Um rico e um pobre estavam a conversar.
A certa altura o pobre diz:
"Mais vale ser pobre e ter saúde
do que
ser rico e não ter saúde."
Ao que o rico responde:
"Nisso tens razão mas
mais vale ser rico e não ter saúde
do que
ser pobre e não ter saúde."
Esta linha de raciocínio acabou por transformar o mundo num lugar menos saudável.
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| O gráfico acima está incluído no World Energy Outlook 2011 da Agência Internacional da Energia (IEA) e mostra que em 2017 se atingem os 450ppmCO2 (se não se quiser ultrapassar esse valor, o consumo de energia terá que diminuir). |
The effects of climate change are dramatically illustrated at the world's "third pole", so-called because the mountain range locks away the highest volume of frozen water after the north and south poles.
The 1956 photograph of the Imja glacier, then one of the largest glaciers at an altitude of around 5,000m, shows a layer of thick ice with small meltwater ponds. But by the time Byers took his shot in 2007, much of the glacier had melted into a vast but stunning blue lake. Today, the Imja glacier, which is just 6km from Everest, continues to recede at a rate of 74m a year - the fastest rate of all the Himayalan glaciers.
Nepal's average temperature has increased by 1.5C since 1975. A major UN Environment Programme report last year warned that at current rates of global warming, the Himalayan glaciers could shrink from 500,000 square kilometres to 100,000 square kilometres by the 2030s - a prediction supported by the rate of retreat seen in Byers' pictures.
Imja is one of 27 glacial lakes in Nepal classified as potentially dangerous. If the moraines which dam the lake are breached, thousands of lives in the most densely populated Sherpa valley in Nepal are at risk from flooding and landslides.
Himalayan glaciers also feed into major Asian river systems including the Ganges, Indus, Mekong and Yangtze. If glacial meltwaters turn to a trickle, widespread droughts will threaten the 1.3 billion people that depend on water flowing in those rivers.
Catastrophe is not the end. Unless you are a monster, the future we've inherited will break your heart. But broken hearts can be mended; life goes on, and when it does, a fierce beauty is sometimes born. The world, when all is said, is always remade by broken people who refuse hopelessness, who refuse to be overcome with sorrow, who refuse to pass on that which broke them.
As we come to grips with the awful fact that we are already committing ourselves to centuries of crisis, loss and burning, we can hew close to the knowledge that while disaster is our inheritance, transcendence can yet still be our legacy. We are all Caryatids now, and we can all dare to hope for the best.
Copenhagen, Denmark: Following a successful International Scientific Congress Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions attended by more than 2,500 delegates from nearly 80 countries, preliminary messages from the findings were delivered by the Congress' Scientific Writing Team. The conclusions will be published into a full synthesis report June 2009. The conclusions were handed over to the Danish Prime Minister Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen today. The Danish Government will host the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2009 and will hand over the conclusions to the decision makers ahead of the Conference.
The six preliminary key messages are:
Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.
The research community is providing much more information to support discussions on "dangerous climate change". Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2C will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and will increase the level of climate disruption through the rest of the century.
Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid "dangerous climate change" regardless of how it is defined. Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.
Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world. An effective, well-funded adaptation safety net is required for those people least capable of coping with climate change impacts, and a common but differentiated mitigation strategy is needed to protect the poor and most vulnerable.
There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches ? economic, technological, behavioural, management ? to deal effectively with the climate change challenge. But they must be vigorously and widely implemented to achieve the societal transformation required to decarbonise economies. A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now, including sustainable energy job growth, reductions in the health and economic costs of climate change, and the restoration of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.
To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change; removing implicit and explicit subsidies; reducing the influence of vested interests that increase emissions and reduce resilience; enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society; and engaging society in the transition to norms and practices that foster sustainability.
