A beautifully photographed short film, a shocking, tragic and important story.

Colorado River: Running Near Empty by : Yale Environment 360.

 

Of course, there is the simple idea that Earth is so much larger than us we have a hard time understanding how we can damage it. This overlooks the fact that there are now a staggering 7 billions of us (that’s 7,000 millions!) Contrast that with the “only” 1.6B of us there were in 1900 and then add that we now have advanced technology that multiplies our destructive power by several orders of magnitude.

But even those amongst us who do understand the facts above often have a hard time grasping the extent of our damage to the environment. This is I think because of so-called “Generational Amnesia“. This is a very simple and yet very real and powerful meme. Basically it means that your kid’s view of what is “normal” for the environment is what they first experienced in their childhood. They will generally dismiss what you tell them about your own “normal” as mere fishermen’s tales. In turn you do the same, where your “normal” was set in your own childhood and you mostly dismiss your parent’s “normal” and so on through the generations.

As a result of this generational amnesia, we see the environmental damage through our own filters limited by our short lifespan and our short memory. We don’t see that environmental damage is that severe or that fast. Yet when observed over just 3 or 4 generations, the picture is entirely different.

I think another factor in our environmental complacency is that so many of us are now born and raised in urban environments (nearly 80% in Canada, the country with the most land per capita). Those of us who are raised in cities tend to have very little understanding and appreciation of the environment and its importance.

Of course, there is also the stupid ideologically-driven view that environmentalism is a socialist plot and that free markets can do no wrong.

This is how we can explain, I think, that there are people who live here in the beautiful mountains of Panama, who love and appreciate nature and its beauty and yet think that environmentalism is stupid or evil.

 

via Humanity falls deeper into ecological debt: study.

 

In 2008, I took a tiny cargo plane to the Inupiaq village of Kivalina, in the northwest of Alaska above the Arctic Circle. I had heard the village would be lost to climate change from erosion, which I imagined to be a slow, gradual, and predictable process.

Touring the island and speaking to residents and government workers, I soon realized the erosion is actually often sudden, severe, and erratic, brought on by increasingly strong storms that threaten the peoples’ safety. Kivalina needs to be relocated. The problem is there is no policy or structure in place to relocate them.

While the continental U.S. shifts between weather extremes - from strong storms fueled by increased precipitation to prolonged droughts aggravated by heat – the changes in the Arctic have been much less ambiguous: steady warming.

Annual mean temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as the global average. The warming is melting glaciers, allowing for the absorption of more heat, with recent studies suggesting the possibility of a completely ice-free summer by 2040or even 2030. Entire ecosystems are transforming, as rising seas pour into freshwater systems, making deltas and lakes more saline and inhospitable for some species, while attracting whole new species.

Continue reading: Relocating Alaska Natives: The Climate is Changing Faster Than Disaster Management and Adaptation Policies | ThinkProgress.

 

via Arctic Death Spiral: Second Lowest June Sea Ice Extent, Lowest June Volume | ThinkProgress.

 

Coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef depend on a narrow set of environmental conditions within which they prosper.  At the heart of their biology, is a symbiosis that they form with tiny plant-like organisms known as dinoflagellates (commonly called zooxanthellae).  This symbiosis is critical to the survival of corals and coral reefs, making possible the efficient trapping of sunlight by reef-building corals.  This allows them a cheap source of energy with which to grow in the sunlit waters along tropical coastlines, and where they often deposit of vast quantities of calcium carbonate (a limestone-like substance), creating the three-dimensional structures that we know of as coral reefs.  These magnificent structures build up over time, attracting over one million species which are known to live in and around coral reefs (Reaka-Kudla 1997).  This mega-diversity is unrivalled anywhere else in the ocean, and supports industries like tourism and fisheries, and provides food for at least 100 million people worldwide (Hoegh-Guldberg 1999).

Continue reading on Great Barrier Reef Part 2: Climate Change Impacts.

 

Phosphate has been essential to feeding the world since the Green Revolution, but its excessive use as a fertilizer has led to widespread pollution and eutrophication. Now, many of the world’s remaining reserves are starting to be depleted.

by fred pearce

Phosphate: A Critical Resource Misused and Now Running Low by Fred Pearce: Yale Environment 360.

 

Despite being one of the best managed marine ecosystems worldwide, there is evidence that the ecological ‘health’ of the Great Barrier Reef has declined since the arrival of European settlers into the Queensland region. This evidence comes from a number of key sources. This area is not without its controversy, which is discussed elsewhere at Skeptical Science by Professor John Bruno (University of North Carolina) and others.

Continue reading via Great Barrier Reef Part 1: Current Conditions and Human Impacts.

 

Continue reading via Ocean life on the brink of mass extinctions: study | Reuters.

