22 October 2016, Climate News Network, Bolivian glaciers melt at alarming rate. A new study mapping the effects of dwindling glaciers on people living in Bolivia reveals rapid shrinkage and potentially dangerous glacial lakes. Between 1986 and 2014 – one human generation –the glaciers of Bolivia shrank by 43%, according to new research. This presents a problem in the long term for more than 2 million people who rely on glacial meltwater supply in the dry season, and immediate danger in the short term for thousands who might live below precarious glacial lakes. Glaciers are in retreat as the world warms − a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in response to the increasing combustion of fossil fuels. They are dwindling almost everywhere in the Andean chain, in Greenland, in Alaska and Canada, the Himalayas, across the entire mass of Central Asia,and everywhere in the tropics. Tropical glaciers But a new study in The Cryosphere, the journal of the European Geosciences Union, is one of the first to examine in detail precisely what this retreat could mean for the human communities in Bolivia, home to one-fifth of the world’s tropical glaciers. Researchers from two British universities and a Bolivian colleague examined NASA satellite images of the region and found that the area of the Bolivia Cordillera Oriental normally covered by glaciers fell from 530 square kilometres in 1986 to about 300 sq km in 2014 − a shrinkage of more than two-fifths. Read more here
Tag Archives: water
21 September 2016, Climate News Network, Dire climate impacts go unheeded. New scientific studies address lack of awareness of the adverse economic, social and biodiversity effects that climate change is already having. The social and economic impacts of climate change have already begun to take their toll – but most people do not yet know this. Politicians and economists have yet to work out how and when it would be best to adapt to change. And biologists say they cannot even begin to measure climate change’s effect on biodiversity because there is not enough information. Two studies in Science journal address the future. The first points out that historical temperature increases depress maize crop yields in the US by 48% and have already driven up the rates of civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa by 11%. Economic growth Hot weather in future could slow global economic growth rates by nearly 0.30 percentage points per year. Almost as surprising, according to Solomon Hsiang, principal investigator in the Global Policy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, is that nobody seems to be aware of these facts. “People get so used to hot days, since they happen all the time, that they never stop to consider that those days are costing them,” Professor Hsiang says. “But if people used different technologies or organised their lives differently to adapt to their climate, then we might be able to do dramatically better.” Read More here
21 September 2016, American Security Project, White House Takes Steps to Address the National Security impacts of Climate Change. This week, President Obama signed a new Presidential Memorandum directing that the impacts of climate change must be considered in the development of all national security-related doctrine, policies, or plans. National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a blog post detailing the plan. The directive will create a new Federal Climate and National Security Working Group tasked with sharing climate science across government and determining research and policy priorities to address these threats. It also directs agencies to make “Implementation Plans” that take into account the impacts climate change will have on human mobility (including migration and displacement), global water and food security, nutrition, public health, and infrastructure. It is important that the threat of climate change is addressed in this way, because climate change is not simply an issue that can be addressed on its own. It is an issue that affects all other national security threats. We know that there are many threats to America’s national security, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation, Russia to China, or even economic stagnation. But the truth is that climate change affects all these other threats as well. Unchecked, even the moderate warming that we’ve seen so far has had significant impacts on water, food, and energy security in certain regions around the world. It has begun to change disease patterns. It is beginning to drive migration. These changes, in turn, could affect state stability and cause collapse of governance in entire regions. Read More here
9 September 2016, The Conversation, EcoCheck: the Grampians are struggling with drought and deluge. Our EcoCheck series takes the pulse of some of Australia’s most important ecosystems to find out if they’re in good health or on the wane. The Grampians National Park is a large conservation reserve, sprawling across 168,000 hectares embedded in western Victoria’s agricultural landscape. With a rich cultural heritage and regionally important flora and fauna, it is a hugely significant area for conservation. But in recent years it has been subjected to a series of major wildfire events, a flood, and long periods of low rainfall. Our research shows that this has sent small mammal populations on the kind of boom-and-bust rollercoaster ride usually seen in arid places, not temperate forests.The fire and the flood We began studying the Grampians in 2008, investigating how small mammals had responded to a catastrophic wildfire that burned half of the national park in 2006. What started as a one-year study has turned into a long-term research program to investigate how the past few years of hypervariable rainfall and heightened bushfire activity have affected the animals that live in the park. Fortunately (for our study, at least), the beginning of our research in 2008 was in the middle of a long run of very poor rainfall years, as the Millennium Drought reached its height. The drought was broken at the end of 2010 by the Big Wet, which led to well-above-average rainfall and floods in the Grampians. But soon after, rainfall rapidly dipped back to below average. It has stayed there ever since. We also saw two more major fire events, in 2013 and 2014, which together with the 2006 fire burned some 90% of the Grampians landscape. Read More here