California pension funds to drop coal-mining companies

Californina Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) speaks about climate change legislation during a committee hearing in the Capitol on Sept. 10. 

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

by Chris Megerian, The Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2015

Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed legislation forcing California’s pension systems, the two largest public funds in the country, to divest from coal companies.

The measure, SB 185 by state Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), requires the funds to sell their holdings in companies that derive at least half of their revenue from mining coal used to generate electricity.

The deadline for divestment is July 1, 2017, and new investments will be prohibited.

The new law will affect $58 million held by the California Public Employees' Retirement System and $6.7 million in the California State Teachers Retirement System, a tiny fraction of their overall investments. The funds are responsible for providing benefits to more than 2.5 million current and retired employees.

De León pitched the measure as a way to emphasize more secure, environmentally friendly investments.

“Coal is a losing bet for California retirees and it’s also incredibly harmful to our health and the health of our environment," he said in a statement.

The University of California has already taken similar steps. Last month, it sold off its $200 million in investments in coal and oil sands companies.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-california-pension-divest-coal-20150930-story.html

17 U.S. Cities Break Records for Hottest Year Ever

by Anastasia Pantsios, Climate Central, December 31, 2014

The globe could be on track to look back on 2014 as its warmest year ever. And 17 U.S. cities are among those recording their hottest temperatures, thanks to the acceleration of climate change.

It really heated up this year for cities in the western U.S. Image credit: Climate Central

Climate Central analyzed temperature data from the country’s 125 largest metropolitan areas to find the 17 scorchers. All are located west of the Rockies, with the majority in California, which has endured lengthy heat waves and a third year of unprecedented drought conditions. Eleven of the cities are in California which, as of November, was recording temperatures about 2 degrees Fahrenheit above its previous hottest year. The Santa Maria-Santa Barbara area is on track to exceed its previous record record by almost 3 degrees.

In California, the cities include Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento-Roseville-Arden-Arcade, Salinas, San Diego-Carlsbad, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, Stockton-Lodi, Vallejo-Fairfield and Visalia-Porterville. Arizona and Nevada each had two metro areas on the list: Phoenix and Tucson in the former, Las Vegas and Reno in the latter. Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, round out the list.

“The heat follows Interstate 5 from Seattle down through Portland, Sacramento and San Diego with detours to San Francisco, Fresno and Modesto before heading east to Las Vegas, Phoenix, Reno and Tucson,” noted Climate Central writer Brian Kahn. “Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and El Paso are among other western metro areas also in line for one of their top five warmest years.”

Climate Central’s analysis also revealed that no U.S. city set a record for cold temperatures, noting that it’s been almost 30 years since any city set such a record, with Kansas City, Missouri; Spokane, Washington; and Boise City, Idaho, notching record lows in 1985.

“And when it comes to global record coldest year, you’d have to go back even further,” added Kahn. “Way further in fact. It’s been over a century since the world’s coldest year on record with 1909 setting the record and 1911 tying it. Going back to 1880—the year record-keeping began—the global average temperature has risen by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In the U.S., temperatures have risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 with a large portion of that rise coming since 1970. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the U.S. average temperature could climb up to another 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century.”

http://ecowatch.com/2014/12/31/warmest-year-ever-climate-change/

Peter Gleick: The answer on human-caused climate change is in

by Peter Gleick, Sacramento Bee, December 20, 2014

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The three-year California drought isn’t bad just because of a severe shortage of rain and snow; previous droughts have seen less precipitation. It’s bad because the past three years have also been by far the hottest in the 119-year instrumental record. JAE C. HONG THE AP

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article4703142.html#storylink=cpy

As our planet warms, scientists and the general public are increasingly asking if human-caused climate change influences the extreme weather events we see all around us. Until recently, the answer was always “we don’t know yet.” Today, the answer is increasingly “yes.”

Earth is in a remarkable transition from a world in which human influence on climate has been negligible to one in which our influence is increasingly dominant. One of the most active research areas in the climate sciences is the field of detection and attribution: the effort to see and identify the fingerprint of climate change in our extremes of weather.

This is tough because the day-to-day fluctuations in weather are naturally large or “noisy.” But scientists have long known that as climate change worsens, we would eventually reach the point when the signal of human influence would rise above and become distinguishable from the noise of natural variability. The California drought is a case in point.

For the past three years, California has been experiencing a bad drought, most simply defined as the mismatch between the amounts of water nature provides and the amounts of water that humans and the environment demand. The state, like any other region of the world, experiences extreme hydrologic events naturally, including floods and droughts. 

Reconstructions of ancient climates from tree rings, ice cores, pollen records and other paleoclimatic assessments reveal extensive and persistent droughts in the past.

But the current California drought isn’t bad just because of a severe shortage of rain and snow – previous droughts have seen less precipitation. It’s so bad because the past three years also have been by far the hottest in the 119-year instrumental record. An analysis recently released by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute concluded these factors make the current drought the most severe in 1,200 years.

Is this a signal of climate change? Recently, there has been a growing debate about the links between climate change and the drought. The debate stems from confusion over two very different questions:

▪  Is California’s severe drought caused by climate change?

▪  Is California’s drought, no matter the cause, influenced or affected by climate change?

These questions are not the same thing. Yet the media, the public and even some scientists have mixed them up. A popular analogy is that we cannot know whether any particular home run hit by a baseball player pumped up on steroids was caused by the drugs. 

Ballplayers hit home runs naturally. But we know that these drugs influence and distort the average performance of the ballplayer over time.

The influence of climate change on extreme events works the same way: Science cannot at the moment tell us much about whether climate changes have caused any particular extreme event. But scientists from many different fields now see parallel lines of evidence from a combination of basic climate science, models and real-world observations that human-caused climate change is already influencing and worsening the risks of extremes such as heat waves, droughts and floods.

For the California drought, this evidence includes the fingerprints of higher temperatures and changes in atmospheric circulation patterns in a climate pumped up by greenhouse gases emitted by human activities. These higher temperatures have led to extra drying of soils, greater agricultural water demand, earlier and faster snowmelt, and higher evaporative losses in reservoirs.

California is not alone in experiencing the growing consequences of climate change. 

Evidence that climate change is influencing extreme events all over the world is now pouring in, including heat waves in Europe, coastal damage in the Eastern U.S. during extreme tides and storms, flooding in the United Kingdom from more intense precipitation events, drastic loss of Arctic ice, and droughts in Australia and the southwestern U.S.

The rainy season in California has started again, ironically with another set of extreme events in the form of intense storms. Many of us hope that the state will see an average or even a wet year to refill dangerously overpumped aquifers and depleted reservoirs. But if there is any lesson to be learned from the past few years, it is that California and the rest of the world must prepare for a future where the influence of human-induced climate change is ever more apparent. And costly.

Peter H. Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental policy group based in Oakland.

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article4703142.html

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article4703142.html#storylink=cpy

rjs: Climate, renewables, environmental news, November 9, 2014

How to Mend the Conservation Divide - A SCHISM has recently divided those who love nature. “New conservationists” have been shaking up the field, proposing new approaches that break old taboos — moving species to new ranges in advance of climate change, intervening in designated wilderness areas, using nonnative species as functional stand-ins for those that have become extinct, and embracing novel ecosystems that spring up in humanized landscapes. Some “old conservationists” have reacted angrily to this, preferring to keep the focus on protecting wilderness and performing classical restoration that keeps ecosystems as they were hundreds of years ago. Editorials, essays and books have been lobbed back and forth, feathers have been ruffled and conservation groups and government officials have felt pressure from both sides. The truth is, despite the disagreements, both groups love nature and want to protect it. These seemingly competing alternatives are really complementary parts of the smartest strategy: We should try everything. Conservation used to seem pretty straightforward: set aside tracts of nature and they will take care of themselves. It is not so simple anymore. Nature left unmanaged is changing in surprising ways because of the great and accelerating human influences of what is being called the Anthropocene — the new epoch of climate change, species movements and global-scale land-use change. Today, keeping nature functioning the way it did before the Industrial Revolution requires increasingly hard and expensive work.

Unapproved GMO wheat grows mistrust in USDA - An unapproved variety of GMO wheat was found in Montana, proving once again that little to no regulation is actually being enforced against Big Ag and biotech companies. It’s no secret that the USDA consistently turns its head while GMO-related rules and regulations are repeatedly broken. According to an article on USA Today, the U.S. is the leader in GMO crops, particularly in Iowa, where 95 percent of the corn planted this past year came from genetically modified seeds. 

GMO wheat mishaps foster skepticism of USDA: In September, the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which oversees biotech crops, said it found the Monsanto wheat two months earlier on a research field at Montana State University, more than a decade after the crop was legally tested there between 2000 and 2003.The finding came as the USDA concluded a nearly yearlong probe into a similar wheat discovery in Oregon in May 2013. In that case, the government was unable to determine how the modified seeds developed by Monsanto appeared eight years after testing ended for the biotech variety. Neither wheat strain has been approved for sale or consumption. Each year, hundreds of tests are conducted around the United States, mostly on corn, soybeans and alfalfa by seed giants including Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service authorized the planting of more than 500 crops that could be tested on as many as 11,300 sites across the nation.

The Browbeat and Baffle Political Battle  -- It never ceases to disgust, horrify and amaze how people are hoodwinked by marketing, media and advertizing.  A textbook case is election 2014.  States have measures on the ballot, and Oregon has one that big business in particular doesn't like.  As a result the campaign to defeat it has become the costliest in Oregon history as big business pounds the airwaves with their deep pocket funded misleading and manipulative ads.   A nearly half-million dollar contribution from soft-drink giant Coca-Cola appears to have put Oregon's mandatory GMO-labeling measure over the top as the costliest ballot measure in state history. Coca-Cola, while donating large sums of money in helping defeat similar labeling measures in California in 2012 and Washington in 2013, had sat out the fight over Measure 92.  Measure 92 was polled last June as 77% of Oregonians voting for it.  Now, it is about to go down in defeat.  This change is the result of pure pounding the airwaves with false political ads, one every commercial break, about every two minutes.  Big food and big chemical have put their big thumb on the political scale:  The Oregonian has been keeping tabs on how Yes on Measure 92 is being outspent and by whom.  The special interests have poured so much money into defeating this measure, the money is currently $20 million to a $6.8 million, almost 3 to 1.  That is one measure in one state.  The contribution donor list is also very depressing.  A woman who owns a coastal fishery gives $200 to label GMO foods, a public defender offers $400 to pass measure 92.  Compare that to the $4.5 million poured in by Dupont as Monsanto contributes half a million there, 2.5 million over there, all to stop Oregonians from knowing what is in their food.