In short, organic farmers can be arrested for growing tomatoes. Food safety Obama style? More information you can find here:
Trust and confidence are the socio-psychological attributes that everyone considers to be essential to get the local and global economies going. How do you build them if the population does not have confidence in their politicians, let alone their banking executives? No confidence building can take place without political and economic leaders basing their policies on equity and sustainability. People have to see and experience fairness. They have to see and experience social, economic and ecological sustainability rather than some short-term measures and rhetoric. How can that be done? In last instance it can and has to be done by implementing values that humanity at this juncture in its history considers essential. Which are those values? We do have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, recently, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights and a Human Rights Council. We also have a 21st century successor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the emerging Earth Charter which integrates the social and ecological values within a framework of the community of life. Humans are members of this Earth Community and they are not necessarily the most important ones in maintaining the Earth’s processes of the flowing of energy, the cycling of matter and the webbing of life. Without microbes there would not be life on planet Earth!
It is the primacy of values and principles over methods that should guide societies in building confidence and trust. Finally, building confidence and trust within the value context described above and taking measures such as the reversal of privately-owned banking systems to publicly owned banking systems, including central banks such as the US Federal Reserve Bank is to be pursued within the largest historical challenge of the sustainability revolution. What that means and the most important question in that regard is succinctly expressed by the first US EPA Administrator in the early 1970s. The Terra solution
Terra (Latin for Earth) is the name that I have given to the new international reserve currency that is based, not upon gold, nails, cowries or a basket of major currencies or commodities, but on carbon emissions permits or CEPs. These CEPS would be allocated on an equal basis to all adults on the planet—perhaps we should include youngsters because they sometimes have a heavy carbon footprint also —using the methodology of Cap and Share, www.capandshare.org. The targets of carbon reduction will determine the amount of CEPs each adult receives; the carbon price on the world market will determine the value of the CEPs. The Terra solution was raised publicly on January 15 during the first session of the UN Department of Information (DPI) where both the senior advisor, Dr. Michael Clark, and Ambassador Sofia Clark were representing the UN General Assembly President's Commission on Monetary and Financial Crises to the NGO community at UN Headquarters. In response to my comment that followed a question of how the Committee was dealing with the climate crisis and that suggested that member states establish an international reserve currency based upon carbon emissions and which would be made part of a nation’s balance of payments, Dr. Clark reacted very positively by calling the suggestion “brilliant”. Later on during the session he referred back to it as an example of how the NGO community can contribute to the Commission’s work. There is general agreement that the new international reserve currency is not to be bound to a nation such as the USA or to a region such as the EU. Many suggestions are being made to peg the currency to non-emission standards. From John Maynard Keynes in 1944 with his “bancor” to several others in the sixties and seventies, to Joseph Stiglitz who has for some time been suggesting a “global greenback” for that purpose. Irish economist Richard Douthwaite and I are among the main scholars/activists who are advocating an emission based currency unit. It is understandable that earlier scientists and statesmen have not chosen to base their currency unit on emissions, because it is only in the last decade or so that the climate crisis has been hitting home. Frans C. Verhagen, M.Div., M.I.A., Ph.D., sustainability sociologist International Institute of Monetary Transformation. www.timun.net New York City, March 2009
There is an enormous amount of pain and suffering of millions of humans and other sentient fellow creatures on account of the synchronous crises in the global financial system and in the change of the climate. This unnecessary suffering will continue to get worse in an international economic system that still enriches the few, impoverishes the many and imperils the planet.
The first phase in resolving these crises is to recognize them for what they are and what they do. While the consequences of these crises have become clear from the thousands of reports that deal with these crises, what the nature of these crises is has not become clear, particularly its causation in all its complexity. So, the second phase is an unbiased analysis in which analysts make explicit their values, perspectives, biases. The third phase builds on the first two: developing policies and plan of action based upon the best integrated thinking humanity has to offer. The final phase is to work for its implementation. It takes courage to take a position rather than be an undecided moderate who can go either way or no way.
This series of three articles presents a solution that does not reform, but transforms the present world order. It is a “global New Deal” that is based upon the values of equity and sustainability, the only values that can lead to stability in the monetary, financial, economic systems.
