Orcas in PE (PICTURE)

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice [The name of the book I am working on now: Fire, Ice and the Whole Wide World]. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

From The New York Times

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 1, 2008

More:
"2007 to Be 'Warmest on Record.'"
"2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."

NVDL: I don't particularly like this sort of article, as its message is essentially: I know for a fact that we don't know what's going on. Thus, it sows uncertainty. It is true that we can't be certain exactly what is going on with the weather. But is that uncertainty a license to continue to perpetrate warming using old technology just because we want to and because it is convenient? The last decade has been the warmest on record, with the most catastrophic storms on record. The trend will continue into the following decade. When do we go: 'Oh, I think things have changed. Now we need to do things differently.'

HOLIDAY is exactly about this myopia. The characters keep asking themselves: 'do you think something is happening; is this global warming?' It is based on passive observation of the environment from the perspective of our being disconnected from it. It is when we are part of the world, that we can participate in the possible resurrection of our world and ourselves.

Snow, freezing rain on tap in Northeast

ALBANY, N.Y. - A storm system slid across the Northeast with snow, sleet and freezing rain Sunday, glazing roads and tying up air travel after blacking out thousands of customers in the Midwest.

At least 10 traffic deaths have been blamed on weather-related traffic accidents.
Winter storm warnings were in effect into Monday in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and into Tuesday in parts of New York state. On the other side of the weather system, warnings were issued for parts of Michigan, where freezing rain and sleet was predicted to turn to all snow late Sunday.
By VALERIE BAUMAN, Associated Press Writer Sun Dec 2, 6:04 PM ET

NVDL: Why should South Africans care about the weather in the USA? Actually, we ought to care a great deal. The world's greatest consumer of heating oil will consume a lot more of the stuff if they suffer a particularly cold winter. That has an impact on the rest of us, in terms of absolute demand for fuel, and thus upward pressure on prices.

Jellyfish attack wipes out N. Ireland's salmon farm

BELFAST (AFP) - Northern Ireland's only salmon farm was completely wiped out by a freak jellyfish attack, the owners said Wednesday.

More than 100,000 fish worth more than one million pounds (2.1 million dollars, 1.4 million euros) were killed in the invasion at Glenarm Bay and Red Bay, on the County Antrim north-east coast.

"We are still assessing the full extent, but it's a disaster," said John Russell, managing director of Northern Salmon Co. Ltd.

"In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing.

"I have never experienced such concentrations of jellyfish spread over such a wide area. The vastness was unbelievable."

The seven-hour attack over Tuesday and Wednesday last week saw the jellyfish covering a sea area of up to 10 square miles (26 square kilometres) and 35 feet (11 metres) deep.

"It's touch and go if we can survive this," added Russell whose firm supplies salmon worldwide. "It's a disaster."
From Yahoo News.

EPH:Cold snap, severe drought put farms under pressure

From Herald Correspondent:

A “TERRIBLE situation could become worse”, say Western Cape producers, concerned fruit may become scarce and meat prices “skyrocket” as hundreds of farmers battle drought and hundreds more recover from last week‘s big freeze.

In the Central Karoo, the situation is so bad that even one of Africa‘s most drought-adapted antelopes, the gemsbok, are “dropping like flies”.

Fruit harvests on more than 500 farms were damaged, some completely ruined, because of last week‘s cold weather and the agriculture department said up to 600 Central Karoo farms were suffering because of a severe drought. The situation was “very bad and cause for concern”.

For more go here.

NVDL: There's the rub. With fuel inputs already increasing, we can no longer avoid other external factors complicating food growing (and making it even more expensive). Like the weather. Unfortunately, both are projected to continue to deteriorate, and not over the next year, for the foreseeable duration of our lifetimes.

Climate Alert: South's Thirst Sets In

NVDL: 4 million Americans depend on Lake that may be dry in 90 days.

ATLANTA, Oct. 15 — For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the [American]Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.

From Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices, a New York Times article.
In North Carolina, Gov. Michael F. Easley asked residents Monday to stop using water for any purpose “not essential to public health and safety.” He warned that he would soon have to declare a state of emergency if voluntary efforts fell short.

“Now I don’t want to have to use these powers,” Mr. Easley told a meeting of mayors and other city officials. “As leaders of your communities, you know what works best at the local level. I am asking for your help.”

Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.

In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water, Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.

Will Gore be the Next US President?

The world needs good, intelligent leadership after at least a decade without it

Thanks to the recent awarding of Nobel Peace Prize, Climate Change has effectively been thrust into the political Zeitgeist, and simultaneously, shoved American Al Gore onto the political platforms. His country is due for another election next year. While Gore maintains that the climate crisis is not political, many Democrats seized the opportunity following Gore’s acceptance of the prize (which he shares with the UN climate change panel) to politicize the issue, and isolate the current US president and his Republican party.

Candidates were quick to praise Gore*, but this stream of political flattery would undoubtedly slow if Gore were to run himself. Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama and John Edwards were all effusive towards the man who was narrowly edged out of the 2000 US election. A White House spokesman, rather than the president himself, said Mr. Bush ‘shared’ the thrill of Gore’s achievements.

“We Want Gore”

Meanwhile, according to The Times (London), Gore’s supporters took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times essentially ‘begging’ him to announce his candidacy. Apparently, for now at least, this remains an improbable scenario.

In fact, astute leadership is sorely lacking not only in the USA, but all over the world. In Africa, even in the so-called ‘model’ democracy of South Africa, there’s a leadership vacuum as this country heads to a crucial election in 2008. Just north is Zimbabwe where leadership has gone awry as Robert Mugabe continues to turn Zimbabwe into the world’s basket case.

