Geoengineering our climate is not a ‘quick fix

A press release from the University of Leeds: The deliberate, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system is not a “quick fix” for global warming, according to the findings of the UK’s first publicly funded studies on geoengineering. The results of three projects – IAGP, led by the University of Leeds; SPICE, led by the University of Bristol; and CGG, led by the University of Oxford – are announced at an event held at The Royal Society, London, on 26 November 2014.

Professor Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change at the University of Leeds, and the principal investigator of the Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals (IAGP) project, said: “Our research shows that the devil is in the detail. Geoengineering will be much more expensive and challenging than previous estimates suggest and any benefits would be limited.

“For example, when simulating the spraying of sea salt particles into clouds to try to brighten them, we found that only a few clouds were susceptible and that the particles would tend to coagulate and fall out before reaching the cloud base.”

In September 2009, The Royal Society published a report, Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty. It influenced research worldwide, identified important gaps and called for a major UK funding programme into geoengineering. The IAGP and SPICE projects were funded the next year, and the CGG project followed in 2012.

IAGP is the UK’s first interdisciplinary research study into the controversial issue of geoengineering. It has brought together a range of expertise – climate modelling, philosophy and engineering – in addition to understanding public perceptions, to assess geoengineering within wider societal values.

“Cleverly designed simulations create less necessity for real-world testing. My favourite part of the research involved creating  a virtual reality in which we tried to rescue Arctic sea ice by dumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from Stratotanker aircraft flying out of Svalbard in Norway,” said Professor Forster. “Issues around monitoring and predicting the effects of our actions led to huge indecision and highlighted how challenging it would be to ever try and deploy these techniques in the real world.”...

Image from the University of Leeds

New method for quickly determining antibiotic resistance

A press release from Uppsala University: Scientists from Uppsala University, the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm and Uppsala University Hospital have developed a new method of rapidly identifying which bacteria are causing an infection and determining whether they are resistant or sensitive to antibiotics. The findings are now being published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.

‘Clinical use of the method would mean that the right antibiotic treatment could be started straightaway, reducing unnecessary use of antibiotics,’ says Professor Dan I. Andersson of Uppsala University, who headed the study jointly with Professor Mats Nilsson of SciLifeLab in Stockholm and Stockholm University.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing medical problem that threatens human health all
over the world. Today, many people are dying because of infections caused by resistant bacteria. When an infected person is treated with antibiotics, ‘empirical therapy’ is usually provided. This means that the choice of antibiotic is based on the resistance situation of the bacteria in a large population (such as the Swedish population), rather than on the resistance, if any, of the bacteria in the infected person’s body. The result is sometimes selection of an antibiotic drug that is ineffective against the bacteria concerned, because the latter is resistant to the drug chosen. This, in turn, boosts the use of antibiotics, especially what are known as ‘broad-spectrum’ antibiotics that work on many types of bacteria. One possible solution to these problems would be for us to have reliable methods of quickly and easily identifying the bacterial species causing the infection and its resistance pattern, and apply the correct treatment immediately.

Professor Andersson continues: ‘This is just what we’ve been working on in our study. We have developed a new method that permits identification of both the species and the resistance pattern of bacteria in urinary infections in less than four hours. By comparison, the resistance determination done at present takes one to two days.’...

Agar plate with colonies, image from NOAA

Sea level rise won’t only affect infrastructure

Scoop via Forest & Bird (New Zealand): The independent conservation organisation Forest & Bird is asking the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) to widen the focus of her next report on climate change-driven sea level rise.

A preliminary report on sea level rise was released by the PCE today. The PCE will release another report next year on the impacts of sea level rise on the most vulnerable areas of coastline around the country, and the risks to infrastructure in those areas.

Forest & Bird Group Manager Campaigns and Advocacy Kevin Hackwell says the next report should also take into account the impacts of sea level rise on our natural coastal ecosystems, and recommend the best ways to deal with sea level rise.

He says some critical natural features could be changed forever by sea level rise. “For example the huge Kaipara Harbour north of Auckland covers 947 square kilometres at high tide, with nearly half of that area exposed as mudflats and sandflats at low tide,” Kevin Hackwell says.

...“Quite a few of our shore birds breed just above the current high tide level on our open coasts or at the head of estuaries. For instance the four remaining nesting sites of New Zealand’s Seabird of the Year, the fairy tern, could be wiped out by storm surges,” Kevin Hackwell says.

“We would also like to see the PCE make recommendations on how sea level rise should be dealt with. Building extensive sea walls is likely to be very expensive, in many places unrealistic, and in the long run may create more problems than they would solve....

Sphinx Rock in Marie's Leg Cove, New Zealand, shot by Pseudopanax, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license 

Bringing ebola tests up to speed

IRIN: Ebola in West Africa is believed to have erupted almost a year ago in southern Guinea, but was confirmed by the French Pasteur Institute only in March 2014, by which time it had killed 60 people and was suspected to have crossed the border into Liberia and Sierra Leone.

While it now takes just a few hours to diagnose Ebola, the rate and scale of the outbreak (in which more than 14,000 cases have been reported so far in West Africa, Europe and the US) still outpace the hours-long tests, necessitating even quicker diagnoses.

Currently in West Africa, samples have to be transported to a laboratory where the commonly used test takes 4-6 hours between set-up and results. Poor roads, and lack of electricity and properly functioning health systems are some of the obstacles to timely diagnoses.

“Getting specimens to the lab can take days and getting the result to clinicians and patients can also take several days. So the time between taking samples and receiving the result can be as long as four days,” Margaret Harris, a spokesperson with the World Health Organization (WHO), told IRIN.

WHO on 18 November called for rapid diagnostic kits to overcome the complex and lengthy lab tests. Safe and easy-to-use kits would help quickly isolate Ebola patients from others who present with similar early symptoms but have other ailments....