It is the International Institute of Monetary Transformation’s position that this needed monetary and financial transformation cannot take place within the present structure of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and the lesser known Bank of International Settlements (BIS). Though they are trying to assert themselves and come up with reformist proposals, they will have to move over for a lasting equitable, sustainable, and, therefore, stable monetary, financial, trading and economic system to take place.
Solving the economic and climatological crises simultaneously, not sequentially
In doing the research for my forthcoming book TIMU: The Transformative Approach to Monetarily Solve the Economic Crisis by Solving the Climate Crisis I have observed that many people of all kinds of backgrounds are very hesitant to think that both the economic and climatological crises should be tackled simultaneously. Both crises are of such magnitude that they can only be tackled sequentially is the reasoning.
I was most encouraged a couple of days ago when two of the world’s most outstanding economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern, published the following statement when they were meeting in Washington D.C. on March 2. They stated: “We face two crises: a deep global financial crisis, caused by inadequate management of risk in the financial sector; and an even deeper climate crisis, the effects of which may seem more distant but will be determined by the actions we take now. The scale of risk from climate change is altogether of a different and greater magnitude, as are the consequences of mismanaging or ignoring it.
The US, in particular, has a window of opportunity to act on the financial crisis and, at the same time, lay the foundations for a new wave of growth based on the technologies for a low-carbon economy. President Barack Obama, in his speech to Congress and budget last week, explained that we need to address both of these challenges, and outlined a broad approach. US leadership could generate a powerful response from across the world, making possible an agreement at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen in December on a scale necessary to manage the risks involved.”
Given that the two economists believe the “scale of risk from climate change is altogether of a different and greater magnitude” than the risk of the economic meltdown it stands to reason that we look at solving the climate crisis first if we can and then consider the connections with the economic crisis. It is the institutional nexus of binding the resolution of both crises together that is being proposed in the Terra Solution and its monetary architecture.
Thus, among climate community activists and scholars, discussing the pros and cons of arbon reduction methodologies of cap&trade and the carbon tax I have been trying to introduce the third option: the Terra international reserve currency which is based on carbon emission permits which form part of a nation’s balance of payments. Like the other two methods the Terra carbon reduction option also reduces carbon emissions. However, the Terra option connects with the economic crisis because the Terra international reserve currency represents real money that will flow from ecological debtor countries in the global North to ecological creditor countries in the global South. It would institutionally guarantee funding for development and pay for mitigation and adjustment costs of the climate crisis in the global South.
When the two economists above pointed to the inadequate (should it not be grievous?) mismanagement of the banking sector as the main cause of the economic crisis, they and almost everyone else fail to mention that in almost all countries the banking system is privately owned. Thus, in the USA, the Federal Reserve Bank with its 12 regional banks is owned by private banks which have managed, since 1913, to be legally in the business of money creation which is the duty, right and responsibility of the public sector. They create money by the fractional reserve system which can multiply a deposit of $1000 ten times. In the discussions about the banking crisis in the USA, Europe and elsewhere (not in China, India) bailouts and even temporary nationalization are seen as solutions.
However, what is needed is a reversal of privately-owned banking systems to publicly owned banking systems, including central banks such as the US Federal Reserve Bank. A most important book in this regard is EH Brown’s The Web of Debt. The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. Benjamin Franklin, President Lincoln, political parties in the 1890s and even President Kennedy for some time managed to have the public sector implementing its constitutional right of coinage.
Frans C. Verhagen, M.Div., M.I.A., Ph.D., sustainability sociologist International Institute of Monetary Transformation. www.timun.net New York City, March 2009
Global Warming: Tree Deaths Have Doubled Across The Western U.S.
1. Length of time to come on stream
Commissioning and building new plants is a time-consuming business (at least twenty years), so they would have little or no impact on cutting emissions over the next twenty years, nor build any resilience in the face of peak oil.
2. Insurance
The insurance industry refuses to underwrite nuclear power, a gap it looks like the government will have to fill, resulting in a huge invisible subsidy for nuclear power.
