Scientists say bird flu pandemic is certain

Probably a little off-topic, but this story from the Disaster News Network raises some important issues in risk and public health: …Many scientists are now sure that a version of H5N1, or the avian flu, will cause a pandemic in the future. While speaking to health officials at the National Emergency Management Summit Thursday, several experts said the issue was no longer an "if" issue, it was now "when." Without knowing when a pandemic will hit, many hospitals and the government are doing what they can to try to prepare the U.S. for the event.

"In 2005 then President George Bush announced a national strategy for pandemic influenza," said Dr. Robin Robinson, senior project officer of the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "It was a pandemic influenza implementation plan.”… “We also wanted to make sure we could have everyone in the U.S. vaccinated within six months of the pandemic declaration," Robinson said.

…All the preparations could wear some down, though, according to P.J. Havice-Cover, a mental health professional and program coordinator for the state of Colorado.…Havice-Cover said we are over-warned in our lives and that causes a numbness to warnings for major events like a pandemic.

"When you tell people to listen to warnings, they don't listen," she said. "There are warning labels on everything. We've heard the warnings over and over and over again, that we've become deaf to them. Ignoring the warning has become an art."

…Havice-Cover stressed the importance of preparing mentally for a pandemic. She said people will go through several stages, including depression and anger. "Grief and loss is a certainty in planning for the pandemic," she said. "You can respect and normalize people's grieving processes by giving them updates on progress. Don't just ignore the losses. If you're in a position to inform the public, talk about it. Community memorial services are very important."

…According to Havice-Cover, eventually the pandemic will subside, but it is important not to expect life to begin quickly again. "Once the community is allowed to return to normal activities, some people are going to do that, but some are going to be very cautious. These are both very normal responses. But Havice-Cover was confident people would get through the pandemic. "Resillience and change is a given; challenges help us grow."

Turner's "The Fifth Plague of Egypt" (1800)

West Africa needs climate help

Daily Observer (Banjul, Gambia): Momodou Kotu Cham, secretary of state for Forestry and the Environment, yesterday opened a two-day ECOWAS climate change focal points preparatory meeting on the Bali Road Map, at the Paradise Suites Hotel in Kololi.

The forum brings together delegates from across West Africa to brief them on the latest development in intergovernmental climate change process and to properly prepare them to effectively and efficiently participate in the negotiations under the Bali Road Map processes. Organised by UNEP, in collaboration with the Department of Water Resources and the National Environment Agency, the negotiation process, under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) Bali Road Map, sets out guidance and direction for negotiations to address climate change issues from now up to 2012 and beyond. It is expected that after the two-day meeting, the outcome of these negotiations will be finalized at Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009.

Declaring the sub-regional forum opened, SoS Cham noted that being in the sub-region and being most vulnerable to climate change, West African countries need assistance to address the most pressing climate threats and to implement adequate adaptation measures.

"As we progress towards Copenhagen," he stated, "all efforts should be made to conclude on the commitment of Annex One countries in the form of quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives (QELROs)." He went on: "The ad-hoc working group on long term cooperative action will have to finalise an agreement on all the four building blocks - mitigation, adaptation, technology and financing, and establish a timetable under the Kyoto Protocol." SoS Cham added that development and transfer of technology remains at the forefront as key elements for crafting a future climate regime and enabling effective implementation of the ongoing actions on both mitigation and adaptation to climate change….

Less nitrogen could increase profit, sustainability

Science Daily: More fertilizer doesn't always mean more profit. That's one conclusion from a 10-year study conducted by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the agency’s Soil Plant Nutrient Research Unit in Fort Collins, Colo., and colleagues at Colorado State University.

From 1998 to 2008, the researchers evaluated and compared potential management strategies for reducing nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen levels in soil and groundwater. The research, led by ARS soil scientist Ardell Halvorson, focused on irrigated cropping systems in the Arkansas River Valley, an agricultural region of Colorado that has high levels of nitrate nitrogen in the fields and groundwater--due, in part, to heavy application of nitrogen fertilizer and the prevalence of shallow-rooted crops such as onions.

The first study showed that onions used only about 12 to 15 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen applied to the crop. Much of the remainder stayed in the top six feet of soil. The next year, Halvorson and his colleagues planted corn on the same land and found that it recovered about 24 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen that had been applied to the onion crop.

…The results suggest that when managing fields with relatively high nitrogen levels, farmers could benefit economically from reduced nitrogen fertilization rates. Recommendations based on this research could have important economic and environmental benefits for the Arkansas River Valley and similar regions.

A walking path by the Arkansas River

Climate change could devastate South American agriculture

Solve Climate: The melting of the Andean glaciers. Massive die-off of the Amazonian rainforests. Rising sea-levels and the inundation of low-lying regions on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. By now, this panorama is familiar to anyone who looks at the potential impacts of anthropogenic global warming on Latin America. Less familiar, though equally serious, is the damage climate change could wreak on the region’s agriculture.

The world’s total agricultural production could decrease between 3 percent and 15 percent due to global climate change, according to the World Bank. Studies suggest those numbers could be much worse in the agricultural regions of Latin America's equatorial belt. How severe the impact on agriculture gets will depend in part on the existence and the magnitude of the carbon fertilization effect. Carbon fertilization is an increase in crop growth due to greater atmospheric carbon interacting with sunlight through photosynthesis.

Analysts concede that a carbon fertilization effect likely won’t reach the levels many hoped for. As economist William Cline, who analyzes the effects of climate change on world agriculture, comments: "I think it would be extremely risky to assume that carbon fertilization is the solution to this problem.”

Keep in mind that Cline’s study and the World Bank analysis, which was partly based upon it, may still sharply underestimate agricultural losses. Neither deals with increased damage from pests or more severe weather conditions. Furthermore, Cline’s study used information from the 2001 IPCC baselines projections. But by now, the 2007 IPCC projections are considered overly conservative and very likely underplay the warming that will occur if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory.…

The Pio XI Glacier in southern Chile, shot by Pierre cb, Wikimedia Commons

Gender equality saves lives, improves resilience

IPS: When ministers and government officials meet at the end of this year for a critical U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, they should bear in mind that the mortality rate for women during climate-related natural disasters is an average of 14 times higher than for men. "Existing inequalities determine who is dying," Rebecca Pearl, the coordinator of the Global Gender & Climate Alliance, told IPS.