Hotter summers are coming to Mumbai, and it won't be pretty

Shruti Navindran in the Guardian (UK): By some projections, India’s financial capital, Mumbai, will experience “unprecedented heat” within the next two decades. Last June, the IPCC Fifth Assessment report warned of larger “near-term increases in seasonal mean and annual mean temperatures” in the region. That spells longer, more frequent bouts of extreme heat, elevated minimum temperatures, and warmer winters. Last month, meanwhile, the journal Nature published a meta-analysis using 39 climate models to predict “dates of departures” when local temperatures would exceed historical extremes recorded over the previous 150 years. They figured Mumbai’s date with the inferno could come as early as 2034 if there was no change in global carbon output.

Though all of us are all sensitive to heat, and quick to react when it climbs above our comfort levels, our knowledge of how it might affect our health doesn’t really go beyond sunstrokes and fainting spells. A 2008 paper by medical geographer Rais Akhtar and environmental epidemiologist Sari Kovats spells out the dubious gifts that climate-change exacerbated heat is likely to bring Asian cities. This includes an uptick in deaths from cardio-respiratory disease, heat-related illness and death, increased rates of potential transmission of vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria, and a shrinking in the quantity and quality of available water, further amplifying the burden of disease. Researchers have also found that climate change-enhanced heat and humidity are conducive to the spread of falciparum malaria, the disease’s deadliest strain.

No one is likely to suffer the ill effects of this heat more than the 7.25 million slum-dwellers who’ve made Mumbai their home, and who comprise well over half the city’s population. “Slum-dwellers face a double burden: they face the crisis, and if they talk about it, they face evictions,” said Sheela Patel, a social worker who has helped the city’s shack and slum dwellers access suitable housing and infrastructure for two decades. Akhtar notes that slums, due to density, lack of vegetation and materials used in construction, tend to be heat traps “exacerbated by the proximity of city structures, vehicle exhaust emissions, and industrial activity”....

A slum in Mumbai, shot by Sthitaprajna Jena, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

New technology may speed up, build awareness of landslide risks

A press release from Oregon State University: Engineers have created a new way to use lidar technology to identify and classify landslides on a landscape scale, which may revolutionize the understanding of landslides in the U.S. and reveal them to be far more common and hazardous than often understood.

The new, non-subjective technology, created by researchers at Oregon State University and George Mason University, can analyze and classify the landslide risk in an area of 50 or more square miles in about 30 minutes - a task that previously might have taken an expert several weeks to months. It can also identify risks common to a broad area rather than just an individual site.

And with such speed and precision, it reveals that some landslide-prone areas of the Pacific Northwest are literally covered by landslides from one time or another in history. The system is based on new ways to use light detecting and ranging, or lidar technology, that can seemingly strip away vegetation and other obstructions to show land features in their bare form.

“With lidar we can see areas that are 50-80 percent covered by landslide deposits,” said Michael Olsen, an expert in geomatics and the Eric HI and Janice Hoffman Faculty Scholar in the OSU College of Engineering. “It may turn
out that there are 10-100 times more landslides in some places than we knew of before.

“We’ve always known landslides were a problem in the Pacific Northwest,” Olsen said. “Many people are just now beginning to realize how big the problem is.”…

This massive landslide near Oso, Washington, in March, 2014, killed 43 people and was one of the most deadly in U.S. history. (Photo by Jonathan Godt, courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey)

‘Monster’ fracking wells guzzle water in drought-stricken regions

Anastasia Pantsios in EcoWatch: The fracking industry likes to minimize the sector’s bottomless thirst for often-scarce water resources, saying it takes about 2-4 million gallons of water to frack the average well, an amount the American Petroleum Institute describes as “the equivalent of three to six Olympic swimming pools.” That’s close to the figure cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well.

But a new report released by Environmental Working Group (EWG) located 261 “monster” wells that consumed between 10 and 25 million gallons of water to drill each well. Among the conclusions EWG teased out of data reported by the industry itself and posted at fracfocus.org is that between April 2010 and December 2013, these 261 wells consumed 3.3 billions of water between them, a average of 12.7 million gallons each. And 14 of the wells topped 20 million gallons each.

“It’s far more relevant to compare those figures to basic human needs for water, rather than to swimming pools or golf courses,” said EWG’s report. “The 3.3 billion gallons consumed by the monster wells was almost twice as much water as is needed each year by the people of Atascosa County, Texas, in the heart of the Eagle Ford shale formation, one of the most intensively drilled gas and oil fields in the country.”

And proving that everything really is bigger in Texas, that’s where most of these monster wells were located, hosting 149 of them. Between them they consumed 1.8 billion gallons of water. The largest was located in Harrison County on the east Texas border, where in March 2013, Sabine Oil & Gas LLC drilled a well using more than 24.8 million gallons of water. Irion County in west central Texas had the most monster wells with 19 averaging water use of 12.9 each. And Texas also had what EWG described as the “dubious distinction” of using more fresh water in fracking, consuming 21 million gallons in 2011 alone….

The Jonah Gasfield in Wyoming, shot by Peter Aergst of the Wilderness Society, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 4.0 license

210 million people benefit from mangroves-associated fisheries

Wetlands International: Some 210 million people live in low elevation areas within 10 km of mangroves and many of these directly benefit from mangrove-associated fisheries. Yet, these people are often unaware of the key role mangroves may play, especially if the associated fisheries are offshore.

A new study by Wetlands International, The Nature Conservancy and the University of Cambridge, launched today at World Fisheries Day, concludes that mangrove conservation and restoration in areas close to human populations will render the greatest return on investment with respect to enhancing fisheries.

The fisheries value of mangroves is site specific as it depends on how many fish a mangrove produces, how many fish are subsequently caught by humans, and then what the fisheries value is, both in economic terms, as a food supply or through the livelihoods that they support.

As demands for fish continues to rise with the increase of coastal populations and rapidly growing economies, understanding where mangrove-associated fish productivity is highest is critical. Well-known species that rely on mangroves in one way or another include crabs, prawns, mullet, herring, anchovy, snappers and groupers….

