...climate change is eating the Himalayas' glaciers, threatening water supplies for hundreds of millions of people downstream across South Asia...Yahoo News
India is the most vulnerable country to climate change, followed by Pakistan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, a ranking by HSBC showed on Monday....
Pakistan was ranked by HSBC among nations least well-equipped to respond to climate risks....Not that prior to the partition of India after independence, Pakistan and Bangladesh were part of India. This area of the subcontinent is most vulnerable.
When everything is taken into consideration, the professional opinion of the IPCC as stated in its Summary for Policy Makers is that emissions reductions alone are nowhere near what are needed. Strong negative emissions are required. A large, continuous, net removal of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere is required.What the post doesn't mention is the adverse health effects and associated cost of environmental pollution, which is a negative externality produced by technology whose cost is being socialized as environmental degradation and adverse health and increased mortality, in addition to global warming.
The methods could be agricultural, reforestation and/or industrial and energy smokestack capture, but one thing is certain; all of these things combined will not create a large net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Direct atmospheric removal of carbon dioxide is required.
This means that even progressive climate policy that is much more aggressive than the Clean Power Plan just adopted in Austin, Texas, that will strive to meet net-zero (or zero emissions of carbon dioxide) by 2030, are inadequate to say the least.
Final word: All is not lost. Treating climate pollution like the pollution it is can be done for similar costs to what we spend on advertising across the planet every year. The same voices that have so badly discombobulated the climate science discussion in the general population have also masked the true solutions to the treatment of climate pollution. Please tell your friends.
Still, it will take a prodigious effort to cure China’s environmental ills. If energy needs increase, expanding the use of renewable energy to 20% of the fuel makeup may be insufficient to avert climate change. China has stated in the international arena that emissions are to peak by 2030, the year by which climate change is predicted to become irreversible. After this point, the earth will have reached the tipping point, in which the Arctic will become a source, rather than a net sink, of carbon.
Therefore, even though China is working hard to increase its usage of renewable energy, this simply may not be enough to stave off climate change. The solution must be a stronger reduction in the use of carbon-intensive energy, entailing conscientious consumer use as well as more efficient producer use and implementation of carbon-reducing technologies. China’s policy makers take a gradual approach to changing the status quo, but climate change cannot wait.
In 2012, the U.S. Intelligence Council issued a report warning that in the next few decades, the fragile ecosystem of international trade and political partnership that America relies on will be threatened as countries that are “important to US interests” come to blows over a single invaluable resource: water. Not oil. “Water is the new oil,” so say economists, business executives and political scientists. Yes, while the majority of the wars of the 20th century were fought over terrain bubbling over with crude, the wars of tomorrow will likely be fought over countries with access to aquifers, canals and fresh water springs....AMERICAblog
New research supported by the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office and insurer Lloyd’s of London finds that, absent major changes, humanity risks a catastrophic collapse in its ability to feed itself by mid-century, due in significant part to human-caused climate change.
Last year, the United Nations’ “highly conservative” IPCC climate panel warned that humanity is risking a “breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes” on its current path of unrestricted carbon pollution. Many studies in the last 12 months have strengthened the scientific case (see this, for instance).
The new research is from the Global Resource Observatory, a project of Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) partnering with the UK government’s Foreign Office; Lloyds of London; a “coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society”; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; and both the Africa and Asian Development Banks.Think Progress
The GSI group does business-as-usual forecasting using system dynamics modeling — arguably the only type of modeling that treats feedbacks and time delays well enough to even approximate what is coming. GSI Director Aled Jones explains that the group “ran the model forward to the year 2040.” The results were stunning:“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”The “good” news: That only happens if humanity doesn’t actually do any serious planning for this outcome — and doesn’t do any serious reacting as it plays out. But homo sapiens isn’t a “brainless frog,” are we?....
“The 21st century, while maintaining systems of governance inherited from the past, is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states, chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tend to prevail over the political.” (p. 128)ht/ Bill Moyers & Co.
Top energy watchdog says two thirds of all assets booked by coal, oil and gas companies may be worthless under the 'two degree' climate dealAnd they are still not discussing this rationally by taking externalities (euphemism for socialized costs) into account with respect to the true price of energy. The socialized cost that is not accounted for is paid by society in terms of reduced quality of life, such as environmental degradation and ill health because of pollution.
We’re thrilled to announce that Chris Mooney is joining The Post to create a new blog about the environment….He will start as part of Wonkblog, and build toward the future rollout of a standalone blog that will pull together the excellent work of The Post’s all-star roster of energy and environment writers.
An international team of scientists, who are studying the vast deposits of methane trapped on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, have captured their first look at plumes of this powerful greenhouse gas bubbling up through water. This discovery could lead to better forecasting, but it also has serious implications for Earth's climate in the years to come.
Much of the science of global warming has been focused on the study of carbon dioxide (CO2) as the main culprit in the current trend of rising global temperatures and resulting climate disruption we're seeing today. This is only appropriate, since CO2 is, by far, the largest contributor to the problem - at least by total amount of gas that's added to the atmosphere on a yearly basis. However, methane (chemical formula CH4) is another greenhouse gas that's been 'on the radar' for climate scientists, because it is much better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere. Over a 20 year span of time, kg for kg, methane traps over 85 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Over a 100 year period, that ratio drops, but even averaged over that long methane is still over 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. Methane is only a small contributor to the overall climate change we're seeing now, but there are fears that this could change in the years to come...The Weather Channel
