GW : Faster Climate change expected - World news

A new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey revealed that there is a clear probability of a more rapid climate change by the end of the century, than what is suggested by previous studies.

The survey just worked towards the expansion of the 2007 findings of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, and it was commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and was issued this month. The new assessment, made from the factors such as rapid sea ice loss in the Arctic and prolonged drought in the Southwest, suggests that earlier projections may have underestimated the climatic shifts that could take place by 2100.

Some projections, already made previously in context of global warming, are on the other hand, also discarded by this new survey, viz. an abrupt release of methane from the seabed and permafrost or a shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that brings warm water north and colder water south. These are not expected to occur till the end of this century. However, the projected amount of potential sea level rise during that period that may be greater than what other researchers have anticipated, as well as a shift to a more arid climate pattern in the Southwest by mid-century. 32 scientists contributed in this two year long duration survey.

According to the statement of Tom Armstrong, senior adviser for global change programs at USGS, the report "shows how quickly the information is advancing" on potential climate shifts. The prospect of abrupt climate change, he said, "is one of those things that keeps people up at night, because it's a low-probability but high-risk scenario. It's unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but if it were to occur, it would be life-changing."

Report of the survey says that the pace of the melting of the ice sheet presently. will result in the increase of 4 ft. in the sea level by 2100, which was predicted to be 1.5 ft. only by that time by IPCC earlier. This is because since the last two years, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are now losing an average of 48 cubic miles of ice a year, equivalent to twice the amount of ice that exists in the Alps.


The models the IPCC used did not factor in some of the dynamics that scientists now understand about ice sheet melting, said the lead author on the report's chapter on ice sheets, Konrad Steffen, who also directs the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Apart from this, Steffen and his collaborators have identified a process of "lubrication," from which the warmer water of oceans gets in underneath coastal ice sheets and accelerates melting.

Looking at the issue of prolonged drought over the next 100 years, scientists said it is impossible to determine yet whether human activity is responsible for the drought the Southwestern United States has experienced over the past decade, but every indication suggests the region will become consistently drier in the next several decades. Some statements made by Richard Seager, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, includes :

1) nearly all of the 24 computer models the group surveyed project the same climatic conditions for the North American Southwest, which includes Mexico.

2) If the models are correct, it will transition in the coming years and decades to a more arid climate, and that transition is already underway. Such conditions would probably include prolonged droughts lasting more than a decade.

3) scientists need to work on developing versions that can make projections on a much smaller scale. That's what the water managers out there really need. Current models don't give them the hard numbers they need.

GW : Air Pollution at alarming rates in NCR ( Noida and Ghaziabad ) - The Times of India

The air polluton touched dangerous levels in the National Capital Region (NCR) towns of Noida and Ghaziabad due to increase in vehicular traffic and industrial growth, officials said.

The levels of Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM), comprising of gases such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, in the residential areas of Noida have shot up to 400 mg per cubic metre as against the permitted level of 200 mg per cubic metre.

The Residual Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM) in the residential areas has shot up to 135 mg per cubic metre as against the normal level of 100 mg per cubic metre.

In the industrial areas, the RSPM levels have gone up by as much as 55 units to touch 555 mg per cubic metre.

"The air has got much filthier than it used to be till two years back. A major reason for this is that the number of vehicles has simply increased two-fold on the city's roads and the pollution enforcement has not become that effective," a senior official of Gautam Buddha Nagar Pollution Control Board (PCB) said.

The PCB recently issued notices to about 18 industrial units asking them to control their air discharge or face closure.

As per the latest data prepared by the PCB, the district has about 90 brick kilns running without compliance to pollution control norms, to which the department recently issued notices.

In Ghaziabad district, the SPM levels measured in industrial areas like Sahibabad and Meerut Road have been found to be as high as 580 mg per cubic metre, against the accepted levels of 500 units.

In residential areas of Ghaziabad, the RSPM levels were discovered to be 150 mg per cubic metre, 50 units above the normal level.

The Sahibabad industrial area has about 400 highly polluting units, comprising of 100 dyeing units, paper plants, meat processing plants and other hazardous chemical units.

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ND : About 1 billion of people around the world face chronic hunger

source : Nasir Khan Blog

The number of undernourished people in the world has increased from 923 million in 2007 to 963 million in 2008. This disturbing figure comes from a report on world hunger released on December 9 by the Rome-based UN Agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), entitled The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008.

The report notes that the number of chronically hungry people rose by 75 million in 2007, while the 2008 figure shows an increase of 40 million. The recent increase in the number of hungry people has been exacerbated by high food prices, especially in developing countries.

In a news release on the FAO web site, FAO Assistant Director-General Hafez Ghanem underscored the difficulties being faced by people in the developing world:

“For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream. The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality.”

The report is the ninth in a series that began in 1996 at the World Food Summit (WFS), which set up the goal of halving world hunger by 2015. While the WFS called for the number of hungry people to decline by 50 percent, the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MGD) has set a target to cut in half the proportion of those suffering malnutrition.

Given the upsurge in food prices and other problems, it will continue to be difficult to achieve either goal by 2015. With the increase to 963 million hungry people, it would be necessary to reduce the number of hungry people by about 480 million. And, while the proportion of undernourished people (the MDG measurement) had been decreasing, from 20 percent in 1990-92 to 16 percent in 2003-05, it appears that this progress is being reversed, moving back up to about 17 percent.