Genetically modified escalation -- Vandana Shiva, despite her exceptional public speaking skills, is not without her critics. Several articles over the past year, among them one in the New Yorker and another in Grist, attack various facts upon which she bases her anti-GMO platform. As best I can tell these pieces had no discernible impact on her popular support, nor did they shift the greater debate over the regulation and labeling of GM foods.  This frightens me. In the GMO debate, the rift between the two opposing sides grows wider by the day and shows no sign of narrowing. Opponents in the debate can’t even agree on the most basic facts relevant to their issue. Do genetically modified crop varieties deliver higher yields? Do they contribute to negative health effects in people and livestock? Do they lead to negative environmental consequences? There are studies that take opposing sides on all of these issues and, sadly enough, their findings are often predictable given their funding sources and the ideological predilections of the researchers involved.The greater debate around the regulation and labeling of GMOs is caught in a trap of escalation. Both sides in the debate – the anti-GMO activists like Vandana Shiva on one side and the biotech firms and their pro-GMO allies on the other – take turns contorting facts and twisting statistics in their favor, coming up with ever more extreme arguments to bolster their respective cases. They appeal to emotion, to fear, to belief, to tradition; they mount character attacks and smear campaigns, demonize each other, and attempt to use political clout to force people out of their jobs and win underhanded legal battles. As their rhetoric grows ever more fierce and wanders further from reality, it becomes nearly impossible to ground their debate in fact and find the common ground needed to end the conflict. Every day the stakes get higher, and higher, and higher…

Landmark 20-Year Study Finds Pesticides Cause Depression In Farmers - Earlier this fall, researchers from the National Institute of Health finished up a landmark 20-year study, a study that hasn’t received the amount of coverage it deserves. About 84,000 farmers and spouses of farmers were interviewed since the mid-1990s to investigate the connection between pesticides and depression, a connection that had been suggested through anecdotal evidence for far longer. We called up Dr. Freya Kamel, the lead researcher on the study, to find out what the team learned and what it all means. Spoiler: nothing good. Because the data is so excessive, the researchers have mined it three times so far, the most recent time in a study published just this fall. The first one was concerned with suicide, the second with depression amongst the spouses of farmers (Kamel says “pesticide applicators,” but most of the people applying pesticides are farmers), and the most recent with depression amongst the farmers themselves. There’s a significant correlation between pesticide use and depression, that much is very clear, but not all pesticides. The two types that Kamel says reliably moved the needle on depression are organochlorine insecticides and fumigants, which increase the farmer’s risk of depression by a whopping 90% and 80%, respectively. The study lays out the seven specific pesticides, falling generally into one of those two categories, that demonstrated a categorically reliable correlation to increased risk of depression.

Salt's poisonous effect is growing threat to crop yields− Salt is poisoning around 2,000 hectares of irrigated farm land every day – and has been doing so for the last 20 years, according to new research. Think of an area about the size of 3,000 football fields that can no longer be used to produce food each day. And then remember that the global population actually grows by around 200,000 people every day. Manzoor Qadir, senior research fellow at the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, and colleagues report in the journal Natural Resources Forum that an area of farmland the size of France – 62 million hectares – has been affected by the build-up of salts in irrigated soil. This is one-fifth of all irrigated land. “To feed the world’s anticipated nine billion people by 2050, and with little new productive land available, it’s a case of all lands needed on deck,” says Dr Qadir. “We can’t afford not to restore the productivity of salt-affected lands.” Salts degradation is an ancient hazard in arid and semi-arid lands, where groundwater is pumped from aquifers below the bedrock and used to grow crops. Evaporation and transpiration leave precipitated salts around the roots of each crop and – since there is no fresh rainwater to wash away the salts − sooner or later the levels build up to intolerable scales, and the land becomes increasingly unproductive.

Europe sees big declines in common bird species - Using data from 25 countries, scientists estimate that European bird populations have declined by more than 420 million over 3 decades, with some of the biggest losses coming from common species such as house sparrows, skylarks, and starlings. The Guardian reports that some rarer birds have seen their numbers increase thanks to conservation efforts, but the more robust species have not received the same attention and have suffered for it. Scientists say the declines are largely caused by habitat loss and that broader, more comprehensive approaches will be required to target these common species because of their widespread distribution and abundance.

Climate change is disrupting flower pollination, research shows: Sexual deceit, pressed flowers and Victorian bee collectors are combined in new scientific research which demonstrates for the first time that climate change threatens flower pollination, which underpins much of the world’s food production. The work used museum records stretching back to 1848 to show that the early spider orchid and the miner bee on which it depends for reproduction have become increasingly out of sync as spring temperatures rise due to global warming. The orchid resembles a female miner bee and exudes the same sex pheromone to seduce the male bee into “pseudocopulation” with the flower, an act which also achieves pollination. The orchids have evolved to flower at the same time as the bee emerges. But while rising temperatures cause both the orchid and the bee to flower or fly earlier in the spring, the bees are affected much more, which leads to a mismatch. “We have shown that plants and their pollinators show different responses to climate change and that warming will widen the timeline between bees and flowers emerging,” said Dr Karen Robbirt, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the University of East Anglia (UEA). “If replicated in less specific systems, this could have severe implications for crop productivity.” She said the research, published in Current Biology on Thursday, is “the first clear example, supported by long-term data, of the potential for climate change to disrupt critical [pollination] relationships between species.”

TED Talk by Nina Fedoroff on Global Food Production - K. McDonald -  This 18-minute talk is by noted food system expert Nina Fedoroff, Pennsylvania State Professor and scientist. It begins with a discussion of the drivers behind affordability and food price swings. She discusses whether there are limits to feeding growing populations during climate change, and with depleting aquifers. In the last eight minutes of the talk, she discusses how we will be growing food in the future, a future in which she supports genetic modification as a tool to making food production more secure.

NASA Bombshell: Global Groundwater Crisis Threatens Our Food Supplies and Our Security - An alarming satellite-based analysis from NASA finds that the world is depleting groundwater — the water stored unground in soil and aquifers — at an unprecedented rate. A new Nature Climate Change piece, “The global groundwater crisis,” by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, warns that “most of the major aquifers in the world’s arid and semi-arid zones, that is, in the dry parts of the world that rely most heavily on groundwater, are experiencing rapid rates of groundwater depletion.”   The groundwater at some of the world’s largest aquifers — in the U.S. High Plains, California’s Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere — is being pumped out “at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished.” The most worrisome fact: “nearly all of these underlie the world’s great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity.”And this is doubly concerning in our age of unrestricted carbon pollution because it is precisely these semiarid regions that are projected to see drops in precipitation and/or soil moisture, which will sharply boost the chances of civilization-threatening megadroughts and Dust-Bowlification. As these increasingly drought-prone global bread-baskets lose their easily accessible ground-water too, we end up with a death spiral: “Moreover, because the natural human response to drought is to pump more groundwater continued groundwater depletion will very likely accelerate mid-latitude drying, a problem that will be exacerbated by significant population growth in the same regions.”

Biggest Brazil Metro Area Desperate for Water -  Brazil is approaching the December start of its summer rainy season with its water supply nearly bare. More than 10 million people across Sao Paulo state, Brazil's most populous and the nation's economic engine, have been forced to cut water use over the past six months. A reservoir used by Itu has fallen to 2 percent of capacity and, because its system relies on rain and groundwater rather than rivers, the city is suffering more than others. In Itu, desperation is taking hold. Police escort water trucks to keep them from being hijacked by armed men. Residents demanding restoration of tap water have staged violent protests. Restaurants and bars are using disposable cups to avoid washing dishes, and agribusinesses are transporting soybeans and other crops by road rather than by boat in areas where rivers have dried up. "We are entering unknown territory," said Renato Tagnin, an expert in water resources at the environmental group Coletivo Curupira. "If this continues, we will run out of water. We have no more mechanisms and no water stored in the closet." The Sao Paulo metropolitan area ended its last rainy season in February with just a third of the usual rain total — only 9 inches (23 centimeters) over three months. Showers in October totaled just 1 inch (25 millimeters), one-fifth of normal. Only consistent, steady summer rains will bring immediate relief, experts say.

These Maps of California's Water Shortage Are Terrifying - Just how bad is California's water shortage? Really, really bad, according to these new maps, which represent groundwater withdrawals in California during the first three years of the state's ongoing and epochal drought: The maps come from anew paper in Nature Climate Change by NASA water scientist James Famiglietti. "California's Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins have lost roughly 15 cubic kilometers of total water per year since 2011," he writes. That's "more water than all 38 million Californians use for domestic and municipal supplies annually—over half of which is due to groundwater pumping in the Central Valley." Famiglietti uses satellite data to measure how much water people are sucking out of the globe's aquifers, and summarized his research in his new paper. More than 2 billion people rely on water pumped from aquifers as their primary water source, Famiglietti writes. Known as groundwater (as opposed to surface water, the stuff that settles in lakes and flows in streams and rivers), it's also the source of at least half the irrigation water we rely on to grow our food. When drought hits, of course, farmers rely on groundwater even more, because less rain and snow means less water flowing above ground.  The lesson Famiglietti draws from satellite data is chilling: "Groundwater is being pumped at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished, so that many of the largest aquifers on most continents are being mined, their precious contents never to be returned."