After the 2004 Asian tsunami, the level of women’s mortality was in the range of 55 to 80 percent, with Indonesia the hardest-hit. Meanwhile, recovery grants often went only to male heads of households, since most women didn't own any land.

In 1998, when severe flash floods hit Bangladesh, women's mortality reached 90 percent. "The reasons behind this are that women were not taught how to swim and they were not allowed to leave their households. So when the flood happened and their men weren’t there, they didn’t want to leave their children behind or their culture didn’t permit them to leave their households without their husbands," Pearl told IPS.

By contrast, when Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras that very same year, only the small community of La Masica reported no deaths. The reason was that women had participated in an early warning systems training six months earlier, and as a result evacuations were organised in time, making it the only community that had a 100-percent survival rate.

A 2006 study by the London School of Economics analysing disasters in 141 countries found that gender differences in deaths from natural disasters are directly linked to women’s economic and social rights. When women’s rights are not protected, more women than men will die from natural disasters, while when women’s rights are protected, the same number of women and men die from natural disasters.

…Helene Oldrup, a researcher on gender studies at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen, talked about how gender perspective can contribute to negotiation and practices: "In the developing world especially, more effective use of knowledge and resources can lead to better decision making."

Three women carrying goods on their heads walking home from a market in Kenya. Shot by Angela Sevin, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Sense of urgency grips Louisiana coastal restoration summit

New Orleans Times-Picayune: Participants in a two-day summit on using river diversions to rebuild Louisiana's coastal wetlands repeatedly challenged federal and state officials to stop talking and do something -- anything -- to begin the restoration process. The summit was prompted by repeated demands by a number of influential coastal scientists and state restoration officials that the Corps of Engineers speed up efforts to include very large diversions of water from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers in its plans for coastal restoration.

The meeting occurred against a backdrop of angst over long delays in the corps planning process for so-called "category 5" flood protection, a mix of coastal restoration and levee work needed to protect southeast Louisiana for the long term.

In the next few weeks, the corps is expected to finally release a draft of its Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Study, including recommendations to Congress. State officials have complained, however, that the report won't include a list of specific projects -- including river diversions -- that Congress can authorize immediately. Instead, the corps has said it will offer several sets of alternative plans for Congress and the state to consider -- which critics call a recipe for endless additional delays.

Jim Tripp, senior counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, also warned that delay in implementing diversion projects could have legal consequences. "The Corps of Engineers and the other federal agencies represented here today have a legal responsibility to do this," Tripp said. "There is a clear legal policy direction from the Congress of the United States. This is a congressional and legal mandate." And, he said, "there is a moral obligation we all have not to let this kind of travesty continue."…

The Atchafalaya River delta, US Army Corps of Engineers

Clean energy investments hit by global financial woes

Environment News Service: The global economic downturn has hit clean energy investments and their growth is no longer on track for the world to avert the worst impacts of climate change, said clean energy and carbon market analysts New Energy Finance today.

The analysts presented findings of their new report, Global Futures 2009, to senior investors, industry executives and policy makers in clean energy and the carbon markets at the second New Energy Finance Summit in London. Summit participation is by invitation only and is limited to 200 people. Although lower economic activity due to the financial crisis will reduce carbon dioixide emissions, the analysts said, in the longer term the drying up of funding for lower-carbon energy solutions is likely to have far greater adverse impact on emissions.
Michael Liebreich, chairman and chief executive of New Energy Finance, said, "This should be a real wake-up call. New Energy Finance is generally on the optimistic side of the debate. Even with the current recession we are more bullish on the shift to clean energy than most mainstream analysts."

"However, it is no longer possible to say we are on track to achieve peak CO2 by 2020," Liebreich said. "Something has to happen, either in terms of restoring credit to clean energy projects, or in terms of a surprisingly substantial outcome in Copenhagen."

This is a crucial year in the international effort to address climate change, culminating in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, set for December 7-18.

Newly constructed windmills D4 (nearest) to D1 on the Thornton Bank, 28 km off shore, on the Belgian part of the North Sea. Shot by Hans Hillewaert (Lycaon), Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

China to plough extra 20% into agricultural production amid fears that climate change will spark food crisis

Guardian (UK): China will increase spending on agricultural production by 20% this year amid warnings that climate change could spark a future food crisis. Prime minister Wen Jiabao's announcement of an extra 121 billion yuan (£13bn) to boost farm yields and raise rural incomes was a central part of his annual budget speech at the Great Hall of the People.

The government's spending pledge also included extra money for renewable energy and improved power efficiency, but these environmental benefits were outweighed by moves to boost overall domestic consumption and a likely emphasis on intensive agriculture.

The short-term aim is to ease the impact of the economic crisis on rural dwellers, who account for more than half of the 1.3bn population. This group is considered a potential source of social instability because the average rural income is just a third that of the city. Wen said grain prices would be increased as an incentive for farmers to produce more….

Chinese harvest, shot by Steve Evans from Bangalore, India, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Surge in Brazilian testing of GM crops, anticipating climate impacts

International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development: Brazilian scientists say 2009 will be big year for the expansion of genetically modified (GM) crops in the country as they search for ways to overcome the negative agricultural impacts related to climate change.

As crops are increasingly pushed southward due to temperature increases and as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts temperatures to increase two to four degrees centigrade in the next 20 years, scientists are looking for new ways to enhance crop durability.

New experiments focused on productivity of new GM soy crops will be conducted this year at a climate-controlled station in the state of Parana. Soy, the country’s leading export product, has already given the scientists encouraging results as the crop performs well in a wide range of weather conditions.

By isolating genes from drought-resistant plants and joining them with traditional crops, scientists at Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research agency, say they are able to identify a given crop’s resilience in harsh climate conditions.

