Mighty caribou herds dwindle, warming blamed

Many caribou herds have lost more than half their number from the maximums of recent decades.

Climate change is piling problem upon problem on the caribou, he said, including bogging them down in thawing permafrost and lengthening the wildfire season, burning up their food.

They believe that the insidious impact of climate change, its tipping of natural balances and disruption of feeding habits, is decimating a species that has long numbered in the millions, and supported human life in Earth’s most inhuman climate.

East Africa's drought - A catastrophe is looming

Governments are at their wits’ end to keep their hungry people alive

THIS year’s drought is the worst in east Africa since 2000, and possibly since 1991. Famine stalks the land. The failure of rains in parts of Ethiopia may increase the number needing food handouts by 5m, in addition to the 8m already getting them, in a population of 80m. The production of Kenyan maize, the country’s staple, is likely to drop by one-third, hitting poor farmers’ families hardest. The International Committee of the Red Cross says famine in Somalia is going to be worse than ever. Handouts are urgently needed by roughly 3.6m Somalis, nearly half the resident population (several million having already emigrated during years of strife). In fractious northern Uganda cereal output is likely to fall by half. Parts of South Sudan, Eritrea, the Central African Republic and Tanzania are suffering too. Rich countries are being less generous than usual. The UN’s World Food Programme says it has only $24m of the $300m it needs just to feed hungry Kenyans for the next six months.

The drought cycle in east Africa has been contracting sharply. Rains used to fail every nine or ten years. Then the cycle seemed to go down to five years. Now, it seems, the region faces drought every two or three years. The time for recovery—for rebuilding stocks of food and cattle—is ever shorter. And if the rains fail before the end of this year, an unimaginably dreadful catastrophe could ensue.

Grappling with the Anthropocene: Scientists Identify Safe Limits for Human Impacts on Planet

Scientists propose a list of planetary boundaries for human impacts ranging from biodiversity loss to the global nitrogen cycle

By David Biello

The scale of mankind's impact on the globe is becoming more and more apparent: We have achieved a species extinction rate to rival great extinction events of all geologic time as well as a rapidly acidifying ocean, dwindling ice caps, and even sinking river deltas, a new study from scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveals. No wonder then that some geologists and other scientists have dubbed the modern epoch the Anthropocene. And now an international group of 28 scientists has taken a preliminary stab at setting some concrete environmental thresholds for the planet.

Provocative New Study Warns of Crossing Planetary Boundaries

The Earth has nine biophysical thresholds beyond which it cannot be pushed without disastrous consequences, the authors of a new paper in the journal Nature report. Ominously, these scientists say, we have already moved past three of these tipping points.

by carl zimmer

Human civilization has had a stable childhood. Over the past 10,000 years, as our ancestors invented agriculture and built cities, the Earth remained relatively stable. The average global temperature fluttered slightly, never lurching towards a greenhouse climate or chilling enough to enter a new Ice Age. The pH of the oceans remained steady, providing the right chemical conditions for coral reefs to grow and invertebrates to build shells. Those species, in turn, helped support a stable food web that provided plenty of fish for us humans to catch. The overall stability of the past 10,000 years may have played a big part in humanity’s explosion.

Early Warning Signals Of Change: 'Tipping Points' Identified Where Sudden Shifts To New Conditions Occur

What do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth's climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common?

According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead.

In the paper, Martin Scheffer of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and co-authors, including William Brock and Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., found that similar symptoms occur in many systems as they approach a critical state of transition.

"It's increasingly clear that many complex systems have critical thresholds -- 'tipping points' -- at which these systems shift abruptly from one state to another," write the scientists in their paper.

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Journal reference:

1. Marten Scheffer, Jordi Bascompte, William A. Brock, Victor Brovkin, Stephen R. Carpenter, Vasilis Dakos, Hermann Held, Egbert H. van Nes, Max Rietkerk and George Sugihara. Early-warning signals for critical transitions. Nature, 2009; 461 (7260): 53 DOI: 10.1038/nature08227

Great Barrier Reef Said to Face Catastrophic Damage

Catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s most extensive bank of coral and a magnet for skin divers, may be unavoidable if global warming continues unchecked, Australian officials said.

