December 13, 2009 - London IndependentTens of thousands stage world's largest climate march in Copenhagen
By Ben Ferguson in Denmark and Jonathan OwenBritons deported and hundreds held as preventative measure after bottles thrown.
Tens of thousands of climate activists marched in Copenhagen yesterday as part of a worldwide "Day of Action" to urge negotiators at UN talks to agree a strong treaty to fight global warming. The rally was mostly held in a carnival atmosphere, but riot police detained about 700 activists at the rear of the march after bottles were thrown and a window at the Danish foreign ministry was smashed. The activists were forced to sit down on the street, with hands tied behind their backs.
The number of people on the march was estimated at 25,000 by police and up to 100,000 by organisers. Banners read, "There is no planet B", and "Change the politics, not the climate". Some activists dressed as polar bears and penguins with signs reading: "Save the Humans!" Some held a giant inflatable snowman under threat of melting from warming caused by burning fossil fuels.
A Copenhagen police spokeswoman later confirmed that two Britons were deported for vandalism and spitting on a police officer during the protests. Police blamed the trouble on militant activist groups, and claimed the troublemakers included groups responsible for provoking violence during a Nato summit in the French city of Strasbourg last April.
The arrests came after the march from the city to the Bella Centre, where the UN Climate Change Conference is being held.
Taking part in the world's largest ever climate-change march, which was named The Flood, and organised by Friends of the Earth, were the supermodel turned activist Helena Christensen, Bollywood actor Rahul Bose, and British actress Helen Baxendale. Christensen said: "They will be very bad politicians if they do not hear us by now."
Protesters were demanding that negotiators strike a deal to prevent catastrophic levels of global warming. In the Global Day of Action, campaigners also staged events abroad, including a four-minute "flashdance" outside the Houses of Parliament, with volunteers across London collecting messages from citizens to give to MPs.
The Flood coincided with the arrival of environment ministers in Copenhagen yesterday for informal talks before world leaders join the summit later this week.
While government officials try to find some sort of compromise, health experts will warn this week of the potentially dire consequences of failure. The lives of hundreds of millions worldwide are being put at risk by climate change, with impacts escalating into the foreseeable future, warns a new report by the World Health Organisation being presented to delegates at the climate talks on Thursday.
Progress against diseases such as cholera, malaria and dengue fever could be reversed, says the Protecting Health from Climate Change report, which predicts that the population at risk of malaria in Africa could rise by 170 million by 2030, and the global population at risk of dengue by an extra two billion by the 2080s. "Climate change threatens the very fabric of global health," said Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, lead author of the report. He added: "We have a choice between a world that is more dangerous, worse for health and more degraded and unfair, and one that is more sustainable, equitable and beneficial for health."
The warning comes as climate experts stress that countries will need to go beyond the deals already on the table just to have a reasonable chance of containing warming at below C.
Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said: "A deal that puts us on the path to having a good chance of avoiding warming of C, is possible - but ... we need to capture the high end of those proposals and more in Copenhagen, and then ratchet up commitments."
An alternative summit in Copenhagen claims to have the answer. A proposal from Klimaforum09 - representing 70 organisations from 92 countries - calling for a "system change" to a carbon-free economy by 2040 will be presented to government delegations on Tuesday. It rejects "false solutions" such as nuclear energy and argues for the "safe, clean, renewable and sustainable use of natural resources".
One of those backing the declaration, the Indian environmentalist Dr Vandana Shiva, said: "Indigenous people and the indigenous world views will definitely need to be brought into the centre of discussion in search of solutions to climate change."
However, a poll this weekend shows dwindling support for environmental issues. A survey by YouGov for the Labour-leaning Left Foot Forward website will make difficult reading for political leaders trying to take voters with them on climate change.
Just 24 per cent believe global warming is an "urgent issue" needing "immediate and radical steps", compared with 38 per cent in a previous YouGov poll in November 2006. And 18 per cent agree that "there is not yet enough clear evidence of global warming and therefore there is no need currently to consider any major steps to change the way we live" - double the 9 per cent in the 2006 poll.
Americans are generally oblivious of how much energy they use. How many times do you leave your computer plugged in when you aren't using it? How many times do you leave your lights on in your house? How seriously did you consider the environment when you chose to live way out in the suburbs, miles and miles from your job? Do you own an SUV?
Thirst for oil poses threat to US national security, says military adviser
The Guardian - London
October 28, 2009
Democratic senators today pivoted from the economy to national security in push for climate change bill
America's thirst for oil is a gathering threat to its national security – and the risk will grow further as the world's population touches 7 billion, a military adviser to the Pentagon told the Senate today.
In a second day of debate on energy, Democratic senators today pivoted from the economy to national security to try to make the case for a climate change bill.
The threat to Americans' security ranged from the here and now – with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq tied down by their reliance on gas-guzzling equipment – to years into the future when extreme temperatures and rising sea levels could lead to a widespread social breakdown.
"We have never before on this planet had close to 7 billion people which we will have in 2011. We have never had the unprecedented level of per capita energy use multiplied by that 7 billion people," Dennis McGinn, a member of the Military Advisory Board, composed of senior retired admirals and generals, told the Senate. "We have a whole host of indicators, warnings and trends that tells us climate change is bad for national security..." link to complete article
"the livestock industry is responsible for a staggering 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions."
Severe global warming will render half of world's inhabited areas unliveable, expert warns
* David Adam in Copenhagen
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009
Severe global warming could make half the world's inhabited areas literally too hot to live in, a US scientist warned today.
Parts of China, India and the eastern US could all become too warm in summer for people to lose heat by sweating - rendering such areas effectively uninhabitable.
Steven Sherwood, a climate expert at Yale University, told a global warming conference in Copenhagen that people will not be able to adapt to a much warmer climate as well as previously thought.
The physiological limits of the human body will begin to render places impossible to support human life if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels, he said.
