Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Thirteen of the Arctic’s 23 largest migrating herds are now in decline, according to the 2010 Arctic Report Card by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A Canadian study last year found that global reindeer populations have fallen 57% from their peak over the past two decades.

“Arctic herds in particular are challenged by climate change, just like polar bears are,” study author and University of Alberta ecologist Mark Boyce told Mother Nature Network’s Russell McLendon. “It’s in the Arctic that climate change is happening faster than anywhere else on the planet.”

Conservation groups such as Defenders of Wildlife often agree, but not all scientists agree. McLendon says some argue instead that a warming Arctic could actually help rangifers — often known as “reindeer” in Eurasia and “caribou” in North America — by prompting plants to sprout earlier and grow bigger.

In its report, NOAA generally attributes the reindeer decline to “a natural cycle possibly exacerbated by harvesting, and the increasing human presence on the ranges.” It notes some herds may be stabilizing but adds “it is far too early to report a trend.” American herds such as the western woodland caribou of Idaho and Washington, are listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Who knows??? Happy Christmas everyone

Geography schools books contain the same basic information forty years ago as they do today, with the addition of more pictures and up todate facts and figures. But the basics are there.
Could you imagine raising a conversation about these basic subjects in geography today- rocks, water, agriculture, rivers… Without seeing panic and confusion cross the other persons face?

You may want to talk about deforestation along the Amazon or Forest Fires in Australia. But no matter where you begin, the converastion threatens to move into a discussion on the most polarised topic: climate change. Climate change has made geography “the new history”. Being both more dynamic and more frightening.

For a moment, imagine a parallel world in which the RTE News opened with the weather forecast, updating us on heatwaves, hurricanes and monsoons affecting different parts of the globe, and then the environment correspondent (Paul Cunningham) took over with some analysis about how these will impact on the everyday lives of people, in terms of food security, health, water, migration, before finally handing over to the political correspondent (David Davin-Power) as he explains the latest twists in the state of the economy???
Visitors to the British Museum’s Moctezuma exhibition are being vividly reminded what happens when you put too much strain on the ecosystem. The city of Teotihuacán had a population of 200,000 in the seventh century AD and then, quite suddenly, it collapsed. The historian Tom Holland, author of “Millennium”, came away from the exhibition shivering with “a sense of unexpected kinship”. The Aztecs had lost touch with some basic geographical facts and their needs had outstripped the natural resources that were available. “Are we in the West,” he asks, “the Aztecs of our time?”

It’s one reason why the geography department has become the most compelling one on the campus. Geography is the new history. We’re living it now!!!

The Global Humanitarian Forum also estimated that 325 million people are seriously affected by climate change — a number it says will double by 2030, as more people are hit by natural disasters or suffer environmental degradation caused by climate change.

“Climate change is a silent human crisis,” Annan said in a statement. “Yet it is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time.”

The report suggests that rising sea levels, desertification and changing rainfall patterns are reducing many people’s access to safe drinking water and food. This in turn increases diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition.

The report said 99 percent of all people who die due to climate-change related causes live in developing countries, even though those countries generate less than 1 percent of total emissions of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

The report used existing data on weather-related disasters, population trends and economic forecasts to draw its conclusions.

Camel Crossing

Global Warming in Venice

 Global Warming in Egypt

 Statue of Liberty battles rising sea waters

Antarctica on Fire

Whale watching in Las Vegas

Global warming proof

Universities at Aberystwyth, Exeter and Stockholm looked at longer timescales than usual for their study.

They mapped changes in 270 of the largest glaciers between Chile and Argentina since the “Little Ice Age”. Studies showed glaciers have lost volume on average “10 to 100 times faster” in the last 30 years. The rapid melt rate is linked to their contribution to global sea level.

The new research was published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday. Their survey centred on remotely sensed images of outlet glaciers of the south and north Patagonian icefields, but used longer timescales than previous studies.