Mangroves in Cuba, shot by Manuel Dohmen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0

Tibetan mega-dam begins operation

Terra Daily via AFP: China has begun generating electricity from Tibet's biggest ever hydropower project, state-run media reported, the latest dam development on Himalayan rivers which has stoked fears in neighbouring India.

The first generating unit of the 9.6 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) Zangmu Hydropower Station, which stands more than 3,300 metres above sea level, went into operation on Sunday, China's official Xinhua news agency said.

The dam on the Yarlung Zangbo river -- known as the Brahmaputra in India, where it is a major waterway -- will be 116 metres (381 feet) high when completed next year, according to reports.

It will have a total generating capacity of 510,000 kilowatts, Xinhua said, making it the largest dam ever built on the Tibetan plateau.

"The hydropower station will solve Tibet's power shortage, especially in the winter," Xinhua quoted an official from the Tibet Electric Power Co. as saying. India has previously expressed concern about damming the Brahmaputra, one of the largest Himalayan rivers and a lifeline to some of India's remote, farm-dependent northeastern states....

An aerial view of the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, shot by Akarsh Simha, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

Almost complete loss of glaciers in the Andes expected by 2080

J. Won Park in Arirang: Most glaciers in the Andes will be gone by the year 2080. That's the worst case scenario painted by the World Bank in its latest climate change report.

The report says the world's average temperature could rise by four degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if the world doesn't take appropriate steps to stop global warming. The report, which mostly focuses on Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, says glaciers have already significantly retreated in the Andes.

It says that, if the trend continues, cities around the mountain range could be at risk of flooding and freshwater supplies could start to dry up. The grim projection goes on to say that, if the average global temperature rises by more than four degrees Celsius, sea levels will rise by almost 60 centimeters.

This would mean an increased risk of storms and tropical cyclones, especially for low-lying countries and small island states. The report also predicts that, in the Middle East and North Africa, warmer average temperatures will threaten already scarce water resources and negatively affect crop yields....

The Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina, shot by Jorge Láscar, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

Tanzania needs over $1 billion for climate change

East African Business Week: The government has established that it needs massive financial support to the tune of over $1 billion annually by 2030 coupled with technological support to address climate change adaptation, a feature also approved by the Tanzania technological needs assessment 2010.

The technological support includes concrete actions on adaptation consistent with the NCSS commitment by the international community both through the convention process and bilateral engagement to support national efforts for climate resilient economic growth.

Richard Muyungi of the Vice President’s Office United Republic of Tanzania said last week that about 8% of the land area of Dar es Salaam 140,000 people and economic assets worth more than $170 million are below the 10m contour line in potentially vulnerable areas, with 31,000 people considered at risk.

“By 2030, without adaptation, this will increase to more than 100,000 people and over $400 million assets and rise further in later years. We are worried because large proportion of GDP is associated with climate sensitive sectors, particularly agriculture whereas rainfall decreases by up to 15% and there is no adaptation average maize yields could decrease by up to 16% by 2030 a loss of around 1 million tonnes a year and 25 - 35% by 2050 equivalent to 2 to 2.7 million tonnes per year,” Muyungi affirmed...

A 2011 flood in Dar es Salaam, shot by Muddyb Blast Producer at Swahili Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

New global disaster reduction strategy must include vulnerable people

Jessica Hartog at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Last week, international experts on disaster reduction met in Geneva to develop a new global framework to make the world more resilient to increasing natural disasters.

It is clear that disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons and floods are on the rise and have huge impacts. The U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) estimates that in the last 20 years, 1.3 million people have been killed by disasters. Of these deaths, 93 percent were in developing countries, highlighting how the poor are disproportionately vulnerable to disasters.

But there is more to the story than mortality rates. In the last 20 years, around 4.4 billion people have been affected in some way or another by disasters.

For people whose assets have been damaged or destroyed, farmers whose harvests have been lost, or communities whose road infrastructure has been damaged - cutting them off from their work, schools and markets -  economic losses are thought to have totalled $2 trillion in the same period.

It is expected that disasters will only continue to increase if we do not take measures to stop this trend. Major drivers are climate change and the growth of cities in areas that are already exposed to floods, tropical storms and earthquakes. This is why an internationally agreed disaster risk reduction strategy is so important....

From the 2010 flooding in Thailand, shot by Napast3379, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license 

Polar code agreed to prevent Arctic environmental disasters

Karl Mathiesen in the Guardian (UK): The international body in charge of sea safety adopted measures on Friday to protect people and the environment during a predicted shipping rush in the Arctic. But environment groups and insurers said the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Maritime Safety Committee had failed to address key issues including a proposed ban on heavy fuel oil and how to safeguard against cowboy operators.

The committee, which met in London this week, signed off on the Polar Code and various amendments to the Safety of Life at Sea (Solas) convention. These changes, which include mandatory requirements for ship design, crew training and search and rescue protocols, are expected to be ratified by the full IMO next year and come into force in 2017.

Melting sea ice due to global warming and pressure to cut costs makes the Arctic commercially enticing to shipping companies who want to avoid the circuitous, pirate-ridden voyage from China to Europe via the Suez Canal. Tourism, fishing and fossil fuel operations are also looking toward one of the world’s most fragile and extreme environments.

Evan Bloom, director of the US State Department’s Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs said: “More and more people are going to be in the Arctic for one reason or another. In the future there may be [more] fishing vessels... There will be more and more tourism. There will be more and more commerce.” He says this increases the likelihood of something going wrong in a region where there is currently very little capability to respond in either a search and rescue or environmental clean-up capacity.

...According to insurer Allianz, Russia predicts a 30-fold increase in shipping by 2020 and an ice-free Northern Sea Route by 2050. China has suggested that by 2020, 5-15% of its trade value - close to $500bn - could pass through the Arctic....

Sea ice off Baffin Island, via NASA

Salinity matters when it comes to sea level changes

A press release from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Using ocean observations and a large suite of climate models, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have found that long-term salinity changes have a stronger influence on regional sea level changes than previously thought.