"There will be some places on Earth where it would simply be impossible to lose heat," Sherwood said. "This is quite imaginable if we continue burning fossil fuels. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't end up there."
The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that average temperatures could rise by 6C this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates. Scientists at the Copenhagen Climate Congress this week said the IPCC may have underestimated the scale of the problem, and that emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than expected...more
The hidden cost of our growing taste for meat
As the west's appetite for meat increases, so too does the demand for soya - used as animal feed by farmers. But the planting of huge tracts of land is causing deforestation and destroying eco-systems in developing countries.London GuardianDecember 7, 2008by Juliette Jowit and Oliver Balch in Minga Pora, Paraguay, report
To the European eye, accustomed to square hedgerows and neatly tilled arable land, the countryside of eastern Paraguay is unexceptional, almost pretty. The rolling hills spread out to the far distance. The sky is vast, the horizon broken only by the occasional homestead, leafy copse or bulky metal silo.
But to 47-year-old Melitón Ramírez, this is no paradise. It's a wasteland. Juddering down a farm track in a muddy Jeep, he points to a wide field by the road. It has been sown with soya and the green-leafed plants are sprouting. It looks like a huge bed of wild clover.
'Thirty years ago, almost all of this was woodland,' says Ramírez, who's been a farmer in Alto Paraná state all his life. He grew up surrounded by the Interior Atlantic Forest, listening to the sound of bare-throated bellbirds and saffron toucanets. Before the advent of commercial farming, 85 per cent of eastern Paraguay was forest. Now, with roughly 12 per cent of it still standing, silence fills the air.
'There used to be 2,000 families living here. Now there are only 30, if that,' he continues.
The story of Ramírez's home village of Minga Porá is familiar in South America. It is a story that starts on the dinner tables of the UK and other rich nations, where a hunger for meat and dairy products fuels an ever-rising demand for the industrial farming of animals using high-protein feed. At the bottom of this food chain is the soya plant. Millions of hectares of intensively cultivated soya are gnawing at tropical forests and savannah - displacing farmers and communities, leading to poverty, ill-health and even violence, ruining habitats and exacerbating global warming.
A report by campaign group Friends of the Earth is to be published on Tuesday to focus the attention of UK consumers and the government on the scale of this destruction. It will detail for the first time the cutting, burning and spraying that occurs as a consequence. The report, What's Feeding our Food?, will start a campaign urging the government to take action, ending subsidies and other policies that encourage intensive farming and making sure public money spent on food is not propping up damaging practices.
Across the main soya-producing countries of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, an area the size of California has been cleared for this one crop, which is exported around the world, mainly to the European Union and China. As the third biggest customer in the European Union, the UK required nearly 1.2m hectares - an area the size of Devon and Cornwall - to generate the 1.7m tonnes of soya beans and 652,000 tonnes of crushed soya meal imported in the most recent year for which figures are available, 2006-7. That was most of the soya used by UK farmers producing 850 million broiler chickens, 10 billion eggs, 10 million turkeys, 4.9 million pigs and 10 million cattle for dairy and beef. Some of this food is exported, but imports, mostly from the EU, are also reared using soya feed, says the report.
'Even though bacon, burgers, milk and cheese may be produced in the UK, most will have come from animals fed on crops grown on the other side of the world,' it says. Nor is the pace of change slackening: this year official estimates judge that soya production will increase in all three major producers. Although demand for meat is largely flat in the UK, it is growing in developing countries.
Attracted by generous offers from Brazilian-born soya growers, Ramírez's neighbours began selling their plots. Soon herbicides began to contaminate the land and water supplies. His own crops began to fail. Worried the chemicals would harm his family, six years ago Ramírez decided to leave...con't
link to photo
The Hidden Cost of Our Taste for Meat
London Guardian
December 7, 2008
con'tThe destruction wreaked by soya has forced about 90,000 families in the neighbouring state of Caaguazú to leave their homes since the mid-Nineties, according to Javiera Rulli, a biologist for Asunción-based research group BASE, and the editor of a book on soya's expansion in South America. 'The expansion of GM soya is leading to social conflict and mass migration,' she says.
Some problems are easy to measure, particularly the damage to the Amazon and Atlantic forests and the Cerrado savannah. Only two per cent of Paraguay's tropical and subtropical Atlantic forest is left, according to the report - the same proportion of 16th-century woodland remaining in the UK.
Others problems are anecdotal, but the report cites dozens of incidents and statistics to build up a picture of the complex chain of social problems that can be traced back to the growth of the soya farms. Then there are the health impacts of spraying fertilisers and pesticides.
In Paraguay, in the tiny rural hamlet of San Isidro, resident Cipriano Vega says there has been a surge in diseases that were almost unknown in the community previously. Diarrhoea, rashes, headaches, allergies, chest infections and epilepsy are all commonplace now, he alleges.
The community has asked the local government to test the water supply, but to no avail. Without such data, Vega admits that it is difficult to prove a link to the herbicides. But he is in little doubt. 'The year before last, two kids were born without the ability to move their arms or legs, and two people recently died of brain haemorrhages,' he says.
Although it is hard to prove any one person or village has been poisoned by the farming chemicals, the World Health Organisation estimates that, excluding suicide, 355,000 people a year are poisoned by chemicals, and agrochemicals are a major contributor, particularly pesticides. 'Acute exposure can lead to death or serious illness,' particularly when people live close to where chemicals are used, adds the WHO briefing on toxic hazards.
Not everybody accepts, however, that the problems of soya production are as widespread as campaigners claim.
Robert Newbery, the National Farmers Union's chief poultry adviser, said soya products for animals were only part of a global industry that also produced soya oil for processed food, and most crops were planted on existing agricultural land. Newbery said the NFU would support action to tackle wrongdoing by soya farmers, but said they were confident 'the majority is grown ethically'.
