by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 7, 2014 | Climate Change, Indigenous Autonomy
By Lxs inadaptadxs al cambio climático
22 years ago on this very continent was brought to the negotiating table the crisis of climate change. Many evasive proposals, claims to turn the crisis into an opportunity for business, denials, omissions and grand tragedies embody the climate crisis in the territories. A balance of 22 years of indifference and cynicism.
Governments and transnational interests continue to invest in the destruction of forests, rivers, oceans, jungles, mashlands, mountains and deserts; living spaces that end up being sacrificed in the name of “development” and “progress”.
In these 22 years, we are far from believing that the solution will come from governments; that the market will contribute to environmental conservation, or that the commodification of nature will protect the climate.
Our view is the way of indigenous communities that have known to preserved ecosystems, in farming communities who struggle to protect their lands, in women who work caringly in the rivers, in the children that keep alive their capacity of fascination with nature, and in the inhabitants of large cities who know that they have been robbed from nature since birth. Our guardians.
Us, the very ones who we are, have come here to convince you (and convince ourselves of the certainty that the world we want already exists), as there are colors of the earth, the suns that shine us, and the ways of our guardians that defend the territories around the globe.
This is why we call to find ourselves on the road to the COP20, to join our histories, our views, and our ways that demand climate justice under these guiding principles:
1. Maintain the fossil fuels underground is not only a priority to halting environmental devastation, but to end one of the evils that has so hurt and changed the pace of the climate in very few decades.
2. Ban the financialization of forests and the commodification of the functions of nature, as they are not a solutions to reduce emissions of carbon gases into the atmosphere; strategies which represent false solutions that have increased the destruction of ecosystems, the breakdown of communitarian social fabric and organization.
3. Water, as a common good can no longer be conceived as a commodity. Dams and hydroelectric dams are part of the mining and energy industries. The production of hydroelectric power is what keeps widening the gap of environmental devastation.
The aggressiveness with which the occupation of territories intends to expand itself does not depend on the political color of governments, but rather is linked to the perpetuation of the capitalist system under the same logic of accumulation at the expense of nature and communities.
Therefore, it becomes more urgent to find one another, Us.
They are the ones who will find the solutions- It’s us, the unadaptaded, the unadaptable climate change- It is us that can and must contain the war against nature.
From Lxs inadaptadxs al cambio climático
by DGR News Service | Mar 20, 2014 | Climate Change
By Renee Lewis / Al Jazeera
Climate change may be stunting fish growth, a new study has said. Fish sizes in the North Sea have shrunk dramatically, and scientists believe warmer ocean temperatures and less oxygenated water could be the causes.
The body sizes of several North Sea species have decreased by as much as 29 percent over a period of four decades, according to the report, published in the April issue of Global Change Biology.
The report presents evidence gathered as researchers followed six commercial fish species in the North Sea over 40 years. Their evidence showed that as water temperatures increased by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, an accompanying reduction in fish size was observed.
It is generally accepted among scientists that decreased body size is a universal response to increasing temperatures, known as the “temperature size rule,” the report said. But before this report, led by scientists at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, there was no empirical evidence showing this response in marine fish species.
The scientists warned that fish stunting cannot be unequivocally blamed on temperature changes, but they did observe fish stunting across varying species and backgrounds that coincided with a period of increasing ocean temperature.
Other factors that could have influenced fish size include fisheries-induced evolution and intensive commercial fishing — which favors larger specimens. But, the scientists said, these causes would not be likely to affect growth rates across species, which was observed in the North Sea study.
Scientists at the University of Washington have been working on a similar study, looking at many species of fish from Alaska to California. Tim Essington, an associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at UW who is working on the study, said he was looking into whether changes in fish body size could be related to environmental parameters.
“We haven’t seen the same strong response,” Essington told Al Jazeera. “But we have seen variation in the sizes of some stocks, like halibut. Its body size has been shrinking sharply over the past 10 years, and has resulted in reduced catch quotas and higher prices at the supermarket.”
He said various factors explain why UW results were different from those of the Scottish team. University of Aberdeen scientists were looking at a much more localized area and a unique data set, and had many more years of data to make comparisons.
Overall, Essington said the Aberdeen findings represented a plausible hypothesis that should be looked at more closely, and that warmer temperatures could explain the stunting.
“Fish aren’t any different than us. It’s all about the difference between how much we eat and how much energy we expend. And they’re arguing that temperature is changing the fishes’ energy versus expension rates,” which could result in smaller sizes, Essington said.
The Aberdeen findings echoed earlier model-derived predictions that fish would shrink in warmer waters. Those projections for future fish size reduction are already being seen in the North Sea, scientists said.
The first global projection of the potential for fish stunting in warmer, less oxygenated oceans was carried out by the University of British Columbia in 2012, and published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The projection said changes in ocean and climate systems by 2050 could result in fish that are 14 to 24 percent smaller globally.
