http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3803649.stm


Informant: Greenpeace News-headlines Digest, Vol 14, Issue 9

Der Eisbrecher "Polarstern" kehrte von einer siebenmonatigen Antarktis-Expedition zurück. Polar- und Meeresbiologen fanden Hinweise für Klima-Umschwung: Rings um die Antarktis steht das marine Ökosystem vor beträchtlichen Veränderungen...

Siehe weiter unter:

http://www.telepolis.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/lis/17582/1.html

02.06.04

Energiekonferenz

Anlässlich der internationalen Konferenz für Erneuerbare Energien hat der Naturschutzbund NABU vor den negativen Folgen des Klimawandels gewarnt. Ungebremste klimatische Veränderungen hätten nicht nur direkte Konsequenzen für das Leben der Menschen weltweit, sondern auch erhebliche Verschiebungen des ökologischen Gleichgewichts zur Folge. Der Klimaforscher Prof. Hartmut Graßl, Mitglied des NABU-Kuratoriums, und NABU-Präsident Olaf Tschimpke forderten daher entschlossene Schritte zum weltweiten Ausbau der Erneuerbaren Energien. "Ohne die Erneuerbaren Energien als dritte Säule neben Energieeinsparung und Steigerung der Energieeffizienz haben wir keine Chance, der Klimakatastrophe zu entkommen", sagte Tschimpke.

Die ganze Nachricht im Internet:

http://www.ngo-online.de/ganze_nachricht.php4?Nr=8578

2. 6. 2004

http://ecolog.twoday.net/stories/231394/

Tim Radford, science editor
Tuesday June 1, 2004
The Guardian

Humans have done so much damage to the atmosphere that even if they stop burning all fossil fuels immediately, they risk leaving an impoverished Earth for their descendants, a giant of research in the field will say this week.

James Lovelock, who detected the build-up of ozone-destroying CFCs and formulated the Gaia theory now widely adopted by environmentalists and biologists, will tell a conference in Devon: "We have not yet awakened to the seriousness of global warming."

The Gaia hypothesis is that life itself regulates the chemistry of the atmosphere, the oceans and the bedrock for life's collective benefit. Any disturbance of the process could have dramatic consequences.

Recently researchers have begun to point to such dramatic outcomes, Prof Lovelock says.

· A Swiss team examined the heatwave that killed 20,000 people in western Europe last year and decided it was almost certainly a consequence of global warming.

· British, Belgian and German scientists reported that the entire Greenland icecap would begin to melt irreversibly if average temperatures rose by 2.7C (4.7F). This melting would take 1,000 years to complete, but would but raise sea levels by seven metres.

· A team from the US National Ocean and Atmosphere Admin istration reported that the sea-level's rise in recent years had been a consequence of the accelerated melting of glaciers.

Prof Lovelock, 84, will tell the conference on the science of Gaia at Dartington Hall, Totnes, on Thursday that some people deny the reality of climate change and want business as usual, while others recognise the threat and embrace organic food, renewable energy and alternative medicine.

"If we follow either of these responses, it will allow Gaia eventually to return to her normal state of health - but by eliminating the majority of humans and probably civilisation as well," he says.

Better science and more advanced technology offer the greatest hope.

"We need a portfolio of energy sources, with nuclear playing a major part, at least until fusion power becomes a practical option.

"We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Almost a third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all-pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.

"If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004


Informant: NHNE

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000760.html


Informant: NHNE

1. 6. 2004

http://ecolog.twoday.net/stories/230421/

Published on Sunday, March 28, 2004 by the lndependent/UK

by Geoffrey Lean

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines04/0328-08.htm

Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control.

Measurements by US government scientists show that concentrations of the gas, the main cause of the climate exchange, rose by a record amount over the past 12 months. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply, marking an unprecedented triennial surge.

Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear that it could show the first signs that global warming is feeding on itself, with rising temperatures causing increases in carbon dioxide, which then go on to drive the thermometer even higher. That would be a deeply alarming development, suggesting that this self-reinforcing heating could spiral upwards beyond the reach of any attempts to combat it.

The development comes as official figures show that Britain's emissions of the gas soared by three per cent last year, twice as fast as the year before. The increase - caused by rising energy use and by burning less gas and more coal in power stations - jeopardizes the Government's target of reducing emissions by 19 per cent by 2010.

It also coincides with a new bid to break the log jam over the Kyoto treaty headed by Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who remains close to Tony Blair.