Bunge, which with Cargill is one of the biggest soya production companies in the region, also said it had been working for many years, especially in Brazil, to make the industry more sustainable, backing a moratorium on buying soya from newly deforested parts of the Amazon, and working with the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment on promoting best practices among producers. 'A lot has been done, but there is always more to do,' said a spokesman.
Melitón Ramírez now lives in the optimistically named El Triunfo (The Triumph), a rural settlement off the trunk road heading west from Ciudad del Este. He and his fellow subsistence farmers hope to prevent soya's continual encroachment by joining the ownership of their lands together so the soya farmers can't pick them off one by one.
Back in the UK, FoE is calling for the government to axe subsidies that encourage intensive livestock production, lobby the EU to change trade policies and international aid that bolster the industry, and ensure that the £2.2bn a year spent on food by public bodies such as schools and hospitals does not buy products from intensive soya-fed animals.
'Most people don't realise that there's a hidden chain of events linking the meat and dairy they buy to factory farming and to climate change, deforestation and loss of livelihoods in developing countries,' said Clare Oxborrow, FoE's senior food campaigner. 'The government must revolutionise the way that meat and dairy is produced in this country to urgently tackle these impacts while supporting sustainable UK livestock farming.'
A versatile crop
• Cultivated for thousands of years in China, soya was considered one of five holy crops, along with rice, wheat, barley and millet.
• The beans can be eaten as sprouts, milk, tofu, tempeh, sauce or miso.
• Shoyu is the dark brown liquid produced by fermenting soya beans.
• According to a report in the journal Biology of Reproduction in 2004, soya may delay baldness and help to prevent prostate cancer.
• A two-year study by the Institute for Optimum Nutrition and Copenhagen University Hospital found that soy milk reduces bone loss in post-menopausal women.
• Candles made from soya burn for longer than ones made from pure wax.
• Compounds in soya known as phyto-oestrogens or plant oestrogens mimic the female hormone oestrogen, so a woman drinking two glasses of soya milk a day will alter the timing of her menstrual cycle.
link to complete article
Fruit and veg boom needed to feed Britain
In the face of climate change, food experts call for more home-grown fruit and less grain for cattle
* Robin McKie, science editor
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 16 2008 00.01 GMT
* The Observer, Sunday November 16 2008
It is an image worthy of a Keats poem or a Constable landscape: great orchards bursting with fruit, fields crammed with ripening vegetables and hillsides covered with sheep and cattle.
But this is no dream of long-gone rural glories. It is a vision of the kind of countryside that Britain may need if it is to survive the impact of climate change and higher oil prices, according to leading agricultural experts.
They have warned that only a total revolution in the nation's food industry can save Britain from serious shortages of staples as world oil production peaks, the climate continues to heat up, the population grows and our dietary needs continue to evolve.
In turn that means a complete shake-up in the way we farm the countryside. At present Britain imports more than 90 per cent of the fruit it consumes.
'We face some awesome changes in the way we deal with food production,' said Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London. 'For the past century we have relied on oil to produce more and more food for ourselves - mainly through the use of petroleum products to make cheap fertilisers.'
The problem is that oil is becoming more and more expensive and is also linked to dangerous emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
As a result, food experts such as Lang have been pressing the government to develop a proper strategy for ensuring that Britain is able to supply itself with food for the rest of the century, but in a way that fits in with the nation's goals on climate change.
It is simply not acceptable for Britain to continue to import foodstuffs such as beans from countries like Kenya, they say. The nation needs to be self-sustaining and to do this in an environmentally friendly manner.
One key approach relies on a return to past methods of food production. The nation needs to re-learn the gardening skills it lost a century ago and to change its diet to one that includes less meat, fewer dairy products and more fruit and vegetables, said Lang. 'This country produces less than 10 per cent of the fruit it eats. That has to change. We need to consider orchard planting on a massive scale as well as encouraging people to eat more fruit and vegetables.'
Nor is it acceptable that 40 per cent of the grain produced in Britain is used to feed the cattle and sheep that provide us with meat and dairy products. Growing grain which is then fed to animals is an inefficient way to deliver protein to the populace.
Instead cattle and pigs should be confined to hillsides where they can graze and not use up grain that has required oil-based fertilisers for its growth. Prime land should be used to feed people directly, Lang insisted.
This point was backed by Dr David Barling of City University's Centre for Food Policy.
'The debates around what and how much food the UK should produce and import should be based upon the priorities of providing a vibrant food economy that is socially just, environmentally benign and provides for a healthy population. This is not the case currently,' he said.
Such changes in the use of the countryside have other implications, however. More people will be required to work this altered landscape while productive land will have to be protected from development. 'We are going to have to revolutionise the way we use the countryside,' said Lang.
That transformation will require a return to old ways that might be welcome but equally there could be changes that might cause upset, such as the building of more rural homes to house those needed to work there.
'We will have to face up to these challenges as well,' Lang concluded.
Independent.co.uk
The long march of the penguins
Exhausted birds are washing up on Brazil's tropical beaches, thrown off course by changing currents. Claire Soares reports
Saturday, 4 October 2008
In between the bronzed bodies in skimpy thongs soaking up the rays on Copacabana beach, a tiny black and white bundle of feathers struggles to emerge from the surf. Exhausted and emaciated, its bones poking through the blubber, the young penguin finally collapses on the sand. It has strayed thousands of miles from home, one of more than 1,000 penguins to have washed up on the Brazilian coast this year.
They have come ashore not just in the shadow of Christ the Redeemer in Rio but further north than ever before, with some making landfall just 400 miles from the Equator. Brazilian coastguards have abandoned their Baywatch-style posing and found themselves acting as penguin first-aiders, protecting them from an over-enthusiastic public whose first instinct is often to stick the birds in an ice bucket.