“It’s a constant challenge for fish to get enough oxygen from water to grow, and the situation gets worse as fish get bigger,” said Daniel Pauly, principal investigator with the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us Project, and the co-author of the UBC study.
The study warned that strategies must be developed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions or risk disrupting food security, fisheries and the very way ocean ecosystems work.
From Al Jazeera America: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/19/report-climate-changestuntingfish.html
by DGR News Service | Mar 7, 2014 | Climate Change
By Agence France-Presse
Time is running out for Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, with climate change set to wreck irreversible damage by 2030 unless immediate action is taken, marine scientists said Thursday.
In a report prepared for this month’s Earth Hour global climate change campaign, University of Queensland reef researcher Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said the world heritage site was at a turning point.
“If we don’t increase our commitment to solve the burgeoning stress from local and global sources, the reef will disappear,” he wrote in the foreword to the report.
“This is not a hunch or alarmist rhetoric by green activists. It is the conclusion of the world’s most qualified coral reef experts.”
Hoegh-Guldberg said scientific consensus was that hikes in carbon dioxide and the average global temperature were “almost certain to destroy the coral communities of the Great Barrier Reef for hundreds if not thousands of years”.
“It is highly unlikely that coral reefs will survive more than a two degree increase in average global temperature relative to pre-industrial levels,” he said.
“But if the current trajectory of carbon pollution levels continues unchecked, the world is on track for at least three degrees of warming. If we don’t act now, the climate change damage caused to our Great Barrier Reef by 2030 will be irreversible.”
The Great Barrier Reef, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, teems with marine life and will be the focus of Australia’s Earth Hour—a global campaign which encourages individuals and organisations to switch off their lights for one hour on April 29 for climate change.
The report comes as the reef, considered one of the most vulnerable places in the world to the impacts of climate change, is at risk of having its status downgraded by the UN cultural organisation UNESCO to “world heritage in danger”.
Despite threats of a downgrade without action on rampant coastal development and water quality, Australia in December approved a massive coal port expansion in the region and associated dumping of dredged waste within the marine park’s boundaries.
The new report “Lights Out for the Reef“, written by University of Queensland coral reef biologist Selina Ward, noted that reefs were vulnerable to several different effects of climate change; including rising sea temperatures and increased carbon dioxide in the ocean, which causes acidification.
It found the rapid pace of global warming and the slow pace of coral growth meant the reef was unlikely to evolve quickly enough to survive the level of climate change predicted in the next few decades.
From Physorg: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-great-barrier-reef-scientists.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 1, 2013 | Climate Change
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
As if ocean acidification and climate change weren’t troubling enough (both of which are caused by still-rising carbon emissions), new research published in Nature finds that ocean acidification will eventually exacerbate global warming, further raising the Earth’s temperature.
Scientists have long known that tiny marine organisms—phytoplankton—are central to cooling the world by emitting an organic compound known as dimethylsulphide (DMS). DMS, which contains sulfur, enters the atmosphere and helps seed clouds, leading to a global cooling effect. In fact, in the past scientists have believed that climate change may actually increase DMS emissions, and offset some global warming, but they did not take into account the impact of acidification.
Researchers, headed by Katharina Six with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, tested how acidification affects phytoplankton in the laboratory by lowering the pH (i.e. acidifying) in plankton-filled water tanks and measuring DMS emissions. When they set the ocean acidification levels for what is expected by 2100 (under a moderate greenhouse gas scenario) they found that cooling DMS emissions fell.
Plugging the results into global modeling system, Six says, “we get an extra warming of 0.23 to 0.48 degree Celsius from the proposed impact [by 2100],” adding that “less sulphur results in a warming of the Earth surface.” This creates a positive feedback loop that will likely have impacts that are anything but positive, according to scientists.
To date, the world has warmed approximately 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last century with a variety of impacts including worsening severe weather, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice, and imperiled species.
Six also notes that a warmer world does not necessarily mean a more productive world for phytoplankton as has been argued by researchers in the past.
“In former times it was assumed that phytoplankton potentially growth better in a warmer ocean,” she explained to mongabay.com. “However, the basis for plant growth is the supply with nutrients. As the oceans will stabilize in the warmer climate, fewer nutrients will be transported into the sunlight zone. Earth system models, like the MPI-ESM that was used for our study, project a decrease in primary production of 17 percent at the end of this century for a moderate climate scenario. The impact from climate change alone led to a decrease in DMS emission of 7 percent.”
The results are still preliminary as researchers have yet to test how DMS emissions will by impacted in tropical and subtropical waters, focusing to date on polar and temperate waters. In addition, further modeling should be done in order to understand possible uncertainties according to Six.
Still, the evidence is strong enough that the researchers write in the paper that “this potential climate impact mechanism of ocean acidification should be considered in projections of future climate change.” Essentially raising current estimates for a moderate climate scenario by around 10 percent.
