Desdemona Despair

By Clar Ni Chonghaile, www.guardian.co.uk
25 May 2012

NAIROBI – Even as drought persists in parts of Kenya's arid north, intense rains are claiming lives in other parts of the country – flooding slums in the capital Nairobi, sweeping away hikers in the Rift Valley, and destroying crops.

Many Kenyans shake their heads in dismay at the increasingly extreme and volatile weather, which is costing money as well as lives in east Africa's economic powerhouse.

Wilbur Ottichilo, an environmental scientist and member of parliament, wants to equip Kenya to deal with these extremes. He has drafted a bill to set up an independent Climate Change Authority to advise on adapting to global warming and cutting the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

He describes the move as a landmark for the continent – Nigeria is the only other African country to have approved a bill to set up a similar body. But President Goodluck Jonathan has not yet signed the bill into law.

Ottichilo's bill is ready for debate and he is confident it will go before parliament soon. He says more than 100 MPs, out of 222, have already expressed support.

"The [Climate Change] authority will coordinate all climate change activities in the country because climate change cuts across all sectors," Ottichilo told the Guardian.

It will establish a national registry for energy and carbon emissions reporting by public and private entities, and set targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Anyone found guilty of committing an offence – such as failing to comply with targets – could be fined up to two million shillings (£15,000) or jailed for up to five years, or both.

The authority will also be able to draw up incentives to promote renewable energy sources.

Ottichilo says action is urgent, citing the heavy seasonal rains that have pounded the country for several weeks after starting late in mid-April instead of mid-March.

"Instead of having uniform, long distribution, it has come in a short block of intense rains so this is going to have a major impact on food security," Ottichilo said

Crops will not have matured when the rains end, and shortages may really bite when the dry season returns, bringing drought to some areas. […]

"For us, climate change is not an abstract academic study. It is a day-to-day, bread-and-butter question," said Professor Patricia Kameri-Mbote, an environmental lawyer and chairperson of the advisory board at Strathmore Law School in Nairobi. She advised Ottichilo on the bill. […]

Kenya's bid to become the first African nation to set up a climate authority

By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer
28 May 2012

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away - the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.

Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.

But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.

One of the largest and speediest fish, Pacific bluefin tuna can grow to 10 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. They spawn off the Japan coast and swim east at breakneck speed to school in waters off California and the tip of Baja California, Mexico.

Five months after the Fukushima disaster, Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York and a team decided to test Pacific bluefin that were caught off the coast of San Diego. To their surprise, tissue samples from all 15 tuna captured contained levels of two radioactive substances - ceisum-134 and cesium-137 - that were higher than in previous catches.

To rule out the possibility that the radiation was carried by ocean currents or deposited in the sea through the atmosphere, the team also analyzed yellowfin tuna, found in the eastern Pacific, and bluefin that migrated to Southern California before the nuclear crisis. They found no trace of cesium-134 and only background levels of cesium-137 left over from nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s.

The results "are unequivocal. Fukushima was the source," said Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who had no role in the research. […]

Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific to US

By HIROKO TABUCHI and MATTHEW L. WALD
26 May 2012

TOKYO – What passes for normal at the Fukushima Daiichi plant today would have caused shudders among even the most sanguine of experts before an earthquake and tsunami set off the world’s second most serious nuclear crisis after Chernobyl.

Fourteen months after the accident, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic.

The public’s fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new catastrophe, now that the three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns are in a more stable state, and as frequent quakes continue to rattle the region.

The worries picked up new traction in recent days after the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found a slight bulge in one of the walls of the reactor building, stoking fears over the building’s safety.

To try to quell such worries, the government sent the environment and nuclear minister to the plant on Saturday, where he climbed a makeshift staircase in protective garb to look at the structure supporting the pool, which he said appeared sound. The minister, Goshi Hosono, added that although the government accepted Tepco’s assurances that reinforcement work had shored up the building, it ordered the company to conduct further studies because of the bulge.