The Magellanic penguins hail from southern Argentina, with the biggest colony just off the Valdes Peninsula. During winter, the birds usually head north in search of more fish-rich waters. Rarely, however, do they stray as far north as Rio, and to reach the waters around Natal is pretty much unheard of. "It's an extremely unusual event," said Valeria Ruoppolo, a vet with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who has being helping rescue the stranded birds. "We have never seen anything on this scale before. It's normal for them to migrate north but this year they just kept going and going."
No one is really sure what has caused the Brazilian exodus – at the moment, the focus is on saving the penguins rather than explaining how they have ended up in this predicament – but the prevailing theory is that changes in water temperatures have caused confusion on the migratory routes. Fish like cold water and so South American penguins in search of food usually ride the cold Malvinas Current north, gobbling as they go. When they hit the warmer Brazil Current, they know it's time to stop and head back. Only this year, the Malvinas Current has been warmer than usual, meaning the penguins couldn't appreciate the difference.
"The penguins didn't realise when they hit the meeting point so they forged on, and, of course in warmer waters there's not as much fish, and then suddenly the birds were like 'Uh-oh! We don't have any more food'," explained Ms Ruoppolo. "If they don't have enough to eat, they lose blubber, then they start to feel cold in the water and that's when they come ashore to get warm."
Backing up this theory is the fact that most of the penguins that have got lost are juveniles, embarking on their first migration without a wealth of life experience to fall back on when faced with uncharted waters. However more analysis is needed before making a definitive conclusion. "This is extreme, but we don't have statistics on the number of penguins and the ocean temperatures," Jose Marengo, a Brazilian climatologist and a member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the Washington Post. "Some of the most important uncertainties we have are on the oceanic currents."
Other experts have suggested that melting ice in Antarctica has strengthened the Malvinas Current, which has then spirited away the younger, weaker and more vulnerable penguins. Another theory is that oil spills and over-fishing have combined to deplete the penguins' fish stocks, forcing them to movefurther afield to feed.
Of the 1,000-plus penguins that have been recovered on land, about a fifth have died of starvation, exhaustion and other illnesses, and experts reckon they are just a fraction of the number of penguins that have perished out at sea.
Brazilian zoos have been inundated with the surviving birds, some of whom who have lost three-quarters of their body weight; are wracked with parasites and diarrhoea; sporting broken flippers, and severely malnourished. By 21 September, Niteroi zoo had received 556 penguins, compared with just seven in the whole of 2007. "We find lots of penguins here with catfish bones in them, which they normally don't eat," explained Thiago Muniz, one of the zoo's vets. "That suggests they're not finding their normal fish."
Rescued penguins have been nursed back to health up and down the coast, first with rehydration fluids, before graduating to fishy milkshakes and then finally whole sardines. Now moves are afoot to return them back to the wild.
The first batch of 400 survivors flew yesterday from Salvador to Rio Grande – with the help of the Brazilian air force – and were then loaded onto trucks and taken to a rehabilitation centre on the coast for final check-ups. Today, the young penguins will be released back into the Atlantic waters along with four adults, who should act as guides for the long swim home to Argentina.
"We are giving these guys a second chance," said Ms Ruoppolo. "Hopefully they'll learn their lesson and not make the same mistakes next time around."
Some of their fellow wanderers have decided to stay put in Brazil, however. Fernandinha, Claudinha, Queridinho, Pity, Predileto, Tutuca, Colhidora and Smarty have been taken under the wing of a retired photographer, Cecilia Breves. "I was very happy when I had one or two, because they are so cute. They'd follow me around everywhere," the 57-year-old told the Washington Post. "It's much harder when there are eight of them."
But the birds seem happy, roaming about her Rio penthouse, chilling out among the palm trees on the veranda or taking a dip in the roof-top hot tub. The red plastic igloo their adoptive mother has bought for them remains untouched.
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Storm Warning
Smithsonian Magazine
September, 2006, Sep2006, Vol. 37, Issue 6
by Madeleine J. Nash
Is global warming to blame for the intensity of recent Atlantic hurricanes?While experts debate that question, they agree that more devastating tempests are headed our way
PLUNGING THROUGH A STAND OF POISON IVY, Jeffrey Donnelly wades into Oyster Pond and begins assembling a crude raft. He and two colleagues lash a piece of plywood on top of two aluminum canoes and push off, paddling their makeshift catamaran toward a fringe of scrub bordering this brackish pond in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Donnelly whips out a hand-held GPS receiver and takes a reading. "This is the place," he says. After setting out a web of anchors, the team settles into hours of monotonous labor. They push long pipes through nearly 25 feet of tea-colored water into thick layers of sediment below. The moans of foghorns drift in from Vineyard Sound, and mist rises and falls like a scrim.
"One, two, three!" Donnelly brings up a five-foot-long core of sediment encased in transparent plastic. "Look!" he whoops, pointing to a thick deposit of yellowish sand bracketed by black-brown pond muck. "That's a hurricane!"
Donnelly, a geologist and paleoclimatologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been prowling the lakes and marshes that dot the New England coastline for nearly a decade, assembling a record of hurricanes going back hundreds of years. The record takes the form of sand washed inland by monstrous storm surges.
What Donnelly is staring at now may be the gritty calling card of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which lifted up a dome of water 20 feet high as it slashed its way from Long Island to Cape Cod with Katrina-class force, leaving at least 680 people dead and tens of thousands homeless. Or perhaps the sand is from the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, which ravaged the fledgling Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, or the Great September Gale of 1815, which put Providence, Rhode Island, under more than ten feet of water.
Hurricanes that intense may not threaten Northeastern states as often as they do Louisiana, Florida or the Carolinas, but they aren't as rare as the people living along the coastline from Virginia to Maine might like to think. The sediment cores Donnelly has collected indicate that devastating hurricanes have slammed into the Northeastern seaboard at least nine times in the past seven centuries.
