Tuesday 26 December 2006

    Newtok, Alaska - The last time chronic flooding forced this tiny Alaska village to relocate, sled dogs pulled the old church to its new home three miles away, far from the raging Ninglick River.

    That was in 1950 and life was simpler in Newtok, mostly a collection of traditional sod dwellings. Modern structures gradually took over the new site as the river again crept to the edge of the Yupik Eskimo community. Persistent erosion has eaten an average of 70 feet of bank a year and now melting permafrost is subsiding, further subjecting the village to severe flooding from intensifying storms.

    "This place is sinking," said Joseph Tommy, 48, who was born in Newtok. "If the erosion keeps on coming, we will be in a grave situation."

    So once again, Newtok must move, leaving residents and officials grappling with an unprecedented crisis that looms over scores of native villages along Alaska's increasingly battered western coast.

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   By Geoffrey Lean
   The Independent UK

    Sunday 24 December 2006

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.

    Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

    As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

    Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

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    By James Kanter
    The New York Times

    Thursday 21 December 2006

    Paris - In the face of stiff opposition from the airline industry, the European Union moved forward Wednesday with plans to impose extra charges on foreign and domestic carriers that pollute too much.

    "We are showing our determination to fight climate change," said Europe's environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who announced the proposal Wednesday in Brussels. "This is one way to persuade other countries to come along with us."

    The rules, which would be legally binding, would apply to all flights within the bloc starting in 2011. Foreign carriers landing and taking off from busy airports like those in Frankfurt, London and Paris would be obliged to join the system the following year. If enacted, the measure could drive up costs for airlines, potentially leading to higher airfares for travelers.

    The proposal draws from the principles of an established system that Europe now uses to help combat global warming and meet emissions goals set forth under the Kyoto Protocol.

    Under that plan, which has so far exempted airlines, governments set goals for the carbon dioxide emissions of producers of power, cement, fuels, pulp and paper. If they exceed those goals, companies must purchase allocations, or credits. Many airlines, supported by the United States government, are seeking to blunt the European plans, calling them expensive and unworkable. They want the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, to draw up any rules for emissions trading so that all countries comply.

    Scientists Reveal That Bears Have Stopped Hibernating
    By Geneviève Roberts
    The Independent UK

    Thursday 21 December 2006

    Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.

    In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep.

    Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life.

    But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundación Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday.

    The change is affecting female bears with young cubs, which now find there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries on the bleak mountainsides to make winter food-gathering sorties "energetically worthwhile", scientists at the foundation, based in Santander, the Cantabrian capital, told El Pais newspaper.

    Wednesday 20 December 2006

I am firmly convinced that the passionate will for justice and truth has done more to improve [the human condition] than calculating political shrewdness, which in the long run only breeds general distrust.

- Albert Einstein, "Moral Decay," 1937

    George Monbiot, British author, professor and Guardian columnist, has written a book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, that should be required reading for all climate activists and for everyone else who cares about the future of life on earth.

    It's not an inspirational book. What Monbiot has written is an extensively researched, hard-headed, pull-no-punches assessment of what needs to be done in a range of different areas of industrialized human society if we are to have a decent chance of avoiding catastrophic, cascading climate change this century.

    Here's his starting point: "If, in the year 2030, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere remain as high as they are today, the likely result is two degrees centigrade [3.6 degrees fahrenheit] of warming [above pre-industrial levels]. [It's risen 0.6 degrees centigrade so far.] Two degrees is the point beyond which certain major ecosystems begin collapsing. Having, until then, absorbed carbon dioxide, they begin to release it. Beyond this point climate change is out of our hands: it will accelerate without our help. The only means by which we can ensure that there is a high chance that the temperature does not rise to this point is for the rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2030."

    Ninety percent by 2030. Right now, the best legislation in Congress, and the legislation many climate activists are rallying around, calls for an 80 percent cut by 2050, 20 years later.

    By John Vidal
    The Guardian UK

    Wednesday 20 December 2006

Climate change in 2006, the public, politicians and industry have all shown significant signs that tackling global warming is on the agenda after scientific studies showed the pace of change gathering speed.

    Not before time, the west awoke in 2006 to the vast economic, political and social implications of climate change - and twigged that it presented as many opportunities as threats to humanity. As temperature and rainfall records tumbled, and unseasonal, intense heatwaves, droughts and floods struck many countries, local and national politicians scrambled to beef up their green policies and credentials, some businesses found they could make a packet from trading carbon, and a broad-based global social and ecological movement emerged, linking climate change to social justice, as well as to poverty and lifestyles.

    A plethora of scientific reports underpinned the global phenomenon throughout the year, which was officially the warmest ever recorded in Britain and the sixth warmest the world has known. It was, globally, a tad cooler than 2005, the hottest ever, but it continued a trend: the eight hottest years ever recorded have been in the last 10 years.

    A succession of alarming reports came out. James Lovelock, the British scientist who devised the Gaia theory - that living organisms affect the environment - forecast planetary wipeout; government studies showed that Australia, in the middle of a "1,000-year" drought, would get even hotter and drier, and that worldwide crop yields would decrease. The Gulf Stream, which warms northern Europe, was found to be slowing, the tundra to be melting faster than previously thought, and satellite images showed that major rivers of Africa are carrying significantly less water than before. Monsoons were even more erratic across the Indian sub-continent, Arctic sea ice was predicted to disappear - along with polar bears - by 2040, and almost all the world's glaciers, in many cases providing water for cities, were confirmed to be in retreat.