environment India Politics: agriculture diplomacy drought geopolitics resource wars
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 21: Now Let’s Not Always See The Same Hands….
Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, discusses the climate problem from a Pakistani perspective:
Pakistan is no stranger to being plagued by multiple crises. News headlines are usually dominated by issues like terrorism, extremism and power shortage but an even more alarming danger could affect the future of Pakistan if it is not tackled on a priority basis.
The dangerous threat we all know as climate change has been virtually left off the radar by our less than visionary leaders when it comes to issues of national priority.
Environmental degradation costs Rs 365 billion annually to Pakistan and unsafe water and sanitation costs Rs 112 alone in terms of financial damage.
A comprehensive report was first highlighted in December 2012 which shows alarming trends of climate change in Pakistan.
The report entitled ‘Climate Change in Pakistan – focused on Sindh Province’ forecast low agricultural productivity from lack of water for irrigation and erratic rainfall. Conditions in the fertile Indus delta, already facing saline water intrusion and coastal erosion, are expected to deteriorate further.
Data gathered from 56 meteorological stations show heat waves increasing from 1980 to 2009, a period marked by glacier retreats, steadily rising average temperature in the Indus delta and changes in temperature pattern in summer and winter.
Ghulam Rasul, chief meteorologist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department and the main author of the report, told dawn.com that although Pakistan’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is low, it is among countries highly vulnerable to climate change.
Yes indeedy. June 6:
As global heating accelerates, Pakistan and neighboring nations will face enormous challenges in the coming decades. It is a cruel irony that those of the world’s countries which have contributed the least to planetary greenhouse emissions are the ones facing the most immediate damage from their effects, while the major sources of carbon pollution are relatively protected by lucky accidents of geography from the consequences of their actions.
Analysts predict that as water shortages intensify and agriculture becomes less predictable and productive, climate change’s strategic impact will include bitter resource wars, a catastrophic development. While morality demands that industrialized nations take immediate steps to reduce atmospheric carbon output, it’s equally imperative that the countries currently suffering the most from this human-caused destabilization strengthen their infrastructure to prepare for times of shortage and privation, while reinforcing diplomatic and cultural systems to ensure that the likely humanitarian crises can be peacefully resolved.
Warren Senders
Published…http://worldnewsviews.com/climate-change-for-the-worse/.
environment India Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility economics fishing
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 10: Khizr Khud Denge Aakar Sahaara…
The Express Tribune (Pakistan) tells us of the sad condition of villagers in the Northern Subcontinent:
Today fishermen living in one of the hundreds of villages in the Indus Delta have truly understood what the great saint meant to say.
Nearly three hundred families living in Kharo Chan village – which in Sindhi language means ‘bitter jetty’ – have bitter memories to share. Allah Din, a farmer, said, “There was a time when the area was lush green and fertile. For nearly 150 years this area fed all of Sindh with its record rice and wheat produces.” But then, the Kotri Barrage was constructed. “The level of sweet water in the Indus River began to go down and salty seawater began to rise. The once fertile lands turned barren,” he said.
He added that things aren’t better off on the other side of the bank – the residents of the taluka on the opposite side can’t produce enough food to sustain themselves, said Allah Din. He added that because seawater has moved inland and freshwater is scarce, villagers have been eyeing urban centres and packing their bags.
Another resident, Muhammad Ayub, who is a schoolteacher, claimed that corruption and political jousts have worsened the situation. He said villagers oppose the government’s plan to build Zulfikarabad because they feel they will become strangers in their own lands. “The government may create problem for us. They want us to migrate, but we will fight till our last breath against the development of Zulfikarabad.”
This is a generic “we’re all fucked; blame the evil corporations” letter. Let’s just say it needed to be said. May 27:
The effects of the rapidly transforming global climate are keenly felt by the world’s farming and fishing societies, whose collective survival is intimately linked with that of the land. It is a cruel irony that these people are perhaps the ones who’ve done the least to bring about the climate crisis; with greenhouse emissions that are statistically non-existent, they are paying the penalty for the high living standards and modern conveniences of the developed world — amenities which depend on an abundant supply of cheap energy.
The plight of Kharo Chan village (and others like it in the Indus Delta) is a harbinger in microcosm of what may lie in store for all humanity. Unless rapid, comprehensive, and responsible action is taken to address this disaster-in-the-making, all of us — rich and poor, traditional and modern, Eastern and Western — will find that the world which nurtured our civilization has been replaced by one far less hospitable to the vast web of Earthly life.
The corporate entities which have corrupted governments around the world and are delaying action on global warming are standing in the way, not of progress, but of survival itself.
