Desdemona Despair

Between 2000 and 2010, the worst drought ever recorded since Euro-American settlement hit the Colorado River Basin. Water levels in Lake Mead dropped to record lows. The drought not only threatened the supply of water to cities like Las Vegas, it also harmed the ecosystems and riparian areas that support countless fish, plants, and animals and endangered species, like the humpback chub and the southwestern willow flycatcher.

Climate models project that the decade-long drought that gripped the region may become the normal climate instead of the rare exception, perhaps as soon as the end of the 21st century (Barnett and Pierce 2009, Rajagopalan, et al., 2009). The threat is being taken seriously by the Bureau of Reclamation, which has developed a plan that brings all stakeholders together in an attempt to balance human needs for water while providing sufficient flows and habitat for sustainable fish, wildlife, and plant populations.

Similar challenges must be faced around the nation. Long-term records at Anvil Lake, a groundwater-fed lake in northern Wisconsin, highlight the importance of water levels to fish, wildlife, and plant species. Over centuries, the lake’s water level has risen and fallen. However, Anvil Lake’s water level became progressively lower during each succeeding dry period, especially during the most recent dry period (WICCI 2011). In the future, any water loss through evapotranspiration associated with warmer temperatures would be expected to exacerbate any drought effect in similar aquatic systems.

These examples hold an important lesson for adaptation strategies. To help plants, wildlife, and ecosystems adapt to a changing climate, it is not enough to focus just on the natural world. Ensuring that ecosystems have enough water in regions expected to experience more droughts will require working with farmers, municipalities, energy industries, among others, to reduce the overall demand for the increasingly scarce water.

National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy draft

30 January 2012 (ABC) – Lake Macquarie Council's effort to manage the impact of rising sea levels has again raised the ire of developer Jeff McCloy, this time over his plans to develop the former Pasminco smelter site.

A council flood study found thousands of lakeside properties would be in danger of flooding by 2100 due to rising seas.

Mr McCloy has already threatened a class action against the Council for devaluing waterfront properties.

But he says he is just been given a new set of sea level predictions for the development site at Boolaroo.

"They've adopted a different policy and given us different levels for that site because of the threat of the rising sea level in 90 years from now, which is a ridiculous number," he said

"The 100 blocks we were expecting and working on for all this time, it's going to cut them down by 20 or 30, unless there's an enormous amount of fill placed."

Developer concerned about sea level predictions

[Desdemona’s been following this story since the beginning: Mau forest evictees. It’s a true climate refugee tragedy and emblematic of the kinds of terrible decisions nations will be forced to make as large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.]

By Peter Kahare
24 January 2012

RIFT VALLEY, Kenya (IPS) – Six-year-old Victor Muruga points to a hole in the bush that he calls his "bedroom". "I sleep there, under that tree and my mother sleeps under that blanket," says Muruga.

Muruga is in a jovial mood as he prepares lunch for the family. The bubbly boy, his three-year old brother Ian Kimani and their mother had to initially spend five days in the bush after being transported here to Mumoi farm, enduring the scathing sun and biting cold as they waited for the government and Kenya Red Cross Society to provide them with tents.

Muruga's family are among the 4,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) affected by Kenya’s 2007/2008 post-election violence who live here on Mumoi farm in Subukia Township, 200 kilometres north west of Nairobi. Four years after the violence, they are yet to be allocated their one-hectare piece of land that the government promised all IDPs. […]

In the country’s 2011/2012 budget allocation, Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta set aside 60 million dollars for resettling IDPs. However, the process of resettlement has been characterised by corruption, tribalism and hostility to the IDPs.

Early last year, the government launched an investigation into a missing two million dollars that had been set aside for the resettlement IDPs, which had allegedly been misappropriated by officials in various ministries and even representatives of IDPs.

The 2007/2008 post-election violence displaced over 660,000 people, over half of whom were displaced in the Rift Valley Province. While more than 300,000 families have returned to their farms, and their ethnic homelands in Central, Nyanza and Western Provinces, some have sold the homes they were forced to flee from and bought land elsewhere.

There remain over 15,000 families displaced by the post-election violence awaiting their land settlements in Rift Valley Province, the largest province in Kenya. Each family has an average of five children.

"These are the people we recognise, plus the 5,710 families evacuated from the Mau Forest in 2009 who are camping in three major camps along the forest boundary," Mondo says. […]

Another politician, Luka Kiagen, a Member of Parliament for Rongai Constituency, in the Rift Valley Province, has been leading a section of elders to complain over the settlement of IDPs in Rongai.