Some outside experts have also worked to allay fears, saying that the fuel in the pool is now so old that it cannot generate enough heat to start the kind of accident that would allow radioactive material to escape.

But many Japanese scoff at those assurances and point out that even if the building is strong enough, which they question, the jury-rigged cooling system for the pool has already malfunctioned several times, including a 24-hour failure in April. Had the outages continued, they would have left the rods at risk of dangerous overheating. Government critics are especially concerned, since Tepco has said the soonest it could begin emptying the pool is late 2013, dashing hopes for earlier action.

“The No. 4 reactor is visibly damaged and in a fragile state, down to the floor that holds the spent fuel pool,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute and one of the experts raising concerns. “Any radioactive release could be huge and go directly into the environment.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, expressed similar concerns during a trip to Japan last month.

The fears over the pool at Reactor No. 4 are helping to undermine assurances by Tepco and the Japanese government that the Fukushima plant has been stabilized, and are highlighting how complicated the cleanup of the site, expected to take decades, will be. The concerns are also raising questions about whether Japan’s all-out effort to convince its citizens that nuclear power is safe kept the authorities from exploring other — and some say safer — options for storing used fuel rods.

“It was taboo to raise questions about the spent fuel that was piling up,” said Hideo Kimura, who worked as a nuclear fuel engineer at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in the 1990s. “But it was clear that there was nowhere for the spent fuel to go.” […]

Spent Fuel Rods Drive Growing Fear Over Plant in Japan

1. Potomac River
Pollution and Clean Water Act rollbacks have national implications.

2. Green River
Water withdrawals could threaten a water-strapped region.

3. Chattahoochee River
New dams and reservoirs threaten to dry up the river flow.

4. Missouri River
Outdated flood management putting public safety at risk.

5. Hoback River
Natural gas development putting clean water, world-class fishing and wildlife in danger.

6. Grand River
Natural gas development threaten clean water and public health.

7. Skykomish River
New dam endangering wildlife habitat and recreation.

8. Crystal River
Dams and water diversions putting fish, wildlife, and recreation at risk.

9. Coal River
Mountaintop removal coal mining endangering clean water and public health.

10. Kansas River
Sand and gravel dredging could cause severe harm to clean water, wildlife.

America's Most Endangered Rivers for 2012

By Fred Guterl 
25 May 2012

Adapted from The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, by Fred Guterl (Bloomsbury USA, 2012).

The eminent British scientist James Lovelock, back in the 1970s, formulated his theory of Gaia, which held that the Earth was a kind of super organism. It had a self-regulating quality that would keep everything within that narrow band that made life possible. If things got too warm or too cold—if sunlight varied, or volcanoes caused a fall in temperatures, and so forth—Gaia would eventually compensate. This was a comforting notion. It was also wrong, as Lovelock himself later concluded. "I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilization are in grave danger," he wrote in the Independent in 2006.

The world has warmed since those heady days of Gaia, and scientists have grown gloomier in their assessment of the state of the world's climate. NASA climate scientist James Hanson has warned of a "Venus effect," in which runaway warming turns Earth into an uninhabitable desert, with a surface temperature high enough to melt lead, sometime in the next few centuries. Even Hanson, though, is beginning to look downright optimistic compared to a new crop of climate scientists, who fret that things could head south as quickly as a handful of years, or even months, if we're particularly unlucky. Ironically, some of them are intellectual offspring of Lovelock, the original optimist gone sour.

The true gloomsters are scientists who look at climate through the lens of "dynamical systems," a mathematics that describes things that tend to change suddenly and are difficult to predict. It is the mathematics of the tipping point—the moment at which a "system" that has been changing slowly and predictably will suddenly "flip." The colloquial example is the straw that breaks that camel's back. Or you can also think of it as a ship that is stable until it tips too far in one direction and then capsizes. In this view, Earth's climate is, or could soon be, ready to capsize, causing sudden, perhaps catastrophic, changes. And once it capsizes, it could be next to impossible to right it again.

