It's become increasingly clear in the arena of global warming research, that warming effects are occurring faster, sooner, and stronger, than most climate change modeling forecasts. In fact, the current situation in the continental US has us here at the APR seriously questioning, if we have reached the "tipping points" climatically now, in which "positive feedbacks" accelerate warming. Which is not known, how, or to what extent it will progress before leveling off.
The unprecedented, in many areas, of well above-average temperatures continues in much of the Central and Eastern US.
And the ratio of newly set (in short defined periods) high-temperature records to low-temperature records, which if there were no warming, would be even, has shot up to 9:1 since January for the continental US (lower 48). Take a look at the these articles, they all offer excellent and vital information. It is alot of material, but we feel they all present the latest, and trusted (by the A.P.R) scientific information on the state of the global climate. Which the corporate/commercial media isn't really reporting in a serious way (yet). This first one is from the folks at Climate Central, which always provides the best, latest, scientific information on global warming. They are a group of scientists and journalists with ties to all the major research institutions across the World.
High Times: More 2012 Record Highs than All of Last Year
By Andrew Freedman
Thanks to a record warm January-to-June period and intense, long-lasting heat waves during March, June, and July, the U.S. has passed an ominous milestone: with about five months remaining in the year, there have already been more record daily high temperatures set or tied so far this year than were set or tied during all of 2011. And 2011 had the second-warmest summer on record for the lower 48 states.
According to Guy Walton of The Weather Channel, who compiles temperature record statistics using data from the National Climatic Data Center, there were 26,674 daily record highs broken or tied during 2011, and through August 5 there were 27,042 records broken or tied this year. The March and July heat waves clearly gave 2012 the edge over last year. During March alone, 7,755 daily records were set or tied, and 4,420 records were broken or tied during July. (You can track temperature records using Climate Central’s Record Tracker.)
Graphic showing how record daily highs have outnumbered record daily lows during recent decades, as the average climate has warmed during the period. Click on image for a larger version.Credit: Climate Central.
While the final four months of the year may not seem like they would add much to the record totals, during 2010, there were 8,636 record daily highs set or tied from September through the end of December, and in 2011 the total was 5,800.
March 2012 was an especially warm month in the lower 48 states, as this map of temperature departures from average shows. Click on image for a larger version.Credit: High Plains Regional Climate Center.
Last year, record daily high temperatures outnumbered record daily lows by a ratio of about 3-to-1. This year, that ratio is even more lopsided, favoring high-temperature records by a ratio of about 10-to-1.
Climate research indicates that over longer timescales, these ratios are increasingly favoring warm records as well. A study published in 2009 found that rather than a 1-to-1 ratio, as would be expected if the climate were not warming, the ratio was closer to 2-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records during the past decade (2000-2009). This finding cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone, the study found, and is instead consistent with global warming.
The study used computer models to project how the records ratios might shift in future decades as the amount of greenhouse gases in the air continues to increase. The results showed that the ratio of daily record highs to daily record lows in the lower 48 states could soar to 20-to-1 by mid-century, and 50-to-1 by 2100.
We thought this article by Prof. Michael T. Klare, from Amherst University, gave a good perspective on how the current 2012 US Heat/Drought will likely affect the rest of the World in the next year. And serve as a model for conditions every year, 30-40 years hence.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/07-2
The Coming Hunger Wars: Heat, Drought, Rising Food Costs, and Global Unrest
The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end,
but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than
one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of
corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of
predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased
misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor
people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.
This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history
is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread
social unrest and violent conflict.
The Hunger Games, 2007-2011
As for the current drought, analysts are already warning of instability in Africa, where corn is a major staple, and of increased popular unrest in China, where food prices are expected to rise at a time of growing hardship for that country’s vast pool of low-income, migratory workers and poor peasants. Higher food prices in the U.S. and China could also lead to reduced consumer spending on other goods, further contributing to the slowdown in the global economy and producing yet more worldwide misery, with unpredictable social consequences.
The Hunger Games, 2012-??
If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one country, the world would undoubtedly absorb the ensuing hardship and expect to bounce back in the years to come. Unfortunately, it’s becoming evident that the Great Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence of global warming which is only going to intensify. As a result, we can expect not just more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often, and not just in the United States, but globally for the indefinite future.
Until recently, most scientists were reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts on global warming. Now, however, a growing number of scientists believe that such links can be demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study focused on extreme weather events in 2011, for instance, climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Great Britain’s National Weather Service concluded that human-induced climate change has made intense heat waves of the kind experienced in Texas in 2011 more likely than ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming had ensured that the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times more likely than it would have been in 1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those experienced in Britain last November were said to be 62 times as likely because of global warming.