He claims that 10,000 people from the Kikuyu community had settled in Rongai at the expense of the largely Kalenjin community who had been evicted from the Mau Forest.

"People displaced from Mau Forest who are residing along the border have been forgotten in the resettlement programme," Kigen told IPS.

The government maintains that there was no discrimination in the resettlement exercise.

"Such allegations are unfounded. It is not by choice that members of the Kikuyu community are the largest number of IDPs," Mondo told IPS.

Non-governmental organisations and civil societies have blamed the government for the continued delay in resettling IDPs.

"The IDPs issue has exposed the intolerance and divisions among communities. The government has not been willing to clear this blot on the face of Kenya. It has failed in upholding the constitution that guarantees security and accommodation for all Kenyans by false promises for four years.

"The government claims that there is no land for relocation. But look at the thousands of acres owned by politicians and lying idle in the country. Can’t they be bought by the government at least to settle the IDPs?" Ndung’u Wainaina, director of the International Center for Policy and Conflict, told IPS. […]

Four Years On, IDPs Remain in Camps

By Kiplang'at Kirui
27 January 2012

The Mau Forest Interim Co-ordinating Secretariat requires Sh3 billion to resettle 7,000 families in Maasai Mau block of Mau Forest Complex. Secretariat chairman Noor Hassan Noor said they have made formal request to the treasury for the funds before eviction exercise begins. Noor made the remarks yesterday during the Joint Enforcement Team workshop in Narok town.

He said that they launched a 100-day rapid response initiative in efforts to secure the forests still inhabited by settlers. "We have made requests to treasury for the funds and I have no doubt at all that the government will meet our proposal," said Noor. Noor said the secretariat uses Sh5 million every month to foot the bills of the joint enforcement team which guards the forest.

The team comprises officials from the regular and Administration Police, the Kenya Forest Service, the General Service Unit and the Narok County Council. Noor said the profiling and survey in the Maasai Mau forest, which is a trust land of Narok County Council, ended two years ago with some 15,000 people settled on the 46,278 hectare forest. He said that they have reduced destruction of the forest by 80 per cent from the time the conservation of the biggest water towers in the country started.

He refuted previous claims that the government has shelved the eviction of settlers in the forest saying the secretariat is using all scientific methods to restore the ecosystem without affecting the lives of the settlers. "We are using all methods to conserve the forest, but evicting the settlers is inevitable," said Noor.

He warned government officers who collude with illegal loggers to destroy forests that stern action will be taken against them. Noor also appealed to Kenyans to stop lighting fires in areas where there are forests. "I urge them to stop playing with fire in forest areas out of ignorance and neglect as the country is experiencing dry seasons," he said

About 15,000 settlers are settled on the 146,800 hectare-Maasai Mau. They encroached it through the extension and sub-division of group ranches which began in 1998. The Mau issue has put the Prime Minister Raila Odinga at loggerheads with a section of Rift Valley MPs led by Eldoret North MP William Ruto. The Rift MPs want all the Mau Settlers must be fully compensated or given alternative settlement before the evictions are effected.

MAU Secretariat Needs Three Billion Shilling to Resettle Families

By Marlowe Hood
29 January 2012

More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change.

Current projections based on computer models underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process, the researchers warned.

Wheat is harvested in temperate zones on more than 220 million hectares (545 million acres), making it the most widely grown crop on Earth.

In some nations, the grain accounts for up to 50 percent of calorie intake and 20 percent of protein nutrition, according to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), near Mexico City.

In 2010, drought and wildfires in wheat-exporting Russia pushed world prices of the grain to two-year highs, underscoring the vulnerability of global supplies to weather- and climate-related disruptions.

Greenhouse experiments have shown that unseasonably high temperatures -- especially at the end of the growing season -- can cause senescence, the scientific term for accelerated ageing.

Excess heat beyond the plant's tolerance zone damages photosynthetic cells.

Fluctuations in wheat yields in India have also been attributed by farmers to temperature, most recently a heat wave in 2010 blamed for stunting plant productivity.

To further test these experiments and first-hand observations, a trio of researchers led by David Lobell of Stanford University sifted through nine years of satellite data for the Indo-Ganges Plains in northern India and then used statistical methods to isolate the effects of extreme heat on wheat.

They found that a 2.0 Celsius increase above long-term averages shortened the growing season by a critical nine days, reducing total yield by up to 20 percent.

"These results imply that warming presents an even greater challenge to wheat than implied by previous modeling studies, and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce crop sensitivity to very hot days," the researchers concluded. […]

Wheat also faces another possibly climate-related threat: aggressive new strains of wheat rust disease have decimated up to 40 percent of harvests in some regions of north Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

Wheat rust is a fungal disease that attacks the stems, grains and especially the leaves of grains including wheat, barley and rye.