The idea that climate behaves like a dynamical system addresses some of the key shortcomings of the conventional view of climate change—the view that looks at the planet as a whole, in terms of averages. A dynamical systems approach, by contrast, consider climate as a sum of many different parts, each with its own properties, all of them interdependent in ways that are hard to predict.

One of the most productive scientists in applying dynamical systems theory to climate is Tim Lenton at the University of East Anglia in England. Lenton is a Lovelockian two generations removed— his mentors were mentored by Lovelock. "We are looking quite hard at past data and observational data that can tell us something," says Lenton. "Classical case studies in which you've seen abrupt changes in climate data. For example, in the Greenland ice-core records, you're seeing climate jump. And the end of the Younger Dryas," about fifteen thousand years ago, "you get a striking climate change." So far, he says, nobody has found a big reason for such an abrupt change in these past events—no meteorite or volcano or other event that is an obvious cause—which suggests that perhaps something about the way these climate shifts occur simply makes them sudden.

Lenton is mainly interested in the future. He has tried to look for things that could possibly change suddenly and drastically even though nothing obvious may trigger them. He's come up with a short list of nine tipping points—nine weather systems, regional in scope, that could make a rapid transition from one state to another. […]

Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok [Excerpt]

By Michel Rose, with additional reporting by Gus Trompiz and Muriel Boselli; editing by Jason Neely
24 May 2012

PARIS (Reuters) – China spurred a jump in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to their highest ever recorded level in 2011, offsetting falls in the United States and Europe, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday.

CO2 emissions rose by 3.2 percent last year to 31.6 billion metric tons (34.83 billion tons), preliminary estimates from the Paris-based IEA showed.

China, the world's biggest emitter of CO2, made the largest contribution to the global rise, its emissions increasing by 9.3 percent, the body said, driven mainly by higher coal use.

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist told Reuters.

Scientists say ensuring global average temperatures this century do not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is needed to limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.

They believe that is only possible if emission levels are kept to around 44 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020. […]

"I think it would be unrealistic to think that there will be major breakthroughs very soon," Birol said.

"Climate change is sliding down in the international policy agenda, which is definitely a worrying trend." […]

"In Japan, the rise is almost exclusively due to higher fossil fuel use. This is a very important indication of what could happen if there was a move away from nuclear energy in other countries," he said. […]

Asked about prospects for global carbon emissions in 2012, Birol said:

"It would come as a very, very big surprise to me if we saw a significant decline in CO2 emissions."

Global CO2 emissions hit record in 2011 led by China: IEA

25 May 2012 (BBC) – Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has vetoed parts of a controversial bill which regulates how much land farmers must preserve as forest.

Among the 12 articles which President Rousseff rejected is an amnesty for illegal loggers.

Brazil's farmers' lobby had argued that an easing of environmental restrictions would promote food production.

Environmentalists oppose the law, which the say will lead to further destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

The bill was approved by the Brazilian Congress a month ago. Environmentalists had urged President Rousseff to veto the entire bill.

President Rousseff rejected 12 articles from the bill and made 32 modifications to the text.

The exact details of the revised document have not yet been made public, but Brazilian Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said the government wanted to avoid diminishing protected areas of the Amazon and other sensitive ecosystems.

The version of the bill passed by the Brazilian Congress last month would have allowed for huge areas of the country, which had been illegally logged before July 2008, to be opened up to farming.

It would also have allowed farming closer to riverbanks, which are especially vulnerable to erosion if trees are chopped down.

Officials said Ms Rousseff had rejected the article dealing with the riverbanks, ensuring their continued protection. […]

Brazil President Rousseff vetoes parts of forest law

By Frank Langfitt
22 May 2012

Mongolia, the land of Genghis Khan and nomadic herders, is in the midst of a remarkable transition. Rich in coal, gold, and copper, this country of fewer than 3 million people in Central Asia is riding a mineral boom that is expected to more than double its GDP within a decade. The rapid changes simultaneously excite and unnerve many Mongolians, who hope mining can help pull many out of poverty, but worry it will ravage the environment and further erode the nation's distinctive, nomadic identity.