Understanding hurricane history takes on new urgency in the wake of the worst hurricane season on record. In 2005, the Atlantic basin produced more tropical storms, 28, and more full-blown hurricanes, 15, than any year in at least the past half century. Last year, memorable for its four major hurricanes, could also lay claim to three of the six strongest storms on record. And as bad as it was, the 2005 season was just an exclamation point in a decade-long hurricane onslaught, which will end--well, scientists can't agree on when, or even whether, it will end.
That's because late last year, around the time Hurricane Katrina stormed ashore in Mississippi, climate scientists were engaged in an urgent debate. According to one group, the increasing intensity of Atlantic storms comes from a natural climate cycle that causes sea surface temperatures to rise and fall every 20 to 40 years. According to another group, it comes from human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (So far, no one has linked the number of hurricanes to global warming.) In the first scenario, the fever in the Atlantic might not break for another decade or more; in the second, it might last for the rest of this century and beyond.
Evidence from sediment cores collected by Donnelly and others hints that long before industrial activity began pumping the air full of heat-trapping gases, particularly carbon dioxide, naturally occurring climate shifts influenced hurricane activity, either by changing wind patterns that steer hurricanes toward or away from land, or by altering the frequency and intensity of the storms themselves. Cores collected by Louisiana State University geographer Kam-biu Liu from four Gulf Coast lakes and marshes, for example, show that major hurricanes struck that region three to five times more often between 3,500 and 1,000 years ago than in the ten centuries since. Donnelly, for his part, has pieced together a similar record in Vieques, Puerto Rico; there, the active hurricane pattern starts 2,500 years ago and ends 1,500 years later. But, Donnelly cautions, these are just a few scattered jigsaw pieces. "We have to collect a lot more pieces in order to put the puzzle together." And that is why he's out in the middle of Oyster Pond, coring his way through time.
I AM TO MEET DONNELLY the next morning at his lab. As a strong thunderstorm rolls through, Donnelly pedals in on a mountain bike looking like a sopping wet Power Ranger. Inside a cavernous room, chockablock with tools, the first core is standing on end, giving the slurry in the topmost foot or so a chance to settle. On the floor lie two long cores in aluminum pipes.
Using a hacksaw, Donnelly cuts the cores into shorter lengths, then uses a table saw to slice them in half lengthwise. Water puddles onto the floor, and we smell rotten eggs--hydrogen sulfide produced by microbes that live within the pond's deep, dark pockets of organic debris. Donnelly opens one of the cores, and I can see a sequence of sandy strips, the spoor of ancient hurricanes.
Later Donnelly takes me into a walk-in refrigerator filled with core samples from some 60 sites stretching from the Yucatán Peninsula to the Lesser Antilles and from the Chesapeake Bay to Cape Cod. In a few years, he says, he hopes to have enough data to put the present-and the future--into broader perspective. But he can't do that yet.
The control box for the earth's climate machine, he muses, has many knobs, and scientists are only beginning to identify the ones that dial the awesome power of hurricanes up and down. "The point is, we know the knobs are there," Donnelly says, and if the natural system can tweak them, so can human beings. It's a thought I hold onto as I prepare to dive into the maelstrom of the debate over hurricanes and global warming.
WHEN CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS arrived in the New World, he heard its native inhabitants speak fearfully of the storm god they called Jurakan. On his fourth voyage, in 1502, the Italian explorer and his ships weathered a hurricane that destroyed much of the settlement his brother Bartolomeo had founded six years earlier at Nueva Isabela, later rechristened Santo Domingo. "The storm was terrible," Christopher Columbus wrote, "and on that night the ships were parted from me." His ships reassembled afterward, but some 25 other ships in a fleet launched by the governor of Hispaniola foundered in wind-frenzied seas.
The scientific study of hurricanes leapt forward in 1831, when William Redfield, a self-taught meteorologist trained as a saddler, finally grasped their nature. In an article published in the American Journal of Science, Redfield described patterns of damage wrought by a powerful storm that had swept through New England ten years earlier, after passing directly over the New York metropolitan area. In one part of Connecticut, he noted, trees appeared to have been blown down by southwesterly winds; in another part, by winds from nearly the opposite direction. Redfield nailed down the rotary nature of a hurricane's eye wall, a churning cylinder of wind circling a calm center...
Storm Warning
Smithsonian Magazine
September, 2006, Sep2006, Vol. 37, Issue 6
by Madeleine J. Nash
...A systematic effort to understand these storms dates to 1898, when President William McKinley directed what was then the U.S. Weather Bureau to expand its rudimentary network for hurricane warnings. The impetus was the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. "I am more afraid of a . . . hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish Navy," McKinley reportedly said. In 1886, a record seven hurricanes hit the U.S. coast; one completely destroyed the thriving port city of Indianola, Texas. The year 1893 was almost as bad; six hurricanes hit the United States. One came ashore near Savannah, Georgia, overwhelming the low-lying Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast; another devastated the island of Cheniere Caminanda off the Louisiana coast. In those two storms alone, 4,500 lives were lost.
Over the next half century, forecasters relying on observations of winds and pressure taken by an expanding network of ship and ground-based weather stations struggled to provide hurricane warnings to vulnerable populations. They often failed. In 1900, a hurricane burst upon the unsuspecting citizens of Galveston, Texas, killing 8,000 to 12,000. In 1938, people stood along Long Island's Westhampton Beach marveling at what they thought was an approaching fog bank, only to realize, too late, that it was the storm-seized ocean heaving up. Twenty-nine people died.
World War II propelled hurricane science into the modern era. In July 1943, Army Air Forces pilot Joseph B. Duckworth--on a dare, it is said--flew through the eye of a hurricane as it neared the Texas coast; he did it again a couple of hours later as weather officer First Lt. William Jones-Burdick took measurements at 7,000 feet, inside the storm's eye. In February 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the first of a series of hurricane missions by Army and Navy aircraft. Later that year, military planes gave chase to a storm that came to be known as the Great Atlantic Hurricane, following it as it roared up the East Coast, taking aim at New England. All along the storm's path, radio newscasters blared out warnings. Of 390 deaths, all but 46 occurred at sea.
