Gulf Stream weakened in 'Little Ice Age'

The Gulf Stream — the ocean current that helps to bring warm weather to much of the North Atlantic region — was significantly weakened during the period known to historians as the Little Ice Age, new research reveals.

The discovery supports the notion that a slowing of ocean currents — as some fear might happen in our future — can have significant consequences for climate.

From around 1200 until 1850, during which average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere dipped by around 1 °C, the strength of the Gulf Stream also slackened by up to 10%, oceanographers report.

from Nature.com

High Water, Low Land

South Louisiana is sinking, says Tulane geoscientist Torbjörn Törnqvist, but rapidly rising sea levels might be a bigger threat to the region. Törnqvist's study of marsh peat samples from an area near New Iberia, La., was published in a recent edition of Eos, the world's most widely read geoscience periodical.

"The emphasis in the whole debate over the past couple of years about the future of coastal Louisiana has been strongly focused on the question of how rapidly the land is sinking, but there has been too little concern about sea-level rise, which is a global problem that could have a big impact here. I think we should be more worried about that than we are," says Törnqvist

from Tulane Daily News

Afghanistan's neglected drought

In a graveyard on a hill overlooking the village of Sya Kamarak in western Afghanistan, villagers gathered last week for the funerals of three young children who died of hunger.

They died on the same day from malnutrition caused by a devastating drought that has hit western, northern and southern Afghanistan.


There were no doctors' reports to confirm the cause of death - the parents were too poor to take them to the clinic which is one day's walk away.

Jan Bibi, 40, said she had been feeding her three-month-old daughter Nazia with just boiled water and sugar because she had nothing else.

"My baby died because of inadequate food. I wanted to breastfeed her but I was not producing enough milk."

from the BBC

Twisting open bottles of water a daily ritual in China

You think you have a water problem, Vancouver? It's nothing compared to life in this country of 1.3 billion people, where being able to drink water from the tap would be front-page news.

This is the land of bottled water. Twisting off plastic bottle caps is a ritual of daily life, 24/7.

In China, you brush your teeth with bottled water, you make your tea with it. If you're smart, you even wash your salad with it unless you want a very bad dose of Chairman Mao's revenge.

Even the rooms in the pampered five-star hotel that Premier Gordon Campbell and his delegation is staying in while in Beijing during a trade mission puts a warning by the faucets that guests should heed if they hope to make their meetings on time: "Tap water is NOT drinkable."

Since the 1990s, when China's water pollution became a byproduct of the country's rush toward becoming an economic superpower, bottled water has become big business. Companies have come up with all sorts of reassuring names for it, too: Pure Clear water, Green Garden water, Crystal Dragon, to name a few.

from the Vancouver Sun

Global Warming Said Killing Some Species

Animal and plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.

These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.

"We are finally seeing species going extinct," said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. "Now we've got the evidence. It's here. It's real. This is not just biologists' intuition. It's what's happening."

Her review of 866 scientific studies is summed up in the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

from the AP

Drink it boiled or bottled this weekend

With predictions that a storm will bring more heavy winds and rain to the Lower Mainland on Sunday, the estimated one million Greater Vancouver residents still under a boil-water advisory on Friday night may have to wait well into the weekend, or even into early next week, before they can safely drink from their taps.

Johnny Carline, regional district chief administrator and water commissioner, said the advisory will probably be in place until after the Sunday storm has passed, but would not rule out that it could be lifted earlier if turbidity levels keep falling.

The uncertainty that news brings caused thousands to swarm stores on Friday in hopes they could get enough bottles of water to carry them through until the municipal supply is deemed safe again.

All Fall Down

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to demolish four of the city’s biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.


Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city’s urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city’s public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

from the NY Times

After More Than a Century of Soaking, Washington Town Mulls Move to Higher Ground

To move this tiny town to higher ground is not such a stretch for the short term. Residents here have done it for years when the big rains have come.

Roll up the rugs. Empty the kitchen cabinets. Put the good furniture on the second floor and hope the river does not rise that high. Then load up the RV and head north of Highway 20 to the church.

“They’re actually getting a little better at this, unfortunately,” said the Rev. Ron Edwards, the pastor of the First Baptist Church and a foul-weather host to many of Hamilton’s refugees.


Most of the about 300 residents of Hamilton repeated their weary routine this week, when an immense band of moisture, known as the Pineapple Express for its origins in tropical waters near Hawaii, dumped record rain and drove rivers to new heights across western Washington and Oregon. The storm killed three people, breached levees, flooded farms, washed out roads and forced hundreds of evacuations.

from the NY Times

Rain pushes levees near breaking point: Record high river levels cause concern for flood officials

Weakened by age, and never designed to last for this many decades, the levees that keep King County's rivers from flooding are being worn away by record high river levels, according to the county's flood manager.