Eduardo Assad, a researcher for Embrapa, says he is concerned that Brazil’s agriculture sector is threatened under the current situation. “What we are doing in Brazil is adapting, anticipating what is to come,” Assad told the Associated Press. “We’ve been working on this for two years, and we are going to need five or 10 years to be prepared.”…

Soybean varieties

Fertiliser overuse in China harms ecosystems

Environmental Research Web: In order to meet its food needs China has encouraged extensive fertilization with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. But now the loss of excess nitrogen to the environment is causing problems such as eutrophication of surface waters, nitrate pollution of groundwater, acid rain and soil acidification, greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollution.

"It took nearly 50 years to achieve food sufficiency in China," Xiao-Tang Ju of China Agricultural University and the Ministry of Education told environmentalresearchweb. "An unanticipated cost has been that massive fertilizer inputs have led to significant environmental degradation. China consumes more than 30% of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer with 9% of global arable land since the 1980s."

With that in mind, researchers at China Agricultural University, the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hebei Agricultural Univeristy, China, and the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute in the UK have found that using 30-60% less nitrogen kept crop yields the same but halved nitrogen loss to the environment. The team studied two double-cropping systems – waterlogged rice/upland wheat in the Taihu region of east China and irrigated wheat/rainfed maize on the North China Plain.

All four crops showed different nitrogen behaviour, "depending on climatic, soil and management practices". The team calculated that the rice/wheat system had an annual nitrogen surplus of 87 kg per hectare. This system had large losses by denitrification, which the scientists reckoned could be reduced by improving carbon management and controlling the water regime.

…"A better nitrogen balance can be achieved without sacrificing crop yields but significantly reducing environmental risk by adopting optimum nitrogen fertilization techniques, controlling the primary nitrogen loss pathways and improving the performance of the agricultural Extension [advisory] Service," said Ju. "The over-application of nitrogen also represents an unnecessary economic expenditure for farmers."

A village in Tongshan County, Hubei (between Tongshan town and Hengshitan Zhen, seen from Highway G106), with a large pond of lotuses, shot by Vmenkov, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Global supply chains guilty of ignoring climate risks

Business Green: Many key suppliers to the world's largest firms are still burying their heads in the sand over climate change, according to the first global supply chain study from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The investor backed lobby group teamed up with over 30 global companies, including Cadbury, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, P&G, Unilever, and Vodafone, to request information on carbon emissions and climate change policy from their suppliers.

The companies received responses from over 630 firms and found that while the majority recognise climate change on the risk and have a board level executive in charge of their environmental strategy, a sizable minority are continuing to ignore the issue. According to the survey, the results of which will be released later today at an event in New York only 58 per cent of respondents considered climate change as a threat to their operations, while a third believed it posed no risk to their business.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, ahead of the publication of the report CDP chief operating officer said that the findings posed a major challenge to multinational firms, given between 40 and 60 per cent of their extended carbon footprint is the result of their suppliers. "The findings suggest that emissions from smaller suppliers are out of control and need to be addressed," he said. "There's a real need for those larger companies that are beginning to act on climate change to work with their suppliers to help them cut emissions."…

A clerk doing inventory work in a Tesco Lotus supermarket in Sakon Nakhon, Thailand. Shot by Matthias Sebulke (Mattes), Wikimedia Commons

Diversity of birds buffer against West Nile virus

Science Daily: North American scientists studying West Nile virus have shown that more diverse bird populations can help to buffer people against infection. Since the virus first spread to North America it has reached epidemic proportions and claimed over 1,100 human lives. “This is an important example of the links between biodiversity and human health”, commented Dr Stuart Butchart, BirdLife's Global Research and Indicators Coordinator.

Biodiversity is increasingly being recognised as socially and economically important because of the valuable services it provides. The authors of this latest research - John Swaddle and Stavros Calos - highlighted the “increasing evidence for economically valuable ecosystem services provided by biodiversity”.

West Nile virus mainly affects birds but can be transferred to humans via mosquitoes. It first spread to North America in 2002, and since that time it has reached an epidemic scale with over 28,000 human cases – including 1,100 deaths - being reported. The cost of West Nile virus-related healthcare in the United States was estimated at $200 million in 2002 alone.

The virus is also an important threat to bird populations. Over 300 species act as hosts, although American Robin Turdus migratorius has been named as largely responsible for transmission from birds to humans. “West Nile virus may compound existing pressures - like habitat loss - to increase the risk of extinction for species”, commented Dr Butchart.

…The way in which biodiversity and disease rates are linked has been dubbed the ‘dilution effect’. Although the exact mechanisms aren’t currently clear, scientists believe that increased diversity within an ecosystem reduces - or dilutes - the proportion of suitable hosts for a disease, and therefore reduces transmission rates. …

The virus in question, from the National Institutes of Health

Drought threatens the Amazon rainforest as a carbon sink

Rhett A. Butler in Mongabay: Analyzing the impact of the severe Amazon drought of 2005, a team of 68 researchers across 13 countries and 40 institutions found evidence that rainfall-starved tropical forests lose massive amounts of carbon due to reduced plant growth and dying trees. The 2005 drought — triggered by warming in the tropical North Atlantic rather than el Niño — resulted in a net flux of 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere — more than the combined annual emissions of Japan and Europe — relative to normal years when the Amazon is a net sink for 2 billion tons of CO2.

The findings suggest that in the face of warming climate, relying on tropical forests as a massive carbon sink is a perilous proposition, raising questions about the effectiveness of schemes to offset industrial emissions by protecting rainforests without also curbing fossil fuel use. Should droughts worsen on a global scale, forests could become a net source of emissions, exacerbating climate change.

"For years the Amazon forest has been helping to slow down climate change. But relying on this subsidy from nature is extremely dangerous", said lead author Oliver Phillips, referencing newly published research indicating that tropical forests have absorbed as much as a fifth of fossil fuel emissions in recent decades.