The glaciers straddle the Andes, on the border between Chile and Argentina. The northern icefield extends for nearly 200 km and covers a surface of 4,200 square km, while the southern icefield is more than 350km long, covering 13,000 square km.

The scientists mapped changes in the position of the glaciers since the “Little Ice Age”. This took place around 1870 for the north icefield and around 1650 for the southern icefield, the last time that they were much larger in the recent past.

Lead author, Professor Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University, said: “Previous estimates of sea-level contribution from mountain glaciers are based on very short timescales.

“They cover only the last 30 years or so when satellite images can be used to calculate rates of glacier volume change.

“We took a different approach by using a new method that allows us to look at longer timescales. We knew that glaciers in South America were much bigger during the Little Ice Age so we mapped the extent of the glaciers at that time and calculated how much ice has been lost by the retreat and thinning of the glaciers.”

Their calculations showed that in recent years the mountain glaciers have rapidly increased their melt rate and thus their contribution to global sea level.

Dr Stephen Harrison of the University of Exeter, added: “The work is significant because it is the first time anyone has made a direct estimate of the sea-level contribution from glaciers since the peak of the industrial revolution (between 1750-1850). “

He said their results showed that estimates taken a decade ago of rates of glacier contribution to sea-level rise are “well above” the long-term averages, which cover 1650/1750 to 2010 and 1870-2010.

The bamboo study raises serious concerns regarding the survival of the Giant Panda. The Giant Panda relies on bamboo to fill ninety-nine percent of their diet. A single panda can eat twenty-six to eighty-three pounds of bamboo a day. There are an estimated 1,600 Giant Pandas remaining in the wild. It takes approximately 41,600 to 132,800 pounds of bamboo a day to feed all 1,600 pandas.

The only remaining wild pandas live in a small area of China. Approximately 980 of the 1,600 wild pandas are living in protected reserves. If bamboo in reserves fails to thrive, the pandas will be forced to leave the protected reserves in search of food. Some pandas inside and outside of reserves may not be able to travel to where new sources of bamboo are growing. Habitat destruction combined with human industrialization has isolated some groups of pandas, making travel difficult if not impossible.

Giant Pandas are finicky eaters and get used to a diet of the particular species of bamboo that they have become accustomed to eating. While pandas may be finicky, they can eat other species of bamboo if necessity forces them to. The real concern is will sufficient amounts of bamboo grow in accessible areas to pandas after a climate change? Scientist’s are trying to predict the growth outcome of the bamboo after climate change. The future results will help analyze the severity of the problem. Until we know which species of bamboo that climate change will affect, we won’t be able to fully assess the situation. Once we know which species of bamboo will survive a climate change and where it will grow, a plan for the survival of the Giant Pandas can be put into action.

The river that carved the Grand Canyon flowed in the opposite direction 55 million years ago, according to a new study of tiny zircon grains.

Where the Colorado River today is carving the Grand Canyon, there once flowed another river in the opposite direction, according to a new study comparing tiny grains of the mineral, zircon, in Utah and Arizona.

Telltale lead and uranium isotopes in the zircons from ancient sediments suggest a vast drainage system that fed what researchers call the California River. It started in today’s Mojave Desert of southeast California and southwest Arizona and headed northeast all the way to northern Utah, some 55 million years ago.

Zircons with the same lead and uranium signatures were found in both old river sediments in northern Utah as well as rocks southwest Arizona. This means there had to be a mighty river to carry the minerals about 700 kilometres (435 miles) northeast.

“Zircons are very resistant to weathering and so can travel a long, long way,” commented geologist Christopher Henry of the University of Nevada in Reno and the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology. That’s why they are handy in reconstructing the ancient lay of the land. “Basically I’d say these people are right.”

The source of the zircons appears to be granite-like rocks in what were called the McCoy Mountains, the remains of which are in southwest Arizona. This would have been part of the headwaters of the California River (so named because that’s where it originated).

