Our Oceans are Under Attack

Arctic sea ice extent hits record low for winter maximum

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...tent-hits-record-low-for-winter-maximum#img-1

Arctic sea ice has hit a record low for its maximum extent in winter, which scientists said was a result of climate change and abnormal weather patterns.

The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) said on Thursday that at its peak the ice covered just over 14.5m sq km of the northern seas. This was 130,000 sq km smaller than the previous lowest maximum in 2011.

The peak occurred on 25 February, which the NSIDC’s senior research scientist Ted Scambos said was “very early but not unprecedented”.

Climate change is driving declining ice coverage in the Arctic, with a recent study finding it has also become significantly thinner, down 65% since 1975.

Scambos said northern oceans have progressively warmed because of climate change. This winter, the warmer seas combined with mild weather to create exceptionally poor conditions for the annual freeze.

 

Amazon rainforest losing capacity to fight climate change as trees die

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ght-climate-change-as-trees-die-10120047.html

The Amazon rainforest has been absorbing about 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.
The Amazon rainforest is losing its ability to absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as trees are dying, which could have negative implication on climate change across the globe.
A study led by the University of Leeds revealed that tree growth in the Amazon rainforest has declined by one-third since the 1980s and that the net uptake of carbon dioxide in the rainforest has dropped by half.
For the first time in history, carbon dioxide absorption by the Amazon rainforest has been surpassed by fossil fuel emissions in Latin America, the study found. Historically, the rainforest absorbed about 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
Trees in the rainforest absorb carbon dioxide and use it for photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert light to energy. Plants turn the carbon dioxide into leaves, stems, roots and other organic matter.

As carbon dioxide emissions have increased, the life cycle of trees has accelerated. This means that trees in the Amazon are dying at a faster rate than they ever have, according to the study.
Forests, including the Amazon, absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted each year and oceans absorb another quarter. The remaining carbon dioxide – more than 17 billion tonnes – lingers in the atmosphere.

Scientific evidence proves that an abundance of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere has raised global temperatures and is a leading cause of man-made climate change.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...sil-fuels-investments-guardian-analysis#img-1

Revealed: Gates Foundation's $1.4bn in fossil fuel investments

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ops-must-be-covered-in-plants-or-solar-panels

Rooftops on new buildings built in commercial zones in France must either be partially covered in plants or solar panels, under a law approved on Thursday.

Green roofs have an isolating effect, helping reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a building in winter and cool it in summer.

They also retain rainwater, thus helping reduce problems with runoff, while favouring biodiversity and giving birds a place to nest in the urban jungle, ecologists say.

The law approved by parliament was more limited in scope than initial calls by French environmental activists to make green roofs that cover the entire surface mandatory on all new buildings.

 

If you ponder humanity’s prospects for the next 50 years, things can look a little bleak. Climate change is shrinking our coastlines. Unsustainable farm practices are depleting our soil. Billions of new mouths will need to be fed. In a world of swelling populations and dwindling farmland, some predict we’re running out of places to go — and to grow food. What’s to be done?

http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/floating-farms/

 

The sky is falling..

 

https://www.thedodo.com/this-terrifying-graphic-shows--935915401.html

This Terrifying Graphic Shows What Our Future Ocean Will Look Like

There are factory farms in the sea and cattle-ranch-style feedlots for tuna. Shrimp farms are eating up mangroves with an appetite akin to that of terrestrial farming, which consumed native prairies and forest. Stakes for seafloor mining claims are being pursued with gold-rush-like fervor, and 300-ton ocean mining machines and 750-foot fishing boats are now rolling off the assembly line to do this work."

The future ocean they envision doesn't look like a place we'll want to take our grandkids swimming.