There’s A 99 Percent Chance 2014 Will Be The Hottest Year California Has Ever Seen -- California is on course to have its hottest year ever, Climate Central reported on Wednesday.  The state has been buffeted by recurring heat waves for several years, and has been in a near ceaseless state of drought since 2011 — with every inch of the state in at least “moderate” drought, and most of it in “extreme” to “exceptional” drought, as recently as September. But things worsened in 2014, as the recurring heat waves shifted into one continuous bake of high temperatures that hasn’t let up. California set another record this year for the hottest first six months ever recorded, Los Angeles endured a record-breaking heat wave in October that forced a number of school closures, and the city faces another bout of extreme heat this week. “It’s just been very consistently warm throughout the year,” With 2014 almost concluded, the chances now top 99 percent that it will beat out 1934 as the hottest year ever recorded in California, according to records going back to 1895. At this point, to fall short of the mark, the state “would have to have a December that’s basically colder than anything we’ve had in California,” Iniguez continued. “Which isn’t going to happen.”

Election Divides GOP On Whether To Seize And Sell America’s Public Lands - In the run-up to Tuesday’s elections, each week seemed to bring a new Republican candidate for federal and state office advocating for America’s national forests, wildlife areas and other public lands to be seized by the states or auctioned off to the highest bidder. Even the Republican National Committee (RNC) passed a resolution endorsing these extreme proposals earlier this year. Not all western state Republicans stood by their party’s platform in this election cycle, however. High-profile candidates who won competitive races in the West deliberately distanced themselves from their party’s platform, or avoided taking a stance on the issue altogether during their campaigns. At the same time, a number of western Republicans in competitive races who chose to embrace their party’s extreme stance came up short on Election Night. Proposals to seize and sell federal land are not only fundamentally unconstitutional, but also would cost state taxpayers millions of dollars, and in many cases, force the sale of public lands to the highest bidder.  Land grabs are also deeply unpopular among voters. Recent public opinion research, conducted by a bipartisan polling team, found that the majority of Western voters firmly oppose proposals to transfer America’s national forests and public lands to state ownership.

Why Sand Is Disappearing -  TO those of us who visit beaches only in summer, they seem as permanent a part of our natural heritage as the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes. But shore dwellers know differently. Beaches are the most transitory of landscapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of all. During big storms, especially in winter, they can simply vanish, only to magically reappear in time for the summer season.  It could be said that “a beach is a place where sand stops to rest for a moment before resuming its journey to somewhere else,”  Sand moved along the shore and from beach to sea bottom and back again, forming shorelines and barrier islands that until recently were able to repair themselves on a regular basis, producing the illusion of permanence. Today, however, 75 to 90 percent of the world’s natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of shores. Many low-lying barrier islands are already submerged. Yet the extent of this global crisis is obscured because so-called beach nourishment projects attempt to hold sand in place and repair the damage by the time summer people return, creating the illusion of an eternal shore.Before next summer, endless lines of dump trucks will have filled in bare spots and restored dunes. Virginia Beach alone has been restored more than 50 times. In recent decades, East Coast barrier islands have used 23 million loads of sand, much of it mined inland and the rest dredged from coastal waters — a practice that disturbs the sea bottom, creating turbidity that kills coral beds and damages spawning grounds, which hurts inshore fisheries.

Reinert Interview: Overfishing - K. Mcdonald - K.M.: You have some thoughts about overfishing. Please share them with us. Reinert: This subject really scares me.  I did some work for ten or more years down in the Galápagos Islands and part of what I saw down there was how the overfishing supply chain works. First, the artisanal fisherman, who rents his boat and his motor from importers in mainland Ecuador and Peru, pays his lease back with fish. It’s so horrible, because these boat owners put pressure on the small fisherman for bigger catches, all season catches, shark fins, sea bass, sea cucumbers, and the like. Big fishing boats from China, Korea, and Japan come sit just outside the protected limits and the artisanal fishermen bring them their catches.  Longer ago, these big Asian fishing boats would actually come into the protected waters of the Galápagos National Park, and I’ve seen them caught and put in jail for it, and you just know that for every incident in the Galápagos, there must be a thousand incidents elsewhere.  It is all so cold blooded. Money flows from brokers in the Far East into Ecuador, Peru, and Latin America to the intermediaries of these fishing operations.  To complete the picture, I’ve seen the unimaginably large fish markets in Tokyo and the enormous volumes of fish that come in and out of there every day. So I’ve seen this thing in operation from the little guy in Ecuador who’s illegally harvesting the sea cucumbers to that cucumber in the market in Tokyo and it makes me realize how huge and unstoppable it is and what an insatiable appetite there is in this world for fish.

New research quantifies what's causing sea level to rise - There have been a number of studies that have come out recently on ocean warming and sea-level rise. Collectively, they are helping scientists coalesce around an emerging understanding of climate change and its impact on the Earth. Most recently, a study by scientists Sarah Purkey, Gregory Johnson, and Don Chambers was published. This team was responsible for a 2010 paper that was groundbreaking in that it quantified very deep (abyssal) sea warming. This latest paper is, in some respects, a continuation of that work. The researchers recognized that changes to the sea levels are mainly caused by thermal expansion of ocean waters as they heat, changes to the saltiness of water, and by an increase in ocean waters as ice melts and flows into the sea. The total annual sea level rise is about 3 mm per year – the question is, how much of that is from expansion and how much is from melting? The researchers used a few tools to answer this question. One tool was ocean bottom pressure measurements. If you can measure changes to ocean pressure, you can deduce how much water is in the ocean. Another tool is through an inventory approach. This inventory method quantifies how much glaciers retreat, polar ice melts, and changes to water storage on land. The paper reports that both methods agree with each other. They conclude that increased water in the oceans is causing about 1.5–1.8 mm per year of sea level rise. The actual value depends, in part, on which years are under consideration. The authors don’t just consider the ocean as a whole. They break the ocean regions into seven different sections. The reason for this subdivision is that the change to ocean levels is not uniform. In some reasons, waters are rising quickly, in other regions, the rise is much slower or zero. One region for regional variability is that the Earth’s gravity is changing.

When thawing glaciers release pollutants: As glaciers increasingly melt in the wake of climate change, it is not only the landscape that is affected. Thawing glaciers also release many industrial pollutants stored in the ice into the environment. Now, within the scope of a Swiss National Science Foundation project, researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Empa, ETH Zurich and the University of Berne have measured the concentrations of a class of these pollutants – polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) – in the ice of an Alpine glacier accurately for the first time. The measurements reveal that the PCB levels in the atmosphere have decreased since the 1970s thanks to the meanwhile global ban on PCBs. Through the progressive melting of the glaciers, however, this residual waste risks being released back into the atmosphere. Climate change has altered the glacier landscape of the Alps dramatically in recent decades. Where long glacier snouts once extended, there are often only scattered ice fields now and mountain lakes are forming in their place. Furthermore the glaciers have melted away in low-lying areas. Not only does this change the face of the Alps; it also influences the water balance as glaciers are a major freshwater source in the Alpine region. Moreover, the thawing glaciers release pollutants that have been stored inside them for considerable periods of time.

The Economist explains: Why scientists are (almost) certain that climate change is man-made | The Economist --On November 2nd the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents mainstream scientific opinion, said that it was extremely likely that climate change is the product of human activity. Extremely likely in IPCC speak means having a probability of over 95%. The claim forms part of its fifth assessment on the state of the global climate. In its first assessment, in 1990, the IPCC had said that "the observed increase [in air temperatures] could be largely due to natural variability." Why have climate scientists become so much more certain that climate change is man-made, not natural? Many factors influence the climate but perhaps the single most important is carbon dioxide (CO₂). CO₂ absorbs infra-red heat at a constant rate and at a higher rate than nitrogen and oxygen—the main constituent parts of the atmosphere—so the more CO₂ in the air, the more the atmosphere will tend to warm up. Scientists attribute climate change to human activity mainly because people have been responsible for large increases in CO₂. At the start of the industrial revolution, in about 1800, there were 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO₂ in the atmosphere. That had been the level for most of human history. This year, however, concentrations exceeded 400 ppm, the first time it had reached that level for a million years. Most of the increase has been caused by people burning fossil fuels. In the United States, for example, 38% of the CO₂ produced in 2012 came from generating electricity and 32% came from vehicle emissions (the rest came from industrial processes, buildings and other smaller CO₂ production). People also produce CO₂ when they cut down forests for farmland and pasture. But the rate at which CO₂ absorbs heat—which has been established accurately in laboratories—does not explain all the increase in global temperatures.  If CO2 concentrations were to double from 1800 levels, global temperatures would rise by roughly 1 °C. But there are many other influences upon the climate.

U.N. Panel Warns of Dire Effects From Lack of Action Over Global Warming - A core finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant, future threat, but is being felt all over the world already. The group cited mass die-offs of forests, including those in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people. The report contained the group’s sharpest warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a far larger one if emissions continue unchecked. The reported noted that in recent years the world’s food system had shown signs of instability, with sudden price increases leading to riots and, in a few cases, the collapse of governments. Another central finding of the report is that climate change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened in some places.

World’s Scientists Warn: We Have ‘High Confidence’ In The ‘Irreversible Impacts’ Of Climate Inaction -- The world’s top scientists and governments have issued their bluntest plea yet to the world: Slash carbon pollution now (at a very low cost) or risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” Scientists have “high confidence” these devastating impacts occur “even with adaptation” — if we keep doing little or nothing.On Sunday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the “synthesis” report of their fifth full scientific climate assessment since 1990. More than 100 governments have signed off line by line on this review of more than 30,000 studies on climate science, impacts, and solutions. Like every recent IPCC report, it is cautious to a fault — as you would expect from “its consensus structure, which tends to produce a lowest common denominator on which a large number of scientists can agree,” as one climatologist explained to the New York Times. And that “lowest common denominator” is brought to an even blander and lower level in the summary reports since they need to end up with language that satisfies every member government.The authors clearly understand this is the last time they have a serious shot at influencing the world’s major governments while we still have a plausible chance of stabilizing at non-catastrophic levels. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said this report will “provide the roadmap by which policymakers will hopefully find their way to a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate change.” That global agreement is supposed to be achieved over the next year and finalized at the December 2015 international climate talks in Paris.