"If the earth's carbon sinks slow or go into reverse, as our results show is possible, carbon dioxide levels will rise even faster," Phillips, a professor at the University of Leeds, added. "Deeper cuts in emissions will be required to stabilize our climate."…

The largest river on the planet, the Amazon, forms from the confluence of the Solimões (the upper Amazon River) and the Negro at the Brazilian city of Manaus in central Amazonas. Seen from space, via NASA

Climate change affecting Europe’s birds now, say researchers

Durham University: Climate change is already having a detectable impact on birds across Europe, according to a group of scientists led by Durham University. The scientists are publishing their findings to create the world’s first indicator of the climate change impacts on wildlife at a continental scale.

Published in the journal PloS ONE, scientists have shown a strong link between observed population change of individual species and the projected range change, associated with climate change, among a number of widespread and common European birds, including the goldfinch and the lesser spotted woodpecker.

By pulling all the data together, the team has compiled an indicator showing how climate change is affecting wildlife across Europe. The European Union has adopted the indicator as an official measure of the impacts of climate change on the continent’s wildlife; the first indicator of its kind.

…The RSPB’s Dr Richard Gregory, the paper’s lead author, said: “We hear a lot about climate change, but our paper shows that its effects are being felt right now. The results show the number of species being badly affected outnumbers the species that might benefit by three to one. Although we have only had a very small actual rise in global average temperature, it is staggering to realise how much change we are noticing in wildlife populations. If we don’t take our foot off the gas now, our indicator shows there will be many much worse effects to come. We must keep global temperature rise below the two degree ceiling; anything above this will create global havoc.”

Dr Stephen Willis, of Durham University, said: “The impact of climatic changes, both positive and negative, can now be summarised in a single indicator which we’ve called the Climatic Impact Indicator. A period of stable annual average temperatures in Europe ended in the early 1980s, and this new Indicator shows that climate change is affecting many species but in different ways. Climate change is having an adverse effect on many birds, though some species are actually benefiting from the recent changes.

…The Climate Change Indicator combines two independent strands of work; bioclimate envelope-modelling and observed populations trends in European birds, derived from the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme.

A European eagle owl, shot by John Haslam from Dornoch, Scotland, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Indonesia applies for World Bank forest CO2 scheme

Reuters: Indonesia has applied to join a World Bank programme that supports developing nations' efforts to fight deforestation and help them earn cash through the sale of tradeable carbon credits. The Bank's $350 million Forest Carbon Partnership Facility aims to support developing states design and create projects under a U.N.-backed scheme that could eventually earn poorer nations billions of dollars a year by protecting their forests.

A Bank official in Jakarta said on Wednesday the Indonesian government this week submitted a lengthy submission to apply to join the Bank's partnership. The Bank backs the United Nations' forest carbon scheme called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, or REDD, which the U.N. hopes to formally bring into a broader climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol from 2013.

Guyana and Panama have already applied to join the Bank's programme but Indonesia is by far the largest to date and among the most crucial nations given the size of the country's remaining forests as well as the rapid rate at which they have been lost. Indonesia is developing separate REDD regulations and is expected to issue them by mid-year, a top government official has said. About 20 REDD schemes are at various stages of development in Indonesia, the Bank has said, and has become a leader in developing rules governing the scheme.

Slash-and-burn farming and clearing for oil palm and other plantations have triggered vast fires in Indonesia, particularly on peat land, accelerating the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, scientists say. Scientists say deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions….

River, village, forest, in West Java, Indonesia. Shot by What's in a name... from Jakarta, Indonesia, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Arctic sea ice will probably not recover

A long, scary piece from the International Polar Year. The boldface is theirs: As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice will most likely disappear during summers in the near future. However, it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project.

…Unprecedented events have been reported during the past 20 years in the Arctic Ocean, mostly related to the Arctic sea ice summer minimum extent that retreated in September 2007, far beyond previous extreme minimum records. This is the first clear evidence of a phenomenon of importance on a planetary scale, forced by global warming, mainly caused initially by an Earth energy imbalance due to greenhouse gas concentrations increasing in the atmosphere.

…. Our main conclusions so far indicates that there is a very low probability that Arctic sea ice will ever recover. As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice is more likely to disappear in summer in the near future. However it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project. The entire Arctic system is evolving to a new super interglacial stage seasonally ice free, and this will have profound consequences for all the elements of the Arctic cryosphere, marine and terrestrial ecosystems and human activities. Both the atmosphere and the ocean circulation and stratification (ventilation) will also be affected. This raises a critical set of issues, with many important implications potentially able to speed up melting of the Greenland ice sheet, accelerating the rise in sea levels and slowing down the world ocean conveyor belt (THC). That would also have a lot of consequences on the ocean carbon sink (Bates et al. 2006) and ocean acidification. Permafrost melting could also accelerate during rapid Arctic sea-ice loss due to an amplification of Arctic land warming 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate trends, as pointed out recently by Lawrence et al. (2008). This permafrost evolution would have important consequences and strong impacts on large carbon reservoirs and methane releases, either in the ocean and/or on land….

The first polar year of Damocles (2007) was mainly characterized and highlighted by the transpolar drift of the French vessel Tara (September 2006-January 2008), 115 years after the Norwegian Fram expedition with Fridtjof Nansen at the helm. Tara drifted along the transpolar drift in an amazing 15 months (500 days) compared to 3 years for the Fram 115 years ago.

Tropical lizards can't take increased heat

Science Daily: From geckos and iguanas to Gila monsters and Komodo dragons, lizards are among the most common reptiles on Earth. They are found on every continent except Antarctica. One even pitches car insurance in TV ads. They seemingly can adapt to a variety of conditions, but are most abundant in the tropics. However, new research that builds on data collected more than three decades ago demonstrates that lizards living in tropical forests in Central and South America and the Caribbean could be in serious peril from rising temperatures associated with climate change.