Global warming and increased variability of rainfall have weakened the plants even as these emerging rust strains have adapted to extreme temperatures not seen before, scientists say. […]

Climate-driven heat peaks may shrink wheat crops

By Captain Paul Watson
29 January 2012

I have been fighting the Canadian seal hunt since 1974. It’s been a long hard road after nearly four decades. During that time I have taken ships into the ice six times, in 1979, 1981, 1983, 1998, 2005, and 2008. I’ve led three helicopter campaigns in 1976, 1977, and 1995. During this time we chased sealing vessels out of the ice, blockaded sealing ships in harbor, walked for miles over treacherous ice conditions, confronting Canadian fisheries officers and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, debated Senators, Members of Parliament, Newfoundland Premiers, Fisheries Ministers and Prime Ministers. We’ve taken celebrities Brigitte Bardot, Richard Dean Anderson and Martin Sheen to the ice floes and we worked to have seal products banned worldwide. We’ve been arrested, beaten by police and by sealers, lost a ship, and we’ve been vilified across Canada as eco-terrorists, extremists and traitors.

We even devised a cruelty free, non-lethal sealing alternative of brushing off molting fur from the white coats because it has the same properties as eider down. The government rejected our alternative. The government wanted the seals to die.

But in the end we won!

The Canadian seal slaughter is commercial-dead and it will have no place in the 21^st Century. This anachronistic barbaric enterprise is being tossed into the dustbin of history where it belongs, and finally after a lifetime of struggle to end it, this obscene embarrassment is for all intents and purposes – dead.

It was a half a century ago when I was ten years old when I saw a seal clubbed to death on the shores of my native New Brunswick in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was my dream then to put an end to it and that dream has all but come true.

Last year in a ridiculous fit of pique, Canadian federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea set the kill quota at 400,000 despite knowing there was no viable market for this cruel and ecologically destructive product. The actual kill was less than 10% of that at 38,000 seal pups.

The sealers may want to kill seals but they are also practical enough to know that it makes little sense to kill them if there is no market for the pelts. Last year the entire industry brought in less than one million dollars and cost the Canadian taxpayers much more than that in subsidies, public relations, and free icebreaking services to the seal killers.

For the last few years the commercial seal slaughter has survived as a glorified welfare system supported by politicians indulging in all sorts of histrionic stunts, to promote it ranging from serving seal meat in the Parliamentary cafeteria to the Governor General sinking her teeth into a raw seal heart with blood dripping down her chin.

Thanks to the fact that seal products are banned in the USA, Europe and Russia, the worldwide market has crashed.

It has been a long, long fight and the credit for this goes to many organizations and individuals who have fought so long and so passionately to achieve this victory for these beautiful creatures.

The late Cleveland Amory and the Fund for Animals, Brian Davies and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Rebecca Aldworth and the Humane Society of the United States, Brigitte Bardot and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, PETA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Harp Seals.org and to the passionate crews who accompanied me to the ice, first with Greenpeace in 1976 and 1977 and after that with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

It was a struggle that began in the Sixties and now the commercial slaughter has ended and it will only be a few more years until the kills dwindle down to what the sadistic savages in the Magdalen Islands of Quebec and a few outposts of Newfoundland kill for recreation. […]

The Canadian Seal Hunt is Dead!  Long Live the Seals!

Baghdad, 27 January 2012 (UPI) – Iraq is facing worsening water shortages caused by the failure of successive postwar governments to ensure supplies and extensive dam-building in neighboring states that could trigger sectarian conflict.

"One prediction, which has yet to come true, has been made repeatedly by former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali since 1988: That the Middle East will at some point in the future see war break out over access to water," the Middle East Economic Digest observed.

"Boutros-Ghali thought an interstate war would occur because of disputes over the ownership of the Nile. This has yet to happen.

"But if policymakers in Baghdad do not act soon, water could well be the source of renewed strife, not between Baghdad and its neighbors, but between Iraq's already deeply divided population," the weekly warned.

"If water availability in the country continues to fall and the quality of what is on offer is not increased, the government will have no one to blame but itself."

International aid organizations have been reporting an increase in violent incidents concerning water supply.

This is happening against a worrying backdrop of mounting sectarian violence between Iraq's majority Shiites, who dominate the government and the security forces, and the minority Sunnis who lost power when Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was toppled after the U.S.-invasion of March 2003. […]

Iraq's water comes primarily from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Both rise in Turkey, which has constructed a chain of dams over the last decade, with more to come. This has drastically reduced the flow of water into Iraq.