U.N. talks of tough global climate targets, vague on national action: (Reuters) - A draft U.N. guide for slowing climate change says world greenhouse gas emissions may have to fall to a net zero this century but is vague about what each nation should do now. About 500 delegates, including scientists and government experts, are meeting in Copenhagen to edit the report, which is meant to guide policymakers in setting national goals for a global climate deal at a U.N. summit in Paris in late 2015. The draft synthesis report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says rising world emissions will have to peak soon and then fall fast to limit risks of what could be "irreversible" damage. "Somewhere after the middle of this century human-caused emissions will have to come down to a net zero," Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, told Reuters. "That in essence is going to design the arithmetic of national actions," he said of efforts to limit rising temperatures to avert desertification, mudslides, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels. Net zero means that any emissions, for instance from burning fossil fuels, would be balanced by other measures such as extracting carbon dioxide from the air and burying it. The report indicates that net zero emissions would give a strong chance of achieving a U.N. goal of limiting a rise in average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above the temperatures in pre-industrial times.

Bill McKibben: IPCC Report Says Climate Change Is 'Severe, Widespread and Irreversible' » At this point, the scientists who run the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must feel like it’s time to trade their satellites, their carefully calibrated thermometers and spectrometers, their finely tuned computer models—all of them for a thesaurus. Surely, somewhere, there must be words that will prompt the world’s leaders to act.  This week, with the release of their new synthesis report, they are trying the words “severe, widespread and irreversible” to describe the effects of climate change—which for scientists, conservative by nature, falls just short of announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse plus random beheadings plus Ebola. It’s hard to imagine how they will up the language in time for the next big global confab in Paris. But even with all that, this new document—actually a synthesis of three big working group reports released over the last year—almost certainly underestimates the actual severity of the situation. As the Washington Post pointed out this week, past reports have always tried to err on the side of understatement; it’s a particular problem with sea level rise, since the current IPCC document does not even include the finding in May that the great Antarctic ice sheets have begun to melt. (The studies were published after the IPCC’s cutoff date). But when you get right down to it, who cares? The scientists have done their job; no sentient person, including Republican Senate candidates, can any longer believe in their heart of hearts that there’s not a problem here. The scientific method has triumphed: over a quarter of a century, researchers have reached astonishing consensus on a basic problem in chemistry and physics.

'All We Need Is the Will to Change' -- A new report from the United Nation's panel of climate scientists offers little in the way of surprises: Climate change, it says, is almost entirely man-made; it will be irreversible if nothing is done soon; and reducing greenhouse gases to zero this century may be necessary to reverse its effects. This isn't surprising. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's final volume, dubbed the "Synthesis Report," echoes the previous three reports that relied on the findings of more than 800 scientists released over the previous 13 months. "Science has spoken," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared at the launch of the report in Copenhagen. "There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side." The report makes it clear that scientists are more certain than ever before that human activity is responsible for climate change. "Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history," the report says. To keep the the global temperature rise from reaching what the panel views as a dangerous level, emissions from fossil fuels may need to drop to zero by the end of the century. The report cites increasingly frequent and severe heat waves, melting glaciers, and dramatically changing sea levels as indicators of the accelerating rate of climate change.  Although the report by and large has a bleak outlook, it also strikes a hopeful tone, saying that educating the general public about climate change is the key to reversal.

Arctic Methane Emissions ‘Certain to Trigger Warming’ -- As climate change melts Arctic permafrost and releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, it is creating a feedback loop that is "certain to trigger additional warming," according to the lead scientist of a new study investigating Arctic methane emissions.   The study released this week examined 71 wetlands across the globe and found that melting permafrost is creating wetlands known as fens, which are unexpectedly emitting large quantities of methane. Over a 100-year timeframe, methane is about 35 times as potent as a climate change-driving greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and over 20 years, it's 84 times more potent.   Methane emissions come from agriculture, fossil fuel production and microbes in wetland soils, among other sources. The study says scientists have assumed that methane emissions from wetlands are high in the tropics, but not necessarily in the Arctic because of the cold temperatures there.  But a spike in global methane concentrations in the atmosphere seen since 2007 can be partly traced back to the formation of fens in areas where permafrost once existed, according to the study, led by University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) biology professor Merritt Turetsky. The methane emissions stemming from melting permafrost could be critical to determining how fast the climate will change in the future.

Snowden documents reveal British climate espionage – Copenhagen climate summit targeted Against the backdrop of UN delegates gathering at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting this week in Copenhagen, Dagbladet Information today documents systematic intelligence operations against international climate negotiations by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Among others, the intelligence service targeted the most recent major UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the COP15, held in December 2009.  As reported earlier by Dagbladet Information, NSA, the US intelligence service, carried out intelligence operations against the COP15. The new documents, however, provide an insight into climate espionage of a more systematic and far-reaching nature than what is currently known about the operations of the NSA.  The climate espionage is a fresh example that modern intelligence services such as GCHQ and NSA are deployed with the purpose of securing advantages for their governments in international negotiations through the collection of intelligence on the confidential negotiation strategies of other countries. Among a number of other examples is the espionage carried out by GCHQ against participants in the economically decisive G20 summit in London in the spring of 2009, which has been uncovered by the British newspaper the Guardian.

Scotland’s Wind Energy Production In October Enough To Power Every Home - According to new numbers published by WWF Scotland this week, wind turbines generated enough electricity in October to power 3,045,000 homes in the U.K. — more than enough for all the homes in Scotland.  Referring to it as a “bumper month” for renewable energy, WWF Scotland’s director Lang Banks said in a statement that “while nuclear power plants were being forced to shut because of cracks, Scotland’s wind and sunshine were quietly and cleanly helping to keep the lights on in homes across the country.” Based on figures provided by WeatherEnergy, part of the European EnergizAIR project, the data also showed that for those homes fitted with solar panels, there was enough sunshine to meet around 40 percent of the electricity needs of an average home. Wind energy has been thriving in the U.K. in recent months. In August the U.K set a new record for wind power generation, with wind accounting for seventeen percent of national demand. This came around the time that EDF Energy announced it was temporarily shutting down four of its U.K. reactors, or around a quarter of its total nuclear generating capacity, due to longevity issues. The four EDF reactors under investigation were commissioned in 1983 and are officially scheduled to be taken out of service in 2019.

G20: Australia makes token concession on climate change after US lobbying -- Australia has reluctantly conceded that climate change can be included in a single brief paragraph of the G20 leaders’ communique after heavy lobbying by the US and European nations. The government had resisted any discussion of climate at the Brisbane meeting on the grounds that the G20 is primarily an economic forum, but other nations argued leaders’ agreements at meetings like the G20 are crucial to build momentum towards a successful international deal at the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris next year. The final wording of the leaders’ statement after the meeting is still being finalised but it is believed to simply recommit to addressing climate change through UN processes. The outcome – and Australia’s resistance – have been attacked by the leading climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern, who has written for Guardian Australia that the latest “synthesis” report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be “high on the agenda” for the G20 meeting.“The G20 is the most effective forum for the discussion of the growth story of the future, the transition to the low-carbon economy. Yet the local politics of a country of less than 25 million is being allowed to prevent essential strategic discussions of an issue that is of fundamental importance to the prosperity and well-being of the world’s population of 7 billion people,” he writes. Australia has agreed the G20 should discuss climate-related issues as part of its deliberations on energy efficiency, but this also appears to be wrapped up in a general commitment that countries consider taking action in the future on some of a long list of areas where energy efficiency improvements might be made.

Poor Countries Tap Renewables at Twice the Pace of Rich - - Emerging markets are installing renewable energy projects at almost twice the rate of developed nations, a report concluded. A study of 55 nations -- including China, Brazil, South Africa, Uruguay and Kenya -- found that they’ve installed a combined 142 gigawatts from 2008 to 2013. The 143 percent growth in renewables in those markets compares with an 84 percent rate in wealthier nations, which installed 213 megawatts, according to a report released today by Climatescope. The boom in renewables is often made for economic reasons, Ethan Zindler, a Washington-based Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst, said in an interview. An island nation like Jamaica, where wholesale power costs about $300 a megawatt-hour, could generate electricity from solar panels for about half as much. Similarly, wind power in Nicaragua may be half as expensive as traditional energy. “Clean energy is the low-cost option in a lot of these countries,” Zindler said by telephone. “The technologies are cost-competitive right now. Not in the future, but right now.”

How Global Fossil Fuel Dependence Hasn’t Changed In 20 Years -- Whilst enjoying the good natured exchanges on this blog concerning the pros and cons of new renewable energy sources I decided to dig deeper into the success of Green energy policies to date. Roger Andrews produced this chart the other day and the low carbon energy trends caught my eye. It is important to recall that well over $1,700,000,000,000 ($1.7 trillion) has been spent on installing wind and solar devices in recent years with the sole objective of reducing global CO2 emissions. It transpires that since 1995 low carbon energy sources (nuclear, hydro and other renewables) share of global energy consumption has not changed at all (Figure 1). New renewables have not even replaced lost nuclear generating capacity since 1999 (Figure 2). ZERO CO2 has been abated and the world has done zilch to prepare itself for the expected declines (escalating costs) of fossil fuels in the decades ahead. If this is not total policy failure, what is?

Fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100 says IPCC: The unrestricted use of fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100 if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, a UN-backed expert panel says. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in a stark report that most of the world's electricity can - and must - be produced from low-carbon sources by 2050. If not, the world faces "severe, pervasive and irreversible" damage. The UN said inaction would cost "much more" than taking the necessary action. The IPCC's Synthesis Report was published on Sunday in Copenhagen, after a week of intense debate between scientists and government officials. It is intended to inform politicians engaged in attempts to deliver a new global treaty on climate by the end of 2015. The report says that reducing emissions is crucial if global warming is to be limited to 2C - a target acknowledged in 2009 as the threshold of dangerous climate change. The report suggests renewables will have to grow from their current 30% share to 80% of the power sector by 2050. In the longer term, the report states that fossil fuel power generation without carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology would need to be "phased out almost entirely by 2100".