Warren Senders
environment India Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 26: Directly From My Heart To You
India West talks about the economic implications of climate change:
Sustainable development that mitigates the impact of climate change for India’s poor can only be achieved by the devolution of the Indian government, stated prominent social activist Sunita Narain at a March 27 lecture at Arizona State University.
“Getting the model of development right so that everyone has access to health care, water and energy supplies is only achievable when the government is de-centralized,” Narain told India-West in an interview after the lecture, which was organized by ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability.The director general of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, Narain has received numerous accolades for her work, including the Padma Shri – India’s highest honor – in 2005. In 2007, Narain was named by Time magazine as one of India’s 15 most influential people. Foreign Policy magazine has thrice named Narain one of the world’s best intellectuals.
“Climate change is already hurting the world’s most poor and vulnerable,” stated Narain, explaining that rainwater – a major resource for India’s largely agrarian population – has been inconsistent, with more rainfall, but for a fewer number of days.
“Farmers are very desperate today. This is their livelihood; it is the only thing they know. And we can send them to cities to get jobs, but the urban sector doesn’t have the ability to absorb all those people,” stated Narain.
A smallpox-infested atmospheric blanket offered to the world’s poor. May 14:
As rising levels of carbon dioxide push the greenhouse effect into overdrive, agriculture all over the world is going to be affected; harvests will shrink, crops will come under attack from invasive parasites and diseases, and inevitably subsistence farmers and small landholders in the world’s poorest countries are going to suffer. In comparison to rich and developed countries, Bangladesh’s carbon footprint is statistically insignificant, yet its citizens are facing imminent displacement from their lands, lives and hopes due to rising sea levels — and this is just one example of a worldwide phenomenon. The cruel irony of global warming is that while the greenhouse emissions triggering planetary warming are produced by the richest and most privileged among us, those who are already economically and politically disenfranchised will reap the whirlwind.
History notes many cases of intentional genocide in the service of colonialism and economic expansion. Climate change’s impact on the world’s poorest people wasn’t planned, but that’s no consolation. It falls to the developed world to act responsibly on the climate crisis, or to shoulder the blame for a catastrophe with both environmental and humanitarian dimensions.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture forests hubris sustainability timescale
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 24: Born A Poor Young Country Boy
Have you hugged a tree today? The Portland Press-Herald:
Unless people dramatically cut the amount of carbon dioxide they’re putting into the air and water through industry, farming, landfills and fossil fuel consumption, Maine’s largest manufacturing industry will be damaged in ways scientists can only begin to predict.
That’s the conclusion reached by experts who are studying how climate change is likely to affect Maine’s more than 18 million acres of forests.
The nation’s most heavily forested state, Maine is likely to be in for a rude awakening in forestry within the next 20 to 100 years, state specialists predict. Which trees will flourish, and where, will change — gradually over time — and imperceptibly at first to most observers.
Which trees might disappear — literally migrating to reach more congenial growing conditions — and what the survivors will need to protect them from an erratic climate and a host of predators are questions researchers are trying to probe, knowing how difficult such projections can be.
But the implications are huge. In Maine, forests translate into a lot of land, money and jobs.
It’s getting harder and harder for denialists to keep it up…not when there’s real money involved. May 12:
Humanity’s success and prosperity would have been unthinkable without the essentially benign climate which made agriculture possible, setting the stage for our civilization to develop into a complex and planet-wide web. We could not have become who we are without closely cooperating with Earth’s natural cycles over countless thousands of years.
No more.
By releasing eons’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, humans have traumatized their environment, with planet-wide consequences, from Maine’s endangered forests, drought-withered Midwestern corn fields, or Bangladeshi farmland inundated by rising sea levels.
These impacts are symptoms of our decision to separate ourselves from the tightly woven fabric of Earthly life. Fighting climate change demands not just that we change our energy economy and find ways to sequester atmospheric CO2, but that we build a relationship with the natural world that is once again based on principles of cooperation, not of competition.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists economics skiing sports sustainability
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 10: You Need A Hug
The Berkshire Eagle assesses climatic impact on the economy of Western Massachusetts:
By the end of the century, the Berkshire County economy — much like the global economy — may be forever altered by the effects of climate change. Some local economic changes have already begun in response to impacts expected from climate change in the coming decades.
Land-use planners and policy specialists in the insurance industry are preparing for changes likely to be brought on by warmer temperatures and more severe weather events. Local farmers and business owners are already looking to their future, many doubtful about the climate change concept, but still determined to build revenue streams that will withstand climate changes or compensate for weather-generated losses.