B.C. Sockeye Salmon Migration Touches Record Low as Waters Warm

The sockeye-salmon migration to British Columbia’s Fraser River has collapsed to a record low for the second summer in three, raising concern among native Indians that the species’ survival may be threatened.

Iraq in throes of environmental catastrophe, experts say

Iraqis cover their faces during one of Baghdad’s increasingly frequent dust storms. Officials say decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on the ecosystem.

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising

JUNEAU Alaska — Global warming conjures images of rising seas that threaten coastal areas. But in Juneau, as almost nowhere else in the world, climate change is having the opposite effect: As the glaciers here melt, the land is rising, causing the sea to retreat.

Australia's Dry Run : Murray-Darling Basin

What will happen when the climate starts to change and the rivers dry up and a whole way of life comes to an end? The people of the Murray-Darling Basin are finding out right now.

Climate Change Impacts Revealed: Disease in Peru

Global warming is hitting Peru hard: More water stress, more migration, more disease.

In tropical countries like Peru, health experts are keeping a close eye on climate change. Rising temperatures can change the way diseases behave, while collateral effects — from the retreat of glaciers that provide vital drinking and irrigation water to more frequent, intense storms and flooding — increase the burden on developing economies.

As diseases like dengue, bartonellosis and malaria spread, pressures mount on already understaffed, underfunded health services. As crops dry up and farmers migrate to urban shantytowns lacking clean water and basic sanitation, the burden is amplified.

"If the environmental impacts are unavoidable, the health sector needs to be mobilized so that the health impacts become avoidable," said Dr. Carlos Corvalán, Pan American Health Organization senior adviser on sustainable development and environmental health in Brazil.

Chris Jordan's Photographs The Waste and Environment

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Growing pollution leads to "global dimming"

Visibility on clear days has declined in much of the world since the 1970s thanks to a rise in airborne pollutants, scientists said on Thursday.

They described a "global dimming" in particular over south and east Asia, South America, Australia and Africa, while visibility remained relatively stable over North America and improved over Europe, the researchers said.

Aerosols, tiny particles or liquid droplets belched into the air by the burning of fossil fuels and other sources, are responsible for the dimming, the researchers said.

Carbon emissions creating acidic oceans not seen since dinosaurs

Human pollution is turning the seas into acid so quickly that the coming decades will recreate conditions not seen on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs, scientists warned.

The rapid acidification is caused by the massive amounts of carbon dioxide belched from chimneys and exhausts that dissolve in the ocean. The chemical change is placing "unprecedented" pressure on marine life such as shellfish and lobsters and could cause widespread extinctions, the experts say.

Climate change accelerates water hunt in U.S. West

There is very little water left untapped and global warming, the gradual increase of temperature as carbon dioxide and other gases retain more of the sun's heat, has created new uncertainties.

Global warming pushes extremes. It prolongs drought while sometimes bringing deluges the parched earth cannot absorb. California Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow says two things keep him up at night: drought and flood.

"It isn't that drought is the new norm," said Snow. "Climate change is bringing us higher highs and lower lows in terms of water supplies."

Climate 'hitting Europe's birds'

Climate change is already having an impact on European bird species, according to British scientists.

Details of the study by an international team of researchers have been published in the journal Plos One.

Some birds are expected to do well as temperatures rise, but these are in the minority, the researchers write.

"Overall, the trend is towards net loss," said a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which contributed to the study.

The researchers found birds that are expected to do well as temperatures rise had indeed increased in number since the 1980s.

But some 75% of species studied by the researchers had declined in the same period.

Penguins in peril as food search turns into marathon

Fluctuation in fish stocks caused by climate change forces Magellanic penguins to forage farther afield while their starving mates look after the chicks

Bleak forecast on fishery stocks

The world's fish stocks will soon suffer major upheaval due to climate change, scientists have warned.