3. Waste
Nuclear waste is a huge problem. The UK alone has 10,000 tons of nuclear waste, a pile which will increase 25-fold when the existing plants are decommissioned, with no solution in sight other than deep burial. The disposal of nuclear waste requires a great deal of embodied energy, including that in the materials used to maintain the disposal facilities (i.e. concrete and steel). It is often said that nuclear waste has a half-life of 100,000 years…it is worth remembering that Stonehenge was built only 4,000 years ago.
A society in energy descent, dependent on local, lower embodied energy building materials, will struggle to maintain nuclear waste sites with cob blocks and straw bales.
4. Cost
A new programme of nuclear power would be staggeringly expensive. Amory Lovins has calculated that 10 cents invested in nuclear energy could generate 1kwh of nuclear energy, 1.2- 1.7kwh wind-power, 2.2-6.5kwh small co-generation, or 10kwh of energy efficiency. Also, having sufficient money to invest so unwisely assumes an economy which is still growing, an increasingly unlikely prospect.
5. Peak Uranium
At the moment, there are about 60 years’ worth of uranium left. However, if electricity generation from nuclear grows steadily, this figure will fall, to the point where if all the world’s electricity were generated with nuclear, we’d have around 3 years supply left.
6. Carbon Emissions
Nuclear is often said to be a carbon-free way of generating electricity. While that may be true for the actual generation, it is not when the entire process is looked at. The mining, processing, enrichment, treatment and disposal all have significant impacts, equivalent to around one-third those of a conventional- sized gas-fired generating plant.
Porque é muitíssimo mais difícil mudar uma sociedade do que mudar uma pessoa.
Em demasiados casos, uma pessoa viciada em algo, apesar de saber que o vício lhe causa problemas de saúde, prefere manter o vício em vez de mudar o seu modo de vida. Não conhećo sociedade humana nenhuma que tenha mudado sem passar por um colapso. Muitas vezes, após o colapso de uma sociedade, surge outra que também colapsa. Por exemplo, veja-se a história de Idanha-a-Velha, Portugal, ou de Ávila, Espanha. Outro exemplo interessante é o apresentado por Thomas Homer-Dixon no livro "The Upside of Down": Baalbek, Líbano, onde o maior pedregulho jamais esculpido pelo homem nunca chegou a sair da pedreira (ver também isto). Este exemplo torna-se ainda mais interessante face à recente actividade isrealita na Faixa de Gaza. Ver, por exemplo, Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask. Por um lado, os conflitos recentes no Líbano, Israel, Palestina, Jordânia, Síria, Iraque, Irão, Paquistão, e Afeganistão são sintomas do recolapso da região onde nasceu a civilizaćão humana. O colapso desta região só não é mais rápido por causa do petróleo que ainda está lá. Por outro lado, a opinião maioritariamente vigente no mundo é que os Isrealitas "estão a defender-se". Ora isto é tão absurdo como dizer que "não há aquecimento global". Não acredito que o mundo inteiro actue efectivamente contra as catástrofes convergentes pois nem sequer consegue fazer a paz na situaćão tão claramente injusta do conflito israelo-palestiniano.
The self-serving theories of growthaholic economists peel away from this deep reality like cheap wallpaper. Since the days of Akhenaten and Caesar, overfed profiteers have insisted that their elite and esoteric genius creates wealth. When they salted the soils or decimated forests, they would march into the next watershed or “discover” another continent.
Those days are over. There are no more giant resource pools to plunder. The wealth of Pharaohs and stock hustlers arrived not from their genius, but from their facility with deception, fashioning loans with fantasy money, and trading bets on the changing value of paper promises, the modern “derivatives” market. But in the end, all this affluence relies on the real wealth: nature, her systems, her materials, and her energies.
Markets will rally and crash again, and paper pushers will stuff more cash into their safety deposit boxes, but in the end, money cannot replace soil and water. Gross domestic products provide no surrogate for authentic well-being.
As world stock markets collapsed this fall, several urgent environmental events rumbled below the superficial hand-wringing, like deep volcanoes awakening to announce, “Nature shall not be mocked.”