“By using long-term observed estimates of ocean salinity and temperature changes across the globe, and contrasting these with model simulations, we have uncovered the unexpectedly large influence of salinity changes on ocean basin-scale sea level patterns,” said LLNL oceanographer Paul Durack, lead author of a paper appearing in the November issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters (link is external).

Sea level changes are one of the most pronounced effects of climate change impacts on the Earth and are primarily driven by warming of the global ocean along with added water from melting land-based glaciers and ice sheets. In addition to these effects, changes in ocean salinity also can affect the height of the sea, by changing its density structure from the surface to the bottom of the ocean.

The team found that there was a long-term (1950-2008) pattern in halosteric (salinity-driven) sea level changes in the global ocean, with sea level increases occurring in the Pacific Ocean and sea level decreases in the Atlantic. These salinity-driven sea level changes have not been thoroughly investigated in previous long-term estimates of sea level change. When the scientists contrasted these results with models, the team found that models also simulated these basin-scale patterns, and that the magnitude of these changes was surpri
singly large, making up about 25 percent of the total sea level change.

“By contrasting two long-term estimates of sea level change to simulations provided from a large suite of climate model simulations, our results suggest that salinity has a profound effect on regional sea level change,” Durack said. “This conclusion suggests that future sea level change assessments must consider the regional impacts of salinity-driven changes; this effect is too large to continue to ignore.”...

Lined with bottles triggered at different levels of the ocean, this conductivity, temperature and depth profiler bearing a suite of sampling bottles is a mainstay of oceanography. It can be deployed to depths of 6,000 meters to study changes in ocean temperature and salinity. Photo courtesy of Ann Thresher/CSIRO

Britain left 'exposed' to more floods and heatwaves

Ian Johnston in the Independent (UK): The UK is dangerously "exposed" to increasingly extreme weather brought about by climate change, a leading adviser to the Government has warned.

Professor Lord Krebs, who chairs an expert group of the independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC), said thousands of lives could be lost in searing heatwaves, and a lack of spending on flood defences would lead to "unnecessary flood damage" unless action was taken. He called on Britain and other countries to do more to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, saying global warming could have "profound implications" even for wealthy countries such as the UK.

In an article for The Independent on Sunday, on our website, Lord Krebs applauded some steps of recent years, noting that 1.4 million homes were protected, and no one died, in last winter's floods. "And yet," he said, "the UK is still exposed in key areas."

The National Audit Office and the CCC's Adaptation Sub-Committee, which he chairs, have concluded "not enough money is being spent on flood prevention". Lord Krebs said: "As a result, unnecessary flood damage will occur... The current approach in England is to 'build and protect'; to allow development on the floodplain as long as there are flood defences in place," he said. "This simply stores up costs and risks for the future. Indeed, such development is encouraged."...

The English countryside near Cold Moor, shot by Scott Rimmer, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

Second bird flu outbreak found on Dutch farm

Seed Daily via AFP: Dutch officials have detected a second case of bird flu on a southern Netherlands farm, officials said Thursday, but could not yet say whether the strain was of a highly contagious variety discovered earlier this week.

The latest outbreak was detected in three barns containing 43,000 chickens on a farm at Ter Aar, just east of The Hague, the Dutch food and safety watchdog NVWA said. The outbreak was of the H5 strain, but "it is not clear whether it was of the highly pathogenic variety or not," added the Dutch economic affairs ministry in a letter sent to parliament on Thursday. "The earliest results are expected by the end of tomorrow (Friday)," it said.

The powerful Dutch poultry industry has now been paralysed for a second time this week with a nationwide ban on the transport of all poultry and related products since 2:00 pm (1300 GMT) on Thursday. The ban will last up to 72 hours.

Authorities have also thrown a 10 kilometre (6.2 mile) cordon around the farm, with four other farms also being tested for avian influenza. The chickens are being destroyed and the farm disinfected, the NVWA added....

A rooster in the grass, shot by fir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.au, Wikimedia Commons, under the GFDL 1.2 license

Climate fund receives $9.3 billion pledge

BBC: Thirty nations meeting in Berlin have pledged $9.3bn (£6bn) for a fund to help developing countries cut emissions and prepare for climate change. The Green Climate Fund was to have held at least $10bn by the end of 2014, so the pledge is just shy of the target.

The South Korea-based fund aims to help nations invest in clean energy and green technology. It is also designed to help them build up defences against rising seas and worsening storms, floods and droughts.

Rich nations previously vowed that by 2020, developing countries would get $100bn (£64bn) a year from such a fund. The US had already pledged $3bn and Japan $1.5bn. The UK, Germany and France have promised about $1bn each, and Sweden more than $500m million.

Smaller amounts were offered by countries including Switzerland, South Korea, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Mexico, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. After co-hosting the donors' conference, German Environment Minister Gerd Mueller hailed the achievement, saying humanity must fight climate change so "it doesn't go the way of the dinosaurs"....

A 2004 flood in Dhaka, shot by Raiyan Kamal, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.5 license 

New York state snow emergency: five dead, 100+ trapped in monster winter storm

NBC News: Troopers in all-terrain vehicles set out Wednesday to reach drivers trapped in a ferocious winter storm that dumped 5 feet of snow outside Buffalo, New York — with plenty more on the way. More than 130 miles of Interstate 90, the main artery running east and west across New York state, remained closed, with no word when it would reopen. More than 100 cars were reported trapped on Tuesday night.

Authorities in Erie County, which includes Buffalo, reported a fifth death, a 46-year-old man found in a car. Four were reported Tuesday, one in a car crash and three from heart attacks, including two people who were shoveling snow.

The towns south of Buffalo were believed to be the hardest hit, but snow totals were hard to come by. The National Weather Service said some places could approach the record for a single-day snowfall in the United States, 6 feet 4 inches.

...Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for 10 counties, and the National Guard was activated to help clean up. The state deployed 526 snowplows and 17 large snow blowers. The weather service warned that 3 to 8 more inches of snow could fall Wednesday, and up to 2 feet more by Thursday night outside Buffalo....

The early stages of a 2006 lake effect snow storm in Buffalo, New York, shot by Jason Safoutin, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.5 license 

EU court rules UK government must clean up dangerous air pollution

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): The government will be forced to urgently clean up illegal air pollution in British cities following a ruling on Wednesday in the European court of justice. It is likely to see many diesel cars and heavy goods vehicles restricted from city centres within a few years.

The landmark case, brought by a small environmental group through the UK courts, will allow people to sue the government for breaching EU pollution laws and will force ministers to prepare plans for many cities to improve air quality.

The court firmly rejected Britain’s long-standing approach to complying with EU air pollution laws which has been to appeal to Europe for time extensions. The government has admitted that under current plans, several cities in the UK will not meet its legal limits for the toxic nitrogen dioxide gas (NO2) until after 2030. This is 20 years after the original deadline set by Europe.

Instead, UK courts will now be able to order the government to produce a plan which achieves NO2 limits in a period of time as “short as possible”. The UK Supreme court is expected to interpret what the time frame should be next year.

“Thousands of people die because of air pollution in Britain every year. This ruling will save lives by forcing the government to finally take this issue seriously. They will now have to come up with an urgent plan to rid our towns and cities of cancer-causing diesel fumes,” said Alan Andrews, lawyer with Client Earth which brought the case.

“This sets a groundbreaking legal precedent in EU law and paves the way for a series of legal challenges across Europe,” he said....

London smog from St. Paul's, shot by Iain Buchanan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Study counters case for climate change-violence link

Lou Del Bello in SciDev.net: Climate change is far from being solely to blame for violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, say researchers — other factors matter much more. Their paper, published on 10 November in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts earlier studies that found that higher temperatures are a major risk factor in conflict.

For instance, last year a different group concluded that a shift towards hotter conditions by a single statistical unit known as a ‘standard deviation’ — equivalent to, for example, warming an African country by 0.4 degrees Celsius for a year — caused a four per cent rise in the likelihood of personal violence and a 14 per cent increase in conflict between groups.

But now a team led by John O’Loughlin, a geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States, says that previous research may have overlooked other key triggers such as political instability, poverty and geographical conditions.

O’Loughlin’s team examined these factors alongside exceptionally hot or dry periods in Sub-Saharan Africa to assess the chances of increased violence. Breaking the area down into subregional grids, the researchers pinpointed 78,000 ‘conflict events’ from the past 33 years and matched them with weather conditions and social and geographical factors.

They found that conflicts such as riots, protests or violence against civilians were more common when temperatures were particularly high. But they also discovered an inconsistent relationship between temperature deviations on the one hand and different types of conflict and different subregions on the other.

And, more critically, they found that longer periods of higher temperatures and wet or dry conditions had less impact on conflict than other influences, such as recent nearby violence and a lack of democracy, says O’Loughlin....

A British jeep passes a sign warning against looting on the outskirts of Ravenna, Italy, 7 December 1944. From the Imperial War Museum

Questions over Mali's ebola response

IRIN: The failure of a top Malian hospital to detect probable cases of Ebola has raised questions about whether the country's health system is sufficiently prepared to tackle the disease.

"We have several confirmed cases," Samba Sow, head of the Mali's National Centre for Disease Control (CNAM), told IRIN. "Our goal is to prevent the virus from spreading." But the government only released an Ebola emergency plan on 30 October, a week after the first Ebola case.

In Kayes, where a two-year-old girl tested positive for Ebola on 23 October, the hospital was caught off-guard. Only two of its 160 workers had received training on how to detect and treat Ebola patients and how to protect themselves while doing so, said hospital director Toumani Konaré. "The staff had the right protective gear, but they didn't know how to use it," he told IRIN.

Before the current outbreak in Mali, the World Health Organization (WHO) had categorized the country as at-risk, due to its long border and strong economic ties with Guinea, where the epidemic began. It was targeted as a country to receive technical assistance, including training on infection prevention, epidemiological surveillance and contact tracing.

Sow said preparations started in April. However, those preparations were focused mostly on the 805km border that Mali shares with Guinea. The government started to send a few health workers to check travellers for fever and other signs of the virus among the chaos of trucks, buses, bush taxis and motorbikes at border checkpoints.

The Ministry of Health says the Kouremalé border checkpoint, where an imam who died of Ebola in Mali on 27 October had entered from Guinea, checks more than 1,000 people and 150 vehicles per day....

Italy faces billion euro bill for killer rainfall

Terra Daily via AFP: Torrential rain drenched northern Italy again Monday as the damage suffered by just one of the regions hit by floods and landslides was put at one billion euros ($1.25 billion).

In Sesto Calende, a small town near Lake Maggiore and the Swiss border, the central square resembled a giant pond, a handful of sandbags doing a poor job of preventing the water from soaking the ground floors of houses and businesses. "It is a nationwide problem caused by decades of neglect and poor governance," said one resident, Mauro, with a resigned shrug.

A total of 12 people have died in weather-related accidents in northern Italy since mid-October. Three deaths at the weekend included a pensioner and his granddaughter who were buried alive when a landslide hit their house on the shores of Maggiore in the early hours of Sunday morning, the third tragedy of its type in less than a week.

Claudio Burlando, the president of the Liguria region, which includes the entire Italian Riviera, said the damage incurred on his patch alone in the last month now exceeded one billion euros.

Apart from the clean-up costs, millions of euros worth of crops have been destroyed and many fields rendered unsuitable for grazing or planting, while motorways and other infrastructure, including a Genoa cemetery where zinc coffins were washed away at the weekend, will have to be repaired at public expense.

Most costly of all, the water-management systems which have proved incapable of dealing with exceptional conditions will have to be upgraded....