Ocean acidification, which has been dubbed “climate change’s equally evil twin” by U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Jane Lubchenco, is expected to have largely negative impacts on many marine species, including dissolving the shells of crustaceans and molluscs, hampering coral reefs, and even changing how far fish can hear.
So, how do we stop this from happening?
“There is only one answer,” Katharina Six told mongabay.com, “the abatement of fossil fuel emissions.”
From Mongabay: “Bad feedback: ocean acidification to worsen global warming“
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 1, 2013 | Climate Change
By Bjorn Carey / Stanford University
The planet is undergoing one of the largest changes in climate since the dinosaurs went extinct. But what might be even more troubling for humans, plants and animals is the speed of the change. Stanford climate scientists warn that the likely rate of change over the next century will be at least 10 times quicker than any climate shift in the past 65 million years.
If the trend continues at its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress on terrestrial ecosystems around the world, and many species will need to make behavioral, evolutionary or geographic adaptations to survive.
Although some of the changes the planet will experience in the next few decades are already “baked into the system,” how different the climate looks at the end of the 21st century will depend largely on how humans respond.
The findings come from a review of climate research by Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science, and Chris Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science and the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution. The work is part of a special report on climate change in the current issue of Science.
Diffenbaugh and Field, both senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, conducted the targeted but broad review of scientific literature on aspects of climate change that can affect ecosystems, and investigated how recent observations and projections for the next century compare to past events in Earth’s history.
For instance, the planet experienced a 5 degree Celsius hike in temperature 20,000 years ago, as Earth emerged from the last ice age. This is a change comparable to the high-end of the projections for warming over the 20th and 21st centuries.
The geologic record shows that, 20,000 years ago, as the ice sheet that covered much of North America receded northward, plants and animals recolonized areas that had been under ice. As the climate continued to warm, those plants and animals moved northward, to cooler climes.
“We know from past changes that ecosystems have responded to a few degrees of global temperature change over thousands of years,” said Diffenbaugh. “But the unprecedented trajectory that we’re on now is forcing that change to occur over decades. That’s orders of magnitude faster, and we’re already seeing that some species are challenged by that rate of change.”
Some of the strongest evidence for how the global climate system responds to high levels of carbon dioxide comes from paleoclimate studies. Fifty-five million years ago, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was elevated to a level comparable to today. The Arctic Ocean did not have ice in the summer, and nearby land was warm enough to support alligators and palm trees.
“There are two key differences for ecosystems in the coming decades compared with the geologic past,” Diffenbaugh said. “One is the rapid pace of modern climate change. The other is that today there are multiple human stressors that were not present 55 million years ago, such as urbanization and air and water pollution.”
Record-setting heat
Diffenbaugh and Field also reviewed results from two-dozen climate models to describe possible climate outcomes from present day to the end of the century. In general, extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall, are expected to become more severe and more frequent.
For example, the researchers note that, with continued emissions of greenhouse gases at the high end of the scenarios, annual temperatures over North America, Europe and East Asia will increase 2-4 degrees C by 2046-2065. With that amount of warming, the hottest summer of the last 20 years is expected to occur every other year, or even more frequently.
By the end of the century, should the current emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked, temperatures over the northern hemisphere will tip 5-6 degrees C warmer than today’s averages. In this case, the hottest summer of the last 20 years becomes the new annual norm.
“It’s not easy to intuit the exact impact from annual temperatures warming by 6 C,” Diffenbaugh said. “But this would present a novel climate for most land areas. Given the impacts those kinds of seasons currently have on terrestrial forests, agriculture and human health, we’ll likely see substantial stress from severely hot conditions.”
The scientists also projected the velocity of climate change, defined as the distance per year that species of plants and animals would need to migrate to live in annual temperatures similar to current conditions. Around the world, including much of the United States, species face needing to move toward the poles or higher in the mountains by at least one kilometer per year. Many parts of the world face much larger changes.
The human element
Some climate changes will be unavoidable, because humans have already emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere and oceans have already been heated.
“There is already some inertia in place,” Diffenbaugh said. “If every new power plant or factory in the world produced zero emissions, we’d still see impact from the existing infrastructure, and from gases already released.”
The more dramatic changes that could occur by the end of the century, however, are not written in stone. There are many human variables at play that could slow the pace and magnitude of change – or accelerate it.
Consider the 2.5 billion people who lack access to modern energy resources. This energy poverty means they lack fundamental benefits for illumination, cooking and transportation, and they’re more susceptible to extreme weather disasters. Increased energy access will improve their quality of life – and in some cases their chances of survival – but will increase global energy consumption and possibly hasten warming.
Diffenbaugh said that the range of climate projections offered in the report can inform decision-makers about the risks that different levels of climate change pose for ecosystems.
“There’s no question that a climate in which every summer is hotter than the hottest of the last 20 years poses real risks for ecosystems across the globe,” Diffenbaugh said. “However, there are opportunities to decrease those risks, while also ensuring access to the benefits of energy consumption.”
From Stanford News: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-speed-080113.html