It’s the soil, folks“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” wrote American ecologist Aldo Leopold five decades ago. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
Economists ignored, even ridiculed, such warnings from ecologists, and the planet now faces a shortage of fertile soil, the result of erosion, salination, contamination, desertification, and a swelling population. UN Agriculture head, Lennart Bage, announced last summer, “Fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset.” It always has been, for everything that lives.
This year, Iran bought over 1 million tons of wheat from the US, something it has not done since 1980. Iran would not come begging to its avowed enemy if it had any other option. Iran, the Saudis, and other oil-rich Middle East nations rely on global agriculture for grain. The United Arab Emirates buy farmland in Sudan and Kazakhstan. South Korea seeks land in Mongolia, China in Southeast Asia. Libya leases farms in the Ukraine.
With the closing of Ukrainian shipments, only three major grain exporters remain: North America, Australia, and New Zealand. However, these global producers rely entirely on fertilisers and fossil fuels. However, the production of phosphorus, principal component of fertiliser, is rare and in decline, and the era of cheap energy is coming to an end.
The big bonfireGlobalisation is literally running out of gas. Geologists at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) Conference in California, in September, confirmed that world oil production has stopped growing and will begin its inevitable decline during the next decade.
A US Department of Energy study (The Hirsch Report) warned in 2005 – the year that global production plateaued – that society required a 20-year lead time to implement an optimal new energy plan. It is already too late for such a measured response, and this failure to act in time is the direct result of denial from lobbyists and economists, who chanted “eternal growth,” while obscuring or ignoring the evidence before them.
Meanwhile, economic growth promoters expect humanity to double its vehicle fleet over the next decade, from 1 billion to 2 billion vehicles, while building more roads across arable farmland.
Wind and solar power developments will help mitigate the coming energy crunch, but will not replace cheap liquid fuels. Biofuels will have certain localised value, if based on agricultural waste, but will prove insignificant on a globalised scale. Corn ethanol undermines food agriculture, and will not remotely replace cheap oil. Cellulose and algae biofuel projects cannot even produce net energy, so they are not economic at any price.
New oil discoveries and recovery technologies lag hopelessly behind the decline of conventional oil fields. Oil industry promoters recently proclaimed “90 billion barrels of oil” in the Arctic. However, these lobbyists failed to mention that this oil – even if it could be confirmed and recovered – represents three years of global supply.
The best and cheapest energy source is conservation. The only environmentally feasible solution to the end of cheap liquid fuels is to burn less. Analyst Randy Udall, who drafted Colorado’s Renewable Energy Mitigation Program, told the ASPO conference that energy companies have no use for conservation. Instead, they will burn more coal, make liquid fuel from coal, and melt bitumen at unearthly temperatures in low-efficiency tar sands and oil shale projects.
Udall called our era of history “the Big Bonfire.” We burn a million tons of fossil fuel every hour, releasing 80-million tons of CO2 each day. And here, we arrive at the third big crack in the growthaholics’ thin facade.
Ancient methaneAccording to the international Global Carbon Project, last year’s annual increase in carbon emissions, 2.9%, exceeded previous projections, “generating stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.” All the international gatherings, carbon-trading festivals, and Kyoto handshakes have failed to reduce carbon emissions or even stabilise the growth rate of these emissions.
Meanwhile, in September, Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University – with the International Siberian Shelf Study, sponsored by the Russian Science Academy and American Geophysical Union – announced evidence that millions of tons of a methane gas – 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – now escapes into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed. As the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned, the deep permafrost appears now to be thawing.
Scientists on board Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi recorded methane bubbling to the sea surface, causing air-borne concentrations 100-times background levels. Ten previous expeditions since 2003 did not detect these levels of free methane. The new data describes releases so intense that the methane does not have time to dissolve in seawater but rises as bubbles to the ocean surface. Similar releases have been recorded in the East Siberian and Laptev Seas, amounting to millions of tons of methane from melting sub-sea permafrost.
