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Climate Change: 30% life forms...
Topic Started: Apr 5 2007, 11:33 AM (140 Views)
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Climate change could eliminate up to 30 per cent of life forms Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
Published: Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Climate change is rearranging the global landscape, threatening to wipe out 20 to 30 per cent all the life forms on earth and flood hundreds of millions people out of their homes, according to the authors of an international report to be released Friday.

Their draft report, obtained by CanWest News, says Canada will face big problems as temperatures rise - twice as many forest fires, vast tracks of melting permafrost, deadly heat waves - but they pale beside the grim forecast for the world's poorer countries and citizens.

"Hundreds of millions of people are vulnerable to flooding due to sea-level rise," says the report. By 2100, it says rising waters will drown low-lying, and densely populated coastal regions in Asia and small island countries.

It says one sixth of the world's people also face growing freshwater shortages as snow-packs shrink and glaciers recede.

Ecosystems and their inhabitants - mangroves, coral reefs, salmon runs, polar bears - are also at risk, the report says: "Roughly 20-30 per cent of species are likely to be at high risk of irreversible extinction if global average temperature exceeds 1.5-2.5 C," which could occur within decades given current greenhouse gas levels. It says many more plants, bugs, birds and mammals could disappear if temperatures climb much beyond that.

Delegates from Canada and more than 120 other countries are meeting in Brussels this week to finalize and approve the report to be released Friday. It is the second of four studies to be released this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of close to 2,000 scientists. They assess available evidence to produce "consensus" reports on climate change and what should be done about it.

The first report, released in February, said global warming is "unequivocal" and human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, is the main driver causing temperatures to climb. That report prompted Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other leaders to promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions associated with the rising temperatures. Friday's report will put more pressure on governments to cut emissions and launch programs to try adapt.

The scientists say change is already clearly underway: "Many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans, are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases," says the final draft of the scientists 21-page summary-for-policymakers.

Melting glaciers and unstable permafrost, earlier spring runoff and bird migrations are now evident, the scientists say. But they say this is just the start of much bigger and irrevocable changes to come.

The report says there will be some benefits - more shipping through the Arctic, fewer people freezing outside in the winter, and Canadian farms and forests expanding northward.

But the list of negatives is much longer - millions more people will go hungry as droughts and crop failure worsen, billions of people will face drinking water shortages and, by the end of this century, hundreds of millions of people in "mega-deltas" in Asia and on small islands could be inundated by oceans that are rising as temperatures climb and ancient ice sheets melt.
more at link..
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/st...51b1c30&k=31613
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Climate change more dire than feared

Thu, April 5, 2007

A report out today will suggest rising sea levels could force millions from low-lying areas.

By BOB WEBER, CP
Dire predictions expected later this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may in fact be too conservative, according to new Arctic sea ice data.

A U.S. study on northern sea ice found not only did 2006 have the second-lowest amount of ice on record, but also the ice is retreating faster than the panel's climate models have predicted.

"The model forecast may be underestimating what we could expect in future years," Walt Meier, a climatologist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said yesterday.

Meier's group tracks the annual extent of the Arctic sea ice by the end of the northern winter, defined as March 31.

This year, 14.7 million square kilometres of Arctic ocean around the globe was covered by at least 15 per cent ice. That's only a little more than last year's 14.5 million square kilometres, which was the lowest figure ever recorded.

The average from 1979 to 2000 was 15.7 million square kilometres.

"It's basically continuing that trend," said Meier.

But his group also compared their measurements, which were based on observations from satellite images, with predictions generated by climate models developed by the more than 1,000 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That panel is expected to release a report tomorrow that details the anticipated consequences of climate change. Leaked versions of the report suggest those effects include rising sea levels that could force hundreds of millions of people in low-lying, largely poor nations from their homes.

more at link..
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Internati...924543-sun.html
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U.N. Looks at Climate Change Threats
By Edith M. Lederer
April 5, 2007 8:03AM


Last month, an international panel of scientists presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan to combat global warming and climate change, warning that failure would produce a turbulent 21st century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease. Diplomats are meeting with scientists this week in Brussels to endorse the global warming study, which will guide policymakers for decades to come.