Coal is the future, insists Tony Abbott as UN calls for action on climate change --The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, has stood by his defence of coal, saying it is the foundation of Australia’s foreseeable future, just days after a United Nations climate report called for an urgent reduction in carbon emissions. “For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of our prosperity. Coal is the foundation of the way we live because you can’t have a modern lifestyle without energy,” the prime minister said on Tuesday. “You can’t have a modern economy without energy and for now and for the foreseeable future, the foundation of Australia’s energy needs will be coal. The foundation of the world’s energy needs will be coal.” Abbott said coal increased the prosperity of people in developing countries. “If we are serious about raising people’s living standards in less-developed countries, if we are serious about maintaining and improving living standards in countries like Australia we have to be serious about making the best use of coal.” Last month at the opening of a coalmine in central Queensland, the prime minister warned against the “demonisation” of fossil fuel. “Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world,” he said. 

rjs: climate and environmental news for October 12, 2014

by rjs, bless him, October 12, 2014

New Experimental GE Wheat Contamination in Montana Puts Wheat Farmers at Risk --The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced that experimental genetically engineered (GE) wheat was discovered in July, 2014 at a  Montana research facility that has not legally grown the variety since 2003. “Once again, USDA and the biotech industry have put farmers and the food supply at risk,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for Center for Food Safety. “Coexistence between GE and non-GE crops is a failed policy that fundamentally cannot work. Genetic contamination is a serious threat to farmers across the country.” In the same announcement, USDA closed its investigation into a May, 2013 GE wheat contamination episode in Oregon without any explanation for the incident. That contamination episode led to closures of vital export markets and a class action lawsuit against Monsanto by wheat farmers. “Just as USDA closes one fruitless investigation, it tries to bury the story of yet another contamination. USDA cannot keep treating these as isolated incidents; contamination is the inevitable outcome of GE crop technology,” said Kimbrell. “It’s time for Congress to take definitive action.” Monsanto is currently in the process of settling a class action lawsuit brought by wheat farmers impacted by the Oregon contamination episode, which forced exports to several Asian and European markets to be suspended and cost farmers millions of dollars. USDA records reveal that Monsanto has conducted 279 field tests of herbicide-resistant wheat on over 4,000 acres in 17 states since 1994. Monsanto has received at least 35 notices of noncompliance from 2010 through 2013, more than any other company.

A hard look at corn economics — and world hunger | Marketplace.org: The corn harvest is coming in, and great weather has produced a record crop. This is terrible news for farmers: Oversupply means cratering prices. If that sounds like a paradox, consider this: Corn, the biggest crop in our agricultural powerhouse of a nation, is not a foodstuff. It’s a highly refined industrial material—more like aluminum than apples. And a hard look at corn economics puts world hunger in a different light. Let's start at an ethanol plant: Lincolnway Energy, in Nevada, Iowa. CEO and President Erik Hakmiller is our guide. The plant includes several big buildings, lots of loud noises... and some unexpected smells. One is hard to place at first. "What you smell is residual carbon dioxide, and a cooking— very much like a bakery smell," says Hakmiller. Then Hakmiller opens the door to a giant building with a corrugated metal roof. It’s a barn. Inside are these golden mountains—piled-up flakes of grain. For every bushel of corn that comes to Lincolnway Energy, only a third comes out as ethanol. Another third comes out as carbon dioxide, which goes into soda pop. The rest—the fat, fiber and protein—ends up on one of these piles. "Each pile being about a thousand tons."

FAO: Global Food Price Index is Down Again - Big Picture Agriculture: -- A very reassuring new Food Outlook Report has just been released by the FAO. If we were to go back over the past five years and review all of the sensationalist headlines proclaiming that food production in the world is headed downwards and far-more-than-that drama predicting assured gloom and doom, we would see that many fear-mongers got it very wrong. The world on average has surpluses of food right now. Weather was quite good all around for the globe’s wheat crop so that 2014 will set a new high record. Strong prices pushed a rebound in corn production to make up for the recent large policy-induced demand for corn coming from the U.S. The Midwestern United States didn’t experience a multi-year drought as many predicted in 2012. And climate change is not as of yet affecting our global food supply in a significantly negative way. The graphs below show us the remarkably positive state of the world for food and agricultural production.

Here's Why We Haven't Quite Figured Out How to Feed Billions More People -- When famine loomed in Mexico and southern Asia in the mid-20th century, agricultural crop researchers saved the day. Scientists at Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the Philippines's International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) came up with new, high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice that raised harvests and kept starvation at bay.  That major advancement in crop production—financed with money from governments and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations—increased yields of cereal grains by using improved crop seeds, irrigation systems, synthetic fertilizer, and pesticides. Led by American agronomist Norman Borlaug, this movement became known as the Green Revolution.  Most increases in agricultural production during the past half century have come from that type of innovation: boosting crop and livestock yields on land that already was being used for agriculture. Studies indicate that this growth in productivity has stemmed largely from investments in agricultural research. But yield improvements have slowed during the past 20 years, and public spending on agricultural research in developed nations such as the United States and those in Europe has flattened. That's a daunting combination at a time when the world's population is soaring toward 11 billion by 2100 and when several parts of the world—from California's Central Valley to Brazil's southern region around São Paolo—are suffering through history-making droughts that have emptied reservoirs and damaged crops. More than 400,000 acres of food-growing lands have been left fallow in California.

Trying to Talk Sense About Demography | naked capitalism - Yves here. This post on demography is consistent with the view of a large segment of the Naked Capitalism commentariat, namely, that pro-growth policies fail to acknowledge pressures on resources, like potable water and oil, and therefore policymakers and economists need to focus much more attention on the question of how to organize a low-growth society. Note that I am not completely convinced of this view. Most of the ways we organize human enterprise are terribly wasteful, from the failure to maintain municipal water systems well (which results in leakage estimated at a typical 20% to 30% loss level), to a lack of willingness to provide incentives to move away from car-dependent suburban living, to too many people eating too much food high up on the food chain. But even allowing for the fact that it would be conceivable, say over a generation or two, to move towards much less resource-intensive lifestyles, we face a more basic conundrum: there are just too many people on the planet, and those who live in developing economies want to live a much more environmentally costly first world lifestyle. To put it more tersely: if you acknowledge the economic and resource implications of demography, you need to favor no or few child policies. But that remains a third rail in politics and economics.  This article, in a somewhat gingerly manner, broaches the notion that no or negative demographic growth would be a good thing. The issue that he does not address is that aside from instinctive and social/cultural pressures to have children is that children also remain the best, if imperfect, social safety net for elderly people. The restructuring of society, with weaker community ties and the need to be willing to relocate to find work, fewer and fewer children are in a position to do much for their aging parents if they aren’t in the same community, and moving back is often too risky to undertake (if you are in your 50s and have what looks like a viable job, tossing that to help your parents is a choice many could not make even if they wanted to).

Should we upgrade photosynthesis and grow supercrops? -- PLANTS are badly out of date. They gained their photosynthetic machinery in one fell swoop a billion years ago, by enslaving bacteria that had the ability to convert sunlight into chemical energy. Plants went on to conquer the land and green the earth, but they also became victims of their own early success. Their enslaved cyanobacteria have had little scope to evolve, meaning plants can struggle to cope as the atmosphere changes. The free-living relatives of those bacteria, however, have been able to evolve unfettered. Their photosynthetic machinery is faster and more efficient, allowing them to capture more of the sun's energy. Scientists have long dreamed of upgrading crop plants with the better photosynthetic machinery of free-living cyanobacteria. Until recently all attempts had failed, but now they've taken a huge step forward. A joint team from Cornell University in New York and Rothamsted Research in the UK has successfully replaced a key enzyme in tobacco plants with a faster version from a cyanobacterium (Nature, Vol. 513, p. 547).  Their success promises huge gains in agricultural productivity – but is likely to become controversial as people wake up to the implications. The enzyme in question is called RuBisCo, which catalyses the reaction that "fixes" carbon dioxide from the air to make into sugars. It is the most important enzyme in the world – almost all living things rely on it for food. But it is incredibly slow, catalysing only about three reactions per second. A typical enzyme gets through tens of thousands. It is also wasteful. RuBisCo evolved at a time when the atmosphere was rich in CO2 but devoid of oxygen. Now there's lots of oxygen and relatively little CO2, and and RuBisCo has a habit of mistaking oxygen for CO₂, which wastes large amounts of energy.

Michael Perelman: Globalization, “Free Trade,” and Food as a Strategic Weapon - naked capitalism Yves here. Michael Perelman gave a wide-ranging talk in Ankara called the Anarchy of Globalization which focused on the local impact of globalization. The presentation was wide-ranging and included a discussion of the evolution of usage and theoretical concerns. We've extracted a section below, on the role of "free trade" agreements and one of their not-widely-recognized side effects, that of weakening food security. The case study is Mexico.

California’s Drought Is So Bad, Even Its Hydropower Is Drying Up --California’s ability to produce renewable energy from hydroelectric dams has been significantly hampered over the last few years because of an increasingly severe and widespread drought, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Monday.  The drought, which began in 2011 and is now covering 100% of the state, is drying up the reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams. The reservoirs create power when the force of the water in them is released onto turbines. When there is less water, there is also less pressure to spin those turbines, thereby decreasing the amount of renewable electricity that can be produced.  Hydroelectric power used to account for 20% of California’s in-state electricity generation for the first 6 months of each year from 2004 until 2013, the EIA said. But during the first 6 months of 2014, hydropower generation was halved, making up only 10% of California’s in-state electricity generation.  To make up for the shortage of hydropower, California also increased its use of natural gas by 3% over the first 6 months of 2014, according to the EIA. Partially because of the length of the drought, California’s natural gas use has increased by 16% overall in the last 10 years, the EIA said.