The escaping methane represents a massive exhalation of ancient hydrocarbons likely captured in the Paleozoic warm era when amphibians crawled from the sea. The carbon escaped once before, during the Permian ecological collapse, 225 million years ago, leading to peak Mesozoic heat, and was recaptured as methane during the last 100 million years. Meteorologists warn that this significant store of ancient carbon could lead to run-away global warming, far beyond the influence of human technologies to sequester or forestall.
The methane represents an unaccounted cost of doing business in the era of the “big bonfire”. Market wizards may shave toxic assets from their balance sheets, but they cannot dictate nature’s accounting.
ResilienceRegardless of stopgap bailouts and more paper promises, economic collapse will continue in fits and starts until humanity achieves genuine ecological balance, adopts a steady state economy, and finally understands that ecology is the foundation of human enterprise. There are only two options for living cultures in a physical system: homeostasis or collapse.
I speak to many young people, who are terrified and/or angry about the state of the world, the wasteful extravagance of society, and needless ecological destruction. I experienced similar reactions when I learned as a child that our world could be vapourised by nuclear weapons. When we’re young, our families and teachers protected us from certain disturbing realities. If we remain naïve or ill-informed, the discovery of alarming truths about our world may create shock and outrage.
The best way to never again be disillusioned is to not be illusioned in the first place.
Economic sleight of hand won’t restore our place on this Earth. Human survival strategies now will be as much about resilience during transformation as finding “solutions” to preserve untenable expectations. Our resilience will include a rediscovery of a richer life with simpler means, a genuine quality of life that cannot be purchased but only lived. Human society can change, and in fact has to change. Don’t get depressed. Get informed and get active.
- Rex WeylerAn economic storm is descending, and for many, the storm will be bad. While the Bush Administration and Congress wrestle with how to bail out Wall Street, and argue about how softly CEOs of failed financial institutions should be allowed to land, average citizens must leap into the new reality without benefit of 24-karat parachutes.
Recently, the Global Footprint Network issued a report stating that by September 23, humanity had consumed all the new resources the planet will produce for the year. For the rest of 2008, we are in the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, drawing down our resource stocks -- in essence, borrowing from the future. Sound familiar? We can't hope to keep to our economic budget if we can't keep to our ecological budget.
Whatever economy emerges from this crisis will need to put less emphasis on "more" stuff and greater emphasis on more of what matters -- like healthy communities, a healthy planet and a higher quality of life. In righting the economic ship, the end game shouldn't be to plug up a broken vessel, but to move to something more seaworthy -- one that sails within both personal and ecological limits.
Regressei agora da Tailândia, numa viagem que envolveu 10 aviões e variados meios de transporte. Prometo que compensarei o dióxido de carbono produzido.
When permafrost melts, the layer of loose soil deepens and trees lose their foundations and tip over. Similar impacts across Earth are likely due to human-caused climate change. Credit: Jon Ranson
To arrive at the link, the authors built and analyzed a database of more than 29,000 data series pertaining to observed impacts on Earth's natural systems, collected from about 80 studies each with at least 20 years of records between 1970 and 2004. Observed impacts included changes to physical systems, such as glaciers shrinking, permafrost melting, and lakes and rivers warming. Impacts also included changes to biological systems, such as leaves unfolding and flowers blooming earlier in the spring, birds arriving earlier during migration periods, and ranges of plant and animal species moving toward the poles and higher in elevation. In aquatic environments such as oceans, lakes, and rivers, plankton and fish are shifting from cold-adapted to warm-adapted communities.
The team conducted a "joint attribution" study in which they showed, first, that at the global scale, about 90 percent of observed changes in diverse physical and biological systems are consistent with warming. Other driving forces, such as land use change from forest to agriculture, were ruled out as having significant influence on the observed impacts.
Next, the scientists conducted statistical tests and found that the spatial patterns of observed impacts closely match temperature trends across the globe, to a degree beyond what can be attributed to natural variability. So, the team concluded that observed global-scale impacts are very likely due to human-caused warming.
Impacts from warming are evident in satellite images showing that lakes in Siberia disappearing as the permafrost thaws and lake water drains deeper into the ground. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
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"Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the warming is causing impacts on physical and biological systems that are now attributable at the global scale and in North America, Europe, and Asia," said Rosenzweig.
