Max Ajl's Climate Chronicles

Agriculture is increasingly recognized as central to the issue of stopping and reversing anthropogenic global warming. Report after report confirms that food production and bio-fuel production, deforestation, land-use change and the conversion of savannah to pasture land contribute significantly to the world’s CO2 emissions.

But with all due respect to the Bjorn Lomborgs of the world, the “world’s” CO2 emissions aren’t the major impasse at global climate summits. Individual countries’ emissions are, meaning, which country gets to emit how much carbon.

Apportioning emissions rights means coming up with a fair, reasonable measurement system for assessing how much carbon each country emits. This isn’t so straightforward.

The epic blow-up at Copenhagen was ultimately about something very simple. It was about economic growth — about who gets to grow, how fast, under what terms, using which energy supplies.

Within this purportedly zero-sum framework, if China grows quickly, burning cheap coal for fuel, with a slowly increasing amount of renewables added to the mix, the West will have to cut growth too sharply. Meanwhile most of the global South worries that the Copenhagen proposals could have permanently put a stop to their plans for growth.

But what if there’s an escape from this cul-de-sac? What if development — entailing, but not the same as, economic growth — could co-exist harmoniously with sharp emissions reductions? What would that imply for development planning?

America produces a lot of food. So much food, in fact, that it is one of the world’s major food exporters, and so much grain and soy that we turn much of it into ethanol to power our cars.

Even excluding the calories that we export or turn into agro-fuels, per-capita caloric availability was 2,700 calories per person in 2007. That’s plenty of food. [Excel link]. No one should be hungry in a country that produces that much food.

But that doesn’t mean that many aren’t going hungry. The latest USDA survey results show that 14.6 percent of the American population — 17 million households — was food-insecure at some point in 2008. “Food insecure” means that the food consumption of one member of the household, or more, was reduced because they lacked for money or other ways to access food. That number shot up from 13 million households in 2007, 11.1 percent of the population.

When the most traditional consultancies in the world note that the world's economies are emitting far more carbon dioxide than even the most optimistic models suggest is safe, that the trajectories we’re on have a terminus marked “oven,” it’s a real alarm.

Brazil is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for about 5 percent of current global GHG emissions.

Maybe this isn’t shocking. It’s a huge country. Its south is speckled with major population centers, and it has a southern industrial belt. Yet most of its emissions don’t come from its cities or its factories. At least not directly. They come from its land.

The Amazon jungle is metaphorically referred to as the lungs of the world: CO2 in, O2 out, transformed through a dense emerald mass. It's an irreplaceable treasure, in many spots still unmapped, and a biological preserve filled with species that we likely haven’t even seen.

So it’s quite welcome that author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is paying attention to what happens to the Amazon.

What’s not welcome are the misdirections Friedman takes while discussing how to protect the remaining 80 percent of the Amazon that has not yet been clear-cut and transformed into cattle ranches and soy plantations.

As anthropogenic climate change gets more serious and more harmful, something happens to the earth’s fresh-water: there’s quite a lot less of it available for human consumption.

Climate change leads to higher temperatures. Higher temperatures lead to melting glaciers, so snow-melt-based water supplies decrease. Climate change also leads to more irregular rainfalls. Under most climate models, rainfall is predicted to occur more frequently in brief, furious bursts rather than the more sustained and regularized patterns that make it easy to store and irrigate crops.

A recently-released World Bank study notes that there is now strong reason to believe that rainfall variability will increase substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa, reducing GDP and heightening poverty. Previous evidence from Ethiopia, for example, showed that just one season of sharply reduced rainfall “depressed consumption” up to five years later.

And in the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-stressed region, per capita water supplies were expected to halve by 2050 even in the absence of global climate change, the effects of a swelling population. The effects on agriculture will be unpredictable but unpleasant—agriculture amounts to 85 percent of the region’s water use.

Water is basic. When there’s not enough of it, people die. When there’s not enough to keep crops properly irrigated, there’s famine. So it’s not a big shock that when water decreases, conflict over it increases. Or to put it more simply, a lack of water leads to war.

When discussing deserts, it’s important to keep in the mind the distinction between deserts as a specific ecosystem and desertification as a specific process.

Deserts are beguiling and wondrous: Atacama in Chile, the Sonora in Mexico, the Sahara in Africa.

Desertification is the rapid, human-induced creation of deserts — the sudden, accelerated conversion of arid or semi-arid land, usually by over-grazing, deforestation, over-extraction of groundwater, drought, over-planting, or some nasty combination of the five.

Deserts, we’re stuck with. Desertification, we can hopefully stop and, if we catch it early, reverse at a reasonable cost — and in the process, do a good bit to stop climate change and global warming.

That’s the idea behind a recent congress on the United Nations Convention on Desertification, which wrapped up this month in Argentina. The Convention is an off-spring of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), better known as the Rio Conference.

Its executive secretary, Luc Gnacadja, warned that action is urgent.

"If we cannot find a solution to this problem ... in 2025, close to 70 percent [of the planet’s soil] could be affected," Gnacadja said. "There will not be global security without food security."

Read More

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 2 comments

Looking at pictures of the Andean ridges, running like exposed spinal columns down the Western flank of Latin America, one is struck immediately by their white tips.

Soon, pictures are going to be the only way to see that whiteness.

Peruvian glaciers have long been known to be melting; Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier is fast disappearing; and now experts say Colombia is on pace to lose all of its Andean glaciers in the next 25 years if current trends continue.

“There's been a sharp downward trend in snow coverage of several of Colombia's big glaciers particularly since 1985. If current rates continue, Colombia won't have any glaciers left by 2035,” Ricardo Lozano, head of the Colombian Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies, told a conference last month.

Read More

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Add new comment

Anyone who’s been to Europe and flashed across the countryside in a high-speed TGV knows that long-haul traveling need not involve either a plane ride with endless security lines and annoying pat-downs or an expensive, tiring drive.

Europe’s bullet-trains, zipping along at over 150 mph, carry passengers far more efficiently over distances from 100 to 500 miles than other forms of transportation.

The Chinese recognize the value. Last week, Bombardier Transportation announced a $4 billion deal with the Chinese Ministry of Railways to supply 80 ZEFIRO 380 high-speed trains for China’s growing network.

So what about the U.S.?