"We don't come out of events like this without seeing problems or new damage," said Steve Bleifuhs, manager of the county's flood hazard reduction section.

Bleifuhs is concerned. A strong weather system is expected to hit Western Washington Sunday night.

"I am nervous, yes," he said.

The flooding that turned Carnation into an island and caused millions of dollars in damage throughout the county has added urgency to quick approval of a multimillion-dollar plan to repair levees and build new ones.

from the King County (WA) Journal

Reinventing the Crescent

At a time when many New Orleanians' only concern with planning is wondering how it can help their flood-ravaged neighborhoods get back to something like normal, some of the world's best-known architects want to get involved in a visionary planning exercise along the city's riverfront.

Nine teams of architects and planners from New Orleans and cities around the world responded to a recent invitation to help plan the redevelopment of a 4.1-mile stretch of publicly owned land along the east bank riverfront.

Among them were at least two winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the highest international honor in the field, and architects from London, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, Edinburgh and other cities.

from the Times Picayune

Diseases appear on rise with temperature

A warmer world already seems to be producing a sicker world, health experts reported Tuesday, citing surges in Kenya, China and Europe of such diseases as malaria, heart ailments and dengue fever.

"Climate affects some of the most important diseases afflicting the world," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum of the World Health Organization. "The impacts may already be significant."

Kristie L. Ebi, an American public health consultant for the agency, warned "climate change could overwhelm public health services."

The specialists laid out recent findings as the two-week U.N. climate conference entered its final four days, grappling with technical issues concerning operation of the Kyoto Protocol, and trying to set a course for future controls on global greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists attribute at least some of the past century's 1-degree rise in global temperatures to the accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel-burning sources.

from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Weather disasters could cost 1 trillion dollars in a year: estimate

Driven by climate change, weather disasters could cost as much as a trillion dollars in a single year by 2040, financial experts warned on Tuesday at the UN's conference on global warming here.

"Most insurance and re-insurance companies have no doubt that the rising tide of losses from weather-related disasters is linked with climate change," said Thomas Loster of German reinsurance giant Munich Re.

"The possibility of a one-trillion-dollar-loss year is one scenario out of many, but whatever the precise figures the losses are already large and set to increase."

from TerraDaily

For Clues on Climate, Seeing What Packrats Kept

Geoffrey Spaulding and Kenneth L. Cole lifted off from a high plateau in the Grand Canyon, their helicopter laden with so many packrat nests that it could barely climb.

“The chopper gave this sickly shudder as we made our way back across the chasm of the canyon,” Dr. Spaulding recalled. “Thank goodness for those Vietnam-vet pilots.”

To Dr. Spaulding, a geologist with the engineering company CH2M Hill, and Dr. Cole, an ecologist for the United States Geological Survey, the nests were precious cargo. Packrats, which look like brown squirrels with Dumbo ears, are skilled home builders, and their massive nests, known as middens, can last 10,000 to 20,000 years (though they are not usually inhabited the entire time).

from the NY Times

Ancient Crash, Epic Wave

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.



from the NY Times

Slow Home Grants Stall Progress in New Orleans

The $7.5 billion program to rebuild Louisiana by helping residents repair or replace their flooded homes has gotten off to a slow start, frustrating government officials and outraging many homeowners who say they are still in limbo 14 months after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Though nearly 79,000 families have applied to the program, called the Road Home, only 1,721 have been told how much grant money they will receive. And just 22 have received access to the cash, which was provided by federal taxpayers and is being distributed by the state.

“I don’t know of anyone who has actually received any money,” said Cassandra D. Wall, who is active in a group of homeowners from the eastern part of New Orleans. Ms. Wall said she planned to attend a protest Nov. 17 in Baton Rouge, the state capital, “to go public with the outrage and the outcry.”

from the NY Times

Disaster readiness in Bay Area assessed

The Bay Area may have experience in disasters, but is it prepared enough for the next one -- particularly when it comes to helping the region's poor?

A group of the country's top experts on disaster preparedness will join with Bay Area leaders in a private gathering in Sebastopol over the weekend to assess how well-equipped -- in training and resources -- local communities, businesses and charities will be when another earthquake or similar disaster strikes.

``It's a statistical probability that we'll have a major disaster, because of geography and geology, in the next 30 years,'' said Anisya Thomas, managing director of the Fritz Institute, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that helps communities prepare for and respond to disasters.

from the Mercury News

Report Warns of ‘Global Collapse’ of Fishing

If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be “global collapse” of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.

The scientists, who are to report their findings on Friday in the journal Science, say it is not too late to turn the situation around. As long as marine ecosystems are still biologically diverse, they can recover quickly once overfishing and other threats are reduced, the researchers say.

But they add that there must be quick, large-scale action to protect remaining diversity, including establishment of marine reserves and “no take” zones, along with restrictions on particularly destructive fishing practices.

from the NY Times