Ocean dead zones are regions where water becomes stripped of its dissolved oxygen. These “hypoxic” (low oxygen) and "anoxic" (no oxygen) conditions can prove lethal for many marine species, changing the biology and chemistry of the ocean. In a few places throughout the world, dead zones occur throughout the year, but summer storms can intensify agricultural runoff, resulting in big phytoplankton blooms that trigger the phenomena.
Phytoplankton are critical to life and are particularly important marine organisms. These microscopic aquatic plants are dispersed throughout the world’s oceans. The plants’ distribution is driven by available light, the presence of nutrients, and physical processes like ocean circulation and upwelling.
"It’s safe to say, with a few exceptions, that all life in the ocean ultimately depends on phytoplankton for its nutrition," notes NASA oceanographer Gene Feldman, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Under certain conditions, excessive phytoplankton growth can result in a dead zone. Dead zones form when large quantities of organic matter, present from the excessive blooms of phytoplankton at the surface, sink to the bottom. After the organic matter or dead phytoplankton sink, bacteria break the dead or decaying phytoplankton down in a process known as aerobic decomposition, releasing carbon dioxide but absorbing oxygen as they work. The resulting low oxygen conditions can cover expansive areas, killing the oxygen-dependent aquatic species, such as fish, that cannot escape their reach, or driving them out of their habitat.
Summer storms intensify the runoff of fertilizers from lawns and farmland, which seep into the rivers and streams that comprise a local watershed and provide a jolt of nutrients to phytoplankton that live along the shore. Excessive nutrients from human activity are one reason many dead zones occur at the mouth of large rivers and in the bays along the shore.
"...frozen away in the permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere currently contains (and much of that is in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide)."
http://www.insnet.org/ins_headlines.rxml?id=11754&photo=
Decades after most countries stopped spraying DDT, frozen stores of the insecticide are now trickling out of melting Antarctic glaciers. The change means Adélie penguins have recently been exposed to the chemical, according to a new study.
The trace levels found will not harm the birds, but the presence of the chemical could be an indication that other frozen pollutants will be released because of climate change, says Heidi Geisz, a marine biologist at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester in the US. She led a team that sampled DDT levels in the penguins.
Melting glaciers release toxic chemical cocktailThe Socialist government, which initially opposed water transfers from one region to another, executed a political U-turn and allowed water to be pumped into Catalonia from the river Ebro in the neighbouring region of Aragon.
The move infuriated southern regions such as Murcia and Valencia, which asked for similar concessions. Both are significant agricultural areas, with a busy tourist season about to start, and expect their water supplies to be hit hard.
Meanwhile, despite heavy rainfall over the weekend water reserves in Catalonia only increased by 1.7%.
The Socialist government is following a controversial programme of building desalinisation plants, which they claim will provide a long-term solution to Spain's endemic water shortage. They have built six so far and plan a further 18. One is due to open outside Barcelona in May next year.
Ramón Llamas, a water expert at Madrid University, says Spain squanders its water and needs better soil management, adding that despite having one of the lowest amounts of rainfall in western Europe, it has one of the highest levels of water consumption a head: the average person in Madrid uses 140 litres a day.
A range of 'built-in' emissions reductions (blue) in the scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Total cumulative emissions to 2100 associated with a frozen-technology baseline are shown for: six individual scenarios, the means of these scenarios (n=6), and for all 35 IPCC scenarios, and the median of the scenario set (AR4). Additional reductions will have to be achieved by climate policy (red), assuming carbon-dioxide stabilization at about 500 parts per million (p.p.m.), leaving allowed emissions for this stabilization target (yellow).
We call it the Emerald Isle for an obvious reason: The Irish landscape is green beyond compare. This image is no postcard caricature, but is indeed very real. For those of us who visit or live in Ireland, there are moments when we are stunned by the depth of green. And those moments occur fairly often.
e veja este artigo: The Growing Battle for the Right to Water.