Mr Byers is co-chairing with US Republican Senator Olympia Snowe a new taskforce, run by the Institute of Public Policy Research and US and Australian think tanks, which is charged with devising proposals that could resolve the stalemate caused by President Bush's hostility to the treaty.

The carbon dioxide measurements have been taken from the 11,400ft summit of Hawaii's Mauna Loa, whose enormous dome makes it the most substantial mountain on earth, by scientists working for the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

They have been taking the readings from the peak - effectively breathalyzing the planet - for the past 46 years. It is an ideal site for the exercise, 2,000 miles from the nearest land and protected by freak climatic conditions from pollution from Hawaii, more than two miles below.

The latest measurements, taken a week ago, showed that carbon dioxide had reached about 379 parts per million (ppm), up from about 376ppm the year before, from 373ppm in 2002 and about 371ppm in 2001. These represent three of the four biggest increases on record (the other was in 1998), creating an unprecedented sequence. They add up to a 64 per cent rise over the average rate of growth over the past decade, of 1.8ppm a year.

The US scientists have yet to analyze the figures and stress that they could be just a remarkable blip. Professor Ralph Keeling - whose father Charles Keeling first set up the measurements from Mauna Loa - said:"We are moving into a warmer world".

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd


Informant: Teresa Binstock

Leading voices are raising alarms about global warming as ocean islets flood, glaciers retreat and Arctic permafrost melts.

By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press Writer
May 30, 2004

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-adfg-climate30may30,1,7435785.story

FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu -- The rising sea is eating at the shores of low-slung Funafuti, a spit of coral and coconut palms in the remote Pacific. Unseen fingers of ocean even reach beneath the sands, surfacing inland in startling places among nervous islanders.

"It used to be puddles. Now it's like lakes," said Hilia Vavae, local
meteorologist.

Far to the north in the Marshall Islands, 1,250 miles away, trees are toppling before aquamarine waves. Watching, perplexed, from the edge of a lagoon, teenager Ankit Stephen asked a visitor: "Why is this happening?"

Six hundred miles west on tiny Kosrae, Alokoa Talley pondered the same question. Neighbors are moving their homes up the lush slopes, away from the encroaching Pacific. "I don't know," a government worker said, "but I think it's because of 'green' something."

The "greenhouse effect," climate change, has languished on the world's agenda since the 1970s, a seemingly distant threat. But year by year, inch by inch, it is rising to the top as ocean islets flood, glaciers retreat, Arctic permafrost melts and voices raise new alarms.

"We may already be seeing -- in the increased incidence of drought, floods and extreme weather events that many regions are experiencing -- some of the devastation that lies ahead," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in March, when he urged all governments to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions.

That long-stalled 1997 accord is opposed in Washington, where U.S. government and industry say emission controls would handicap the U.S. economy. Now only ratification by Russia can revive it, making this a critical year on the political front in a long, difficult debate over what to do about climate change.

On the scientific front, meanwhile, signs of global warming mount. Like the glass of a greenhouse, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other gases in the atmosphere let sunlight in but tend to warm the Earth by trapping heat it emits toward space. That's scientific fact; the scientific puzzle involves other factors that might lessen -- or worsen -- the warming and what it does to the planet.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fossil fuels burned in everything from automobiles to electricity plants, reached record levels in the atmosphere last winter, a Hawaii observatory reported in March.

Then, in April, other U.S. scientists reported that NASA satellite readings showed an average increase in the globe's land surface temperatures of 0.77 of a degree Fahrenheit between 1981 and 1998. This reinforced earlier findings, from ground stations, that global temperatures rose 1 degree over the 20th century.

These rising curves of greenhouse gas and global temperature parallel the analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-organized network of climatologists and other scientists worldwide.

In a 2001 report, the panel listed as a key finding: "Most of observed warming over last 50 years likely due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activities."

If emissions are brought under control too slowly, temperatures could rise an additional 10.4 degrees by the year 2100, the panel said, adding that even with rollbacks in smokestack, tailpipe and other emissions, temperatures could rise 2.5 degrees by the end of the century.

Warming is expected to be unevenly distributed and change regional climates in powerful ways, shifting climate zones hundreds of miles, possibly making farmlands drier, deserts wetter, melting ice caps, intensifying storms, spreading disease to new areas, and raising ocean levels anywhere from 3 1/2 inches to 3 feet by 2100, depending on controls, the panel said.