After the war, the U.S. Weather Bureau--renamed the National Weather Service in 1970--established a formal program of hurricane research. To study these formidable whirlwinds, flights continued to transport scientists through turbulent eye walls and the eerie stillness of the eye itself. In the 1960s, earth-orbiting satellites began providing even higher observational platforms. Since then, forecasters have progressively narrowed "the cone of uncertainty," the teardrop-shaped blob that surrounds their best predictions of where a hurricane is likely to go. At 48 hours, track forecasts are now "off" on average by just 118 miles; at 24 hours, by less than 65 miles, both significant improvements over 15 years ago. Despite these advances, hurricanes undergo sudden surges in power that are easy to spot once they start but dauntingly hard to predict.
LIKE A GIANT BUMBLEBEE, the P-3 Orion buzzes in from Biscayne Bay, dipping a wing as it passes the compact concrete building that houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Miami-based Hurricane Research Division. The plane, a modification of the submarine hunters built in the 1960s for the U.S. Navy, is one of two that fly scientists in and out of some of the planet's mightiest storms, including Hurricane Katrina as its engorged eye neared landfall.
Among those on that flight was research meteorologist Stanley Goldenberg, whose third-floor office looks, appropriately enough, as if a hurricane just blew through it. Goldenberg is well acquainted with hurricanes blowing though. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew demolished his family's rented house in Perrine, Florida. A computer-enhanced satellite image of the hurricane, with its monstrous circular eye wall, now hangs on his wall. "The bagel that ate Miami," he quips.
Hurricanes belong to a broad class of storms known as tropical cyclones, which also occur in the Indian and Pacific oceans. They do not develop spontaneously but grow out of other disturbances. In the Atlantic, most evolve out of "African waves," unstable kinks in the atmosphere that spiral off the West African coast and head toward Central America. Along the way, these atmospheric waves generate ephemeral clusters of thunderstorm-producing clouds that can seed hurricanes.
At the same time, hurricanes are much more than collections of thunderstorms writ large; they stand out amid the general chaos of the atmosphere as coherent, long-lasting structures, with cloud towers that soar up to the stratosphere, ten miles above the earth's surface. The rise of warm, moist air through the chimney-like eye pumps energy into the developing storm.
Ocean warmth is essential--hurricanes do not readily form over waters cooler than about 79 degrees Fahrenheit-but the right temperature is not enough. Atmospheric conditions, such as dry air wafting off the Sahara, can cause hurricanes--along with their weaker cousins, tropical storms and depressions--to falter, weaken and die. Vertical wind shear-the difference between wind speed and direction near the ocean's surface and at 40,000 feet--is another formidable foe. Among the known regulators of vertical wind shear is El Niño, the climate upheaval that alters weather patterns around the globe every two to seven years. During El Niño years, as Colorado State University tropical meteorologist William Gray was first to appreciate, high-level westerlies over the tropical North Atlantic increase in strength, ripping developing storms apart. In 1992 and 1997, both El Niño years, only six and seven tropical storms formed, respectively, or a quarter of the number in 2005. (Then again, Goldenberg observes, the devastating Hurricane Andrew was one of the 1992 storms.)
For years, Goldenberg notes, scientists have been pondering why the number of Atlantic hurricanes varies from year to year, even though roughly the same number of African waves move out over the ocean each year. What accounts for the difference? El Niño explains some, but not all, of the variance. By combing through the historical record and more recent recordings from scientific instruments, Gray, along with Goldenberg's colleague Christopher Landsea, has found another pattern: hurricanes in the Atlantic march to a slowly alternating rhythm, with the 1880s and 1890s very active, the early 1900s comparatively quiescent, the 1930s through 1960s again active, 1970 through 1994 quiescent again.
Five years ago, a possible explanation for this pattern emerged. Goldenberg shows me a graph that plots the number of major hurricanes--Category 3 or higher--that spin up each year in the Atlantic's main hurricane development region, a 3,500-mile-long band of balmy water between the coast of Senegal and the Caribbean basin. Between 1970 and 1994, this region produced, on average, less than half the number of major hurricanes that it did in the decades before and after. Goldenberg then hands me a second graph. It shows a series of jagged humps representing the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation, a swing of sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic that occurs every 20 to 40 years. The two graphs seem to coincide, with the number of major hurricanes falling as waters cooled around 1970 and rising as they began warming about 1995...
Storm Warning
Smithsonian Magazine
September, 2006, Sep2006, Vol. 37, Issue 6
by Madeleine J. Nash
Scientists have yet to nail down the cause of the multi-decadal oscillation, but these striking ups and downs in surface temperatures appear to correlate--somehow--with hurricane activity. "You can't just heat up the ocean by 1 degree Celsius and Pow! Pow! Pow! get more hurricanes," says Goldenberg. More critical, he thinks, are atmospheric changes--more or less wind shear, for example--that accompany these temperature shifts, but what comes first? "We still don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg," he says. "The ocean tends to warm when the trade winds get weaker, and the trade winds can get weaker if the ocean warms. Will we lock it down? Maybe someday."
After leaving Goldenberg's office, I drive across town to the National Hurricane Center, a low-lying bunker whose roof bristles with satellite dishes and antennae. Inside, as computer monitors rerun satellite images of Katrina's savage waltz toward the Gulf Coast, top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials have gathered to announce the agency's best estimate of how many tropical storms and hurricanes are likely to form in 2006. It's not an encouraging forecast: eight to ten hurricanes, fewer than last year, but four to six of them Category 3s or higher. (Last year there were seven.) The predictions are based, in large part, on the multi-decadal oscillation. "The researchers are telling us that we're in a very active period for major hurricanes," says Max Mayfield, the center's director, "one that will probably last at least 10 to 20 more years."