It is still too early to apply the methodology used by these scientists to
calculating the effect of global warming on the heat waves of 2012, which are
proving to be far more severe, but we can assume the level of correlation will
be high. And what can we expect in the future, as the warming gains
momentum?
When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course,
In this, Collins was prescient, even if her specific vision of the violence on which such a world might be organized is fantasy. While we may never see her version of those hunger games, do not doubt that some version of them will come into existence -- that, in fact, hunger wars of many sorts will fill our future. These could include any combination or permutation of the deadly riots that led to the 2008 collapse of Haiti’s government, the pitched battles between massed protesters and security forces that engulfed parts of Cairo as the Arab Spring developed, the ethnic struggles over disputed croplands and water sources that have made Darfur a recurring headline of horror in our world, or the inequitable distribution of agricultural land that continues to fuel the insurgency of the Maoist-inspired Naxalites of India.
Combine such conflicts with another likelihood: that persistent drought and hunger will force millions of people to abandon their traditional lands and flee to the squalor of shantytowns and expanding slums surrounding large cities, sparking hostility from those already living there. One such eruption, with grisly results, occurred in Johannesburg’s shantytowns in 2008 when desperately poor and hungry migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe were set upon, beaten, and in some cases burned to death by poor South Africans. One terrified Zimbabwean, cowering in a police station from the raging mobs, said she fled her country because “there is no work and no food.” And count on something else: millions more in the coming decades, pressed by disasters ranging from drought and flood to rising sea levels, will try to migrate to other countries, provoking even greater hostility. And that hardly begins to exhaust the possibilities that lie in our hunger-games future.
At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate consequences of
the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food
prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that
undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or
2013. Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can
expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures,
persistent droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished,
desperate people.
Food -- affordable food -- is essential to human
survival and well-being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate,
and angry. In the United States, food represents only about 13% of the average household budget, a relatively small
share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly taxing
for most middle- and upper-income families. It could, however, produce
considerable hardship for poor and unemployed Americans with limited resources.
“You are talking about a real bite out of family budgets,” commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural economist at Omaha’s
Creighton University. This could add to the discontent already evident in
depressed and high-unemployment areas, perhaps prompting an intensified backlash
against incumbent politicians and other forms of dissent and unrest.
It is in the international arena, however, that the
Great Drought is likely to have its most devastating effects. Because so many
nations depend on grain imports from the U.S. to supplement their own harvests,
and because intense drought and floods are damaging crops elsewhere as well,
food supplies are expected to shrink and prices to rise across the planet. “What
happens to the U.S. supply has immense impact around the world,” says Robert Thompson, a food expert at the Chicago Council on
Global Affairs. As the crops most affected by the drought, corn and soybeans,
disappear from world markets, he noted, the price of all grains, including
wheat, is likely to soar, causing immense hardship to those who already have
trouble affording enough food to feed their families.
What happens next is, of course, impossible to
predict, but if the recent past is any guide, it could turn ugly. In 2007-2008,
when rice, corn, and wheat experienced prices hikes of 100% or more, sharply
higher prices -- especially for bread -- sparked “food riots” in more than two dozen countries,
including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen. In
Haiti, the rioting became so violent and public confidence in the government’s
ability to address the problem dropped so precipitously that the Haitian Senate
voted to oust the country’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis. In
other countries, angry protestors clashed with army and police forces, leaving scores dead.
Those price increases of 2007-2008 were largely
attributed to the soaring cost of oil, which made food production more
expensive. (Oil’s use is widespread in farming operations, irrigation, food
delivery, and pesticide manufacture.) At the same time, increasing amounts of
cropland worldwide were being diverted from food crops to the cultivation of
plants used in making biofuels.
The next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely
associated with climate change. An intense drought gripped much of eastern
Russia during the summer of 2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket region by
one-fifth and prompting Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt China’s grain harvest, while intense flooding destroyed much
of Australia’s wheat crop. Together with other
extreme-weather-related effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more than 50% and the price of most food staples by
32%.
Once again, a surge in food prices resulted in
widespread social unrest, this time concentrated in North Africa and the Middle
East. The earliest protests arose over the cost of staples in Algeria and then
Tunisia, where -- no coincidence -- the precipitating event was a young food
vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, setting himself on fire to protest
government harassment. Anger over rising food and fuel prices combined with
long-simmering resentments about government repression and corruption sparked what became known as the Arab Spring. The rising cost
of basic staples, especially a loaf of bread, was also a cause of unrest in
Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. Other factors, notably anger at entrenched autocratic
regimes, may have proved more powerful in those places, but as the author of Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti, wrote, “The initial trouble was traceable, at least in part,
to the price of that loaf of bread.”
