World Water Week: The Escalating Cost of Staying Moist

On the subject of water, one of my favorite topics, this week is “World Water Week” in Stockholm, an annual conference whose aim is to serve as “the main arena for an exchange of views and experiences between members of the scientific, business, policy and civil society communities in order to advance efforts related to water, the environment, livelihoods and poverty reduction.”

Jason Godesky on The Anthropik Network, has this to say about it all:

“Water, water everywhere,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” bemoans, “Nor any drop to drink.” This is World Water Week, and though more than two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered in water, 97.2% of it is contained in five oceans of salt water. 90% of all the earth’s fresh water is locked in the Antarctic ice sheet. Global warming has caused droughts, the loss of glaciers, the evaporation of whole lakes, and ultimately, a global water shortage.

The result of such shortages, of course, would be water wars. This is no hypothetical possibility; Israel’s recent invasion of Lebanon was fought for access to the Litani. Israel is not alone in its dire need for water; the whole Middle East, Africa and Sri Lanka are in the same dire straits. Even wealthy nations are beginning to feel the pressure. China, India and even the United States’ own Colorado River are becoming serious concerns.

Good reading here.

 

Latest Target of Global Warming: Australian Wines

We prefer cocktails to wine here, but the following is a bit disturbing:

AUSTRALIAN wine regions won’t be able to grow the grapes they’re famous for because of global warming, wine lawyers said today.

Lawyers from Adelaide-based Finlaysons rate climate change as the biggest long-term challenge facing Australia’s wine industry.

Wine quality could suffer from reduced harvest times, more extreme weather and reduced water supplies, Finlaysons partner Will Taylor said.

“Climate change is probably the biggest long-term issue facing the wine industry throughout the world and individual Australian winemakers and grapegrowers need to be planning for it now,” Mr Taylor said.

“We’re likely to see changes in vine phenology and wine styles, including potential reductions in quality, shorter optimum harvest times, reduced water supply in most areas, different disease and pest pressures, and changes in the varieties of grapes that can be grown successfully in particular areas across Australia.”

Mr Taylor said the character of Australia’s wine regions will change.

“That represents a fundamental challenge for the Australian wine industry, given our wine regions are known and loved around the world because of their existing characteristics.

“The bottom line is that regions like Barossa Valley, Margaret River, Hunter Valley and Yarra Valley won’t be able to grow the grapes they’re famous for.”

Full article here. If global warming could eradicate wine coolers from the Earth, then we could really get behind the Bush environmental agenda.

 

Rise in Typhoons May Be Related to Global Warming

Global warming is contributing to an unusually harsh typhoon season in China that started around a month early and has left thousands dead or missing, government officials and experts say.”The natural disasters caused by typhoons in our country have been many this year,” the head of the China Meteorological Administration, Qin Dahe, said in recent comments on his organization’s website.

“Against the backdrop of global warming, more and more strong and unusual climatic and atmospheric events are taking place.

“The strength of typhoons are increasing, the destructiveness of typhoons that have made landfall is greater and the scope in which they are travelling is farther than normal.”

The vice minister of the Ministry of Water Resources, E Jingping, also spoke last week about the unusual ferocity, frequency and early arrival of typhoons in China this year.

E said the typhoon season in China normally starts around July 27, but this year the first typhoon hit the southern province of Guangdong on May 18.

. . . Natural disasters in China this year have killed 1,699 people and left another 415 missing, the nation’s Red Cross Society said last week.

Full article here.

 

Pat Robertson Admits an Inconvenient Truth

From Reuters:

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said on Thursday the wave of scorching temperatures across the United States has converted him into a believer in global warming.

“We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels,” Robertson said on his “700 Club” broadcast. “It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.”

This week the heat index, the perceived temperature based on both air temperatures and humidity, reached 115 Fahrenheit in some regions of the U.S. East Coast. The 76-year-old Robertson told viewers that was “the most convincing evidence I’ve seen on global warming in a long time.”

Last year, Robertson said natural disasters affecting the globe, including hurricanes Katrina and Rita that wrecked the U.S. Gulf Coast, might be signs that the biblical apocalypse was nearing.

The issue has divided conservative Christians.

In October, Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate, said the National Association of Evangelicals was teaming up with “far left environmentalists” for saying global warming was caused by humans and needed to be mitigated.

Signers of that statement included California mega-church pastor Rick Warren, author of the bestselling “The Purpose Driven Life.”

In the late 1990s, Robertson paid at least $300,000 to investigate the revival of an oil refinery east of Los Angeles. The bid was unsuccessful.

Televangelists getting together with environmental leftists? Now I know the world is coming to an end.

 

Scientists’ Hurricane Solution: Stop Building on the Coast

Ten climate experts who are sharply divided over whether global warming is intensifying hurricanes say that this question, a focus of congressional hearings, news reports and the recent Al Gore documentary, is a distraction from “the main hurricane problem facing the United States.”

That problem, the experts said Monday in a statement, is an ongoing “lemming-like march to the sea” in the form of unabated coastal development in vulnerable places, and in the lack of changes in government policies and corporate and individual behavior that are driving the trend.

Whatever the relationship between hurricanes and climate, experts say, hurricanes are hitting the coasts, and houses should not be built in their path.