In one example of a specific local economic effect likely to result from climate change, Cameron Wake, associate professor with the Institute of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire and a lead author of the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, had a dire assessment of the local ski industry: “By the end of the century, the only ski areas that remain viable [in the Northeast] will be in the western mountains of Maine.”
It’s one of my favorite parts of the world. April 27:
The Berkshires aren’t alone in experiencing the accelerating impact of climate change, a real-world crisis that even the most vehement denialists cannot ignore much longer. Between dwindling snowpacks, multi-year droughts, unseasonal monsoons, and the arrival of invasive insect pests, this planetary phenomenon manifests itself at local and regional levels in ways that will bring significant economic, social and environmental effects. There may be temporary benefits for a few species here and there, a few communities poised to take advantage of short-term circumstances — but the future offered by our radically transforming climate is almost entirely bleak.
Are there positive aspects to this slo-mo disaster? Only that we humans may, at long last, fully grasp that our individual and collective behaviors have effects far distant in space and time. The lives of our descendants hinge on our recognition that the greenhouse effect renders political and cultural distinctions utterly and finally irrelevant.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists sustainability wine
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 3: When You Gonna Let Me Get Sober?
The Riverside Press-Enterprise (CA) talks about climate change’s effect on winemakers in the area:
Grape growing in the Temecula Valley Wine Country and other prime wine-producing regions of California would wither by mid-century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and farmers don’t make significant adjustments to their crops, say the authors of a new climate change study.
Under a worst-case scenario, the area suitable for wine production in the Temecula region would shrink by more than half by 2050, according to the work by Conservation International and Environmental Defense Fund, which looked at the impacts of climate change on wine production and conservation. The loss would be smaller if international agreements were reached to reduce emissions, researchers said.
“Certainly in the lowlands it looks like there’s plenty of declining suitability,” said study co-author Patrick Roehrdanz, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. “We don’t use the word disappear, but you have to do something to compensate for decline in precipitation.”
Under state projections, temperatures around the Temecula wine country would increase about 2 degrees by 2050 under the lowest emission levels. The average temperature in the area was 62.6 degrees in 1975; by 2050, it is expected to be 67.2 degrees, according to the Cal-Adapt website.
And those projections are the conservative ones. April 21:
As California winemakers assess the impact of climate change on their grapes, they can feel comforted that conservative politicians and media figures believe the greenhouse effect is a liberal hoax. These prominent denialists also believe that decades of careful scientific research on the world’s climate are irrelevant, since scientists are only interested in money. By viewing the climate crisis through ideological lenses, they’ve made it impossible to discuss science without a political slant — and the consequences are going to be devastating to agriculture in America and the world.
The undisputed facts of global warming have been part of climate science for decades, but denialists have steadily hindered and delayed action for the basest of motives: short-term greed. Their radical refusal address the consequences of our greenhouse emissions is now bearing fruit, and as Temecula Valley vintners are coming to realize, it’s going to be a bitter vintage indeed.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists extreme weather fires forests scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 17: Charm Offensive
The Denver Post alerts us to the fire problem:
The hotter, drier climate will transform Rocky Mountain forests, unleashing wider wildfires and insect attacks, federal scientists warn in a report for Congress and the White House.
The U.S. Forest Service scientists project that, by 2050, the area burned each year by increasingly severe wildfires will at least double, to around 20 million acres nationwide.
Some regions, including western Colorado, are expected to face up to a fivefold increase in acres burned if climate change continues on the current trajectory.
Floods, droughts and heat waves, driven by changing weather patterns, also are expected to spur bug infestations of the sort seen across 4 million acres of Colorado pine forests.
“We’re going to have to figure out some more effective and efficient ways for adapting rather than just pouring more and more resources and money at it,” Forest Service climate change advisor Dave Cleaves said.
“We’re going to have to have a lot more partnerships with states and communities to look at fires and forest health problems.”
Reality bites, don’t it? April 4:
Well, 2012 was the world’s hottest year in recorded human history, so it would be a good time for Americans to finally acknowledge the implications of global climate change. The Forest Service’s prediction of increasingly severe forest fires over the coming decades is just one of many ways that atmospheric CO2 is going to impact our lives.
While “global warming” sounds vaguely comforting (everybody likes being warm, right?), the true picture of climate change is one in which dangerous factors are going to be getting worse. Already suffering from droughts? Brace yourself for multi-year water shortages. On the other hand, if you’re already getting rained on, you should brace yourself for massive flooding. And if forest fires are a problem where you live, the next century’s going to give starring roles flames, soot, smoke and destruction.