 

10 JUN 2011: SNOWPACK DECLINE IN ROCKIES
HAS RAPIDLY ACCELERATED, STUDY SHOWS

A new study says snowpack decline in the northern Rocky Mountains over the last 30 years has been more severe than at any other time in nearly 1,000 years. In an analysis of 66 tree-ring records, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that the average spring snowpack in the northern Rockies in recent decades has been even lower — and experienced a more prolonged decline — than two other low-snowpack periods, one in the early 14th century and another in the 16th century. The report, published in the journal Science, says the increasing role of warming on snowpack variability may foreshadow “fundamental impacts on streamflow and water supplies across the western United States.” Snowmelt from the Rockies drains into the Colorado, Columbia, and Missouri river basins, which together provide 60 to 80 percent of the water for 70 million people. Meteorological data show that snowpack in the last 30 years has been the lowest since record-keeping began a century ago, but the USGS study demonstrates that the recent decline is unusual over a 1,000-year time scale.

 

In November, Rear Admiral David Titley, the Oceanographer of the Navy, testified that  “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower…in the last several thousand years.”Titley, who is also the Director of Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, said he has told the Chief of Naval Operations that “we expect to see four weeks of basically ice free conditions in the mid to late 2030s.”

Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School has “projected a (virtually) ice-free fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs).” Contrary to some reporting, that projection has been unchanged for years, though Maslowski is in the process of creating a more sophisticated model that he expects “will improve prediction of sea ice melt,” as he explained to me recently.

Until then, we have some new observational data of Canadian sea ice thickness (below) and this remarkable figure from Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice Blog, based on data from the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center [click to enlarge]:

Arctic sea ice volume by month in km³ with simple quadratic trend lines (detailshere)

Continue reading on Climate Progress…

 

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released its monthly global temperature data.  It reveals that there is no April in the temperature record before 2005 that was warmer than April 2011.

And that’s in spite of the fact that we are still in the tail end of a major La Niña and just coming out of “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”  April 2011 is surpassed in warmth only by 2005, 2007, and 2010.  It tied with 2002 and just beat 1998.

The Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology foresees a transition to an El Niño this summer.  NOAA only foresees “ENSO-neutral conditions.”  NASA’s Hansen had predicted back in October that “It is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global temperature.”  An El Niño would make that an extreme likelihood.

We have, as reported, seen almost unbelievable extreme weather in this country (see Hell and High Water: Weather Channel labels Texas drought and Mississippi floods truly “exceptional”; Masters: This is “only” a “1-in-100 to 1-in-300 year flood).”

We have also been seeing record-smashing extreme weather around the globe, from England to Canada, from Colombia to China — but the U.S. media is so focused on the Mississippi that these events have received little attention here.

April was the hottest in the Central England Temperature record going back some 350 years:

UPI reports “Canada’s central province of Manitoba braced Thursday for the worst seasonal flooding in 300 years, local officials said.”  Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has more here:

The flood is being called a 300-year flood, and damages are already in excess of $1 billion. In neighboring Alberta, the reverse extreme is causing havoc: severe drought and strong spring winds have made ideal conditions for wildfires,

And Colombia has been hit by “11 months of nearly nonstop rain” displacing over 3 million people.  Masters again has details:

“Some parts of the country have been set back 15 to 20 years”, said Plan’s Country Director in Colombia, Gabriela Bucher. “Over the past 10 months we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” said the director of Colombia’s weather service, Ricardo Lozano. Up to 800 mm (about 32 inches) of rain has fallen along the Pacific coast of Colombia over the past two weeks (Figure 3). The severe spring flooding follows on the heels of the heaviest fall rains in Colombia’s History. Weather records go back 42 year in Colombia. Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos said, “the tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history.”

… See also my December 2010 post, Heaviest rains in Colombia’s history trigger deadly landslide.

China has been hit by a devastating drought.  The NYT reports today that:

A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporary unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency. The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze down to a near-record low.

AFP published this picture with the caption, “Chinese fishing boats are seen stranded a dried up river bank along the Yangtze river. Drought on the massive waterway has led to historically low water levels that have forced authorities to halt shipping, the government and media said Thursday”:

In his October analysis, Hansen warned, “Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts.”

I’ve often said of our current extreme weather, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”  Unfortunately, we may not have to wait that long to see the weather of the last year topped.

Related Posts:

• NASA’s James Hansen: “One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest” on record
• 2010 Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse
• Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment
• NOAA: Monster crop-destroying Russian heat wave to be once-in-a-decade event by 2060s (or sooner)
• NCAR’s Trenberth on the link between global warming and extreme deluges:  “There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”

 

Extreme warming forces climate scientists to add hot pink to temperature map « Climate Progress.

 

Well worth watching: http://hot-topic.co.nz/the-climate-show-7-box-and-boxsters-the-cryosphere-special/