In fact, those forest lizards appear to tolerate a much narrower range of survivable temperatures than do their relatives at higher latitudes and are actually less tolerant of high temperatures, said Raymond Huey, a University of Washington biology professor. "The least heat-tolerant lizards in the world are found at the lowest latitudes, in the tropical forests. I find that amazing," said Huey, lead author of a paper outlining climate warming's threat to lizards published in the March 4 Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The Royal Society is Great Britain's national academy of science.

It has often been assumed that tropical organisms are much better at dealing with high temperatures than those in colder climates because the lowland tropics are always warm. But that assumption is only true to a point, Huey said, because those in the tropical forest experience a much narrower range of temperatures during the year and are rarely, if ever, exposed to extreme high temperatures….

A komodo dragon, taken by Raul654, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

Obama restores scientific consultation to Endangered Species Act

Environment News Service: President Barack Obama issued a memorandum today temporarily rescinding a Bush-era rule that weakened the Endangered Species Act. The Bush rule allowed federal agencies whose activities might harm threatened and endangered species to avoid the longstanding requirement that they consult first with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Issued jointly by the Departments of the Interior and Commerce just one month before the end of the Bush administration, the rule exempted many federal actions from review under the Endangered Species Act, even activities that generate greenhouse gases or emit toxic chemicals Instead, it allowed federal employees to use their own discretion to decide whether their actions were likely to harm endangered species, whether or not they had the scientific expertise to make those decisions.

In his memo, President Obama requests the Secretaries of the Interior and Commerce to review the regulation issued on December 16, 2008, and to determine whether to undertake new rulemaking procedures….

This endangered banded iguana says, "Thank you." Photo by Tim Vickers, who has released it into the public domain.

Top Paper in Environmental Science: Leaving a legacy of dead zones

Erika Engelhaupt in Environmental Science & Technology: “Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia: Alternate States and a Legacy” by R. Eugene Turner and Dubravko Justic, Louisiana State University; and Nancy N. Rabalais, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, 2008, 42 (7), 2323−2327; DOI 10.1021/es071617k.

In 1974, biologist R. Eugene (Gene) Turner was tossing about in a tiny 15-foot boat off the Louisiana shore when his handheld oxygen meter started showing strangely low readings. Turner was scouting the coastal waters as a new faculty member at Louisiana State University, and what he discovered led to a career-spanning quest to understand low-oxygen “dead zones”, or hypoxia, in the Gulf of Mexico. His longtime collaboration with coauthors Nancy N. Rabalais and Dubravko Justic (affectionately dubbed “Dubi” by his teammates) has now resulted in ES&T’s top science paper of 2008.

“Other people had measured low oxygen before, but it had never been followed up,” Turner says. He initially wondered if the low-oxygen areas were related to the large number of oil and gas rigs nearby, but soon he realized that high levels of nutrients flowing down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico were to blame. Most of the nutrients come from fertilizers used in the Midwest, and these nutrients stimulate excessive growth of algae that later rob waters of oxygen when they die and decompose.

In 1985, Turner and Rabalais received a small grant to map hypoxic zones. Rabalais then had her own turn bobbing about 25 miles offshore in an undersized Boston Whaler with a handheld oxygen meter. “I came back and told him I wasn’t going to die doing this research,” she says. For more than 20 years since then (and in successively larger boats), the now husband-and-wife team of Turner and Rabalais has surveyed hypoxia in the Gulf, with only one exception in 1989 when funding ran dry.

This year’s award-winning paper is a culmination of research that led the team to conclude that coastal ecosystems in the Gulf are becoming more sensitive to nutrient loads. “It’s not the same system as in the 1960s. It’s taking less nutrients now to fuel this hypoxic situation,” Rabalais says.
Over time, large nutrient-fueled algal blooms have deposited loads of organic matter to coastal sediments, and the slow decay of these remnants in the sediments continues to use oxygen. This extra demand for oxygen adds to the problem created by each year’s new blooms, and as a result, the potential size of the hypoxic zone doubled for a given nitrogen load from 1980 to 2000.

Impacts in Vietnam -- worse hazards, but spotty awareness

Thanh Nien (Vietnam): Even as authorities try to come to grips with the challenges posed by climate change, local residents in coastal and low-lying areas are unaware of the magnitude of the threat facing them. Although there are no official statistics for the damage caused, the rise in sea level has already eroded or submerged housing and arable land over the past several years and the damage is forecast to increase every year.

International agencies have warned of a one-meter rise in sea level by 2100 as a consequence of global warming. Vietnam is considered one of the top countries most at risk from its impacts. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in January warned that a one-meter rise in sea level could flood up to 12 percent of arable land and affect nearly 10 percent of the population, now estimated at about 86 million people. The flooded area would equal 4.4 percent of the country’s total land mass of 331,690 square kilometers.

However, in a random survey of residents in the coastal province of Bac Lieu in the Mekong Delta, Thanh Nien found they were still unaware of the damage caused by climate change.

….Authorities in Ca Mau Province are saying a 10 centimeter rise in sea levels in recent years has already caused significant damage. The province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development has reported a high tide peak of up to 30 centimeters higher than in previous years. The rise in sea level has inundated 16,300 hectares of aquaculture ponds in several districts since early this year, with losses estimated at about VND3 billion (US$172,000).

…The Mekong Delta, the country’s largest area of rice paddies and fishery farms, is forecast to suffer the most, with up to 90 percent of land set to go under with a one-meter increase in sea level. The South Western Environment Protection Agency has reported the area of rice fields had reduced to 3.77 million hectares in 2006 from 3.94 million hectares in 2000.

Last November's flooding in Hanoi, shot by hunganh3, Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0

An interactive map of plant hardiness zones

One of our readers, Pete Russo, writes: "I maintain a detailed and interactive map browser that displays the USDA plant hardiness zones for the continental US using the google maps api. Your readers my be interested in using this as a reference. Check it out...

I pilfered this image of plant hardiness zones from the USDA, but Russo's map uses Google cartography and layers that you can add or subtract at will. You can zoom in on your locale with a topographic view. It won't do your planting for you, but still, it's pretty cool. Pass it along to gardeners.

