More evidence of the consequences of failure arrived yesterday from conservation groups who reported that climate change was causing the deaths of hundreds of baby hedgehogs, born out of season. More than 70 ailing young have been handed in to a centre at Fife, in eastern Scotland, and the Withington Hedgehog Care Trust in Manchester has had a similar experience.

An indication of the effects of climate change on fish has also arrived this week, from a team of German scientists who warned that rising sea temperatures were killing off the eelpout. The fish, which lives in the North and Baltic seas, has been hit by warmer summers, which have increased its need for oxygen at the same time as the water's oxygen levels have dropped. The researchers' studies of the fish's biology showed the first thing to suffer as temperatures rise beyond 17°C was its oxygen supply.

Australia is engaged in its own climate war, with the pace of global warming faster across the country than in other parts of the world, the country's Bureau of Meteorology said. Half of the country was desperate for water and the other half was awash with a year's rainfall for the entire continent. "Most scientists agree this is part of an enhanced greenhouse effect," said the bureau's senior climatologist, Neil Plummer.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

CLOUD CLUES
By Beth Duff-Brown
Associated Press
posted: 27 November 2006
10:01 am ET

EUREKA, Nunavut Territory (AP) -- Scientists are peering into the clouds near the top of the world, trying to solve a mystery and learn something new about global warming.

The mystery is the droplets of water in the clouds. With the North Pole just 685 miles away, they should be frozen, yet more of them are liquid than anyone expected.

So the scientists working out of a converted blue cargo container are trying to determine whether the clouds are one of the causes -- or effects -- of Earth's warming atmosphere.

“Much to our surprise, we found that Arctic clouds have got lots of super-cooled liquid water in them. Liquid water has even been detected in clouds at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 F),'' said Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Research Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“If a cloud is composed of liquid water droplets in the Arctic, instead of ice crystals, then that changes how they will interact with the earth's surface and the atmosphere to reflect, absorb and transmit radiation,'' said Uttal.

“It's a new science, driven by the fact that everybody doing climate predictions says that clouds are perhaps the single greatest unknown factor in understanding global warming.''

With NASA reporting that 2005 was the warmest year on record worldwide, the debate over global warming marches on, but not here. The American and Canadian scientists at the Eureka Weather Station in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, like the Inuit who are seeing their native habitat thaw, are beyond questioning the existence of climate change.

“If we compare the debate over the theory of evolution with the debate over the theory of global warming -- global warming's a whole lot more certain at the moment,'' said Jim Drummond, a University of Toronto physics professor and chief investigator for the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change.

“By and large,'' he said, “we are not now arguing about whether global warming is going to happen; the argument has turned to: How big is it going to be?''

Uttal, Drummond and other American and Canadian scientists recently visited Eureka, an outpost established jointly by Canada and the United States in 1947 and now equipped with instruments that sound like sci-fi inventions -- the ozone spectrophotometer, for instance, or the tropospheric lidar. (A lidar, an amalgamation of “light'' and “radar,'' uses laser light to detect atmospheric particles.)

The new technology helps to better understand the impact of clouds on Earth's surface temperature. The clouds being studied here range from six miles high to almost touching the ground.

“For a couple of decades we have known that super-cooled liquid water droplets could exist in clouds,'' Uttal said. “But the prevalence of it in Arctic clouds was not really known until these specialized sensors starting operating in the Arctic about eight years ago.''

“The really exciting thing,'' she said, will be the ability to track an aerosol layer or an Asian dust cloud from their source and measure their effect on a cloud.

Uttal noted that water clouds are more likely to warm the Arctic atmosphere than ice clouds, since the liquid clouds retain more heat radiated by the Earth's surface. “This means that the ice-to-water ratios in clouds may be very important in controlling the Arctic surface temperatures and how it melts,'' she said.

In Nunavut, the melting is keenly felt. “In the old days, we used to have 10 months of winter; now it's six,'' said Simon Awa, an Inuit leader and deputy minister for the environment of Nunavut who was on the trip to Eureka. “Every year we're getting winter later and later.''

For these 155,000 people of Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States, it means less time to hunt caribou, walrus and polar bear. Studies show that average winter temperatures have increased as much as 7 degrees in the Arctic over the last 50 years. The permafrost -- ground that is continually frozen for at least two years -- is thawing, imperiling polar bears and forcing other animals to migrate farther north.

The walrus have moved farther away, said Awa. “So you're taking more time out, away on the land hunting.'' Meanwhile, families back home are forced to eat store-bought food that is costlier and less healthy.

“The majority of the world's population hasn't really felt the global warming,'' said Awa. “But right now in the Arctic and in Nunavut, we're really worried because it's already affecting us. We are a thermometer of the world for what could happen.''

Russ Schnell, director of Observatory and Global Network Operations for NOAA, notes that climate change is cyclical -- that the planet's vegetation, over millions of years, sucks in and spits out carbon dioxide.

“All the carbon dioxide in the coal and oil was once in the air. The plants took it and it went into the oceans or into the ground -- and now we're taking it back out,'' says Schnell.

“The cycle is the same today, only you're taking something that took 100,000 years and doing it in one hundred years,'' he said. “There's a point where animals can't change fast enough, there's a point where plants can't change fast enough, so they'll either compete it out or go extinct.''