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NFU claims extreme weather poses biggest threat to British farming
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... uk-farming
Erratic swings from floods to heatwaves and drought caused by climate change is devastating harvests, says NFU president

Extreme weather being driven by climate change is the biggest threat to British farming and its ability to feed the nation's growing population, according to Peter Kendall, president of the National Farmers' Union.

His comments, in an interview with the Guardian, come after a week of intense weather extremes. Last Monday, west London experienced the hottest day for seven years, while on Tuesday the drought in many parts of the country came to an end with intense thunderstorms that brought almost a month of rain in a day to parts of Worcestershire. Torrential downpours also put a dampener on the first weekend of the school summer holidays, with flash-flooding in parts of the south-east and the Midlands.

"The biggest uncertainty for UK agriculture is extreme weather events," said Kendall, who grows wheat and barley on the 250-hectare (620 acre) farm in Bedfordshire he runs with his brother. "I sometimes have a pop at those who say climate change is going to help farming in northern Europe. ..

..
"The wheat is usually green at this time, but its already gone brown," says Laurence Matthews, overlooking a bone-dry and dusty field on his 3,000-acre farm near Dorking in Surrey. "It's like a tinderbox: there's a real risk of fire."

The summer heatwave is having a dramatic effect on his crops. "Without water, the plants just shut down," he says. But it is the twists and turns of increasingly erratic weather that is making farming more difficult, Matthews says. "In spring 2012, it was unbelievably dry and hot, then from April it just rained right through to 2013, which made it very difficult to get our crops established."

The autumn-sown crops that survived the deluge developed only short roots, as the soggy soils made drawing up water easier. But the sudden heatwave this summer has left the crops without the deeper roots they need to flourish. "We'll get smaller grains," he says.

"The volatility in the weather in the last few years has been much greater," he says. "It is definitely getting much more difficult to manage."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... arms-crops

http://humanistcafe.wordpress.com/2013/ ... r-the-sea/

Teapocalypse: The *MAP* of Denier States Under the Sea

Posted on August 3, 2013 by HUMANISTCAFE

There is no amount of empirical data that will persuade the modern conservative that climate change is a reality.

Not the fact that the polar ice caps are melting . Not the fact that Arctic sea ice is disappearing. Not the fact that the global concentration of carbon dioxide has reached 400 parts per million. Not the fact that frankenstorms and wildfires wreak indiscriminate havoc with alarming regularity. Not even the fact that 2001-2010 was the warmest decade in recorded history.

The planet is cooking and all Johnny Wingnut can say is, “pass me the Hawaiian Tropic.”

And, it doesn’t matter where the information comes from, either. NOAA and NASA are part of a One World Order conspiracy or, at the very least, a socialist plot to eradicate guns, god, liberty and Ted Nugent.

The Pentagon is in on the plot too because as early as 2004 it began contingency planning the quite unpleasant scenarios resulting from megadroughts and massive flooding. Population shifts and crop failures lead to destabilization and unrest across the globe. At the Pentagon, they’re paid to analyze real data and they’re more than a little nervous about what climate science suggests.

The modern conservative is an oxymoron if ever there was one. And, these oxymorons – the Gohmerts and the Bachmanns – are too busy charming snakes and masturbating Exxon executives to give a good goddamn about planet Earth. Climate change isn’t mentioned in the Old Testament so to hell with it. Exxon executives, well they must be in there somewhere – maybe the Book of Lamentations.

It seems, it will take something biblical for the Gohmerts to finally comprehend what is happening. Perhaps even diluvian – they really dig that Noah’s Ark story.

A Teapocalypse!

Jehovah God punishes only the deniers and saves the believers. Isn’t that the way these things go. Only this time, it’s science we’re talking about. When JG is done, the country will look something like this:



That’s the country if climate change affects only the states whose representatives in the House and the Senate deny global warming.

Now, some states get a little lucky – they are saved by rather hefty mountain ranges. A few progressive cities in denier states are saved too – like San Antonio and Austin. But, Red ‘Merica gets hit hard.