California Drought Cuts Hydroelectric Generation in Half » The prolonged drought in California, now entering its fourth year, has altered the state’s mix of energy generation sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That’s mixed news for those pushing for more reliance on renewables and less on fossil fuels. The EIA issued a report yesterday that showed that, with the state’s reservoirs currently at 42% of their normal levels for this time of year, the ability of hydroelectric dams to produce power has been cut in half. The dams, which normally produce about 20% of the state’s power, are now producing only 10 percent. With hydro power production at a 10-year low, reliance on natural gas hit a 10-year high. That’s not good news, since fracking for natural gas requires copious amounts of water and has stirred up opposition in the state. (While most fracking in California is for oil, it also sits on large natural gas reserves.) According to the EIA, “In California, natural gas-fired capacity is often used to help offset lower levels of generation from hydropower facilities. The chart below shows how this inverse relationship can work: when monthly hydropower generation dips under 10-year average levels, monthly natural gas generation often rises above its 10-year average in response. From January through June of 2014, natural gas generation in California was percent higher compared to the same period in 2013 and 16% higher compared to the January-June average from the previous 10 years.”

"Nobody Has Any Idea How Disastrous It's Going To Be" Warns California Water Expert -- Newly released images created from NASA satellite data illustrate the staggering effect the California drought has had on groundwater supply in the state. As Mashable's Patrick Kulp explains, the images show the amount of water lost over the past 12 years, with different colors indicating severity over time. “Nobody has any idea how disastrous it’s going to be,” Mike Wade of California Farm Water Coalition told the Associated Press, as RT reports a growing number of communities in central and northern California could end up without water in 60 days due to the Golden state’s prolonged drought. While California is bearing the brunt, experts note "We're seeing it happening all over the world, in most of the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world."

California drought and climate warming: Studies find no clear link - Global warming contributed to extreme heat waves in many parts of the world last year, but cannot be definitively linked to the California drought, according to a report released Monday. The third annual analysis of extreme weather events underscored the continuing difficulty of teasing out the influence of human-caused climate change on precipitation patterns. One of three studies examining the California drought in 2013 found that the kind of high-pressure systems that blocked winter storms last year have increased with global warming. But another study concluded that a long-term rise in sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific did not contribute substantially to the drought. And researchers noted that California precipitation since 1895 has "exhibited no appreciable downward trend." Overall, the report editors concluded that the papers didn't demonstrate that global warming clearly influenced the drought, which is one of the worst in the state record.

Scientists say greenhouse gases most likely worsen California drought: (Reuters) - California's catastrophic drought has most likely been made worse by man-made climate change, according to a report released Monday by Stanford University, but scientists are still hesitant to fully blame the lack of rain on climate change. The research, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society as part of a collection of reports on extreme weather events in 2013, is one of the most comprehensive studies linking climate change and California's ongoing drought, which has caused billions of dollars in economic damage. The report found that high-pressure ridges like the one that stubbornly parked itself over the Pacific Ocean for the past two winters, blocking storms from hitting California, are much more likely to form in the presence of man-made greenhouse gases. The ridge, dubbed the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge by researchers, or "Triple R," parched the state during the past two rainy seasons. "You can visualize it as a fairly large boulder in a small stream," said Daniel Swain, a lead author on the report, which said the phenomenon has caused storms to bypass not only California but also Oregon and Washington, pushing rain as far north as the Arctic Circle. Using climate model simulations, the researchers found that "Triple-R" events are three times more likely to occur today than in preindustrial climates.

South-North Water Scarcity Engineering Projects in China | Big Picture Agriculture: One of the regions of the world which has a worrisome level of water scarcity is northern China, including its capital city of Beijing, a city with a population of over 21 million people. The World Bank’s definition of a water scarce region is 35,300 cubic feet of fresh water per person, per year. Each Beijing resident has about 15% of that amount and 11 of China’s 31 provinces are dryer than this. Northern China has only a fifth of the country’s fresh water but two-thirds of its farmland. Seventy percent of northern China’s water is used for agriculture to produce crops such as corn and wheat. Groundwater levels are plummeting because of un-tariffed extraction by farmers and urbanites and groundwater is also becoming contaminated. Thousands of rivers have disappeared in the region due to overuse for grain production, and for highly inefficient use in industry. Much of the river water that is left is too polluted even for industrial use. A 2009 report revealed that half of the water in 7 main Chinese rivers was unfit for human consumption. Northern China is arid and southern China is water-rich, so the Chinese government’s “fix” attempt has been throwing tens of billions of dollars towards water engineering projects to get water moved from south to north across the country. The first of three phases, the Eastern Route, was completed last year. In that project, China’s 1,400-year-old Grand Canal was expanded with concrete to move water from the Yangzi river basin towards the port city of Tianjin.

The world is warming faster than we thought - It's worse than we thought. Scientists may have hugely underestimated the extent of global warming because temperature readings from southern hemisphere seas were inaccurate. Comparisons of direct measurements with satellite data and climate models suggest that the oceans of the southern hemisphere have been sucking up more than twice as much of the heat trapped by our excess greenhouse gases than previously calculated. This means we may have underestimated the extent to which our world has been warming. Paul Durack from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in the US and colleagues have compared direct and inferred sea temperature measurements with the results of climate models. While these three types of measurements together suggest that our estimates of northern hemisphere ocean warming are about right, a different story emerged for down south. The team estimate that the extent of warming in the southern hemisphere oceans since 1970 could be more than twice what has been inferred from the limited direct measurements we have for this region. This means that together, all the world's oceans are absorbing between 24 and 58% more energy than has previously been estimated by direct, in situ measurements.

Scientists speed up analysis of human link to wild weather: - Climate scientists hope to be able to tell the world almost in real-time whether global warming has a hand in extreme weather thanks to an initiative they plan to launch by the end of 2015. In recent years, scientists have become more adept at working out whether climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions is exacerbating wild weather and its impacts around the world, but the task usually takes months. "In the media, we are seeing this notion that you cannot attribute any individual events to climate change, but in fact the science has really evolved over the past decade," said Heidi Cullen, chief scientist with Climate Central. The U.S.-based non-profit science journalism organisation is leading the initiative to speed up that analysis alongside the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, scientists at Oxford University, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and others.  A review of 16 major weather events in 2013, released on Monday, found that human-caused climate change clearly increased the severity and likelihood of five heatwaves studied - including in Australia, Japan and China. For other events like droughts, heavy rain and storms, pinning down the influence of human activity was more challenging, the researchers said. 

The Ocean’s Surface Layer Has Been Warming Much Faster Than Previously Thought - Surface layers of the ocean have been warming significantly faster than previous estimates had projected, according to a new study. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that the upper 700 meters (about 2,296 feet) of the ocean have been warming 24 to 55 percent faster since 1970 than previously thought. This difference in estimations is likely due to “poor sampling” of ocean temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere, the study notes. If estimations for temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere are readjusted to fit better with climate models, they increase, the scientists found. “It’s likely that due to the poor observational coverage, we just haven’t been able to say definitively what the long-term rate of Southern Hemisphere ocean warming has been,” lead author of the study Paul Durack told the BBC. “It’s a really pressing problem — we’re trying as hard as we can, as scientists, to provide the best information from the limited observations we have.”  

Meanwhile, temperatures in the deep ocean didn’t increase significantly between 2005 and 2013, according to another study in Nature Climate Change. Both studies noted gaps in data, however, which made uncertainties in temperature estimates more likely. As Science Magazine points out, most ocean temperature readings are collected by buoys that only account for the ocean’s upper 2,000 meters (6,561 feet). With the average depth of the ocean at 4,300 meters (14,107 feet), those buoys are likely missing significant data collection on ocean warming.

Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized --Under an international program begun in 2000, and that started producing useful global data in 2005, the world’s warming and acidifying seas have been invisibly filled with thousands of these bobbing instruments. They are gathering and transmitting data that’s providing scientists with the clearest-ever pictures of the hitherto-unfathomed extent of ocean warming. About 90 percent of global warming is ending up not on land, but in the oceans. Research published Sunday concluded that the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought. Gathering reliable ocean data in the Southern Hemisphere has historically been a challenge, given its remoteness and its relative paucity of commercial shipping, which helps gather ocean data. Argo floats and satellites are now helping to plug Austral ocean data gaps, and improving the accuracy of Northern Hemisphere measurements and estimates. “The Argo data is really critical,” said Paul Durack, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher who led the new study, which was published in Nature Climate Change. “The estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes.” Durack and Lawrence Livermore colleagues worked with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist to compare ocean observations with ocean models. They concluded that the upper levels of the planet’s oceans — those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined — had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58% faster than had previously been realized.

A Gulf in Ocean Knowledge - Scientists probably have significantly underestimated how much the world’s oceans have warmed since the 1970s, according to a new study. The finding may force researchers to revise their gauges of some climate change effects, including the rate of sea-level rise.The study, by Paul J. Durack of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and others, found that the underestimation was the result of decades of spotty sampling of water temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere, home to three-fifths of the world’s oceans. Until 2004, when a worldwide system of autonomous floats, called Argo, became operational, there were relatively few temperature measurements south of the Equator. While atmospheric warming because of the trapping of heat by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has most of the public’s attention, the oceans store far more of this heat. The study showed that the amount of heat absorbed by the top 2,200 feet of the oceans from 1970 to the mid-2000s may be as much as 58% higher than previously estimated. “We potentially may have missed a fair amount of heat that the ocean has been taking up,” Dr. Durack said. The researchers looked at global climate models, partitioned between north and south, and found a strong correlation between these simulations and data on sea-surface height as measured by satellites. But the models were not a good match for temperature, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. This suggested that the problem was not with the models so much as with the lack of temperature data before 2004. The study was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Coastal Cities Are Drowning, Thanks To New Reality Of Sea Level Rise -- Coastal American cities are sinking into saturated new realities, new analysis has confirmed. Sea level rise has given a boost to high tides, which are regularly overtopping streets, floorboards and other low-lying areas that had long existed in relatively dehydrated harmony with nearby waterfronts. The trend is projected to worsen sharply in the coming years.  A new report, released by the Union of Concerned Scientists late on Tuesday, forecasts that by 2030, at least 180 floods will strike during high tides every year in Annapolis, Md. In some cases, such flooding will occur twice in a single day, since tides come in and out about two times daily. By 2045, that’s also expected be the case in Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, N.J., and 14 other East Coast and Gulf Coast locations out of 52 analyzed by the Union of Concerned Scientists.  “The shock for us was that tidal flooding could become the new normal in the next 15 years; we didn’t think it would be so soon,” said Melanie Fitzpatrick, one of three researchers at the nonprofit who analyzed tide gauge data and sea level projections, producing soused prognoses for scores of coastal Americans. “If you live on a coast and haven’t seen coastal flooding yet, just give it a few years. You will.”  The group originally set out to study increased risks of storm surges and hurricanes as seas rose, but quickly changed tack. “We realized before we even got through the statistics of the last 40 years that tidal flooding is a much bigger story,” Fitzpatrick said. “But nobody’s really telling that story.”

