Climate Change and Global Prosperity

A new report from the United Nations Development Program warns that if drastic measures are not taken to prepare nations for the impacts of climate change, the economic progress of the world's developing countries could stall or even be reversed by 2050.

This year's annual report, approaches the issue of climate change and environmental degradation from the standpoint of economic development and the eradication of poverty.Environment Clean Generations "Even if someone's a climate skeptic, this report says, 'Put that aside for a second,' " said William Orme, a spokesman for the United Nations agency. "If you believe in something like a moral commitment to the global community and in getting people out of poverty, we must address these environmental problems."

Each region of the world faces unique challenges between now and 2050, the report warns, but most are linked to environmental complications arising from climate change.

Sub-Saharan Africa could suffer the gravest inequities if the worst-case scenarios come to pass, it adds. Many Africans rely solely on natural resources for their livelihoods and lack a means of coping with environmental hazards like air and water pollution and poor sanitation, the report notes.

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With Population Growth and Climate Change Making US Water Worse

Climate change and population growth in the United States will make having enough fresh water more challenging in the coming years, an expert on water shortages said on Wednesday.

"In 1985-1986 there were historical (water level) highs and now in less than 25 years we are at historical lows. Those sorts of swings are very scary," said Robert Glennon, speaking at the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference in Erie, Pennsylvania. Environment Clean Generations

Glennon, a professor at Arizona State University and the author of "Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It," said that that according to climate experts, shorter, warmer winters mean less ice and greater exposure to the air, leading eventually to more water evaporation.

"We think about water like the air -- infinite and inexhaustible but it is very finite and very exhaustible," Glennon said.

"When you have a shorter ice season you have great exposure to the air and more evaporation. As temperatures go up it is very troubling," Glennon said. "The cycles are going to become more acute which is very troubling."

This past summer, Ohio Governor John Kasich vetoed a bill that would have allowed unrestricted removal of five million gallons of water from Ohio's lakes and rivers every 90 days.Environment Clean Generations

Kasich, a Republican who has criticized government regulations, surprised some political observers by following the advice of organizations that felt the bill would allow lake levels to become dangerously low.

Glennon agrees the bill would have set the stage for diversion in other lakes. "It would have been open season on the Great Lakes."Environment Clean Generations

Glennon doesn't believe that water diversion whether by pipeline, desalinization or more drilling are long-term answers. He thinks conservation, water reuse, and better agriculture practices bolstered by higher, seasonally-adjusted water costs will bring things in line.Environment Clean Generations

"We pay less for water than we pay for cell phone service or cable television," he said. "All of our incentives are wrong."

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Climate Warming, Animals and Plants Shrinking

Contradicting a century-old hypothesis, increased global carbon dioxide levels seem to be shrinking plants instead of fostering their growth. Animals from polar bears to marine iguanas are being stunted too.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius published calculations predicting that doubling CO2 levels would trigger a global temperatures increase of about 5-6 degrees C.

"We would then have some right to indulge in the pleasant belief that our descendants, albeit after many generations, might live under a milder sky and in less barren surroundings than is our lot at present," Arrhenius said during a lecture that same year.

But it seems reality hasn't lived up to Arrhenius' verdant dreams of vigorous vegetation.

"Plants were expected to get larger with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide," but changes in temperature, humidity and nutrient availability seem to have trumped the benefits of increased CO2, said researchers from the National University of Singapore in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Forty-five percent of the species studied now reach smaller adult sizes than they did in the recent past. The researchers, led by Jennifer Sheridan and David Bickford, point to climate change induced warmer temperatures and changing habitats are possible culprits in the case of the shrinking creatures.

"We do not yet know the exact mechanisms involved, or why some organisms are getting smaller while others are unaffected". "Until we understand more, we could be risking negative consequences that we can't yet quantify."

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The change was dramatic in cold-blooded animals. Only two decades of warmer temperatures were enough to make reptile runts.

An increase of only one degree Celsius caused nearly a 10 percent increase in metabolism. Greater use of energy resulted in tiny tortoises and little lizards.

Fish are smaller now too. Though overfishing has played a part in reducing piscine proportions, the researchers also point to experimental results showing that warmer temperatures also stunt fish growth.

Warm-blooded animals weren't immune from the climate change caused size change.

Many birds are now less bulky, including passerines (the order that includes cardinals, blue jays, and crows) as well as goshawks and gulls.

Mammals have been miniaturized too. Soay sheep are scrawny. Red dear are runts. And polar bears are puny, compared to historical records.

This isn't the first time this has happened in Earth's history.

Fifty-five million years ago, a warming event similar to the current climate change correlated to beetles, bees, spiders, wasps and ants shrinking by 50 to 75 percent over several thousand years.