Water plan helps Kiribati prepare for sea level rise

Insciences.org: The central Pacific nation of Kiribati has taken a leap forward in protecting itself against the effects of climate-related sea level rise thanks to a project led by The Australian National University. Most of the atolls and islands of Kiribati stand less than six metres above mean sea level, which means they will be partly inundated if sea levels rise to the extent predicted in climate change forecasts.

Because of its vulnerability, Kiribati was one of the first countries in the world to be selected under the Global Environmental Facility Strategic Priority on Adaptation. This project provides adaptation strategies for countries at risk from climate change. During extensive consultations throughout the islands, communities were asked for suggestions on adaptation strategies. Seven out of the top ten strategies identified were concerned with access to freshwater, water quality and the protection of freshwater sources.

It was found that many of the freshwater problems arose because Kiribati had no wide-scale water resource policies or plans to draw on. An international effort set out to remedy this, drawing on over 30 years experience working in Kiribati. The project was led by Professor Ian White from the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, and involved experts from Australia, Kiribati, Fiji and France….

NASA astronaut image of Onotoa Atoll, Gilbert Islands, Kiribati

Community-based adaptation to climate change

IRIN: The impact of climate change is going to affect the poorest communities the most, so the focus has shifted to formalising community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change, which will help the poorest and most vulnerable" to access funding and information.

"Even with the best of intentions and lots of money being made available by the international community towards adaptation to climate change, it will only trickle down to the poorest and most vulnerable (as is our experience of development funding in general in the past)," said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

But what is CBA to climate change? Huq explained by email that CBA is "still an 'aspirational' term that (we hope) will describe the universe of adaptation to climate change activities being done by very vulnerable and poor communities (mostly in developing countries but not necessarily only there) over time. We are still at a very early stage of developing the methodology and definitions."

…The focus is now on "clubbing" all community-based adaptation activities under the term "community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change", said Huq. "So it is still a work-in-progress to define CBA to Climate Change (as opposed to CBA to Climate Variability)." A CBA project looks much like any development project - for example, water harvesting in drought conditions rather than a stand-alone response to climate change - noted an IIED policy brief written by Huq. CBA to climate change is just another new layer added to other community-driven initiatives.

"The adaptation element introduces the community to the notion of climate risk and then factors that into their activities. This makes them more resilient, both to immediate climate variability and long-term climate change," said the IIED brief. "It should be noted, though, that the few existing CBA projects are so new that they have hardly been tested for resilience to climate variability, let alone to climate change."…

Tea Weighing Station located at the Chakva tea farm and processing plant just north of Batumi, close to the Black Sea coast Georgia. The Chakva farm and plant was one of the major suppliers of tea to all parts of the Russian Empire.Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915.

Three European earth science missions move to the next phase

Space Mart: ESA [the European Space Agency] has announced three candidate Earth Explorer mission concepts to progress to the next phase of consolidation. This selection is part of the user-driven process that will lead to the launch of the Agency's seventh Earth Explorer satellite in the 2016 time frame. Last week ESA's Programme Board for Earth Observation decided on three Earth Explorer missions that will undergo Feasibility Studies.

The decision was based on recommendations made by ESA's Earth Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) following the Earth Explorer User Consultation Meeting held in Lisbon, Portugal in January. This decision means that the BIOMASS, CoReH2O and PREMIER missions now go through to the next stage of consolidation. The BIOMASS mission aims to determine, for the first time and in a consistent manner, the distribution and temporal changes of forest biomass at a global scale.
…. COld REgions Hydrology High-resolution Observatory (CoReH2O) is the first satellite mission dedicated specifically to measuring fresh water stored in snow on land surfaces and in snow accumulation on glaciers and ice sheets.
The amount of water held in snow is an important component of the water cycle - though presently poorly understood. Since climate change is impacting the amount of snow and ice present it also has a critical impact on water resources.
… The objective of the Process Exploration through Measurements of Infrared and millimetre-wave Emitted Radiation (PREMIER) mission is to quantify processes controlling global atmospheric composition in the mid- to upper-troposphere and lower stratosphere, which is between 5 and 25 km above the surface of the Earth. The composition and dynamics of the atmosphere at the boundary between the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere has an important impact on chemical exchanges and the Earth's radiative balance.

The mission aims to improve chemistry-climate models that are needed to accurately predict future changes in climate on decadal to century time scales.

"BIOMASS" illustration from the ESA's website

Taking the pulse of our planet: Volunteers needed to track seasonal signs of climate change

US Geological Survey: Volunteers across the nation are being recruited to get outdoors and help track the effects of climate on seasonal changes in plant and animal behavior. The USA-National Phenology Network (USA-NPN), a consortium of government, academic and citizen-scientists, is launching a new national program built on volunteer observations of flowering, fruiting and other seasonal events. Scientists and resource managers will use these observations to track effects of climate change on the Earth's life-support systems.

"This program is designed for people interested in participating in climate change science, not just reading about it," said USA-NPN Executive Director and U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jake Weltzin. "We encourage everyone to visit the USA National Phenology Network Web site and then go outside and observe the marvelous cycles of plant and animal life."

Phenology is the study of the seasonal cycles of plant and animals, such as plants sprouting, flowering and fruiting, and animals reproducing, migrating and hibernating. Changes in these patterns, caused by climate change or other factors, can significantly affect human economies and health. In some areas, such changes have already imperiled species, such as in the disappearance of some wildflowers from near Walden Pond, home of the famed 19th-century naturalist Henry David Thoreau.

The USA-NPN monitoring program harnesses the power of people and the Internet to vastly increase the data available to scientists and the public alike, Weltzin said. The program provides easy-to-use methods to track the life cycles of nearly 200 species of plants, and will begin monitoring animals next year.

Mark D. Schwartz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and chair of the USA-NPN board of directors, said monitoring changes in seasonal events across large areas helps researchers forecast the effects of global climate change on plants, animals, and ecosystems….