FROM HIS 16TH-FLOOR OFFICE on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, meteorologist Kerry Emanuel commands a crow's-nest view of the esplanade along the Charles River, the dividing line between Boston and Cambridge. In 1985, he remembers, the windows wept with spray blown up from the river by Hurricane Gloria, a moderately strong storm that, nonetheless, made a mess of the Northeast. A painting by a Haitian artist that shows people and animals drowning in a storm surge hangs on a wall near his desk.
Last year, right after Katrina hit, Emanuel found himself in the media spotlight. A few weeks earlier he had published evidence in the journal Nature that hurricanes in both the North Atlantic and the western basin of the North Pacific had undergone a startling increase in power over the past half century The increase showed up in both the duration of the storms and their peak wind speeds. The cause, Emanuel suggested, was a rise in tropical sea surface temperatures due, at least in part, to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Even scientists who would expect hurricanes to intensify in response to greenhouse warming were stunned by Emanuel's suggestion that global warming has already had a profound effect. Computer simulations of a warming world, notes climate modeler Thomas Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, suggest that by the end of this century, peak sustained wind speeds could increase by around 7 percent, enough to push some Category 4 hurricanes into Category 5 territory But Knutson, along with many others, did not think that the intensity rise would be detectable so soon--or that it might be five or more times larger than he and his colleagues anticipated. "These are huge changes," Knutson says of Emanuel's results. "If true, they may have serious implications. First we need to find out if they're true."
Emanuel's paper raised the ante in what has grown into an extremely intense debate over the sensitivity of the earth's most violent storms to gases spewed into the atmosphere by human beings. In the months since the dispute began, dozens of other studies have been reported, some of which support Emanuel's conclusions, others of which call them into question. The debate has grown so impassioned that some former colleagues now scarcely speak to one another.
As Emanuel sees it, sea surface temperatures are important because they tweak a fundamental dynamic that controls hurricane intensity. After all, storm clouds form because the ocean's heat warms the overlying air and pumps it full of moisture. And the warmer the air is, the more vigorous its rise. For their part, Emanuel's critics, Goldenberg and Landsea among them, don't utterly discount ocean warmth. They just put far more emphasis on other factors like wind shear as the main determinants of storm intensity.
Sorting out the differences between the two camps is not easy Goldenberg and Landsea, for example, grant that greenhouse gases may be contributing to a slight long-term rise in sea surface temperatures. They just don't think the effect is significant enough to trump the natural swings of the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation. "It's not simply, yes or no, is global warming having an effect?" says Landsea, the science and operations officer for the National Hurricane Center. "It's how much of an effect is it having?"
Emanuel, while respectful of Landsea, is not backing down. In fact, he has now stirred up a second storm. "If you'd asked me a year ago," Emanuel says, "I would have probably told you that a lot of the variability in hurricane activity was due to the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation. I've now come to the conclusion that the oscillation either doesn't exist at all or, if it does, has no perceptible influence on the temperature of the tropical Atlantic in the late summer and fall"--that is, in hurricane season.
Emanuel says that much of the cooling in the tropical North Atlantic in the 1970s can be traced to atmospheric pollutants, specifically to a haze of sulfurous droplets spewed out by volcanoes and industrial smokestacks. Global climate modelers have recognized for years that this haze in the atmosphere acts as a sunshade that cools the earth's surface below. Emanuel says that now that this form of air pollution is on the wane (and this is a good thing for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with hurricanes), the warming influence of greenhouse gas pollution, and its effect on hurricanes, is growing ever more pronounced. "We will have some quiet [hurricane] years," he says. "But unless we have a really big volcanic eruption, we'll never see another quiet decade in the Atlantic in our lifetime or that of our children."
Is such a grim prediction warranted? Scientists on the periphery of the debate aren't yet sure. For now, says meteorologist Hugh Willoughby of Florida International University, the points of agreement among experts are more important than the differences. Whether a natural oscillation or greenhouse warming is to blame, the odds of a major hurricane striking the U.S. coastline are higher than they have been for more than a generation. And the dangers such storms pose are higher than ever...
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Is our taste for Sunday roast killing the planet?
A UN expert has blamed meat eaters for visiting environmental mayhem on the world as the demand for beef drives deforestation, water scarcity, air pollution and climate change.
Science editor Robin McKie and Caroline Davies reportThe London Observer, Sunday September 7 2008
Your Sunday roast stands accused. According to the United Nation's chief climate expert, Rajendra Pachauri, that tasty piece of top rump resting on your dining table is the source of many of the world's environmental woes, in particular those involved in the dangerous warming of the planet's climate.
Our appetite for animal flesh is boosting fertiliser production, pollution and emission of greenhouse gases to dangerous levels, Pachauri has told The Observer. Give up meat - at least for one day a week - and we can help to save the Earth, he added.
Nor is Pachauri, the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, alone in his complaints. A host of campaigners have united to condemn meat-eaters for bringing environmental mayhem to the world. 'The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future: deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilisation of communities and the spread of disease,' the Worldwatch Institute has warned.
These are harsh charges to bring against those of us who love our leg of lamb or the odd fillet for our dinner. And not surprisingly, the meat industry has robustly rejected the accusations. Chris Lamb, head of marketing for the pig industry group BPEX, said meat producers were being unfairly targeted while some environmentalists' proposals for cutting emissions were actually harmful. For example, keeping livestock indoors would cut carbon dioxide but damage animal welfare, he said. 'Climate change is a very young science and our view is there are a lot of very simplistic solutions being proposed.' Nevertheless, it is clear that meat-eating has been forced on to the defensive in recent months, a point highlighted by Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Served (Portobello Books) in a recent article in Observer Food Monthly (Is meat off the menu?, June 22) . He believes growing food for animals is a waste of resources in an overcrowded world.