The U.N. Security Council put climate change on its agenda for the first time, warning global warming could be a catalyst for new conflict around the world.
The council said it would hold a high-level meeting later this month on how changing weather patterns could threaten international security.

"The traditional triggers for conflict which exist out there are likely to be exacerbated by the effect of climate change," Britain's U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, the council president, said Wednesday.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett will chair the April 17 meeting and has invited the 14 other council nations to be represented at ministerial level, Jones Parry said. No statement or resolution is expected from the meeting, the council's first on the subject,

Last month, an international panel of scientists presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan to combat climate change, warning that failure would produce a turbulent 21st century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease, expanding oceans and displaced coastal populations.

Diplomats are meeting with scientists this week in Brussels to endorse the study, which will guide policymakers for decades to come.

more at link..
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?...id=011000M7BSWV
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http://www.rep-am.com/story.php?id=21598
Inuit villagers see effect of warming first hand
Saturday, March 31, 2007
By Sam Cook
Copyright © 2007 AP Wire
Simeonie Keenainak, a high school shop teacher in Pangnirtung, looks on as Ely's Will Steger and Simon Qaminirq Of Iglulik lash new crossbars to Qaminirq's dogsled.
Keenainak, 57, has generously donated his shop's space for the sled-rebuilding project. He shouts a question across the room to Steger and Qaminirq, who are taking a week-long break in Pangnirtung on their Global Warming 101 Expedition across Baffin Island.
"You guys gonna show the movie and tell people what's going on up here?" asks Keenainak, who teaches at Attagoyuk High School.
"That's what we're gonna do, try to tell the world about what's happening," Steger says.
What's happening up here, say Keenainak and virtually every other Inuit you speak to, is that the climate is changing. They believe they've seen evidence in the land that they are so closely tied to and they're afraid the rest of the world isn't paying attention.

Steger is. That's why he and seven others began a three-month traverse of Baffin Island on Feb. 24. They hope to produce a documentary of the trip and the Inuit they interview along the way to persuade U.S. leaders that they need to take action quickly to mitigate the effects of global climate change.
Keenainak, a hunter and fisherman, has seen many changes in recent years.
"The ice conditions," he says. "The ice don't get thick like they used to, not just because the weather is getting warmer but because the sea water is getting warmer. The lakes, too, don't get as thick. It seems like the world is getting warmer from the bottom, too."
Theo Ikummaq, 52, another expedition member from Iglulik, sees other signs.
"Little streams are flowing, even in March," he says, sitting at a community reception for the expedition in Pangnirtung. "Streams, not rivers, which shoundn't be.
"The polar bears are wandering inland because there's no (sea) ice for them to hunt on."
Inuit hunters are adapting as best they can, Ikummaq says, but in communities where many families depend on "country food" to eat or to sell, it can mean lean times.
"Fishing for halibut (turbot) -- it's gone," Ikummaq says. "Because of the (lack of) ice, they can't get to the fish. That's a lot of money that's not happening.
"(Inuit) are not going to places they used to go for fish or seal or caribou. They can find them, but maybe it's steeper, less convenient."

Elders in the communities, whom other Inuit depend on to tell them when or where to hunt, are confounded by these changes over the past 10 years or more.
"They cannot predict the weather or the ice or the movements of animals," said Geela Reid, a 37-year-old Inuit woman who was on a flight from Ottawa, Ontario, to Iqaluit, Nunavut. "My father could predict the weather. He was a good hunter in our area. He'd wake up in the morning and look at the sky and say where the wind direction would be that afternoon. But now they can't do that. It's coming from all kinds of directions."
"We have seals basking on the ice in February. It's unheard of. It shouldn't be," said Billy Otooangat, heritage services officer for Auyuittuq National Park based in Pangnirtung.
"In summertime, the water seems more rough. It's windy on Cumberland Sound," says a middle-aged woman who asked to be identified onny as "a resident of Pangnirtung, a wise woman." "And the sun is very hot, burning the skin more. In winter, the ice condition is much different than when I was a young girl. It was always solid. Now it's open sometimes, or the ice is thin. We used to get ice in October. Now the water takes longer to freeze up. It freezes in December now. That's a very big change."
Luke Airut, 65, of Iglulik and his team of Eskimo dogs are part of Steger's expedition, too. He speaks only Inuktitut, the Inuit language, but Qaminirq interpreted as Airut talked about changes he's seen in his lifetime.
"Ever since he was a teenager," Qaminirq says, interpreting, "he used to collect some water from a bucket on a lake. Now there's no lake there. And he would see more glaciers in those early years, but they've melted."