The seas would rise because water expands as it warms and because of the runoff of ice melt from the continents.

In fact, the oceans have expanded, rising an average 1 to 2 millimeters a year -- up to one inch every 12 years -- during the 20th century. More recently, satellites show "the rise has been highly accelerated" to 3 millimeters a year, said Walter Munk of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Pacific Islanders aren't alone.

Rising seas are a growing threat from Alaska, where Eskimos are relocating an Arctic island village, to New Orleans and Shanghai -- near-coastal cities already below sea level, sinking on their own, and further endangered by expanding oceans.

Prevailing winds, tidal peculiarities and other factors can make sea levels vary from place to place. At Funafuti, capital of a mini-nation midway between Hawaii and Australia, gauges have shown the sea rising 5 to 6 millimeters a year since 1993, meteorologist Vavae said.

But some islands are subsiding, sinking under their own weight. "In many islands, I think the answer is that both are happening -- subsidence and rising levels," said Roger Lukas, a University of Hawaii oceanographer.

Similarly uncertain: What will a swelling ocean do to Funafuti?

One rule of thumb, disputed among specialists, holds that each millimeter rise in sea level can claim 5 feet of shallow ocean beach. Some theorize, however, that a moderately higher Pacific would "rearrange" but not obliterate an atoll like Funafuti, a ring of islands around a lagoon.

Rearrangement would be bad enough for Lototele Malie, 75, whose pastel-blue concrete house, with 15 adults and children, sits at the edge of Funafuti's dwindling ocean beach.

"A month ago, the tide came right here," he said, pointing 3 feet away to the lip of his concrete-slab patio. "It's getting dangerous," he said, with the thunder of waves as a backdrop.

The Malies and others have little room to maneuver. Just 300 yards from their rear doors, the choppy waters of the 9-mile-wide lagoon are rising. In between sit other salt-caked plywood or cinderblock houses, beside gaping pits dug in the island's coral foundation by U.S. troops in World War II.

Those pits, filling now with seeping seawater, supplied the crushed material for Funafuti's airport, where today some of Vavae's "lakes" have begun to appear at peak tides. "People got especially worried when the runway flooded. That's new," Margaret Bita, 45, said after Sunday church services.

The church and little airport lie on the broadest part -- 600 yards across -- of slender, steamy, 7-mile-long Funafuti, home to about half the 11,000 people of Tuvalu, an impoverished nation getting by on fees from foreign fishing fleets, international aid and money sent home by merchant seamen.

This main island narrows elsewhere to a mere 50 yards of sand, swaying palms and roadway between lagoon and sea. Its elevation is seldom more than a few feet. When February's "king" tides washed out a small causeway, children swam to school.

"I think it would be better if my kids were somewhere else," said hospital worker Beia Fetau, 40, preparing to help with Sunday school in shirt, tie and traditional male sulu, or skirt.

As recently as the 1980s, Vavae said, the peak king tides came only in January and February. Now, she said, they crash ashore from September to May. But it's the quiet seepage from below that most alarms Tuvaluans.

Because of intruding saltwater, many have abandoned their gardens of deep-rooted pulaka, a tuber crop grown in pits here for centuries. On the nearby islet of Vasafua, the coconut trees are dying. Another small uninhabited island, Tepuka Savilivili, has vanished beneath the waves.

"It went underwater in the cyclone in 1997," Vavae said.

Disentangling long-term climate change from short-term natural variability is a challenge at the local level, especially in the Pacific, where the periodic climatic phenomenon El Niño raises and lowers ocean levels, causes droughts and stirs up severe storms. But people across the Pacific feel sure that something unusual is happening.

In Kiribati, another mini-state north of Tuvalu, they've also lost an islet in the main atoll of Tarawa. On Majuro, the Marshalls' capital, the lagoon outside Ankit Stephen's home has undercut dozens of towering coconut palms, as islanders futilely try to stop the waves with piles of debris.

On Kosrae, a "high island" of volcanic peaks in the Federated States of Micronesia, the people have always lived along a flat coastal strip, but some are now dismantling their simple homes and heading for the hills, as recommended by the government.

"Nobody remembers such tides before. The sea is actually moving inland," said Simpson Abraham, head of Kosrae's Resources Development Authority. Some offshore islets have vanished, he said.

In Tuvalu, devoutly Christian since missionary days, many talk not of greenhouses, but of Genesis, reminding each other of God's promise to Noah: As long as rainbows cross the sky, there will be no more great floods. "God will protect us," one woman churchgoer assured a visitor.