Sesto Calende on the Ticino River, shot by Markus Bernet,Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

Corps of Engineers embraces uncertainty of climate change

A press release from the US Army Corps of Engineers: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is adapting the way it operates to accommodate climate changes that could cause floods and droughts. "During the past 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen an increase in periods of high temperature and severe floods and heavy downpours and droughts," said Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commanding general, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "We all have observed changes to the frequency and the severity of these events."

In April and May of 2011, he said, residents in the Mississippi basin experienced some of the worst flooding seen since 1927. The next year, in 2012, droughts in the same region impacted navigation along the same river, which required "a significant response effort" to get traffic moving again on the river.

"That is what the nation, and the world, is experiencing," Bostick said. "These changes are increasing the risk and the vulnerability of operations, missions and infrastructure; effective climate change preparation and resilience are important to the corps. Adaptation and preparation is not an optional thing for the Corps of Engineers. It's something we feel we have to do."

During a press conference Thursday, at the Corps of Engineers headquarters here, Bostick explained that the corps is aware of climate change, and is changing the way it operates to accommodate changes due to climate.

"We're translating science into policy, we are adapting new infrastructure to withstand changes in climate, and we are looking at our existing infrastructure to see where it is vulnerable to changing climate and the steps we must take to make it more resilient," Bostick said. "We are also looking at how all of this fits into a systems approach."...

US Army Corps of Engineers photo of a dam at Burnsville Lake in West Virginia

Netherlands bans poultry transport after discovering bird flu

Seed Daily via AFP: Dutch officials on Sunday banned the transport of poultry in the Netherlands after the discovery of a highly infectious strain of bird flu which could jump to humans.

The "highly pathogenic" form of avian influenza discovered at a farm in the centre of the country is very dangerous to birds and "contamination can occur from animals to humans," the Dutch government said in a statement. About 150,000 chickens at the farm in Hekendorp are to be destroyed by Dutch health authorities, which for the moment have not identified the exact strain of flu.

Avian influenza is fatal for chickens, and poses a health threat to humans, who can become sickened by handling infected poultry. The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed more than 40
0 people, mainly in Southeast Asia, since first appearing in 2003. Another strain of bird flu, H7N9, has claimed more than 170 lives since emerging in 2013.

The Dutch transport ban is to last a maximum of 72 hours and includes moving poultry, eggs and bird manure....

A poultry farm in Hungary, shot by Civertan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Mudslides kill four along Swiss-Italian border

Yahoo News via AFP: At least four people were killed as landslides triggered by torrential rain slammed into houses and buildings on either side of the Swiss Italian border Sunday, police and media said. In the rain-drenched southern Ticino region of Switzerland, two people died and four were injured when a mudslide slammed into a small residential building, regional police said.

On the other side of the border, a pensioner and his granddaughter were killed when another landslide engulfed a house on the Italian shores of Lake Maggiore, local media reported. Three other family members survived.

Those landslides were the latest of many to recently have hit northern Italy and southern Switzerland amid incessant rainfall over recent weeks. They also came a day after storms in southern France killed six people, including a mother and her two small sons whose car was swept away in flooding.

In Switzerland, the bodies of two local women, aged 34 and 38, were pulled Sunday from the rubble of the three-story apartment building in Davesco-Soragno, near Lugano, after being hit by the mudslide shortly before 2:30 am (0130 GMT), Ticino police said.

Another resident had returned home after the landslide hit and was unharmed, but police said they were still searching the area to make sure no one else was under the rubble. The tragedy came 10 days after a young mother and her three-year-old daughter were killed when a landslide swept away their house in the same region...

A foggy road near Ticino, shot by Luca Casartelli, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Groundwater warming up in synch

Peter Ruegg at ETH in Zurich: Global warming stops at nothing – not even the groundwater, as a new study by researchers from ETH Zurich and KIT reveals: the groundwater’s temperature profiles echo those of the atmosphere, albeit damped and delayed.

For their study, the researchers were able to fall back on uninterrupted long-term temperature measurements of groundwater flows around the cities of Cologne and Karlsruhe, where the operators of the local waterworks have been measuring the temperature of the groundwater, which is largely uninfluenced by humans, for forty years. This is unique and a rare commodity for the researchers. “For us, the data was a godsend,” stresses Peter Bayer, a senior assistant at ETH Zurich’s Geological Institute. Even with some intensive research, they would not have been able to find a comparable series of measurements. Evidently, it is less interesting or too costly for waterworks to measure groundwater temperatures systematically for a lengthy period of time. “Or the data isn’t digitalised and only archived on paper,” suspects the hydrogeologist.

Based on the readings, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the groundwater is not just warming up; the warming stages observed in the atmosphere are also echoed. “Global warming is reflected directly in the groundwater, albeit damped and with a certain time lag,” says Bayer, summarising the main results that the project has yielded. The researchers published their study in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.

The data also reveals that the groundwater close to the surface down to a depth of around sixty metres has warmed up statistically significantly in the course of global warming over the last forty years. This water heating follows the warming pattern of the local and regional climate, which in turn mirrors that of global warming.

The groundwater reveals how the atmosphere has made several temperature leaps at irregular intervals. These “regime shifts” can also be observed in the global climate, as the researchers write in their study. Bayer was surprised at how quickly the groundwater responded to climate change....

The Portuguese cistern of El Jadida, shot by Fulvio Attisani, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Will geoengineering make people give up cutting their carbon footprint?

Adam Corner in the Guardian (UK): If you thought there was a machine that could magically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it underground, would you be less likely to worry about reducing your own carbon footprint?

The question is not entirely hypothetical. Geoengineering is the catch-all term for a suite of technologies that could one day be used to alter the Earth’s climate and combat global warming. Most of them are unlikely to ever see the light of day: they are considered too risky, too unpredictable, or too reckless to be taken seriously by the scientific community.

...As geoengineering has gradually moved on to the policy agenda, debates about the ethics of meddling with the global thermostat have become more prominent. Central among these is whether geoengineering might undermine fragile public and political support for the more pressing business of reducing carbon emissions.