Climate-change denialists are in a losing battle with the facts of the greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture analogies biodiversity ecology sustainability
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 14: We’re Not Even Peninsulas
The Columbus Dispatch recycles a story from the NY Times on the intertwined fates of the fig and its little insect symbiote:
There are more than 700 species of wild fig in the tropics. Most can be pollinated only by a unique species of fig wasp. In turn, the wasps rely on fig plants as hosts for their eggs. Neither species can survive without the other.
Now a new study from equatorial Singapore, in the journal Biology Letters, finds that the wasps are vulnerable to climate change, meaning that the wild fig plants are, too. And that is ominous news for many other species, the researchers say, including birds, squirrels and other animals that feed on figs.
The scientists found that temperature increases of a few degrees could cut the adult life spans of pollinating fig wasps to just a few hours, from one or two days.
Are we Donne yet? April 1:
The microscopic wasps whose life-cycle is bound up with that of the fig tree offer a revealing analogy to our own species current predicament. Plant and insect are so tightly connected that neither’s existence is possible without the other; thinking of them as two independent species is misleading. Rather, they’re part of a single system of mutual support — a system now critically endangered a runaway greenhouse effect.
Similar intimate connections are found everywhere on our planet; symbiosis and interdependence are the rule, not the exception. Only one species — our own — claims exemption, and by reintroducing hundreds of millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological eyeblink, we have unwittingly rent asunder the tightly woven fabric which sustains us all. The fig-and-wasp partnership is just one of thousands of likely casualties of our hubristic separation from the great web of Earthly life. If we clever apes cannot recognize that no living thing is an island, we’ll find, when we finally ask for whom the bell tolls, that it’s tolling for us.
Warren Senders
Education environment Gardening Politics: agriculture bees denialists idiots pesticides
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 12: When We Said We Were “Against Drones,” This Was NOT What We Meant
The NYT’s article on neonicotinoids and bee death has a fine conclusion:
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
If they can say “you told us so,” we won’t say “We told you so.” Idiots. March 30:
Bret Adee’s grudging recognition that tree-huggers’ warnings about the dangers of unrestricted pesticide use were “ahead of the curve” highlights a central dilemma: environmentalists would love to be proven wrong. We’d love to be wrong about pesticides, about pollution, about ocean acidification, and (most of all) we’d love to be wrong about climate change — but denial is not a viable option.
Facts are troubling things, as American apiarists are now discovering. As the dismaying data accumulates on their doorsteps, even the most ardent climate-change deniers will eventually have to face the painful truth that those hippie liberal scientists knew what they were talking about. But environmentalists are a forgiving lot: if erstwhile skeptics like Mr Adee can acknowledge that we were right all along about neonicotinoids, maybe they’ll pay attention to our concerns about the greenhouse effect — before it’s too late for action to be of any use.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 10: Keep Repeating, “It’s The Berries!”
U.S. News And World Report, on the looming end of coffee:
But in recent years, keeping the world’s coffee drinkers supplied has become increasingly difficult: The spread of a deadly fungus that has been linked to global warming and rising global temperatures in the tropical countries where coffee grows has researchers scrambling to create new varieties of coffee plants that can keep pace with these new threats without reducing quality.
While coffee researchers can do little to prevent climate change, they’re hard at work to keep up as Earth braces for temperature increases of several degrees over the next several decades.
“Coffee is the canary in the coal mine for climate change,” says Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you can’t think about the long term risk for planetary impacts, think about the short term risk for your coffee. Know that a day without coffee is potentially around the corner.”
The problem has gotten so bad that on March 18, Starbucks bought its first ever coffee farm, specifically to research new climate change-resistant coffee varieties.
“The threats climate change pose isn’t a surprise to us,” says Haley Drage, representative for the company. “We’ve been working on this for more than 10 years and it’s something we continue to work with farmers on.”
Drinking my cappuccino right now, in fact. I’m sure gonna miss it when I’m old. March 28:
The fact that climate change will significantly impact the world’s coffee growers should open a few more eyes to the dangers of a runaway greenhouse effect. But beyond the Arabica beans that go into our morning cup, practically every aspect of agriculture around the world is facing enormous disruption.
Starbucks’ work on developing new varieties which can withstand the coming weather extremes is a rare example of corporate readiness to look farther into the future than the next quarterly report — something which other corporations should emulate.
If fossil fuel companies behaved this way, they’d abandon an irresponsible fixation on short-term profits, and instead foster respect for the planetary environment. Instead of providing lavish funding for anti-science politicians, we’d see them investing heavily in the development of the sustainable energy sources we’ll be needing in the years to come.
And that would be a wonderful thing to wake up to.Warren Senders