Saving wheat crops worldwide

Seed Daily: CSIRO Plant Industry scientists and international collaborators have discovered the key to overcoming three major cereal diseases, which in epidemic years cost wheat growers worldwide in excess of AUS$7.8 billion. In a paper published today in the prestigious journal Science, scientists from CSIRO Plant Industry, the University of Zurich and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center have identified a wheat gene sequence which provides protection against leaf rust, stripe rust and powdery mildew.

"Genetic disease resistance is highly desirable in plants as it is more environmentally friendly and profitable than strategies like spraying pesticides," says a senior principal research scientist at CSIRO Plant Industry, Dr Evans Lagudah. "The newly identified resistance gene product - known as Lr34 transporter protein - is the first of its kind to be found in a commercial crop that is capable of delivering broad-spectrum control of multiple pathogens."

Lr34 has two extremely valuable characteristics. Whereas one gene usually only protects against a single disease for a limited time under commercial production, Lr34 provides long lasting disease resistance and acts against multiple diseases.

"The fungi that cause rust diseases are very adaptable and can rapidly evolve to overcome resistant cereal varieties," Dr Lagudah says. "Scientists and farmers can commonly only respond to a rust outbreak after it has passed, but tests conducted after identifying the Lr34 gene sequence show it has provided partial but constant protection against leaf rust for over 80 years."…

Wheat harvest on the Palouse, in the northwestern US

Hungry sharks being fished out of food: report

Cnews (Canada): Dolphins, sharks and other large marine species around the world are going hungry as they seek out dwindling supplies of the small, overlooked species they feed on, according to a new study that says overfishing is draining their food sources. In a report released Monday, scientists with the international conservation group Oceana said they found several species were emaciated, reproducing slowly and declining in numbers in part because their food sources are being fished out.

"This is the first time that we're seeing a worldwide trend that more and more large animals are going hungry," Margot Stiles, a marine biologist at Oceana and the author of the report, said from Washington, D.C. "It's definitely starting to be a pattern."

The researchers looked at the health of prey species stocks, like herring, pollock, mackerel, squid and anchoveta, to determine what effect overfishing is having on the larger predators that feed on them. Using data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, they found that the majority are over exploited by the fishery. Only 20 per cent of the prey species being fished can sustain the larger predators.

In Canada, scientists said Atlantic cod in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are becoming skinny because they are having more trouble finding reliable sources of small prey like capelin. In Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, striped bass are turning up emaciated because of shrinking supplies of herring and anchovies….

Atlantic horse mackerel, from Nordisk familjebok (1919), vol.28, p.282

China plans 59 reservoirs to collect meltwater from its shrinking glaciers

Guardian (UK): China is planning to build 59 reservoirs to collect water from its shrinking glaciers as the cost of climate change hits home in the world's most populous country. The far western province of Xinjiang, home to many of the planet's highest peaks and widest ice fields, will carry out the 10-year engineering project, which aims to catch and store glacier run-off that might otherwise trickle away into the desert.

Behind the measure is a concern that millions of people in the region will run out of water once the glaciers in the Tian, Kunlun and Altai mountains disappear. Anxiety has risen along with temperatures that are rapidly diminishing the ice fields. The 3,800-metre Urumqi No1 glacier, the first to be measured in China, has lost more than 20% of its volume since 1962, according to the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute (Careeri) in Lanzhou.

To deal with the consequences, Xinjiang will set aside 200m yuan (£20m) for each of the next three years. In the first phase, 29 reservoirs will be built with a combined capacity of 21.8 billion cubic metres of water, according to the Xinhua news agency….

Hailuogou glacier in Sichuan province, China just below Gonga Shan. Shot by Truthven, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

California snow not enough to overcome drought

Reuters: California's mountain snowpack is only at 80 percent of normal, despite recent snowstorms, and is far from enough to ease a prolonged drought, making water conservation measures a necessity, state officials said on Monday. The drought is forcing municipal water rationing and sharp cutbacks in irrigation supplies to farmers.

"Although recent storms have added to the snowpack, California remains in a serious drought," said Lester Snow, director of the state's Department of Water Resources. "This year's precipitation levels are still below average. On the heels of two critically dry years it is unlikely we will make up the deficit and be able to refill our reservoirs before winter's end. It's very important that Californians continue to save water at home and in their businesses," Snow said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last Friday declared a statewide drought emergency, urging California cities to impose mandatory conservation measures to cut urban consumption by 20 percent. Schwarzenegger said he fears the state may face punishing droughts for several more years.

California's farms, which have been especially hard hit by the dry spell, produce more than half the fruit, vegetables and nuts grown in the United States….

Ansel Adams took this picture. His caption was, "Farm, farm workers, Mt. Williamson in background, Manzanar Relocation Center, California."

Scientists urged to step to plate on climate politics

Dan Vergano in USA Today: Money and politics, the stuff of social science, now drive global warming, and climate science needs to get with it, a National Research Council report suggests. "Demand is growing for credible, understandable and useful information for responding to climate change," says the report, called Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change. The report, released Thursday, calls for "transformation" of climate science to emphasize the climate's influence on food, economics and public health.

Otherwise, there's lots of evidence that politicians will tackle such practical problems without scientists. In his speech to Congress last week, for example, President Obama asked his audience "to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change." The Senate and House had hearings last week that explored the economics of climate change. And the Center for Public Integrity reported that about 2,340 climate change lobbyists, advocating for everything from more nuclear reactors to money for saving coral reefs, have found employment since 2008.

…A House Ways and Means Committee hearing discussed keeping emissions worldwide below levels needed to trigger a 2-degree rise, which poses "severe risks to natural systems and human health," says climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists. But Field warns that such an increase already may be locked in this century because of newly recognized effects:

• Forest fires in drying tropical regions will release extra carbon dioxide.
• Melting tundra in the warming Arctic releases methane, a greenhouse gas.
• Warmer oceans are less able to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide....

Michaelangelo's version of David and Goliath, the Sistine Chapel

Protecting wine grapes from heat and drought with particle film

Science Daily: Deficit irrigation is an agricultural technique used to achieve a variety of results depending on the crop. For white wine grapes, it balances the crop load by limiting the canopy size so there aren't too many leaves shading the grapes. For red wine grapes, deficit irrigation again limits canopy size, but also affects berry components associated with wine quality.