The distribution of undernourished people in the world is largely concentrated in the developing world, although there were 16 million undernourished persons in developed countries in 2003-2005. Among the 832 million chronically hungry persons in 2003-2005, 65 percent were concentrated in India, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.

In sub-Saharan Africa, while the proportion of people who are chronically hungry was reduced between the early 1990s and 2003-2005, one in three persons still remains undernourished. However, most of the numerical increase in the undernourished has come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has suffered from a persistent conflict resulting in an increase from 11 million to 43 million chronically hungry people.

While South America has been one of the most successful sub-regions in reducing hunger, this success has not been uniform throughout the Latin American and Caribbean region. In Haiti, for example, 58 percent of the population suffers from chronic hunger.

The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have had a direct, negative impact on levels of undernourishment in the Near East and North Africa regions, which have generally experienced some of the lowest levels of undernourishment. The number of chronically hungry undernourished persons in the region nearly doubled, from 15 million in 1990-92 to 28 million in 2003-2005. This number has increased by 4.9 million in Afghanistan, and by 4.1 million in Iraq.

While there has been some modest progress in Asia and the Pacific regions, “nearly two-thirds of the world’s hungry people still live in Asia,” according to the FAO report.

Since 1992, barely a third of the developing countries have been able to reduce the number of those suffering from chronic hunger. The findings show that those hardest hit by increases in food prices were the poor, the landless, and female-headed households.

Low-income families are more likely to be “net food buyers,” or households that consume a higher value of food staples than the value they produce, who stand to lose from an increase in the price of food staples.

While landowners are in a good position to gain from food price increases, the report notes, “Across the board, high food prices hit landless households hardest.”

Female-headed households will also suffer proportionally more than male-headed households. This is due to female-headed households’ tendency to spend a higher proportion of income on food, heightening the impact of food price increases, and the gender-specific obstacles that women face, which may restrict their access to certain resources such as land and credit.

Facing higher food prices, households may try to cope by changing the quality, quantity, and diversity of foods eaten, or make cuts in other areas such as health care and education. The first strategy results in malnutrition and higher risks of deficiencies in essential micronutrients, especially among women and children.

The story of Drissa Kone, living in Côte d’Ivoire, illustrates some of the problems that arise as individuals attempt to save money on medicine. Suffering from a severe respiratory infection, he has turned to counterfeit medicines, which sell for a fraction of the price of legitimate medicines but are of questionable quality and may even further harm his health.

The FAO has analyzed the key determinants of countries’ vulnerability to high food prices: whether they are net importers of energy products and cereals, relative levels of poverty, and prevalence of undernourishment. The report discusses the diverse number of ways in which a food crisis can arise, resulting from both natural and man-made disasters.

Natural disasters can be classified by whether they are “slow onset” or “sudden onset.” While slow onset disasters, such as droughts, have constituted the majority of natural disasters, sudden onset disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, increased from 14 percent of all natural disasters in the 1980s to 27 percent in 2000.

According to the FAO, man-made disasters include both war or conflict and socio-economic shocks that may be internal or external. War has been the primary cause of man-made disasters, although disasters arising from socio-economic shocks have risen from 2 percent in the 1980s to 27 percent in 2000.

As the WSWS wrote in a three-part series, “The world food crisis and the capitalist market,” the sources of the current food crisis “lie in economic and political processes of privatization and price speculation that have unfolded over the past three decades and are bound up with the globalization of capitalist agriculture.”

The world is presently reeling from a gigantic “socio-economic shock,” in the form of a developing global financial crisis, which will inevitably exacerbate the world hunger crisis, as millions of people find themselves jobless, homeless, and are thrust deeper into poverty.

That nearly 1 billion people are suffering from hunger is yet another testament to the irrational allocation of resources under capitalism. As the foreword to the report notes: “Hunger has increased as the world has grown richer and produced more food than ever in the last decade.”

While the capitalist mode of production has revolutionized the productive forces, developing the capacity to feed every person on earth and eliminate hunger, the social relations of production have become a fetter upon the realization of this goal. The FAO’s The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008 documents the devastating impact of the growth of social inequality—in the form of chronic hunger—on large numbers of the world’s population.

GW : First Major Energy Study Shows That Wind Is The Cleanest Source

[N]obody conducted an elaborated study to find out the best ways to fight against global warming, reduce pollution, and which are best renewable energies, therefore Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, decided to do something about this and he conducted the first major and scientific energy-related study.

He says that the best ways to accomplish our green goals are “blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants.” Also, he added that the so-called clean coal is “not clean at all.”

Here is Jacobson’s list of clean energies from best to worst:

1. Wind Power

2. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)

3. Geothermal Power

4. Tidal Power

5. Solar Photovoltaics

6. Wave Power

7. Hydroelectric Power

The professor says that we should forget and go against nuclear, clean coal, corn ethanol, and cellulosic ethanol. According to Jacobson’s findings, cellulosic ethanol is worse than corn ethanol as it releases more air pollutants, it requires more land for crops, and it damages the wildlife.

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