But coasts are attractive places to live, and political pressures on states and Congress tend to result in discounted insurance costs for property in harm’s way, the statement said.

The scientists added that reimbursement for losses can spur more building in the wrong places. “Federal disaster policies,” they said, “while providing obvious humanitarian benefits, also serve to promote risky behavior in the long run.”

“These demographic trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of heightened activity,” they concluded, stressing that a storm like Hurricane Katrina or worse “was (and is) inevitable even in a stable climate.”

Full article here.

 

French Toast

Reuters reports:

The French government said on Thursday 112 people had died due to the heat in the hottest July since 1950.

The toll was far lower than a killer heatwave three summers ago when thousands died.

Most of the people who died this year were over the age of 75 and many of those were already ill, the Institute of Health Surveillance said.

Twelve people died at work, four died while doing sport, three more were homeless people and one baby died of hypothermia.

The death toll had previously been reported at 64.

Temperatures averaged 24 Celsius (75 Fahrenheit) across France in July but climbed to the mid-30s for several days.

“It was the hottest July in France since 1950,” Meteo France, the country’s weather agency said.

It said that this year’s heatwave was not as long or as intense as the one in 2003, in which 15,000 people died prompting a bout of soul-searching over family ties and the plight of the elderly.

After the heatwave of 2003, France boosted measures to protect vulnerable groups, particularly the elderly, during unusually hot weather. This summer it issued advertisements advising the public to drink water and stay in cool places.

 

Heatwave Continues, Blackouts Likely

A smothering heat wave shattered records for electricity use across a wide swath of the country yesterday as utilities and government officials called for conservation and braced for even more strain on the power grid today.

Power systems held up well despite worries about overloaded plants, transformers or lines. But utility executives warned that the risk of breakdowns rises steadily as a heat wave wears on, and with todays temperatures expected to top yesterdays, with possible record highs along the East Coast, power companies were girding for a huge challenge. 

Three independent system operators, agencies that manage regional grids for New York, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, set record highs for electricity demand yesterday, breaking records set just two weeks ago. New England was just shy of a record. 

Experts say demand is rising faster than the ability to meet it, which over the long run could pose the risk of both local and regional failures.

Full article here.  The good news about having a blackout is that we won’t have to watch while the Middle East goes up in smoke.  You should always try to look on the bright side of these things.

 

Blair and Governator Fight Global Warming Together

WASHINGTON (AP) — Britain and California are preparing to sidestep the Bush administration and fight global warming together by creating a joint market for greenhouse gases.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plan to lay the groundwork for a new trans-Atlantic market in carbon dioxide emissions, The Associated Press has learned. Such a move could help California cut carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases scientists blame for warming the planet. President Bush has rejected the idea of ordering such cuts.

. . . The aim is to fix a price on carbon pollution, an unwanted byproduct of burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gasoline. The idea is to set overall caps for carbon and reward businesses that find a profitable way to minimize their carbon emissions, thereby encouraging new, greener technologies.

Full article here.

 

Indonesia Still Rockin’, China’s All Wet and Spain’s Feeling the Sting

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.1 hit offshore the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said on Thursday.

The United States Geological Survey put the quake, which occurred at 1116 GMT, at a magnitude of 6.0.

Senior Indonesian seismologist Fauzi told Jakarta-based Radio Elshinta the earthquake appeared too small to trigger a tsunami.

“We don’t need to be concerned about the possibility of a tsunami. The scale was too low for a tsunami. It could be felt though, so we hope there won’t be any damage,” Fauzi said.

See full piece here.

Meanwhile, 25 people died in southern China in the “floods, landslides and other disasters” caused by Typhoon Kaemi; and jellyfish are attacking the Spanish coast:

Sweltering temperatures sweeping Europe have brought a plague of jellyfish to Spain’s eastern seashores, forcing holidaymakers to stay out of the sea, the Red Cross said on Thursday.

The unwelcome visitors, which can reach the size of a dinner plate, have flourished thanks to a glut of plankton brought on by higher sea temperatures and a decline in natural predators like dolphins and turtles.

The Red Cross has treated more than 10,000 jellyfish stings this summer so far in the eastern region of Catalonia, a spokesman for the organization said.

“Nearly a third of those have been in the past week,” he said.

Timmy, I think the jellyfish are trying to tell us something!

 

End-of-World News Round-Up, 7-27-06

• Condoleezza digs in against a cease-fire while Lebanon witnesses its worst day of fighting since hostilities broke out earlier this month.

• Meanwhile, al-Qaeda’s ugly head, in the guise of its #2 lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has poked itself out from underneath a dungheap in an undisclosed location and declared that “The al Qaeda organization will not stay silent regarding what the Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon are facing . . .,” and it kind of sounds like a threat to me.

• NASA has dropped the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” from its official mission statement after NASA scientist James Hansen, following threats from Bush administration officials who complained that Hansen had no business talking about global warming on the public dime, used it repeatedly in defense of his public warnings about greenhouse gas emissions.

• And, finally, Indonesia’s governor at OPEC, Maizar Rahman, confirms that OPEC has no control over rising oil prices — something many of us have suspected for quite some time.