A drawback of this canopy-limiting process is that fruit can become sunburned, especially under sunny, arid conditions, which can adversely affect productivity and fruit maturity. A particle film, which increases light reflection and reduces leaf temperature, has been tested on several crops. It acts as a sunscreen by reflecting the harmful ultraviolet rays off of the leaves and fruit, but still allows the right radiation for photosynthesis through to nourish the plant.

Krista Shellie of the U.S. Department of Agriculture led a study to learn more about foliar particle film's effects on wine grapes when the grapes were grown under varying levels of water stress. The study, published in the American Society for Horticultural Science journal HortScience, also noted particle film's effect on grape yield and maturity. Grapes were grown according to commercial practice with the exception of the watering schedule and application of the particle film. Film effectiveness was monitored by measuring the amount of leaf gas exchange, but particle film's influence on this process seemed to differ depending on the amount of water stress the vine was experiencing.

Particle film did not prevent sunburn on exposed fruit when vines were under the most stressful growing conditions, but did increase the weight of a red-skinned wine grape by 7% and increased a white-skinned wine grapes' soluble solids concentration by 11%. But, the weight of white-skinned wine grape and the soluble solids concentration of the red-skinned grape were unaffected. Other factors pertaining to yield, including grape maturity, were not influenced by particle film….

California wine grapes, shot by Thomas Oldcastle, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License

Government 'to recommend siestas' to combat heatwaves

Telegraph (UK): People in areas hit by extreme heat will be advised to stay indoors during hottest time of the day – between 11am-3pm - swap suits for casual loose-fitting clothes, avoid hot food, drink lots of water and use fans. The alert was prepared by the Department of Health, in consultation with other agencies including the Met Office.

Met Office scientists have predicted that climate change means heat waves will become more frequent over the next two decades, becoming regular after 2030. The highest temperature measured in the UK was 101.3F (38.5C), recorded at Faversham in Kent on August 10, 2003 – but the Met Office warns this may be a normal summer temperature in 70 years.

On Friday, the Met office hosted a private conference for governmental agencies and public health experts, to discuss the emergency plan. A national response centre, overseen by the Cabinet and similar to the "Cobra" system that already handles major national emergencies, could be set up to co-ordinate a response should an extreme heatwave occur.

The new Heatwave Plan, to be published later this year, will also focus on residential and nursing homes for the frail elderly who are particularly at risk from prolonged heat. Wayne Elliott, head of health forecasting at the Met Office, said: "The heatwave that hit France in 2003 caused an extra 35,000 deaths. "Such events are likely to happen more often and become longer and more extreme as climate change takes hold."…

Wilhem von Gloeden, "Greek siesta". From an Italian magazine called "Varietas", from July 1910.

The little Canadian satellite that could ... and does

Ottawa Citizen: While NASA lost a $285-million satellite this week, a Canadian microsatellite that does the same job is chugging along happily in orbit -- at one-1,000th the cost. The 30-centimetre-long University of Toronto satellite is searching for "missing" carbon dioxide -- the vast amount of Earth's main greenhouse gas that somehow vanishes each year.

That's what NASA's OCO satellite would have done if it had survived launch on Tuesday. The big difference: Canada built and launched its tiny version for $300,000. The OCO (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) launched Tuesday, but failed to reach orbit.

Meanwhile, the U of T's CanX-2 is cruising 700 kilometres above Earth, "and functioning really well" after some glitches that followed its launch last April, said Ben Quine. He's the director of space engineering at York University, which made an instrument aboard the tiny CanX. Its job, like OCO's, is to find Earth's missing greenhouse gas.

"The measurement principle is almost exactly the same as the one for the OCO," he said. "It's very sad when you lose a spacecraft, but it also means that we are the only people in orbit with one-kilometre resolution on the ground." That means York's Argus instrument can look at small details below. A Japanese satellite does the same job, but can't look at features less than 10 kilometres wide.

"Argus is the lowest-possible-cost approach to making this measurement. NASA was probably the highest-possible-cost approach," he said, "so the instruments are not going to be exactly commensurate." Still, little Argus began sending a stream of data in December.

…The CanX satellite "is about the size of a milk carton," Quine said. It's 34 centimetres long by 15 by 15, and cost about $300,000, including the launch. It weighs 3.5 kilograms -- less than one per cent of OCO's weight. "With these little microsatellites, the launch is about $100,000," he said. Many microsatellites can share the same rocket…

Satellite animation by Wiki-MG**** @@@-fr Accueil fr:Accueil 10:10, 24 January 2007 (UTC), Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

Droughts 'may lay waste' to parts of US

Guardian (UK): The world's pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.

In an update on the latest science on climate change, the US Congress was told that melting snow pack could lead to severe drought from California to Oklahoma. In the midwest, diminishing rains and shrinking rivers were lowering water levels in the Great Lakes, even to the extent where it could affect shipping.

"With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the south-west is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle," said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science. He went on to warn of scorching temperatures in an array of cities. Sacramento in California, for example, could face heatwaves for up to 100 days a year. "We are close to a threshold in a very large number of American cities where uncomfortable heatwaves make cities uninhabitable," Field told the Senate's environment and public works committee.

The warnings were the first time Congress had been directly confronted with the growing evidence that the impact of climate change will be far more severe than revealed even in the UN's most recent report, in 2007. The hearing was also the first time senators had been permitted to hear testimony about the dangers to human health from climate change. In 2007, the Bush administration censored testimony from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the rise in asthma and other respiratory illnesses, as well as the increasing occurrence of "tropical" parasites.

"The CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern," said Howard Frumkin, the director of the centre for environmental health at the CDC. Yesterday's gathering of climate scientists, led by the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, RK Pachauri, was designed to give momentum to efforts by the Democratic leadership to press ahead on energy reform….

White Sands National Park, New Mexico