 

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/guardian-climate-change-campaign

This Major Newspaper Just Declared War on Fossil Fuels

Inside the Guardian's decision to embrace climate activism

After 20 years at the helm of one of the United Kingdom's most influential newspapers, Alan Rusbridger is about to step down as editor of the Guardian. He's not going quietly: In an op-ed a couple weeks ago, Rusbridger pledged to use his waning weeks to launch a full-out war on climate change:

So, in the time left to me as editor, I thought I would try to harness the Guardian's best resources to describe what is happening…For the purposes of our coming coverage, we will assume that the scientific consensus about man-made climate change and its likely effects is overwhelming. We will leave the sceptics and deniers to waste their time challenging the science. The mainstream argument has moved on to the politics and economics…

We will look at who is getting the subsidies and who is doing the lobbying. We will name the worst polluters and find out who still funds them. We will urge enlightened trusts, investment specialists, universities, pension funds and businesses to take their money away from the companies posing the biggest risk to us. And, because people are rightly bound to ask, we will report on how the Guardian Media Group itself is getting to grips with the issues.

Is it time for the Washington Post and the New York Times to launch climate petitions of their own? Randerson wouldn't say, but he did argue that especially in the United States, "the media have not done a service to their readers in explaining what's really at stake here."

Now we get a chance to see if a more direct approach does the trick.

 

NASA | Arctic Sea Ice Sets New Record Winter Low

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iNet2WkHkU

Watch Arctic Ice Cover Hit a 30-Year Low

As if the public needed more evidence that climate change is real, now there’s one more item to tack on the list: This winter, Arctic sea ice extent reached a record low, and peaked earlier this year than it ever has before. NASA created a stunning visualization of ice developing over the northern pole—a network of thin, swirling sheets that just don’t reach as far as they used to.

New information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows Arctic sea ice reached a maximum extent of 5.61 million square miles this winter—50,000 square miles below the next lowest maximum recorded in 2011. As NASA illustrates, this is well short of the average maximum sea ice concentration observed in the 35 years prior, and the lowest of any year since satellite observation began in 1979.
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/arctic-ice-extent-hits-30-year-low/

 

'Climate change contributed to war in Syria'

http://www.dw.de/climate-change-contributed-to-war-in-syria/a-18330669

A recent study concluded that climate change helped spark the conflict in Syria. DW asked the study's lead researcher to explain the link between climate and conflict - drought and population growth were major factors.

There is a very clear sequence of events before the uprising, like an upward trend in temperature over the last 85 to 100 years. Within the last 25 years, three droughts have occurred. The last drought, just before the start of the conflict, lasted three to four years and was the most severe drought on record. So we asked: how severe would these droughts have been without the upward trend in temperature, which we presume to be human-induced? And we found that there was a big difference in severity. So this pointed to climate change as a contributing factor to this drought.

What was the impact of the drought?

The drought was so severe that it basically caused an agricultural collapse in the northeastern region. People there were highly dependent on wheat production. And when the drought occurred, the wheat production failed, so a lot of the farmers left their villages and a mass migration of people to the cities started. This was right after the US had gone into Iraq - so if you combine that with natural population growth, there was a tremendous population shock to the cities in Syria's west.

There was an increase in population of as much as 50 percent between 2002 and 2010. And the resources were just not sufficient to be able to deal with this population growth. The Assad government did very little to support this population as well. So, all these factors were coming together, and pushed them beyond their level of resilience.

Climate models suggest that this region is going to continue to become drier as the 21st century progresses - and that is certainly alarming. Even if the conflict were to end soon, this still presents a real problem for people like farmers, who are trying to put together a sustainable livelihood.

 

UN calls for action as global water crisis looms
http://www.dw.de/un-calls-for-action-as-global-water-crisis-looms/a-18329395

The UN has warned that the world will soon face a crisis of huge dimensions if water management does not improve. Population growth and climate change are among the factors fueling the problem.

In its annual World Water Development Report released on Friday, the world body said if current trends of water usage continue, the demand for water will exceed its replenishment by 40 percent by 2030.

The report said the rise in the world's population by some 80 million people per year was one of the main factors behind this looming global water deficit, with the current population of some 7.3 billion likely to reach 9.1 billion by 2050.

It said climate change, which will affect rainfall patterns, and growing urban populations across the world will also exacerbate water shortages, with global demand for water likely to rise by 55 percent by 2050.

Groundwater in jeopardy
The report highlighted the fact that some 20 percent of groundwater supplies - which provide drinking water to some 50 percent of the world's population - are now suffering from over-extraction, which leads to freshwater in coastal areas often being contaminated by saline intrusion.

 

We're Pumping So Much Groundwater That It's Causing the Oceans to Rise

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/groundwater-pumping-sea-level-rise

Pump too much groundwater and wells go dry—that's obvious.