Major U.S. Cities Will See 10 Times More Coastal Flooding By 2045 - Flooding during high tide could occur so frequently in some U.S. cities in the future that parts could become “unusable,” according to a new report. The report, published by the Union for Concerned Scientists, looked at 52 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tide gauges in coastal cities in Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Virginia and other states. UCS analyzed the states’ flooding risk under mid-range sea level rise predictions taken from the White House’s National Climate Assessment — an estimate of 5 inches of sea level rise by 2030, and 11 inches by 2045. It found that tidal flooding could triple in some cities in 15 years and occur 10 times as often in most cities in the next 30 years.  The Mid-Atlantic states are particularly vulnerable, the report found. A tripling of tidal flooding events in these states would mean that, in some cities, flooding could occur multiple times per week. The report also found that by 2045, one-third of the cities and towns looked at could start experiencing tidal flooding more than 180 days each year, and nine cities would see flooding 240 times each year.  These floods aren’t the type that cause death or major destruction, the authors of the report noted on a press conference Wednesday. They’re “nuisance” floods, the kind that force residents to wade through water on their way to work and move their cars before the tide comes to avoid saltwater damage. But as sea levels rise, there’s likely only so much of this flooding that communities will be willing to take, report co-author Erika Spanger-Siegfried said. If the flooding becomes chronic, some areas may be forced to decide whether to relocate businesses and homes.

A Danish company is building a $335 million seawall around New York -- In the aftermath of Sandy, Ovink brought his knowledge Stateside and joined the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) initiative to rebuild and reinforce the New Jersey and New York coastline. At HUD, he conceived and led Rebuild by Design, a contest in which architects, designers, scientists, engineers, and recovery specialists submitted proposals for a smarter and more resilient infrastructure along the region’s waterfront.One of the winning proposals was Bjarke Ingels Group’s Big U. It’s not simply a big wall — at nearly 10 miles long, the system would wrap around the southern half of Manhattan and mix different kinds of spaces, from parks to community areas, with infrastructure designed to fight flooding. Developed in conversation with residents, developers, businesses, and city officials, the Big U is a continuous protective structure that blends and adapts to each neighborhood it passes through. In the Lower East Side neighborhood, a raised stretch of land known as the Bridging Berm acts as a natural dam, but also provides recreational green space for residents in the neighborhood. Panels installed on the underside of FDR Drive will be lit and decorated by local artists, creating a space for a seasonal market. But in times of emergency, those same panels can be flipped down to create a floodwall. Ovink calls the features "a chain of pearls." But, he insists, all the components are "tied with one strong strategy of protecting Manhattan." Big U was awarded $335 million dollars to start on implementation. Other winning proposals address other flooding threats in the region, from Long Island and the Bronx, to Staten Island and New Jersey. Each project requires further funding and coordinated effort between local governments and communities. But the radical solutions that emerged from Rebuild By Design have already inspired similar design initiatives. "President Obama announced the National Disaster Resiliency Competition based on the success of Rebuild by Design," Ovink says. "Another billion dollars of disaster recovery money is now attached to it."

Ocean Health Gets "D" Grade in New Global Index: Scientists assigned a grade for global ocean health on Tuesday, giving the world's waters a "D" on an annual oceans report card, citing overfishing, pollution, climate change, and lack of protections as key problems. But the score for nations' territorial waters—generally those that are within 200 miles (322 kilometers) of shore—has improved since 2012, and scientists say the overall outlook for the ocean is better than many expected. The latest report card is part of the third annual update to the the Ocean Health Index, which evaluates the state of the seas and the benefits they provide to people. "This new assessment is the first fully global look at ocean health," said Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for Conservation International, an environmental group that prepared the index with help from researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of British Columbia; the New England Aquarium; and others. For the first time, this year's index measures scores for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean plus the 15 other ocean regions beyond national jurisdiction, often called the high seas. The overall global score was 67 out of 100.

‘The Other CO2 Problem’: How Acidic Oceans Will Cost Our Economy Billions --The growing acidity of the world’s oceans could cost the global economy $1 trillion by 2100 if humans don’t stop putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to an extensive report compiled by 30 experts worldwide and released Wednesday by the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Oceans have absorbed so much carbon dioxide emitted from power plants, deforestation, manufacturing, and driving, that their acid levels have increased by a staggering 26 percent over the last 200 years, the report said. The disruption of the ocean’s natural pH levels are directly impacting the health of marine life and ecosystems and scientists emphasize that if these trends continue unchecked, it could be both horribly detrimental for the world economy and largely irreversible for thousands of years. “The oceans are facing major threats due to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Braulio Terreira de Souza Dias, the Convention’s executive director, in a statement accompanying the report. “In addition to driving global climate change, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide affect ocean chemistry, impacting marine ecosystems and compromises the health of the oceans and their ability to provide important services to the global community.”

Acid damage to coral reefs could cost $1 trillion -- Ocean acidification is set to cost us $1 trillion by 2100 as it eats away at our tropical coral reefs. That's the warning from a report released today by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which assesses the economic impacts the problem could have. The ocean's pH is now 8.0, down from 8.1 in the mid-18th century. Because the pH scale is logarithmic, this change means that, over the past 250 years, the world's oceans have seen a 26% increase in acidity – a result of the oceans absorbing about a quarter of our carbon dioxide emissions. With ocean pH projected to dip to 7.9 by the end of the century, the oceans may soon be 170% more acidic than they were before the industrial revolution – a change that is likely to affect not just our ecosystems, but our economies too. Ocean acidification is a trend that went largely unnoticed until a decade ago, but the rapid pace of scientific investigation since means huge progress has been made in understanding its effects. We know that acidification will be bad for marine organisms because past increases in acidity led to mass extinctions – particularly of those with hard calcium carbonate shells. Coral reefs are particularly at risk. Acidification reduces the concentration of carbonate ions in the upper layers of the ocean, and when carbonate levels get too low, the calcium carbonate skeletons of the corals themselves will start to dissolve.

The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever - In Louisiana, the most common way to visualize the state’s existential crisis is through the metaphor of football fields.  Each hour, Louisiana loses about a football field’s worth of land. Each day, the state loses nearly the accumulated acreage of every football stadium in the N.F.L. Were this rate of land loss applied to New York, Central Park would disappear in a month. Manhattan would vanish within a year and a half. The last of Brooklyn would dissolve four years later. The land loss is swiftly reversing the process by which the state was built. As the Mississippi shifted its course over the millenniums, spraying like a loose garden hose, it deposited sand and silt in a wide arc. This sediment first settled into marsh and later thickened into solid land. But what took 7,000 years to create has been nearly destroyed in the last 85. Dams built on the tributaries of the Mississippi, as far north as Montana, have reduced the sediment load by half. Levees penned the river in place, preventing the floods that are necessary to disperse sediment across the delta. The dredging of two major shipping routes, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, invited saltwater into the wetlands’ atrophied heart. The oil and gas industry has extracted about $470 billion in natural resources from the state in the last two decades, with the tacit blessing of the federal and state governments and without significant opposition from environmental groups. Oil and gas is, after all, Louisiana’s leading industry, responsible for around a billion dollars in annual tax revenue. Last year, industry executives had reason to be surprised, then, when they were asked to pay damages. The request came in the form of the most ambitious, wide-ranging environmental lawsuit in the history of the United States.

New and Improved Ice Loss Estimates for Polar Ice Sheets: In a previous post, several years ago, I discussed the various ways that we measure changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.. Today, scientists still use these main methods for identifying ice changes but recent technological and data processing advances have improved the accuracy of these estimates. An example of this is the CryoSAT-2 satellite system which was launched 4 years ago by the European Space Agency and is now giving early results on the state of the two polar ice sheets. Before discussing the results of this study, it is worthwhile to understand what CryoSAT-2 measures. CryoSAT-2 is a radar altimeter which sends a radar signal towards the ground, this signal is then reflected back to the satellite and using information about the time, phase and geographic position of the satellite we can estimate the elevation of the surface. Repeatedly measuring the surface elevation of an ice sheet over time therefore allows us to assess whether ice is being lost (elevation decreasing) or gained (elevation increasing). The results of early radar altimetry analyses using the ERS-1 and ERS-2 platforms were often misconstrued by contrarians and not provided with the appropriate context necessary to interpret the data. The important caveats being that these early radar altimetry studies underestimated ice sheet losses due to biases in coastal areas associated with steep slopes and low sensor resolution.  CryoSAT-2 by contrast has a higher resolution and a lower susceptibility to errors on high slopes making it far more suitable for measuring ice changes in the coastal areas of Antarctica and Greenland. These coastal areas, as noted in this post, are the regions most likely to encounter substantial ice losses.

NOAA: Record Antarctic Sea Ice Growth Linked To Its Staggering Loss Of Land Ice  -- NOAA said in a news release Tuesday that “as counterintuitive as expanding winter Antarctic sea ice may appear on a warming planet, it may actually be a manifestation of recent warming.”  The most important thing to know about Antarctica and ice is that a large part of the South Pole’s great sheet of land ice is close to or at a point of no return for irreversible collapse. The rate of loss of that ice has reached record levels, tripling in the last five years alone. Only immediate action to sharply reverse carbon pollution could stop or significantly slow that. And that really matters since 90 percent of Earth’s ice is in the Antarctic ice sheet, and even its partial collapse could raise sea levels by tens of feet (over a period of centuries) and force coastal cities to be abandoned. In September, the extent of seasonal Antarctic sea ice reached a new record.The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) explained this week that the best explanation from NSIDC scientists is that it “might be caused by changing wind patterns or recent ice sheet melt from warmer, deep ocean water reaching the coastline … The melt water freshens and cools the deep ocean layer, and it contributes to a cold surface layer surrounding Antarctica, creating conditions that favor ice growth.”