There’d be some justice if it all happened this way. No oxymorons would be hurt in the making of the Teapocalypse, but they would be relocated to reservations in Appalachia, the Isthmus of South Dakota and Little Rock Island out there in the middle of the Gulf of Arkansas (see map).

Maybe then, finally, the modern conservative would believe the undeniable. Then, of course, it’s really too late for him anyway. Most of real America would be gone.

There is nothing discriminating about global climate change, though. It will hit the believers and the deniers alike. Those who want to make necessary changes and those who would change nothing.

When the floods and the fires come, the deniers will busily deny having denied while the rest of us scramble to save what of Mother Earth we can.

It doesn’t have to come to that, but it will. And, it will be biblical.

The city may not be totally prepared for this summer's hurricane season, but Mayor Bloomberg announced a fairly comprehensive plan today for protecting the shoreline from flooding in the years and decades to come. If you have a couple of hours to spare, you can read the whole report, but the gist is that a system of dunes, levees, bulkheads, wetlands, tide gates, removable floodwalls, and even something called a groin — at a total cost of $20 billion — would line the coast. Perhaps most ambitiously, Bloomberg even proposed building a new neighborhood called Seaport City in the waters off lower Manhattan.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined a far-reaching plan on Tuesday to protect New York City from the threat of rising sea levels and powerful storm surges by building an extensive network of flood walls, levees and bulkheads along its 520 miles of coast.The mayor said the plan would initially cost about $20 billion, and eventually far more. The city would spend the money on fortifying infrastructure like the power grid, renovating buildings to withstand hurricanes and defending the shore, according to a 438-page report on the proposals.

The proposals, in all, would change the look and fabric of the city, though not until well after the mayor leaves office at the end of the year.

Still, he emphasized that Hurricane Sandy was such a devastating event that the city had to move immediately.

“This plan is incredibly ambitious — and much of the work will extend far beyond the next 203 days — but we refused to pass the responsibility for creating a plan onto the next administration,” he said in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “This is urgent work, and it must begin now.”

The report details 250 recommendations, including the installation of flood walls and other measures to protect some of the areas that were hit worst by the hurricane in October.

The plan covers so many parts of the city and proposes such an array of projects that the cost could change — and given the history of such large projects, it is likely to grow substantially.

Seven ways the drought in the West really sucks
By Lisa Hymas

Almost 87 percent of the Western U.S. is in a drought, the Los Angeles Times reports today in a big, gloomy article with big, gloomy pictures. New Mexico is 100 percent droughty. Here are just a few of the ways that sucks.

1. The Rio Grande is so dry that it’s been dubbed the Rio Sand. Satellite photos show reservoirs drying up too.

2. People in parts of New Mexico are having to take drastic measures to get water. “Residents of some towns subsist on trucked-in water,” the L.A. Times reports, “and others are drilling deep wells costing $100,000 or more to sink and still more to operate.”

3. Water wars are flaring up and states are getting litigious. Also from the Times: “Texas has filed suit, arguing that groundwater pumping in New Mexico is reducing Texas’ share of the Rio Grande. Oklahoma has successfully fended off a legal challenge from Texas over water from the Red River.”

4. Wild critters are in trouble. Wildlife managers in New Mexico are bringing water to elk herds so they don’t die of thirst. Some conservationists think those managers should also bring food to bears so the bears don’t lumber into human settlements while desperately seeking sustenance.

5. Trees are taking a beating. Thousands of trees in Albuquerque have died of thirst.

6. Swimming holes are becoming dirt holes. A trio of Texas state agencies is inviting the public to share photos of the drought, and one recurring subject is swimming signs in front of waterless landscapes, like this one.

7. Some desperate farmers in New Mexico have resorted to selling their water to fracking companies so they can afford to pay their bills. As Joe Romm writes at Climate Progress, “The worse news is that many of them are actually pumping the water out of the aquifer to do so. The worst news of all is that once the frackers get through tainting it with their witches’ brew of chemicals, that water often becomes unrecoverable — and then we have the possibility the used fracking water will end up contaminating even more of the groundwater.”