Second of four parts

The Central Asian nation of Mongolia has untold riches in copper, coal, and gold, which could help many of its nearly 3 million people — more than one-third of whom live in poverty.

But mining is also reshaping Mongolia's landscape and nomadic culture. Camel and goat herders worry that new mega-mines will siphon off precious water in an area that's already suffering from the effects of climate change.

Mijiddorj Ayur, whose livestock graze near the Oyu Tolgoi mine, tends camels in a stretch of Mongolia's South Gobi province that's a moonscape of sand and gravel. He relies on the animals for meat, wool and milk, and they rely on hand-pumped well water to survive.

"When we come to the well, we can see the level of the well water is 8 inches lower than it used to be," says Mijiddorj, 76, who wears a golden, double-breasted robe called a deel and a brimmed felt hat.

Mijiddorj — Mongolians typically go by one name — says the well water has dropped in the last several years because of lower rainfall, while the grasslands are shrinking because of rising temperatures from climate change.

Now, he sees another potential threat: Oyu Tolgoi, a giant mine that will need huge amounts of water to process copper ore. The company has already drilled test wells near where Mijiddorj's camels drink.

"My greatest fear is we won't have water," he says. "I don't care about the gold or the copper, I'm just afraid there won't be water." […]

Mongolia's Dilemma: Who Gets The Water?

BONN, Germany, 24 May 2012 (AP) – U.N. climate talks ran into gridlock Thursday as a widening rift between rich and poor countries risked undoing some advances made last year in the decades-long effort to control carbon emissions that scientists say are overheating the planet.

As so often in the slow-moving negotiations, the session in Bonn bogged down with disputes over technicalities. But at the heart of the discord was the larger issue of how to divide the burden of emissions cuts between developed and developing nations. Developing nations say the industrialized world - responsible for most of the emissions historically - should bear the brunt of the emissions cuts while developed nations want to make sure that fast-growing economies like China and India don’t get off too easy. China is now the world’s top polluter.

“There is a total stalemate,” said Artur Runge-Metzger, the chief negotiator for the European Union.

The negotiations in Bonn were meant to build on a deal struck in December in Durban, South Africa, to create a new global climate pact by 2015 that would make both rich and poor nations rein in emissions caused by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels. But on the next-to-last day of two weeks of talks there was little sign of progress, as different interpretations emerged on what, exactly, was agreed upon last year.

“There is distrust and there is frustration in the atmosphere,” Seyni Nafo, spokesman for a group of African countries, told The Associated Press.

The European Union claims China and other developing countries are backsliding on commitments made in Durban to bring the discussion on emissions cuts from both rich and poor nations into one forum, instead of the current structure, which has two parallel negotiation tracks. Developing countries - backed by climate activists - accuse the U.S., EU and other industrialized nations of trying to evade commitments made in previous negotiations and shift responsibilities for tackling climate change to the developing world.

“Developed countries like the U.S., Japan, Canada and Russia … have consistently blocked references to the existing legal principles, while continuing to ignore the fact that their meager emission cut targets expose the world’s most vulnerable people to climate change’s devastating effects,” said Mohamed Adow, a senior climate change adviser at Christian Aid.

Meanwhile, emissions are going up, not down.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency said Thursday that carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached a record high of 31.6 gigatons in 2011, a 3.2 percent increase from the year before.

Despite improving on its energy efficiency, China accounted for the biggest contribution to the global increase, with emissions growing by 720 million tons, or 9.3 percent, the IEA said.

U.S. emissions fell by 1.7 percent, “primarily due to ongoing switching from coal to natural gas in power generation and an exceptionally mild winter,” the agency said, while Japan’s emissions rose 2.4 percent as it increased the use of fossil fuels in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. […]

UN climate talks deadlocked in Bonn as divisions between rich and poor nations reopen