Elders in Iglulik are proud that Airut is part of the expedition and talking about the climate change they see, Qaminirq says.
Climate change is a major topic of discussion and political activism in Canada's North. Nobel Prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Iqaluit has made headlines in Nunavut newspapers for testifying about global warming before the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., on March 1. Political candidates in northern villages pledge to push for legislation that will slow climate change.
People in these remote Inuit communities of Canada's Arctic feel their voice is not being heard.
"I'm sure someone from the government has come up to interview people, but we don't hear back from them," says Arctic Bay's Reid. "We don't see results or actions or anybody trying to do anything about it."
That's partly why the Steger-led expedition has been well-received.
"We've got the (Inuit) culture behind us," Steger says during the weeklong layover at Pangnirtung. "I think it's a real opportunity for us and the culture together. They need our voice, and we need theirs.
"Lemeca Akicita, wau welo!"
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Climate change in North America: Heat waves, storm surges, water shortages

Written by EDITH M. LEDERER
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Chicago and Los Angeles will likely face increasing heat waves. Severe storm surges could hit New York and Boston. And cities that rely on melting snow for water may run into serious shortages.
These are some of the findings about North America in a report by hundreds of scientists that try to explain how global warming is changing life on Earth. The scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of their findings on global warming last Friday and outlined details of the report focusing on various regions on Tuesday.


According to the panel, global warming is already having an effect on daily life but when the Earth gets a few degrees hotter, the current inconvenience could give way to danger and even death. The North American impact will be felt from Florida and Texas to Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories.

``Canada and the United States are, despite being strong economies with the financial power to cope, facing many of the same impacts that are projected for the rest of the world,'' Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program which co-founded the panel, said in a statement.

He said the findings underline that the best way to reduce the effects of global warming is ``deep and decisive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change in the first place.''

The panel warned that shifts in rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, rising temperatures, increased demand and reduced supplies of water in some places are likely to increase tensions between users _ industry, agriculture and a growing population.

``Heavily-utilized water systems of the western U.S. and Canada, such as the Columbia River, that rely on capturing snowmelt runoff, will be especially vulnerable,'' the report said.

A temperature warming of a few degrees by the 2040s is likely to sharply reduce summer flows, at a time of rising demand, it said.

By then, the panel estimated that Portland, Oregon, will require over 26 million additional cubic meters of water as a result of climate change and population growth, but the Columbia River's summer supply will have dropped by an estimated 5 million cubic meters.

Meanwhile, it said, just over 40 percent of the water supply to southern California is likely to be vulnerable by the 2020s due to losses of the Sierra Nevada and Colorado River basin snow packs.

The panel also said ``lower levels in the Great Lakes are likely to influence many sectors'' and exacerbate controversies over diverting water to cities such as Chicago, and the competing demands of water quality, lake-based transport, and drought mitigation.

Cities could also be at risk from high tides and storm surges, it said.

Near the end of the 21st century, under a strong warming scenario, the New York City area could be hit by increasingly damaging floods from surges, ``putting much of the region's infrastructure at risk,'' the panel said.

Boston's transportation network may also be at risk from a sea level rise and the increased probability of a powerful storm surge, it said.

As for the impact of rising temperatures, the panel said a 25 percent increase in heat waves is projected for Chicago later this century, while the number of heat-wave days in Los Angeles is projected to increase from the current 12 per year to between 44 and nearly 100.

By the mid-21st century, regions in Alaska and Canada's Northwestern Territories are likely to be at ``moderate to high risk'' due to coastal erosion and thawing of permafrost including the report said.

North American producers of wood and timber could suffer losses of between $1 billion and $2 billion a year during the 21st century if climate change also sparks changes in diseases, insect attacks and forest fires, the panel said.

http://www.planetsave.com/ps_mambo/The_New...s_200704118705/
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