Is climate change to blame for all the droughtiness? The L.A. Times:

The question many here are grappling with is whether the changes are a permanent result of climate change or part of cyclical weather cycle. …

Nonetheless, most long-term plans put together by cattle ranchers, farmers and land managers include the probability that the drought is here to stay.

John Clayshulte, a third-generation rancher and farmer near Las Cruces, removed all his cattle from his federal grazing allotment. “There’s just not any sense putting cows on there. There’s not enough for them to eat,” he said.

“It’s all changed. This used to be shortgrass prairies. We’ve ruined it and it’s never going to come back.”

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

Global Scientists Shocked by True Scale of Ocean Warming
Posted by News Editor in Latest News, Oceans, RSS on August 5, 2013 12:15 pm

SANTA BARBARA, California, August 5, 2013 (ENS) – Warming oceans are causing marine species to change their breeding times and shift their habitats toward the poles much faster than land-based species, finds new research by scientists at 17 institutions across the world.

The researchers warn that these big shifts in the timing of major events could produce disruption to ocean food webs, affecting all sea life, as well as humans who depend on the sea for food.

Findings of the three-year research project, conducted by a working group of University of California, Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, NCEAS, and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, are published in the current issue of the journal “Nature Climate Change.”

The report, “Global imprint of climate change on marine life,” will form part of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, IPCC, Assessment Report due for publication in 2014. Based in Geneva, the UN-backed IPCC assesses scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information concerning climate change, its effects, and options for adaptation and mitigation.

“The effects of climate change on marine species have not been a major focus of past IPCC reports because no one had done the work to pull together all the disparate observations from around the world,” said NCEAS associate Carrie Kappel. “This study provides a solid basis for including marine impacts in the latest global accounting of how climate change is affecting our world.”

Unlike previous studies that relied on terrestrial data to estimate the impacts of climate change on oceans, this research team assembled a marine-only database of 1,735 changes in marine life from the global peer-reviewed literature. The studies have an average length of 40 years of observation.

The team found that 81 percent of changes across different populations and ocean basins were consistent with the expected impacts of climate change.

The study took in research from all the world’s oceans, with particular focus on the east and south coasts of Australia, both U.S. coastlines, the European Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

It included marine mammals, fish, seabirds, turtles, squid, plankton, molluscs, deep sea invertebrates and crustaceans, mangroves, seagrasses and deepwater algae and covered the polar, temperate, subtropical and tropical oceans.

The study offers a “very simple, but important message” says one of the lead authors, Professor Camille Parmesan, National Marine Aquarium Chair in Public Understanding of Oceans and Human Health at Plymouth University’s Marine Institute in the UK.

“This is the first comprehensive documentation of what is happening in our marine systems in relation to climate change,” said Parmesan. “What it reveals is that the changes that are occurring on land are being matched by the oceans. And far from being a buffer and displaying more minor changes, what we’re seeing is a far stronger response from the oceans.”

Parmesan has been active in IPCC since 1997, and in her capacity as a lead author, she shared in the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to IPCC. In addition to her work at Plymouth, she serves as a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at University of Texas at Austin.

“Here’s a totally different system with its own unique set of complexities and subtleties,” said Parmesan. “Yet the overall impacts of recent climate change remain the same: an overwhelming response of species shifting where and when they live in an attempt to track a shifting climate.”

Phytoplankton, zooplankton, and bony fish showed the largest shifts. The “front line” of some of these marine species is moving towards the poles at the average rate of 72 kilometers (45 miles) per decade, which is faster than the terrestrial average of six km (four miles) per decade, even though sea surface temperatures are warming three times slower than land temperatures.

The timing of nature’s springtime calendar in the oceans has advanced by more than four days, nearly twice the figure for its advancement on land, the research team learned.

The study found phytoplankton – which provide the basic food for all life in the seas – are now blooming an average of six days earlier in the season, compared with land plants. Baby fish appear to be hatching around 11 days earlier in the season.

“The results were quite a shock,” says co-author Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and University of Queensland. “We found that changes in sea life attributable to a one degree increase in the Earth’s overall temperature appear much greater than those seen in life on land so far.”

The oceans are estimated to have absorbed 80 percent of the extra heat put into the Earth system by human use of fossil fuels, but have nevertheless warmed more slowly than the land owing to their huge mass, said Pandolfi. “This makes the very large changes in the behavior of sea life all the more surprising.”