Saufatu Sopoanga, as Tuvalu's prime minister, must look into the future, not the Bible. He is talking to New Zealand about a kind of 21st century Noah's ark -- a standby plan for a mass migration there.

"In 50 or 100 years, the islands are expected to go under water. What can we do?" Tuvalu's leader asked on a day when a tropical morning downpour soon gave way to a rainbow in a blue, very warm sky.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times


Informant: Teresa Binstock

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Source:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/175309_focus30.html

P-I Focus: While we're off fighting terror, the planet's crumbling

By RICHARD STEINER
PROFESSOR

History has shown that human societies often misjudge risk, and that is the case today. With world attention focused almost exclusively on terrorism and Iraq, another, even more serious security threat deepens -- the global environmental/humanitarian crisis.

While we remain virtually hypnotized by terrorism, humanity is quietly destroying the biosphere in which we live, ourselves and our future along with it. Just since 9/11, 25 million children died from preventable causes, the world's population grew by 200 million people and thousands of species went extinct. Also, 250,000 square miles of forest were lost, 50,000 square miles of arable land turned to desert, 8 billion tons of carbon were added to the atmosphere and air pollution claimed more than 4 million lives.

Our boat is sinking, we know the causes and consequences, and we know how to solve the problem. Yet policy-makers keep rearranging the deck chairs. Left unattended, this broad environmental/humanitarian crisis will foreclose any hope for security in the world. Certainly we must address terrorism, but just as certainly we must ensure our planet's sustainability.

Some of the key indicators of our current condition help put these relative risks in perspective.

Population

World population stands at 6.4 billion, more than four times its number at the start of the 20th century. Although some nations have reached population stability, many of the poorest, developing nations are far from it. The population -- growing by 74 million a year -- is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, the additional billions coming almost exclusively in the poorest countries.

The largest generation of young people ever, some 1.7 billion ages 10 to 24, is just now reaching reproductive age. Where fertility remains high there is widespread poverty, discrimination against women, high infant mortality and lack of access to family planning, health care and education. More than 350 million women lack any access to family planning. Some religions oppose contraception, and female infanticide has become epidemic. Programs to stabilize population need about $20 billion a year (about one week's worth of world military expenditures) but now receive about $3 billion a year.

Consumption

Conspicuous consumption has become a homogenizing force across the developed world. Just since 1950, we have consumed more goods and services than all previous generations combined. The consumption of energy, steel and timber more than doubled; fossil fuel use and car ownership increased four-fold; meat production and fish catch increased five-fold; paper use increased six-fold, and air travel increased 100-fold.

In the United States, where malls are more prevalent than high schools, shopping has become the primary cultural activity. Although world economic output continues to increase, when real costs are calculated, sustainable economic welfare has been in decline since the '70s. One measure of resource consumption of humanity -- our "ecological footprint" -- surpassed sustainable levels in the late '70s, and for an average American is now 20 times that of a person in some developing countries.

Studies estimate that, if the developing world were to consume at our rate, another five or six planets would be needed to sustain this level of consumption. The United Nations says that a 10-fold reduction in resource consumption (or a 10-fold increase in energy/material efficiency) in industrialized countries will be needed for adequate resources to be available for developing countries.

Rich-poor divide

The unequal distribution of consumption adds to environmental, social and economic damage as well. The gap in per-capita income between rich and poor nations has doubled in the past 40 years. The upper 20 percent in economic class -- Europe, Japan, North America -- account for more than 80 percent of the material and energy consumed globally while the poorest 20 percent account for just 1 percent of consumption. The world's 350 billionaires have a combined net worth exceeding that of the poorest 2.5 billion people. Those poor live on less than $2 a day and lack basic sanitation, health care, clean water and adequate food.

Despite unprecedented economic expansion of the '90s, today some 900 million adults are illiterate and 30,000 kids die every day from preventable causes. Poor countries pay more than $350 billion a year just to service the interest on their debt to developed countries (a total of $2.4 trillion) and often try to raise this money through environmentally destructive activities. Some countries spend more to service their foreign debt than on education and health care combined.

Biodiversity

Ecologists fear we are losing between 50 and 150 species each day, a rate thousands of times higher than the evolutionary background extinction rate of about one species a year. Some estimate that we have lost perhaps 600,000 species since the "biotic holocaust" began around 1950; if present trends continue, half of all species on Earth would be extinct in the next 50 years. Overhunting, invasive species, pollution and climate change are factors in this sixth mass extinction event, but by far the greatest cause is habitat loss. The lost ecological services could be devastating. It may take 5 million to 10 million years for biological diversity to recover.