But there is another consequence that gets little attention as a hotter, drier planet turns increasingly to groundwater for life support.

So much water is being pumped out of the ground worldwide that it is contributing to global sea level rise, a phenomenon tied largely to warming temperatures and climate change.

It happens when water is hoisted out of the earth to irrigate crops and supply towns and cities, then finds its way via rivers and other pathways into the world's oceans. Since 1900, some 4,500 cubic kilometers of groundwater around the world—enough to fill Lake Tahoe 30 times—have done just that.
Sea levels have risen 7 to 8 inches since the late 19th century and are expected to rise more rapidly by 2100. The biggest factors are associated with climate change: melting glaciers and other ice and the thermal expansion of warming ocean waters.

Groundwater flowing out to sea added another half-inch—6 to 7 percent of overall sea level rise from 1900 to 2008, Konikow reported in a 2011 article in Geophysical Research Letters. "That really surprised a lot of people," he said in a recent interview with Reveal.

Konikow also has reported that 1,000 cubic kilometers—twice the volume of Lake Erie—were depleted from aquifers in the US from 1900 to 2008, and the pace of the pumping is increasing.





Drilling for water could account for as much as 7 percent of global sea level rise.

 

California Is Fast Running Out of Water—Blame It on Big Ag

http://www.alternet.org/environment/california-fast-running-out-water-blame-it-big-ag

The drought issue is inextricably linked to food production and climate change.

The bold headline of a recent Los Angeles Times editorial by the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti starkly warned: “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?” The write-up quickly made the social media rounds, prompting both panic and the usual blame game: It’s because of the meat eaters or the vegan almond-milk drinkers or the bottled-water guzzlers or the Southern California lawn soakers.

California’s water loss has been terrifying. But people everywhere should be scared, not just Californians, because this story goes far beyond state lines. It is a story of global climate change and industrial agriculture. It is also a saga that began many decades ago—with the early water wars of the 1930s immortalized in the 1974 Roman Polanski film “Chinatown.” http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/the-water-fight-that-inspired-chinatown/?_r=0

Many growers also grumble that rules enacted to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered species of fish, have diverted water away from farms.

But this crisis should not devolve into arguments pitting water against food, water against jobs, or even water against an endangered species. There’s only a little bit of water left to fight over, and the real question that gets lost in all the back-and-forth is: How do we live sustainably? After all, we need both food and water to survive.

 

Absolutely Terrifying: 'There Are Really Only Two Big Patches of Intact Forest Left on Earth'
http://www.alternet.org/environment...only-two-big-patches-intact-forest-left-earth
A new study uncovers the ruinous consequences, to plant and animal species, of our increasingly fragmented forests.
“There are really only two big patches of intact forest left on Earth — the Amazon and the Congo — and they shine out like eyes from the center of the map,” lead author Nick Haddad, a professor at North Carolina State University, told the New Yorker.

“Nearly 20 percent of the world’s remaining forests are the distance of a football field — or about 100 meters — away from forest edges,” he elaborated in a statement. “Seventy percent of forest lands are within a half-mile of forest edges. That means almost no forests can really be considered wilderness.”

In general, the studies showed that when patches of forest become smaller and more isolated, the abundance of birds, mammal, insects and plants decreases in kind — those pressures, the authors write, reduced the species’ ability to persist. Areas surrounded by a higher proportion of edges, they also found, were a boon to predators that target birds, which is arguably good, in the short-term, for the predators, although not so much for the birds. Fragmented forests experienced a decline in their core ecosystem functions, as well: they were less able to sequester carbon dioxide, an important element of mitigating climate change, and displayed reduced productivity and pollination.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...nge-denial-immoral-says-head-episcopal-church

An oceanographer before she was ordained at the age of 40, Bishop Jefferts Schori said she hoped to use her visibility as a church leader to help drive action on climate change.

Climate change is a moral challenge threatening the rights of the world’s poorest people and those who deny it are not using God’s gift of knowledge, says presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.

“It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.”

In the same context, Jefferts Schori attached moral implications to climate denial, suggesting those who reject the underlying science of climate change were turning their backs on God’s gift of knowledge.