“When you see changes as large as these, life generally has three options – migration, adaptation or extinction. In the case of migration and extinction, these can directly affect industries like fishing and tourism which depend on local sea life,” he said.

“On the other hand, as sea life moves around the planet and adapts to the changes, new opportunities may also open up – so it isn’t all bad news,” Pandolfi said.

“The study tells us that the situation with life in the oceans is now very dynamic and fast-changing, and marine managers, fishers and others who depend on the seas for a living need to take account of that,” he said. “For example, we need to minimize the sorts of stresses we put on sea life to give it the best chance of re-establishing in new places and environments.”

Co-author Pippa Moore, lecturer in aquatic biology at Aberystwyth University in Wales, agrees, saying, “These results highlight the urgent need for governments around the globe to develop adaptive management plans to ensure the continued sustainability of the world’s oceans and the goods and services they provide to human society.”

coffin_dodger » Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:11 am wrote:^^

excuse me please whilst I slip from my usually calm self into my irate, aggresive self to say:

Why the fuck isn't this being addressed as a matter of utmost urgency by every human being on the planet?

I know that was pointless and added fuck-all to the ongoing debate, but it feels good to scream it ocassionally.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23538771

Rise in violence 'linked to climate change'

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service
Shifts in climate are strongly linked to increases in violence around the world, a study suggests.

US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war.

The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.

The study is published in Science.

Marshall Burke, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: "This is a relationship we observe across time and across all major continents around the world. The relationship we find between these climate variables and conflict outcomes are often very large."

The researchers looked at 60 studies from around the world, with data spanning hundreds of years.

They report a "substantial" correlation between climate and conflict.

Their examples include an increase in domestic violence in India during recent droughts, and a spike in assaults, rapes and murders during heatwaves in the US.

The report also suggests rising temperatures correlated with larger conflicts, including ethnic clashes in Europe and civil wars in Africa.

Biological root?
Mr Burke said: "We want to be careful, you don't want to attribute any single event to climate in particular, but there are some really interesting results."

The researchers say they are now trying to understand why this relationship exists.

"The literature offers a couple of different hints," explained Mr Burke.

"One of the main mechanisms that seems to be at play is changes in economic conditions. We know that climate affects economic conditions around the world, particularly agrarian parts of the world.

"There is lots of evidence that changes in economic conditions affect people's decisions about whether or not to join a rebellion, for example."

But he said there could also be a physiological basis, because some studies suggest that heat causes people to be prone to aggression.

"It is a major priority for future research to distinguish between what is going on in each particular situation."

The scientists say that with the current projected levels of climate change the world is likely to become a more violent place.

They estimate that a 2C (3.6F) rise in global temperature could see personal crimes increase by about 15%, and group conflicts rise by more than 50% in some regions.

Commenting on the research, Dr Stephan Harrison from the University of Exeter said it was a "timely study".

"What they have found is entirely plausible... For example, we already know that hotter and drier weather causes an increase in urban violence. Likewise, during cooler and wetter weather people tend to stay indoors, and the threat diminishes."

However, other researchers have questioned whether climate breeds conflict.

Work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that this environmental factor was not to blame for civil war in Africa.

Instead, Dr Halvard Buhaug, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway, concluded that the conflict was linked to other factors such as high infant mortality, proximity to international borders and high local population density.

Commenting on the latest research, he said: "I disagree with the sweeping conclusion (the authors) draw and believe that their strong statement about a general causal link between climate and conflict is unwarranted by the empirical analysis that they provide.

"I was surprised to see not a single reference to a real-world conflict that plausibly would not have occurred in the absence of observed climatic extremes. If the authors wish to claim a strong causal link, providing some form of case validation is critical."

coffin_dodger » Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:11 am wrote:^^

excuse me please whilst I slip from my usually calm self into my irate, aggresive self to say:

Why the fuck isn't this being addressed as a matter of utmost urgency by every human being on the planet?

I know that was pointless and added fuck-all to the ongoing debate, but it feels good to scream it ocassionally.