This is what is known by economists and philosophers as a ‘moral hazard’ argument: the phenomenon whereby people who feel insured against a particular risk are more likely to exhibit risky behaviour. Will the prospect of geoengineering make people feel ‘insured’ against the risks of climate change, and indulge in ‘riskier’ environmental behaviour themselves?

In a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on Monday, my colleague Nick Pidgeon and I attempted to answer that question. Using a nationally representative online survey, we provided 610 people with a ‘factsheet’ about geoengineering, and then asked them a series of questions. One striking finding was that some people seem more susceptible to the ‘trap’ of the moral hazard than others.

People who were wealthier, and who identified with self-focused values such as power and status, were more likely to agree with the statement “Knowing geoengineering is a possibility makes me feel less inclined to make changes in my own behaviour to tackle climate change.”...

A smoggy sky in Taiwan, shot by Carrie Kellenberger, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Prepare for more lightning

Will Dunham in Reuters: Rising global temperatures may cause a big jolt in the number of lightning strikes in the United States over the rest of the 21st century in the latest example of extreme weather spawned by climate change, scientists say.

Researchers forecast on Thursday that lightning strikes will increase by about 50 percent by 2100 in the continental United States because thunderstorms will become more explosive in the coming decades thanks to a warming planet.

This increase could lead to more wildfires because lightning already triggers half of these blazes in the United States, the researchers said. Lightning also kills dozens of Americans annually, with that risk expected to rise.

Considering factors including precipitation levels, cloud buoyancy and warming air, the scientists predicted a 7 percent increase in the number of lightning strikes with each degree Fahrenheit global average temperature increase (12 percent for each degree Celsius).

The 11 different climate models used in the study pointed to an increase of 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) between now and 2100. "There are about 30 million strikes per year in the contiguous U.S. now. So, in 2100, we would expect about 45 million per year," said climate scientist David Romps of the University of California, Berkeley and the U.S. government's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led the study published in the journal Science....

Lightning over Lausanne, shot by Orphée, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Farmers and scientists divided over climate change

A press release from Purdue University: Crop producers and scientists hold deeply different views on climate change and its possible causes, a study by Purdue and Iowa State universities shows. Associate professor of natural resource social science Linda Prokopy and fellow researchers surveyed 6,795 people in the agricultural sector in 2011-2012 to determine their beliefs about climate change and whether variation in the climate is triggered by human activities, natural causes or an equal combination of both.

More than 90 percent of the scientists and climatologists surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with more than 50 percent attributing climate change primarily to human activities. In contrast, 66 percent of corn producers surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with 8 percent pinpointing human activities as the main cause. A quarter of producers said they believed climate change was caused mostly by natural shifts in the environment, and 31 percent said there was not enough evidence to determine whether climate change was happening or not.

The survey results highlight the division between scientists and farmers over climate change and the challenges in communicating climate data and trends in non-polarizing ways, Prokopy said. "Whenever climate change gets introduced, the conversation tends to turn political," she said. "Scientists and climatologists are saying climate change is happening, and agricultural commodity groups and farmers are saying they don't believe that. Our research suggests that this disparity in beliefs may cause agricultural stakeholders to respond to climate information very differently."

...Focusing on the causes of climate change, however, is likely to polarize the agricultural community and lead to inaction, said study co-author Lois Wright Morton, professor of sociology at Iowa State University. To foster productive dialogue, she said, scientists and climatologists need to "start from the farmer's perspective."...

A 1935 image of a truck garden in Oregon, from the OSU Collections, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Ocean primed for more El Nino

Space Daily via SPX: The ocean is warming steadily and setting up the conditions for stronger El Nino weather events, a new study has shown. A team of US, Australian, and Canadian researchers sampled corals from a remote island in Kiribati to build a 60-year record of ocean surface temperature and salinity. "The trend is unmistakeable, the ocean's primed for more El Nino events," says lead-author Dr Jessica Carilli, now based at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Team member Dr Helen McGregor from the Research School of Earth Sciences at The Australian National University said the change in El Nino patterns could have a major impact on Australia's weather. "During an El Nino event warm waters to the north of Australia move eastward, taking their rainfall with them," she said. "This changes the pattern of Australia's rainfall and droughts significantly."

El Ninos occurs irregularly every two to seven years and have often coincided with severe droughts in Queensland and New South Wales. The current conditions show that a weak El Nin
o has brought warmer and drier conditions to Australia for late 2014.

The team focused on regional differences in sea temperatures that generate the circulating winds known as the Walker Circulation, which drive the trade winds that bring moisture across the Pacific Ocean to the north of Australia.

The island from which the corals were sampled, Butaritari, was chosen for its location at one end of the Walker Circulation....

A causeway on Butaritari, shot by Tauʻolunga, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.5 license

Micro loans can offset effects of climate change

The Daily Star (Bangladesh): Microfinance institutions should modify their financial products for those at vulnerable climate zones to deal with global warming, a keynote speaker at a climate change seminar said yesterday.

The MFIs offer three types of products: loans, savings and insurance. Each product can be modified depending on the type of shock the MFI customers might be suffering from, said Fazle Rabbi Sadeque Ahmed, coordinator of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation's Community Climate Change Project.

For instance, in areas that are becoming more prone to flooding, MFIs can encourage: aquaculture initiatives among farmers, floating gardens, investment on raised tube wells for safe water and new houses to be built on raised beds or raised embankments.

All these measures can be supported by making use of loans, savings and insurance products that include a set of climate sensitive conditions, he said.

Ahmed's comments came at the inaugural session of a daylong seminar styled 'climate change adaptation at community level: the role of MFIs', jointly organised by the Institute of Microfinance and Bangladesh Water Partnership. The event was aimed at identifying the bankable projects and overcoming the challenges at village level in implementing climate change resilience through microcredit....