As for the current drought, analysts are already warning of instability in Africa, where corn is a major staple, and of increased popular unrest in China, where food prices are expected to rise at a time of growing hardship for that country’s vast pool of low-income, migratory workers and poor peasants. Higher food prices in the U.S. and China could also lead to reduced consumer spending on other goods, further contributing to the slowdown in the global economy and producing yet more worldwide misery, with unpredictable social consequences.
The Hunger Games, 2012-??
If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one country, the world would undoubtedly absorb the ensuing hardship and expect to bounce back in the years to come. Unfortunately, it’s becoming evident that the Great Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence of global warming which is only going to intensify. As a result, we can expect not just more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often, and not just in the United States, but globally for the indefinite future.
Until recently, most scientists were reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts on global warming. Now, however, a growing number of scientists believe that such links can be demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study focused on extreme weather events in 2011, for instance, climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Great Britain’s National Weather Service concluded that human-induced climate change has made intense heat waves of the kind experienced in Texas in 2011 more likely than ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming had ensured that the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times more likely than it would have been in 1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those experienced in Britain last November were said to be 62 times as likely because of global warming.
When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course,
manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social
world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and
survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove
catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food
riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every
sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and
deadly.
In her immensely successful young-adult novel The Hunger Games
(and the movie that followed), Suzanne Collins riveted millions with a
portrait of a dystopian, resource-scarce, post-apocalyptic future where
once-rebellious “districts” in an impoverished North America must supply two
teenagers each year for a series of televised gladiatorial games that end in
death for all but one of the youthful contestants. These “hunger games” are
intended as recompense for the damage inflicted on the victorious capitol of
Panem by the rebellious districts during an insurrection. Without specifically
mentioning global warming, Collins makes it clear that climate change was
significantly responsible for the hunger that shadows the North American
continent in this future era. Hence, as the gladiatorial contestants are about
to be selected, the mayor of District 12’s principal city describes “the
disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that
swallowed up so much of the land [and] the brutal war for what little sustenance
remained.”
In this, Collins was prescient, even if her specific vision of the violence on which such a world might be organized is fantasy. While we may never see her version of those hunger games, do not doubt that some version of them will come into existence -- that, in fact, hunger wars of many sorts will fill our future. These could include any combination or permutation of the deadly riots that led to the 2008 collapse of Haiti’s government, the pitched battles between massed protesters and security forces that engulfed parts of Cairo as the Arab Spring developed, the ethnic struggles over disputed croplands and water sources that have made Darfur a recurring headline of horror in our world, or the inequitable distribution of agricultural land that continues to fuel the insurgency of the Maoist-inspired Naxalites of India.
Combine such conflicts with another likelihood: that persistent drought and hunger will force millions of people to abandon their traditional lands and flee to the squalor of shantytowns and expanding slums surrounding large cities, sparking hostility from those already living there. One such eruption, with grisly results, occurred in Johannesburg’s shantytowns in 2008 when desperately poor and hungry migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe were set upon, beaten, and in some cases burned to death by poor South Africans. One terrified Zimbabwean, cowering in a police station from the raging mobs, said she fled her country because “there is no work and no food.” And count on something else: millions more in the coming decades, pressed by disasters ranging from drought and flood to rising sea levels, will try to migrate to other countries, provoking even greater hostility. And that hardly begins to exhaust the possibilities that lie in our hunger-games future.
© 2012 Michael T. Klare
And now, the latest scientific research, offered from the folks at NASA, who have been studying the Earth's ecosystems globally for the past 40 years. Which is saying that the current US (lower 48, not AK, we've had a cool, cloudy summer...) heat/drought of 2012 can be scientifically (through statistical analysis) attributed to anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. And that this year is a good model to represent average conditions several decades hence. We won't display the article for brevity's sake, but we strongly encourage you to give it a look.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming-links.html
However, the US Government is hopefully beginning to wake up to the seriousness of the situation, as this speech from a few days ago by Senate Majorite Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) would suggest.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/07/653371/senator-harry-reid-opens-clean-energy-summit-with-a-bold-speech-on-climate-change-we-must-act-today/?mobile=nc
Senator Harry Reid Opens Clean Energy Summit With a Bold Speech on Climate Change: 'We Must Act Today'
by Stephen Lacey
It appears that advocates of clean energy are getting the message: If you want to talk about clean energy in a political context, you must talk about the environmental imperative.
In a speech opening up this year’s 5th National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave one of the most powerful public speeches on climate that any national policymaker has made in years.
Reid joins Senators Al Franken, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, and Sheldon Whitehouse, all of whom have made excellent climate speeches on the Senate floor in the last year. However, today’s speech was done in a much more prominent public forum in front of top journalists, regulatory officials, and policymakers.