Syria, which has also suffered because of the Turkish dams, and Iran have been building dams too, further cutting the river flows from the north and the east into a country that until the late 1950s was a breadbasket for the Arab world.

Iraqi farmers recently blocked border crossings from Iran east of Baghdad to protest Tehran's diversion of the al-Wind River that irrigates one of Iraq's largest agricultural areas.

"Cutting water is a crime against life," the farmers' leader declared.

"Iran has diverted 15 tributaries to the Tigris since 2006 alone," observed Casey Walther, who, until earlier this month, was UNESCO's American water projects coordinator in Iraq.

Two new Iranian dams could potentially cut off water to two of Iraq's main dams at Haditha in the northwest and Mosul in the north.

"I visited them last summer and were already down to about 50 percent of capacity," said Walther. […]

With tension over the dwindling water supply escalating, Walther said he fears the worst.

"I'm concerned that when you look at the hydrological makeup of the country, the water comes from the northwest and travels down to the southeast, which is pretty much the country's ethnic fault lines," he observed. […]

Iraq water crisis could stir ethnic clash

By Margaret Kriz Hobson
28 January 2012

A group of 573 scientists today released a letter (PDF) to President Obama asking him to stop oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic waters until experts can study the proposed oil development's impacts on sensitive Arctic ecosystems and native subsistence activities. …

"We want to make it a high priority for the administration to really focus in on the safety, the science, the challenges in the Arctic and the need for more of a comprehensive innovative research and monitoring program that guides decisions about where and how drilling can take place," said Marilyn Heiman, director of Pew Environment Group's U.S. Arctic program.

Pew's campaign to slow oil development in the U.S. Arctic began in December with online ads and broadcast commercials, including advertisements after the State of the Union address on CNN and MSNBC. Next week, the group is also running ads in The New York Times and other media outlets.

[Here’s the text of the letter.]

January 23, 2012

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Secretary Salazar
Department of the Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240

Dear President Obama and Secretary Salazar,

Decisions about resource extraction on the Outer Continental Shelf should be based on sound scientific information. Your administration first displayed a strong commitment to science during the President’s inaugural address in 2009. This commitment was underscored by Secretary Salazar’s announcement on March 31, 2010 when, as a part of a three-pronged approach to Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas development, he directed the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to conduct an evaluation of science needs and gaps in the U.S. Arctic Ocean. The evaluation would help the Department of the Interior determine how best to “…conduct scientific analyses to gather the information we need to develop resources in the right places and the right ways.”1

The USGS completed its task in June 2011, releasing USGS Circular 1370: An Evaluation of the Science Needs to Inform Decisions on Outer Continental Shelf Energy Development in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, Alaska. The report is commendably objective and broad-ranging. We are grateful to the Secretary of the Interior for commissioning it and to the authors of and contributors to the report for their hard work. The report’s 62 recommendations indicate many pressing needs including:

• further research on the physical and biological environment of the region,
• studies on specific aspects of the life history of important species,
• the development of a comprehensive monitoring program that can detect environmental change and identify the drivers of such change,
• the synthesis of existing information in order to answer key questions including the identification of ecologically significant areas,
• an assessment of cumulative impacts from multiple sources,
• greater inclusion of the traditional knowledge of Arctic residents,
• the creation of a data management system that provides timely sharing of information from all research activities, and
• a closer integration of scientific studies and findings with decisions being made about offshore industrial activity.

We, the undersigned 573 research scientists, call upon the Administration to follow through on its commitment to science by acting on the USGS recommendations. Doing so prior to authorizing new oil and gas activity in the Arctic Ocean will respect the national significance of the environment and cultures of U.S. Arctic waters and demonstrate the value that your Administration places on having a sound scientific basis for managing industrial development of the Outer Continental Shelf.

[Signatures]

Hundreds of scientists ask Obama to halt drilling

By arevamirpal::laprimavera
28 January 2012

Toshihiro Takatsuji, associate professor at Nagasaki University announced the result of his measurement of radioactive cesium in the air at an international symposium, and said a high level of cesium-134 (11,300 becquerels/kg) was detected from the dust collected in the filter paper in early April last year in Nagasaki City, 1,000 kilometers away from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

It took him 9 months to reveal what he had known in April last year. Not bad, I guess, considering there are many others who still hold back information that they obtained in March and April last year while they eagerly wait for the acceptance of their papers at international peer-review journals. Some information could have made a big difference in how people responded to the nuclear crisis if it had been revealed in a timely manner.