Ebola a stark reminder of link between health of humans, animals, environment

Emily Caldwell at the Ohio State University News Room: For many, global public health seems like an abstract and distant problem – until the Ebola virus is diagnosed among people in our midst. Though no one would call the Ebola pandemic a good thing, it has presented an opportunity for scientists to alert the public about the dire need to halt the spread of infectious diseases, especially in developing and densely populated areas of the world.

“What often seems like an abstract notion becomes very concrete when a deadly virus previously contained in Western Africa infects people on American soil,” said Wondwossen Gebreyes, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at The Ohio State University. “It does create a certain sense of urgency and awareness that this world is much smaller than we think.”

Gebreyes is the lead author of an article published in the Nov. 13, 2014, issue of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases that makes the case for accelerating efforts to put “One Health” into action. One Health refers to a strategy to more fully understand and address the links between animal health, human health and the environment.

The paper emphasizes the danger of zoonotic infections – those transmitted from animals to humans – and the staggering damage they do, especially in developing nations that lack a variety of resources. These diseases don’t just kill people, but they cause tremendous economic harm in a variety of ways: killing livestock, reducing the ranks of qualified health and education providers, creating political unrest and stopping development in its tracks.

There is an urgent need for progress. Approximately 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases are those transmitted from animals to humans, and the world is on pace to experience at least one deadly disease outbreak each year.

...“To attain a true One Health approach, we need broad recognition of the interconnectivity among the health of humans, domestic or wild animals and the environment, which are all closely linked by the pathogens that they share,” he said....

Ground water depletion driving global conflicts

Chris Arsenault at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Global ground water supplies, crucial for sustaining agriculture, are being depleted at an alarming rate with dangerous security implications, a leading scientist said.

"It's a major cause for concern because most of the places where it (ground water depletion) is happening are major food producing regions," James Famiglietti, a University of California professor who conducts research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "India is the worst off, followed by the Middle East, and the U.S. is probably number three ... the Chinese, particularly on the north China plain, are more water limited than people believe."

Famiglietti's conclusions are based on his latest research paper "The global ground water crisis" published in the journal Nature Climate Change last month. The study uses analysis of satellite images to warn that ground water in many of the world's largest aquifers is being exploited at a far faster rate than it can be naturally replenished.

Farming accounts for more than 80 percent of the United States' water use, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the figures are similar globally. Famiglietti has been called to the Pentagon a number of times to discuss the potential impact of groundwater scarcity with leading military planners....

A dried up pool at Fairburn Ings, shot by Bernard Bradley, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Wildfire suppression a losing battle

Tim Radford in the Standard-Examiner via Climate News Network: A research report says towns, rural settlements and even whole societies will become increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic losses unless people learn to live with wildfire, rather than try to fight it.

But Max Moritz, of the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and research colleagues from the United States and Australia report in Nature journal that they also found evidence from three continents suggesting that government policies can make things worse.

Fire-fighting strategies and land-use practices actually encourage development on inherently hazardous landscapes, and so risk making losses more calamitous in the decades to come as climate change and population increase exacerbate the hazard.

The researchers considered the Mediterranean basin of Europe, the southwestern U.S., and Australia — three regions in which wildfires play a part in the natural management of the ecosystems, and therefore all naturally at risk, and all home to communities badly hit by wildfires in recent years.

The research paper concludes: “The ‘command and control’ approach typically used in fire management neglects the fundamental role that fire regimes have in sustaining biodiversity and key ecosystem services. Unless people view and plan for fire as an inevitable and natural process, it will continue to have serious consequences for both social and ecological systems.”

Researchers develop new model to study epidemics

A press release from New York University: For decades, scientists have been perfecting models of how contagions spread, but newly published research takes the first steps into building a model that includes the loop linking individual human behavior and the behavior of the epidemic itself.

The first results of the highly complex modeling led by researchers at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering were recently spotlighted as “brilliant research” by the American Physical Society.

Eventually, the team hopes the model will more accurately predict who should be vaccinated and isolated first and what travel restrictions will be most effective in preventing different epidemics. The speed of mass communication and modern travel requires changes to most current models. Even underdeveloped countries now have electronic devices that quickly spread the word about diseases and airplanes can carry the infected everywhere nearly as quickly, explained Alessandro Rizzo, visiting professor of mechanical engineering and a leader of the research effort. Modeling thus must be improved by accounting for contagions that spread mor
e slowly than travelers and ones that spread more quickly.

The new model also takes into consideration the differing rates at which the infected and those who merely fear infection react and thereby spread disease. For example, prior work by other researchers indicates that symptomatic people will often self-isolate and—not surprisingly—that the actions of the infected are more relevant to the spread of an epidemic than those of healthy individuals who are avoiding a contagious area. But in some kinds of epidemics, ill people who are asymptomatic behave as if they are healthy, selfishly infecting others. The new model seeks to account for these individual reactions and more.  The research team expects that a fully tested and working model is several years away...

1918 image of a Spanish flu mask in New South Wales

Dengue's spread flies under the radar amid ebola scare

AFP: One of the most familiar sounds in Malaysia's capital is the approaching drone of a fumigation fogger spewing thick white plumes of insecticide, part of so-far futile efforts to arrest a spiralling dengue fever outbreak.

Malaysia is among several countries across Asia and Latin America grappling with a mosquito-borne virus that is proving tough to eradicate as it infects millions.

While the Ebola threat has captured headlines, the World Health Organization (WHO) warns that dengue -- while far less lethal -- has become one of the fastest-growing global health threats, contracted by 50-100 million people each year.

"The increase in dengue incidence and severity of the outbreaks is a global phenomenon, with a 30-fold increase over the past five decades," said Ahmed Jamsheed Mohamed, a doctor in the WHO's Southeast Asia office, adding that eradication is "not seen as feasible in the near future".

...While Ebola has killed nearly 5,000 people this year, mainly in west Africa, with an estimated 13,000 infections, dengue kills up to 20,000 annually, and 40 percent of the world's population live in dengue-risk areas....

Mosquito larvae, photo data unavailable