Rain and snow would have broken up a lot of McCoy Mountain’s rocks into sand, and that sand would have been carried into the river, and eventually all the way to present-day Uinta Basin in north-eastern Utah.

But it wasn’t enough to just find the zircons, said Steve Davis, the lead author of a paper on the research in the October issue of the journal Geology. He and his co-authors also had to play devil’s advocate and try to statistically disprove the connection between the distantly placed zircons.

“We had to prove how sure we were that they didn’t come from the same place,” said Davis. They failed to do that and so bolstered the opposite conclusion: that the rocks are originally from the same place and those in Utah were carried by a long river.

The zircons are not the only evidence of an opposite-running river, said Davis. There are also other studies which found what are called palaeocurrent indicators that basically tell geologists which direction the water was flowing at a given location in the ancient river.

Palaeocurrent indicators include such things as the angles at which river rocks are stacked, or the ways river bottom sand ripples are piled. Palaeocurrents in Utah and Arizona all suggest something very opposite the Colorado was going on 55 million years ago.

The zircons, on the other hand, give a broader picture of where the river started and how far it flowed, which, Davis reports, could have been up to 1,000 kilometres (621 miles).

 

Reference:

Steven J Davis, William R. Dickinson, George E. Gehrels, Jon E. Spencer, Timothy F. Lawton and Alan R. Carroll. The Paleogene California River: Evidence of Mojave-Uinta paleodrainage from U-Pb ages of detrital zircons. (2010) Geology, vol 38, 931-934.

• Women will be on the front lines of the increase in disease caused by heightened global temperatures and increased storm activity. The World Health Organisation estimiate that around 50 million women living in high malaria zones become pregnant every year, and around 10,000 of them and 200,000 of their babies die from malaria infection. The more the climate warms, the more malarial mosquitoes circulate and the more dire the risk to women.
• A 2007 study from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters in places where women’s rights are not protected. Considering that women’s rights are very commonly not protected as robustly as men’s, women in countries around the world face a bleak outlook as the climate changes and the frequency of natural disasters increases.
• Women are usually responsible for maintaining their families’ access to drinking water, which is less and less available to many in the developing world. According to a report by WHO, 1.2 billion people do not have access to safe water, and of those that do, most live far away from it. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, 42 percent of the population has to walk more than 30 minutes to get safe water. The more the climate warms, the farther they’ll have to go. And guess who does all that walking?
• Women’s lack of land rights and comparatively minimal access to microcredit means that they are simply less secure than men. When the going gets tough, women cannot depend on stable sources of income or external help. According to a study in the Lancet, women own less than 2 percent of all the world’s arable land. Further, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that in five African countries female small farmers got less than 10 percent of the credit that male small farmers received. Women’s comparative lack of assets and education makes their insecurity all the worse.

The fact is that women already get the short end of the stick, and that end is going to get shorter and shorter as the world warms.

But it isn’t just women who suffer from the world’s disregard of the inequalities they face. If women aren’t brought into the conversation about solutions in a meaningful way, the global community will have trouble slowing down that warming. Around the world, after all, women are heavily involved in all the tasks that use land and water resources — agriculture, animal husbandry, cooking, washing, hauling water. We won’t be able to engineer effective solutions without their input and cooperation.

How’s that for an emerging issue?

Growers in tropical Assam state, India’s main tea growing region, say rising temperatures have led not only to a drop in production but to subtle, unwelcome changes in the flavour of their brews.

The area in northeastern India is the source of some of the finest black and British-style teas. Assam teas are notable for their heartiness, strength and body, and are often sold as “breakfast” teas.

“Earlier, we used to get a bright, strong cup. Now it’s not so,” said L.P. Chaliha, a professional tea taster.

Rajib Barooah, a tea planter in Jorhat, Assam’s main tea growing district, agreed that the potent taste of Assam tea has weakened.

“We are indeed concerned,” he said. “Assam tea’s strong flavor is its hallmark.”

Tea growers want the Indian government to fund studies to examine the flavour fallout from climate change.

What Next??