Here’s the climate portion of the speech, which was used to set up the pressing need to develop more renewable energy and efficiency:
"Twenty-five years ago, President George H.W. Bush promised to use the “White House effect” to combat the “greenhouse effect.” Yet a quarter century later, too many elected officials in Washington are still calling climate change a liberal hoax. They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet.Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying – or going to slaughter early – as heat
Of course, if those skeptics had taken a stroll along the Potomac River on a 70-degree day this February, they would have seen cherry trees blossoming earlier than at any time since they were planted 100 years ago. Washington experienced its warmest spring since record keeping began in 1895.
And back in the skeptics’ home states, the harbingers of a changing climate are just as clear as those delicate February blossoms – and infinitely more perilous.
This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events – events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the earth’s climate changes.
The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century – or maybe ever. Presently, disasters have been declared in the majority of U.S. counties. More than half the country is experiencing drought, and seventy-five percent of the nation is abnormally dry this year.
waves parch America’s breadbasket, breaking records set during the Woody Guthrie Dust
Bowl years.
Now ravaging wildfires have replaced the dust storms of the 1930′s. Devastating fires have swept New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and other parts of the Mountain West, destroying hundreds of homes and burning millions of trees. These fires are fed in part by vast areas of dead forest ravaged by beetles and other pests that now survive through warmer winters.
On the East Coast, extreme thunderstorms and high winds called “derechos” – literally meaning straight-line storms – have eliminated power for 4.3 million customers in 10 states in the mid-Atlantic region. One 38-year veteran of the utility industry told the New York Times this: “We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now.” At the height of this storm – while the power was out and the air conditioning wasn’t working – the East Coast experienced record high temperatures.Arctic sea ice is also at its lowest point in recorded history.
Down south, the Mississippi River is nearly dry in various places, with shipping barges operating in only 5 feet of water. Just Friday, barges were grounded because the water level was so low. And New Orleans’ water supply is now being threatened by salt water moving up the Mississippi due to extremely low water.
But while record drought has struck many parts of the United States, torrential rains have poured down in others. In June, the fourth tropical storm of the hurricane season – a season which typically begins in the fall – dropped 20 inches of rain on Florida.
And our nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions. Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. The water used to cool power plants – including nuclear power plants – has either run dry or reached dangerously high temperatures.
And that’s just in the United States – just through the month of July.
This month, the massive ice sheet atop Greenland experienced sudden and almost uniform melting – a phenomenon not seen in the modern age.
This spring, rain fell unexpectedly in Mecca despite 109-degree temperatures. It was the hottest downpour in the planet’s recorded history.
The Amazon River Basin has experienced super-flooding – reaching record high levels due to long summer rains and greater than normal glacial melting.
Massive forest fires have swept Siberia.
Monsoons in Bangladesh left hundreds dead and nearly 7 million people homeless.
And last week more than 600 million people in India were without power. Late monsoons and record temperatures increased demand for electricity to irrigate crops and air condition homes, overloading the fragile power grid and causing the blackout.
Scientists say this is genesis – the beginning. The more extreme climate change gets, the more extreme the weather will get. In the words of one respected climate scientist: “This is what global warming looks like.”
Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change. Not every flood or drought can be attributed to human-induced transformation of our planet’s weather patterns. But scientists report that these extreme events are dozens of times more likely because of those changes.
The seriousness of this problem is not lost on your average American. A large majority of people finally believe climate change is real, and that it is the cause of extreme weather. Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits.
These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality.
It’s time for us all – whether we’re leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives – to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don’t.
Virtually every respected, independent scientist in the world agrees the problem is real, and the time to act is now. Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Not next month or next year. We must act today."
We certainly agree here at the Alaska Progressive Review with Senator Reid's assessment. And applaud his speech for giving us an accurate depiction of reality. The question is now, what is the US government going to do about it? Remember, it's not just the US that is now suffering adverse affects, as the climate system warms, but people all over the World.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19174538
It's time for all the governments of the World to come together honestly and look at what we are doing as societies to global ecosystems, and change what is necessary, if we are to provide a future as relatively stable as we have had, for future generations. Obviously there are strong forces with vested interests in keeping things as they are, the fossil-fuel industry, corpotocracy, etc... We like to think though now, with the information availability thanks to the internet, that the free flow of information will help the majority of humanity overcome these resisting forces peacefully. Cheers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19174538
It's time for all the governments of the World to come together honestly and look at what we are doing as societies to global ecosystems, and change what is necessary, if we are to provide a future as relatively stable as we have had, for future generations. Obviously there are strong forces with vested interests in keeping things as they are, the fossil-fuel industry, corpotocracy, etc... We like to think though now, with the information availability thanks to the internet, that the free flow of information will help the majority of humanity overcome these resisting forces peacefully. Cheers.