Leadership in South Korea

When I lived in South Korea I was astonished to learn of the political intransigence – the nothing-doing attitude towards North Korea. To allow a situation for both countries to remain ‘technically at war’ seemed to me to be very risky. So perception of South Korean leadership was, to my mind, a bit ‘iffy’ in terms of North Korea. It is good to say that this unpleasant situation – the North-South stalemate – has seen significant progress in recent days.

In other countries too, Britain, the Middle East and the United States in particular, we’re not seeing the sort of charismatic leadership that the world needs to see.

I suspect the reason for this is that voters worldwide are too distracted to care. Happily this is happening, but for a slew of very unhappy reasons.

Future Shock

Ignoring the converging bad weather systems was always going to allow us temporary party time. Now those storms are upon us. A future characterized by unaffordable oil is now undeniable, along with its concomitant side-effects: housing markets going into recession, inflation, and reduced buying power – worldwide – for the consumer.

The Cost of Bad Weather

At the same time, the weather is becoming a phenomenon that is increasingly intruding into our daily lives. Now high food prices are being blamed not only on higher fuel inputs, but on crop failures due to severely erratic weather. This two pronged devil’s fork is only likely to get worse. Other side-effects of extreme weather storms include massive infrastructural damage, electrical blackouts and other injurious effects at a time when costs are already hurting both macro and micro-economic units.

Austere Message

And that’s the urgent and austere message we’re faced with. Things are likely to get worse. Which means even under the best leadership, there is very little we can do beyond what we are increasingly being forced to do. The planet’s weather is now so far along it’s feedback loop that cutting emissions now will have negligible effects for this generation.

Stabilizing Force

What a leader like Al Gore can bring to the world, is a sense of sanity; a restored sense of humanity. This is a vital ingredient as resources become increasingly depleted, and countries find themselves tempted to go to war for what they don’t have. With Al Gore at the helm of the world’s most powerful economy, and the world’s most powerful military, one assumes this either would not happen, or that he would temper the severity of whatever the crash (economic, environmental and geopolitical) when it comes.

The likes of Noam Chomsky would have us believe that, in the end, our leaders are really just speakers, puppets really, for a powerbase. This ought to be composed of voters, but is usually a subtle and unseen power club of corporates and other economic and political players. While it is true that government’s overt mission is to serve it’s constituents (it’s voters), their feedback is seldom fair or transparent. We know that government often find ways not to invest taxpayers money in the interest in their shareholders, so that over time increasingly substantial fractions are withered away.

Thus wherever there is a leadership vacuum, two primary requirements must be met. An activated and interested set of constituents. These voters need to remain involved, and actively pursue accountability, results and responses. The second is a leader and leadership team who are genuinely altruistic, honestly engaged as agents and representatives whose interests are their own. This implies that we and our leaders need to refocus on urgent priorities, as the world changes gears and the storm clouds gather.

*Background for this article from ‘Nobel prize puts Gore at centre of election’ – from The Times (London)

400%

Greenland's ice masses are melting at an accelarating rate. 400% more ice has melted than the 2004 figure. That's around 50-100 cobic kilometres a year for starts, up to around 300 cubic kilometres now. Ice melt was measured using GPS stations located on mountains along the ice cap.*

*Source: The Saturday Star

Iceberg off St Francis Bay

From IOL.co.za TODAY:

An iceberg, 25 metres in length and 20 metres in height, has been spotted south-east of St Francis Bay, Eastern Cape, the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) said on Monday.

"This is very unusual and in fact we don't know of anything in recent history that has being reported this close to South African waters," said NSRI spokesperson Craig Lambinon.

The iceberg was spotted around 6pm on Monday by those aboard a fishing vessel, the Ntini. It was floating 35 nautical miles south-east of St Francis Bay.

Lambinon said maritime authorities were taking the report "quite seriously" and the maritime radio services were broadcasting a warning to vessels in the area.

The situation would be monitored throughout the night to try to determine the direction and speed of the drift of the iceberg. - Sapa

For more news on this topic. click here.
NVDL: Isn't it ironic that after panioc in South Africa's largest metropol, we get this story, which demonstrates that are concerns are real.

Grim Reaper Eyes Poor Countries

Thanks JL
Peter Walker and agencies Tuesday September 18 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Developing countries in Africa and Asia will be among those most affected by climate change, global warming experts will warn today.

Millions of people are likely to face drought, hunger and floods given predicted increases in global temperatures, scientists will say in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The UN-convened body, which is the world's most authoritative organisation on climate change, will today issue the fourth assessment report by its Working Group II. The document names Africa, the Asian mega-deltas, small islands and the Arctic as being most at risk.

According to the report, an interim summary of which was published in April, it is probably too late to avoid some major consequences. The full document was launched this morning at the Royal Geographical Society in central London. It warns that agriculture and human health in developing nations will be hit, along with coral reefs, sea ice, coastal regions, mountains and tundra.

During a two-day meeting in London this week, IPCC experts will discuss its impact on Africa and other vulnerable areas, as well as Britain and Europe.
The interim summary made for grim reading, even after it was toned down following pressure from America, China, India and Saudi Arabia. It said that by 2080, 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people will face water shortages, and some 200 million to 600 million will face food shortages.

NVDL: Anyone out there pregnant or planning to start a family? Maybe a good time to start reading the news and thinking about what the future will mean, not only for you, but also your puppy's. Our just-in-time one-click get-what-you-want lifestyles are about to slip down a few gears as we move down a few rungs on the Convenience LifeStyle Ladder.