Gravity Shift Reveals West Antarctic Ice Loss - The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is headed toward “unstoppable” collapse according to recent studies. A new visual released by the European Space Agency show what the start of that collapse looks like both for the mass of the ice sheet and its signature on the planet’s gravitational field.We think of gravity as a constant, holding us in place on the planet. But the reality is there are small changes in gravity all over the globe. Not enough that you’ll feel lighter on your feet in one place compared to another, but enough that scientists can use satellites to measure the differences. Those measurements can, in turn, help us better understand the world around us, from how earthquakes shift land to how fast ice sheets are receding and what that means for sea level rise. The measurements released by the European Space Agency  on Friday fall into the latter category. They show gravity in the region is decreasing as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has melted faster and faster over a 3-year period from 2009-12, sending more water into the sea. This region of the ice sheet has been intensely studied by scientists and recent research indicate melt could be “unstoppable.” The melt of that section of the ice sheet would raise sea levels 10-13 feet, though the timetable for that happening is centuries, not single years or decades.

Have Humans Really Created a New Geologic Age? -- While humans arrived only recently on geologic time scales, our species already seems to be driving some major plot developments. Agriculture occupies about one-third of Earth's land. The atmosphere and oceans are filling up with chemical signatures of our industrial activity. Whole ecosystems have been reshaped as species are domesticated, transplanted or wiped out. These changes have become so noticeable on a global scale that many scientists believe we have started a new chapter in Earth’s story: the Anthropocene. Atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the term in the early 2000s, and it has become engrained in the scientific vernacular. But don’t ask what the Anthropocene technically means unless you’re in the mood for some drama.  “It’s not research, it is diplomacy. It’s not necessary for geologists,” says Lucy Edwards, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. Others think there is a case to be made for at least trying to codify the Anthropocene, because it is forcing the global community to think about the true extent of human influence. "It focuses us on trying to work out how we measure the relative control of humans as opposed to nature,"  "For example, is human activity altering the rate of uplift of mountains? If you had asked that question 20 years ago, geologists would have looked at you as if you were mad," says Brown. "But we know some faults are lubricated by precipitation, so if we are altering global precipitation patterns, there is a slight chance of a link. If that is the case, that is quite a profound potential interaction between humans and their environment."

Neglected disaster plan deepens Pakistan's climate vulnerability  - Pakistan has yet to implement a national plan to deal with natural disasters, experts say, leaving the country struggling to cope with its fourth major floods in five years. Hammered out at a meeting of the National Disaster Management Commission (NDMC) in 2012, the ambitious 10-year blueprint for tackling disasters has yet to be approved because the commission has not met since. The commission, chaired by the prime minister and made up of key government officials, was established to come up with a National Disaster Management Plan. The plan the group produced spells out measures to improve the country's ability to weather natural disasters, including floods. But the plan "has not been ratified because an NDMC meeting has not been called by the prime minister due to his being over-engaged with political affairs, the deepening energy crisis and the terror wave which continues to afflict the country," said Ahmed Kamal, a spokesperson for the National Disaster Management Authority. That does not mean approval of the disaster management plan is not on the prime minister's priority list, he added, though he declined to give a time frame.

India sends mixed signals on climate change - Climate change activists in India have expressed criticism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision not to attend the UN Climate Summit in New York earlier this week. The summit, organised by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to raise the political and public profile of the climate change crisis, was attended by more than 120 world leaders, including US President Barack Obama. Experts in India said that Modi's presence at the summit would have helped change India's image as an obstructionist in climate change negotiations. "The prime minister should have prioritised the largest environmental gathering," said Sanjay Vashist, director of the Climate Action Network South Asia. "It was an opportunity for India to sound proactive as well as call on the developed countries to be more ambitious in reducing carbon emissions. "Observers are hoping that the next UN climate conference - which will be held in Peruvian capital Lima in December - will produce a negotiating text for a global agreement to be signed in Paris in 2015.Experts in India pointed out that New Delhi's concerns - the low level of carbon emission reductions by developed countries, the delay in providing climate finance, and the pressure on emerging economies to reduce carbon emissions, which dilutes the principle of equity - are justified. But these experts said that India has failed to communicate its concerns to the world without sounding like it was blocking the talks."India is seen in a negative light. India's engagement and communication is poor." "It is important for India to be constructive because the stakes are very high."

Big Business Climate Change Movement Grows in Size and Heft -- Climate Week presented a two-front push for nations to take action on climate change. The moral case was emphatically made by a record-setting, 400,000-person march through Manhattan. What followed was a similarly unprecedented barrage from investor groups and corporations to convince world leaders that there's also a compelling economic case for taking steps against global warming.  The business presence last week was particularly striking because of its breadth and heft, and because of its extension well beyond the so-called "green bubble" that surrounds companies, investors and advocacy groups who embraced the cause long ago.Signatories representing $26 trillion in investment funds called on world leaders to enact strong policies, cut fossil fuel subsidies and make polluters pay for the effects of their emissions. There were commitments and pledges from the likes of General Motors, food makers Mars Inc. and Nestle, and consumer products giant Unilever. And a string of corporate CEOs joined early-adopters like Ikea Group in supporting renewable energy and citing proof that companies and countries can tackle climate change and prosper at the same time.

'This Changes Everything' Tackles Global Warming -  Cutting the vast amounts of man-made pollution that feed global warming is an enormous challenge for societies that gobble up coal, oil and gas. But in "This Changes Everything," Naomi Klein argues that those fuels aren't the root problem — capitalism is. That message is likely to motivate fans of Klein's earlier books, such as "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine," but it also leads to a tough question. Is blaming capitalism for climate change just rhetorical hot air — or a brutal and uncomfortable truth? Whatever side you take, Klein deserves credit for not sugarcoating the problem. She writes that limiting global warming won't be quick, easy or without disruptions, yet holds out hope that the end result will be better for people, the environment and even the economy. But make no mistake: "This Changes Everything" argues that we don't just have to cut carbon pollution. We have to change society, and our own lifestyles. Klein writes: "Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war." And while Klein is predictably hard on big business and conservatives who deny climate change, she doesn't spare environmental groups or liberals. Klein pointedly shows how easy it is to ignore global warming, noting that until recently she "continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong" with the "elite" frequent flier card in her wallet.

IEA Reverses Its Stance On Rebound Effects: A reversal in the International Energy Agency’s views on energy efficiency suggests that as much as 2,176 million tons of oil equivalent worth of extra clean energy consumption will be required by 2035 to meet the organization’s aggressive climate targets. That’s the equivalent of 19 Australias’ energy consumption. This finding is the result of a Breakthrough analysis of a new IEA report, which showcased a new position for the agency on what energy experts call “rebound effects” – a hotly contested phenomenon in energy consumption growth. Rebound effects emerge when increased energy efficiency improves the performance or lowers the cost of energy services, leading to consumer “re-spending,” investment effects, and macroeconomic rebounds in energy consumption in response to lower energy prices. As the IEA writes, “correct accounting for the rebound effect may reduce the potential contribution of energy efficiency to climate change mitigation, possibly altering the relative priority of different CO2 abatement policies.”  The new report marks a major institutional leap forward for the IEA, which until last month had downplayed rebound effects both quantitatively and discursively. IEA publications – including their regular and widely read World Energy Outlook and Energy Technologies Perspective – have long emphasized the leading role that energy efficiency can play in reducing global carbon emissions, contributing “about 40% of the CO2 abatement needed by 2050” according to the new report. But such claims were made with the support of modeling that assumed rebound effects totaling only 9 percent on average (WEO 2012, page 316), far below levels identified by the academic consensus – a consensus that now includes the IEA itself.

The Vast Benefits Of Energy Efficiency: New York Times Op-Ed Confuses The Facts - The New York Times has published a uniquely misleading op-ed, “The Problem With Energy Efficiency.” How misleading is it? Consider the cornerstone claim by the authors: The growing evidence that low-cost efficiency often leads to faster energy growth was recently considered by both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency. They concluded that energy savings associated with new, more energy efficient technologies were likely to result in significant “rebounds,” or increases, in energy consumption. This means that very significant percentages of energy savings will be lost to increased energy consumption. The I.E.A. and I.P.C.C. estimate that the rebound could be over 50 percent globally. Let’s set aside for now that first misleading statement. There is no “growing evidence that low-cost efficiency often leads to faster energy growth.” To the extent that there is any evidence that broad efficiency measures actually lead to faster energy growth than would have occurred without those measures, both the IEA and IPCC clearly reject it, as we’ll see. Based on the New York Times piece, however, you’d think that the IPCC and the IEA were quite devastated by their analysis of the rebound effect and had become sour on energy efficiency as a climate-mitigation tool for policymakers. In fact, the reverse is true. Based on their review of the literature, both the IEA and IPCC strongly endorse energy efficiency measures!

Energy Expert Interview Series: Peak Oil | Big Picture Agriculture: This posting is the first in what will be a series of Monday posts which are portions of an interview that I was privileged to do with Bill Reinert this past summer. Reinert has about the most wide-ranging knowledge and understanding of energy issues of anyone that I’ve ever come across. I also happen to think that he’s one of the most logical voices you’ll ever see on energy, transportation, fuels, and other important environmental issues. His views are firmly grounded in reality since his life’s work was spent trying to solve energy problems in the industrial world. Because of this, they can be rather unpopular with wishful-thinkers or Elon Musk worshiper-types. The first part of the interview which covered car technology and fuels (including corn ethanol and more ideal octane boosters) was published over at Yale Environment 360 last week. I encourage you to read it. Today’s question (below) is about the subject of “peak oil,” a critical issue for an energy engineer who was responsible for future car technology at Toyota.