'The average meat eater in the US produces about 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide more than a vegetarian every year. That's because animals are hungry and the grain they eat takes energy, usually fossil fuels, to produce,' he says.
The world's fertiliser industry uses natural gas as a basic ingredient and therefore contributes to global warming when it uses fossil fuel to manufacture the extra fertilisers needed to ensure cattle and other animals have sufficient food. For example, it requires 2.2 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of plant protein, according to researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In turn, it takes even more plant protein to make animal protein. It requires four calories of plant protein to make one of chicken protein, while the ratio for pork is 17:1; for lamb, 50:1; and for beef, a staggering 54:1. 'That is a lot of energy and a lot of grain diverted,' adds Patel.
In fact, it is a massive amount of energy, the journal Physics World has noted. 'The animals we eat emit 21 per cent of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity,' it states.
Geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin from the University of Chicago have even calculated that changing eating habits to become a vegetarian does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a fuel-efficient hybrid car, such is the amount of Co2 generated in the production of beef, pork or lamb.
Nor is carbon dioxide the only issue. Apart from turning grain into flesh, livestock also transforms it into methane, as flatulence. And that has especially serious consequences, as the World Watch Institute stressed in 2004 in its report 'State of the World'. 'Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16 percent of the world's annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas,' it noted.
According to scientists' calculations, methane has a global warming potential that is 23 times that of carbon dioxide. This means that a gram of methane - produced from a cow's rear-end - warms the planet's atmosphere 23 times as much as a gram of CO2 produced, say, from a car engine. Thus the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has concluded that nearly a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions come from livestock, more than from all forms of transport.
On top of these ecological headaches, there is the issue of rainforest clearance. Despite all efforts to halt their destruction, rainforests are still being cut down at an alarming rate. Every year, 32 million acres - an area the size of England - is destroyed or degraded. Some of this land is used to provide pasture for cows. Other areas are given over to fields for the growing of soya beans which are then used to feed cows.
Apart from the increased amounts of methane and carbon dioxide that are produced by this type of farming, the world loses out though loss of wildlife - 90 percent of all species on Earth live in rainforests - as well as through the destruction of trees which filter our air, emit oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. Rainforests are the lungs of the Earth but we are choking them through our appetite for meat, say environmentalists.
Nor are there any signs of improvement. In 2006, farmers produced an estimated 276 million tonnes of chicken, pork, beef and other meat: four times as much as they did in 1961, according to the Worldwatch Institute. On average, each person on the planet now eats about 43kg of animal flesh. Nor is this trend getting any better. It is estimated that meat production is destined to double from its present level by the middle of the century.
Hence, Pachauri's urging of the world to give up meat for at least one day a week. 'In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity,' said Pachauri, an Indian economist and a vegetarian. 'Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there,' he added.
It is a fairly forceful conclusion and it has triggered an equally robust response from those who belief the lifestyle of a carnivore is perfectly acceptable, both morally and environmentally. In a counterblast to Raj Patel's Observer Food Monthly article, the distinguished food writer Joanna Blythman said that universal prescriptions for solving the world's food crisis should be treated with suspicion. 'Try telling the Masai tribesmen who have reared livestock for millennia that they should plough up scrubby Kenyan savannah and plant millet,' she argued.
As to 'wet, green Britain', it lends itself to livestock production. 'Huge upland swathes of the country are quite incapable of growing food crops, but this otherwise useless land can be grazed by cattle, sheep, goats, deer and other game,' Blythman added.
Certainly, in Britain, the idea that meat production is a recipe for widespread environmental destruction is not as easy to sustain as it is in other parts of the world, such as the Brazilian rainforest. As UK farmers point out, grazing animals on uplands keeps heather and grasses under control and help some of our rarest birds to survive, in particular ground-nesting birds such as the lapwing, curlew, golden plover, snipe and red grouse. And in turn, these birds provide for food for UK raptors, including the red kite and golden eagle. Take away our sheep and cows and the environmental impact could be disastrous. As a recent RSPB report stated: 'Grazing animals form an important component of the uplands.'
Nor are birds the only concern. Heather left untamed grows out of control - stringy and lanky - and strangles the growth of other plant species. Without sheep and cattle to graze on them, heather landscapes would eventually become barren and would start to pose fire risks. Crucially, this latter problem strikes at the very heart of the relationship between farming in Britain and the issue of global warming.
Our peatlands, which cover much of our upland regions, are massive stores of carbon dioxide. In England and Wales, they could absorb up to 41,000 tonnes of CO2 a year if they were in pristine condition. But if damaged by burning, as well as by too much draining of water and by overgrazing, as has occurred in the past, they could release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide.
So protecting peat has become a major ecological priority for Britain, and authorities now recognise the important role that hill farmers who rear cattle and sheep play in maintaining this vital habitat.
As to the rest of British farmland, which sits on lower ground and richer soil, there is some room for change though the benefits are obvious.
'It is true that Britain also has extensive areas of semi-natural grassland with richer soil, currently used for livestock that could, theoretically, be drained and ploughed to grow fruit, vegetable and cereals,' says Blythman.
'But in that process, all the carbon that is currently taken out of the atmosphere and stored in grass pasture would be released into the environment.'
The issue of meat-eating and global warming is far from clear cut, in other words. Turning to a vegetarian diet to save the planet might produce significant cuts in carbon production in many parts of the world but it could also have damaging consequences for others, including Britain. The UK has a long, established tradition in lifestock production and its agriculture is geared to those ends. So yes, cut back on your week's intake of ham and chicken as Pachauri suggests but individuals should not feel pressured into adopting a lifestyle that is completely vegetarian in order to help to halt global warming.
As Blythman says: 'A no-meat diet? That sounds like ideology triumphing over common sense, time-honoured custom and appetite.'