But maybe not in this case, as I cannot compare this number with any other number. How about the measurement of air filter papers in Fukushima or Tokyo during the same time period? How about the measurement in Nagasaki prior to the nuclear accident? What are we comparing this Nagasaki number to?

Chugoku Shinbun (1/26/2012):

福島第１原発から約千キロ離れた長崎市の大気観測所の吸引調査で、事故１カ月後に高い数値の放射性物質が確認されていたことが分かった。広島市南区の広島 大広仁会館で２５日にあった同大原爆放射線医科学研究所（原医研）の国際シンポジウムで長崎大の高辻俊宏准教授が報告した。

It has been revealed that the suction survey at an atmospheric observatory in Nagasaki City, about 1000 kilomters from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, showed a high level of radioactive materials one month after the nuclear accident. Toshihiro Takatsuji, associate professor at Nagasaki University reported at an international symposium by Hiroshima University Research Institute of Radiation Biology and Medicine (RIRBM) held on January 25 at Hiroshima University in Hiroshima City.

高辻准教授は事故後、１週間ごとに装置で吸引した空気や吸引口のろ紙の付着物のセシウムの量を調査。２０１１年３月２３日から７月２７日までの結果を報告した。

Professor Takatsuji measured the amount of radioactive cesium in the air captured by the air suction apparatus and on the filter paper at the suction entrance every week after the nuclear accident. He reported the results from March 23 to July 27, 2011.

４月６日からの週が特に高く、ろ紙に付着したちりなどのセシウム１３４の濃度は福島県飯舘村の土壌に相当する１キロ当たり１万１３００ベクレルだった。

The week beginning on April 6 registered the highest level of radioactive cesium. The density of cesium-134 on the dust caught by the filter paper was 11,300 becquerels/kg, equivalent to the level seen in the soil in Iitate-mura in Fukushima Prefecture. […]

11,300 becquerels/kg of cesium-134. No information about cesium-137, if it was detected at all in the air or on the filter paper.

I dispute the reference to Iitate-mura, though. From what I have read, the density of radioactive cesium in Iitate-mura's soil is much higher (50,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium). […]

Now They Tell Us: Detection of High-Level Cesium-134 in Nagasaki City in April 2011

Prominent doom blogger Gail Zawacki, of Wit’s End fame, has succumbed to the demands of her high-school-aged kid and created a new website for her collection of photographs and scientific papers. Here’s how Gail describes the new site:

I hadn't paid much attention to climate change, even though I saw An Inconvenient Truth when it first appeared in the theaters. I had the impression that climate change was going to affect places far away, in the distant future.

That changed in August of 2008. To my astonishment, the leaves on the trees wilted abruptly.  All of them, all at once, were hanging straight down, limp and lifeless.  I had never seen anything like it, and nobody else seemed to notice or care. I realized only a major impact could affect them so profoundly.

I started to read about climate change, and to write scientists and foresters, trying to learn what was happening to the trees. I assumed that a very long-term decline in precipitation and snow cover must be causing the trees to die off. In the fall of that year, the conifers began producing cones in excess, and dropping their needles, which I read is a sign of imminent death.

Once I started to educate myself about our changing climate, I quickly realized that the time to stop burning fuel was probably around 1960.  Amplifying feedbacks are now well underway, and unstoppable, as is ocean acidification.  There is no question that we have set in motion a catastrophe that can only result in mass extinctions, perhaps even of ourselves.

In the course of grieving over this realization, I continued to study the trees, perplexed by the dramatic and suddenness of symptoms of distress. In the summer of 2009, I came to the conclusion that drought can not explain tree decline, because young trees being watered in nurseries, and annual plants - even heat tolerant ornamentals from much hotter latitudes - exhibited the same damaged foliage as the season progressed.

Simply by process of elimination it became clear that the only component of the environment that all plant life shares in common is the atmosphere.  Reluctantly, I became convinced that what is injuring vegetation is air pollution.  Like many people, I assumed that because the air looks clear, it is clean.  Ozone, however, is invisible, just like oxygen, nitrogen, and CO2 … and the constant background levels are increasing every year.  I quickly discovered, to my amazement, that there has been a vast amount of scientific research on this topic and in fact, it is quite well known to government agencies, foresters, and agronomists that ozone is harmful to human health, crops, and trees. […]

Check out Gail’s new site, if you’re interested in the effects of pollution on the world’s forests. It’s your one-stop-shop for all of the scientific evidence that you need to foresee a planet without trees.

Dead Trees … Dying Forests