Forests

Half of Earth's original forest cover is gone, and an additional 30 percent is degraded or fragmented. Only 20 percent of the original forest on Earth remains today as large, relatively undisturbed "frontier forests." And half of this frontier forest is threatened by human activity, mostly by logging. Another 100,000 square miles of forest is lost each year, mostly in the tropics, and only a very small amount of this forest loss is offset by regrowth.

Since 1960, about 30 percent of the Earth's tropical forests have disappeared and with them, thousands of species. Between 50 percent and 90 percent of the terrestrial species inhabit and depend upon the forests, and more than half of the threatened vertebrate species on Earth are forest animals. The link is clear: lose forests -- lose species.

Food

Today about 1 billion people are undernourished and 600 million are overnourished. The United Nations lists 86 countries that can't grow or buy enough food and predicts that by 2010 global food supply will begin to fall short of demand.

More than 6 million people a year, mostly children, die from malnutrition. Grain production is declining and environmentally damaging meat production continues to increase. The 1.3 billion cattle (weighing more than all of humanity) have degraded a quarter of the planet's land surface.

More than 10 percent of world farmland and 70 percent of the world rangeland is degraded, and poor agricultural practices result in the loss of more than 20 billion tons of topsoil a year.

Water

Fresh water may well be the most precious substance on Earth. People use about half of all available fresh water, causing aquifers to shrink around the world.

Some 70 percent of all water used by humans goes to irrigation; most simply leaks and evaporates from inefficient irrigation systems. Some water tables, such as the north China plain, drop by more than a meter a year. Two billion people have no choice but to drink water contaminated with human and animal waste and chemical pollution.

The World Health Organization estimates there are 1.5 billion cases of diarrhea a year in children from contaminated water, causing 3 million deaths.

Today, water supplies in 36 nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are not sufficient to meet grain production needs. In China, 400 cities suffer from acute water shortage and half of the nation's rivers are polluted. The world lost half of its wetlands in the past century, and more than 22,000 square miles of arable land turns into desert each year. It's projected that in 20 years, the demand for water will increase by 50 percent and two-thirds of the world population will be water-stressed.

Atmosphere

Air pollution exceeds health limits daily in many cities in the world. Some 5,000 people a day die from air pollution, and kids in some cities inhale the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes every day just by breathing the air.

Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuel now stand at 6.5 billion tons a year (four times 1950 levels), resulting in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations 33 percent greater than pre-industrial levels.

Global warming is no longer seriously doubted, and nine of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. The warming has accelerated the melting of polar ice caps and mountain glaciers; a rising sea level has inundated some Pacific islands, and more frequent and severe droughts, storms and floods cost more than $50 billion and 20,000 lives a year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded most of the warming over past 50 years was human-induced.

Oceans

Once thought to be inexhaustible, the Earth's oceans are more polluted and overexploited than at any other time in history. Seventy percent of world fish populations are either overfished or nearly so. Marine pollution has increased dramatically, and warming ocean temperatures have killed more than a fourth of the world's coral reefs. The 1998 coral "bleaching" event killed almost half of all Indian Ocean corals in just a few months, and Australia's Great Barrier Reef is threatened with complete collapse by the end of the century if warming continues.

If we connect these dots, the picture is clear: We are approaching a breaking point on the home planet.

The fate of the Earth may well be decided in our lifetime, and we all should begin behaving as though we are living together on one small, precious, life-sustaining spaceship, which indeed we are.

The solution is straightforward -- stabilize population, reduce consumption and share wealth. We know exactly how to do this; we just need to pay for it.

The United Nations says $40 billion a year -- about what consumers spend on cosmetics -- would provide everyone on Earth with clean water, sanitation, health care, adequate nutrition and education.

The secretary general of the 1992 Earth Summit cautioned, "no place on the planet can remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery ... we're either going to save the whole world or no one will be saved."

Without urgent attention, the global ecosystem will continue to unravel and we'll consign future generations to a nightmare of deprivation, insecurity and conflict.

It's time to broaden our understanding of security beyond just that of terrorism to securing a sustainable future for spaceship Earth.
Richard Steiner is a professor and conservation specialist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.


Informant: Teresa Binstock