Woodrats and squirrels also shrunk by about 40 percent.

That event, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, happened over a longer time than the current global warming.

The speed of modern climate change could mean, "organisms may not respond or adapt quickly enough", especially those with long generation times.

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Irrigation Might Raise Sea Level

Ocean levels have risen several inches over the last century, and that's only likely to increase going forward. Most of that is related to climate change — but now scientists may have discovered a hidden factor in all this: irrigation. 

At first glance, that might seem surprising. After all, irrigation is just moving water from one area to another, to allow people to live in naturally dry or arid areas. The problem is that not all irrigation comes from water already on the surface - a lot of it is now extracted from deep underground, introducing tons of extra water that would not otherwise be a part of the planet's water cycle.

Researchers from the US Geological Survey calculated that the last century saw over a thousand cubic miles worth of water extracted from underground and used for irrigation purposes. 

That was enough water to boost ocean levels by about half an inch, accounting for 12.6% of the total sea level rise in the 20th century.

And all this isn't likely to stop anytime soon. Ground water extraction has skyrocketed in the last decade, with some estimates say we're now bringing up about 34 cubic miles each year. That's enough to increase sea levels by .016 inches each year, which is 13% of the current rise. 

While melting ice and other climate-related factors remain responsible for the vast majority of the sea level increase, this adds a new wrinkle to how we use irrigation and ground water going forward.

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Why Scientists Say End Is Near?

In a purely symbolic but still unsettling move, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the minute hand on its Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. On the 60-year-old Doomsday Clock, midnight is nuclear destruction, the end of life as we know itManhattan Project physicists, who developed the atomic bomb for the United States, instituted the clock in 1947 after their bombs wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Since then, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS), which boasts 18 Nobel Prize winners among its leaders, has moved the hand on the clock 18 times. Each move symbolizes the group's current analysis of the world's chances of survival in the face of political, environmental and technological developments.

The most notable factor to the keepers of the clock is the state of nuclear affairs -- whether the world is in a proliferation trend or a disarmament trend. The latest move puts us at 11:55 p.m. In an announcement on Wednesday, the BAS cited several reasons for its dark prediction regarding humankind's proximity to obliteration.

The BAS believes the world has entered a "second nuclear age," the first nuclear age having ended with the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991 by the United States and Russia. Since then, the tide has slowly turned away from a global decision to limit nuclear-weapons technology and toward the creation of new nuclear states.

The United States and Russia currently have more than 26,000 nuclear weapons ready to launch at a moment's notice, and the United States recently established a policy that makes small nuclear bombs viable weapons against certain security threats. In the meantime, says the BAS, the world's nuclear watch dogs have done little but loudly protest, and as a result, the world faces the most dangerous nuclear climate since the Cold War.

In the last five years alone, Pakistan and India were locked in a nuclear standoff; North Korea has declared itself a new member of the club by detonating a nuclear bomb; Iran is widely believed to be on the path to a nuclear weapon; and the growing presence not only of nuclear arsenals but also nuclear-power-plant technology has made the sale and possession of nuclear materials nearly impossible to fully track and regulate. The idea that a small group could get its hands on enriched plutonium or uranium is far more realistic today than it has ever been.

Nuclear concerns have always comprised the bulk of factors moving the hand on the clock. But in 2007, actual climate for the first time rivaled nuclear climate for greatest threat. In moving the clock to 11:55, the BAS made a hard case for the destructive power of climate change.


The organization now considers global warming to be only slightly less threatening to the future of life on Earth than nuclear holocaust. Citing the melting of ice in Greenland, desertization of once-fertile areas, pollution of the air and oceans and other ecological nightmares, the BAS believes that climate change will ultimately lead to widespread nuclear wars over habitable land that will end up destroying whatever is left of the Earth.

The predictions are dire, to say the least. In addition to nuclear and climate concerns, the scientists of the BAS also point to emerging technologies in the area of bioscience and nanoscience as contributing to the symbolic "five minutes to the end." The ultimate uses of recent, giant advances in both genetics and nanotechnology have yet to be determined.

Genetic engineering may cure cancer; it may also create a super-human weapon. Nanotechnology may build an elevator to space or perform more precise surgery than ever thought possible; it may also result in a bomb the size of a gnat.

But all is not lost. See The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Web site to read about some of the BAS-recommended changes the world can make in order to move the Doomsday Clock back.
The closest the clock has ever been to midnight is 11:58 p.m., which was in 1953, the year both the United States and Russia tested hydrogen bombs. Hydrogen bombs are more powerful than the atomic bombs developed by the Manhattan Project physicists.