Eora Borealis

Decades of drought helped trigger Darfur’s violence as rival groups fought over scarce water and arable land. Now, experts fear the war and its refugee crisis are making the environment even worse, leaving the land increasingly uninhabitable and intensifying tensions with no end to the drought in sight.

Darfur’s tragedy could be repeated in much of North Africa and the Middle East, experts fear, because growing populations are straining a very limited water supply. Data show rainfall steadily declining in the region, possibly because of weather changes linked to global warming.

“The consciousness of the world on the issue of climate change has to change fast,” said Muawia Shaddad of the Sudan Environment Conservation Society. “Darfur is just an early warning.”

Read the whole article: Darfur faces environment crisis

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Darfur conflict worsens environment
Environment woes key source of Sudan conflicts
Darfur conflict due to climate change

Deep coal seams that are not commercially viable for coal production could be used for permanent underground storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated by human activities, thus avoiding atmospheric release, according to two studies published in Inderscience’s International Journal of Environment and Pollution. An added benefit of storing CO2 in this way is that additional useful methane will be displaced from the coal beds.

Finding ways to store (sequester) the greenhouse gas CO2, indefinitely, is one approach being investigated in efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels and so help combat climate change. CO2 might be pumped into oil wells to extract the last few drops of oil or be placed deep underground in brine aquifers or unmineable coal seams.

Read the whole article: Greenhouse gas burial

New research shows that man-made climate change could cause the Greenland ice sheet to break up in hundreds, rather than thousands, of years, the chair of a United Nations panel of scientists said on Monday.

Its entire collapse would raise sea-levels globally by around 7 meters (23 feet), they said.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its five-yearly report earlier this year, and described threats from global warming including sea-level rise of up to 79 centimeters this century.

Read the whole article: Greenland ice may melt much faster

A massive algae bloom has spread out over another of China’s big lakes, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on years of clean up efforts.

“In recent days, due to the hot and humid weather, a large amount of algae has bloomed in Dianchi Lake, turning the water as green as paint in a stretch along the shore near Kunming city,” the Oriental Daily reported Monday. “Wave after wave of rolling green lake water laps up on the shore giving off an awful stench.”

Dianchi, in southwest China’s Yunnan province, is the country’s sixth largest freshwater lake. It has suffered from severe pollution since the early 1990s and is plagued by algae blooms each summer, the paper said.

Read the whole article: Algae choking another major Chinese lake
Read more: Two China lakes menaced by algae outbreaks

Like many towns in this part of the arid U.S. Southwest, Flagstaff faces a never-ending challenge in its search for water, and it is getting harder.

“Eight years of drought conditions and a growing population haven’t helped,” said Randy Pellatz, the assistant director of utilities for the city of Flagstaff.

The heavily forested, mountain town of Flagstaff has grown to 62,000 people from 45,000 in 1990, straining its water resources. Upper Lake Mary, a man-made reservoir that provides up to 40 percent of the town’s water needs of 11 million gallons a day, is down to 18 percent of normal levels.

Read the whole article: Search for water gets harder in US Southwest
Read more: San Francisco bans bottled water for city staff

Extracting salt from seawater to make it drinkable is the wrong way to handle water shortages around the world and could exacerbate climate change, a leading conservation group said Tuesday.

But independent scientists disputed the findings and said desalination plays a minor role in global warming.

The World Wide Fund for Nature said its study found that desalination uses large amounts of energy, emits greenhouse gasses and destroys marine life in some coastal areas.

Read the whole article: Desalination could aggravate climate change
Read more: Why desalination doesn’t work (yet)

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”.

In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world’s leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the “gravest threat” of climate change.

Read the whole article: The Earth today stands in imminent peril
Read more: Rising seas to destroy US beaches

Rich countries are being hypocritical in criticizing China’s greenhouse gas emissions while using the country’s cheap labor in industries that pollute, Asian business and government leaders said Monday.

“This is green imperialism,” Nor Mohamed Yakcop, Malaysia’s deputy finance minister, told a panel discussion on global warming at the World Economic Forum on East Asia, a two-day conference that ended Monday. The next meeting will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s main city, in June 2008.

China has come under increasing pressure from the United States in particular to take more forceful measures to curb carbon dioxide emissions. China relies on coal, among the dirtiest fuels, to provide two-thirds of its energy.

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Rich nations accused of green imperialism on climate change

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Rich nations blamed for global warming

Scientists in Chile are investigating the sudden disappearance of a glacial lake in the south of the country.

When park rangers patrolled the area in the Magallanes region in March, the two-hectare (five-acre) lake was its normal size, officials say. But last month they found a huge dry crater and several stranded chunks of ice that used to float on the water.

Read the whole article: Lake disappears suddenly in Chile
Read more: Glacial lake vanishes in Southern Chile

Wind-blown dust from the drought-stricken Southwest can speed the melt of snow in Colorado’s mountains, yet another unpredictable effect of climate change, a new study shows.

In 2006, snows in areas of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains above and below the tree line (above which trees can no longer grow), unexpectedly melted a month earlier than usual.

The cause for the premature melt was dust, most likely originally from parched deserts in Arizona and New Mexico, hundreds of miles away.

The dust is less reflective than snow and so reduces the overall reflectivity of the area, allowing for more of the sun’s energy to warm, and subsequently melt, the snow pack. A similar effect of dark soot falling on Arctic snow is thought to speed melting there.

Read the whole article: Arizona dust causes Colorado meltdown

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University of Colorado study shows desert droughts lead to earlier annual mountain snow loss