Melting ice means global warming report all wet

Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures.

But that may be the sugarcoated version.

Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations:

They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University earth sciences professor Lonnie Thompson, a polar ice specialist. "I think there are unpleasant surprises as we move into the 21st century."

Michael MacCracken, who until 2001 coordinated the official U.S. government reviews of the international climate report on global warming, has fired off a letter of protest over the omission.

from the AP

Doctors puzzled over Katrina patients

Dr. Jay Brooks had to do an unusual kind of sleuthing before he could diagnose and treat the patients from New Orleans who washed into his Baton Rouge office after Hurricane Katrina. Their doctors back home had done the usual tests and blood work, but Brooks had to reconstruct what they found from the bag of prescription drugs the patients handed him.

"There were patients who came out of New Orleans who sat in my office and said 'I have cancer.' I asked what kind, and they said 'I don't know.' I looked at the drugs they had and could kind of figure out what was going on," Brooks said.

For Brooks, the chief of hematology-oncology at Ochsner Baton Rouge, the bewilderment that many Katrina evacuees showed about their medical conditions underscores the need to create a permanent, electronic medical record that doctors can view if patients find themselves displaced by a hurricane or otherwise in need of medical care far from home.

from the Times Picayune

Arsenic in Hurricane Katrina wood debris

Hurricane Katrina left behind an estimated 55 million cubic meters (m³) of tangled debris in Louisiana and Mississippi—enough to cover 150 football fields piled 15 meters high. To add to the disposal problem, much of the lumber in those piles contains arsenic, a known carcinogen.

The arsenic comes from chromated copper arsenate (CCA) treatments that were applied to wood to protect it against termites and decay, two big problems in the steamy southeastern U.S. that made the pesticide very popular until recently. To sort the good wood from the bad, a team of researchers led by Helena Solo-Gabriele of the University of Miami used handheld X-ray fluorescence devices to make on-the-ground measurements of arsenic in the New Orleans debris. The results were published today on ES&T’s Research ASAP website (DOI: 10.1021/es0622812).

The team sampled more than 200 pieces of lumber at seven sites in New Orleans, including the hard-hit Ninth Ward neighborhood, where piles of housing still remain untouched. From their measurements in New Orleans, they estimate that in total, Katrina debris in Mississippi and Louisiana contained about 1740 metric tons of arsenic from treated wood.

Arsenic-treated wood was banned in U.S. playground equipment in 2001, and CCA manufacturers and users agreed to work with the U.S. EPA in 2002 to take the pesticide out of residential use. This led to the creation of arsenic-free replacement chemicals, which contain copper, for most applications.

from ES&T News

Drilling blamed for Java mud leak

A mud leak that has displaced thousands of Indonesians was most probably caused by drilling for gas, a scientific study into the disaster concludes. The British-based scientists believe the drilling in East Java ruptured pressurised limestone rock, allowing water and mud to rise to the surface.

They warn thousands of cubic metres of mud a day could continue to spew out for months, if not years, to come.

An Indonesian minister has insisted the eruption is a natural disaster.

Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie - whose family firm controls the drilling firm involved, Lapindo Brantas - said it was caused by the devastating earthquake near Yogyakarta on 27 May.

His comments echo those made by Lapindo Brantas, which has denied a drilling accident was to blame.

Hot mud and gas have been spewing from the ground in Sidoarjo since early June, and show little sign of stopping.

The mud flow, made up of what is known locally as Lusi, has submerged several villages in the surrounding area and displaced more than 10,000 people.

from the BBC

Nigerian houses swallowed by sand

Ciroma Mohammed is standing on the spot he says was once occupied by his house in north-east Nigeria. "We lose houses to the desert every year," he says from the village of Bulamadu in Yobe State.

Almost all the villagers in this dusty arid region say they have lost homes and farms to the Sahara Desert which is expanding southwards.

"What we do is that when the sand moves and buries our homes and farms and even our wells, we simply keep retreating southwards," says Aminu Mahmud, another villager who says he has already lost two different houses to the sand.

He says the situation deteriorates every April when strong pre-rainy season sandstorms sweep sand into their settlements.

"The desert's unrelenting onslaught is pushing us further away from our original homes and it seems there's absolutely nothing we can do about it," Mr Mahmud says.

"The desert has swallowed up our houses, our farms, our roads, our lives. It has changed our livelihoods."

A middle-aged Muslim woman who did not want her photograph taken says women in Bulamadu now spend most of the day travelling long distances in search of potable water.

"Water has become more precious than gold now," the woman who introduced herself as Mairo said, as she sat frying bean cakes known as kosai.

"You wake up one morning and the water well that was there yesterday has been buried under the sand. As a result, most of us women have to trek long distances to get water.">

from the BBC

Temperature rise may mean more wildfires

For the past 20 years, wildfires in western states have raged more often and more intensely, an alarming trend that has been blamed mostly on decades of aggressive fire suppression and century-old grazing and logging practices.

Recently, however, evidence has emerged that appears to show global warming also could be playing a significant role.

And computer models developed last year show that if the climate continues to warm, the risk of large wildfires in California could increase by more than 50 percent. In Northern California, they could nearly double in number.

The Bay Area, where neighborhoods are often on the edges of wooded areas, also could be threatened by more fires.

"The warmer it gets, the more forest fires you get, especially in Northern California," said Anthony Westerling, an environmental engineer and geographer at UC Merced who developed the models with a colleague.

"Some of the biggest increases were in the foothills of the Sierra and the Sierra themselves," he added.

Warmer temperatures mean earlier snowmelt, longer fire seasons and drier vegetation and soils.

In the summer, Westerling published a study in the journal Science that suggests a possible link between the increase in western wildfires and global warming.

The study found that large wildfires in western states increased "suddenly and dramatically" beginning in the late 1980s, and that the increases were largely driven by warming temperatures.

from the Contra Costa Times

Can a 'leaky' levee save the Louisiana coast?

With working-class towns like Leeville and Golden Meadow partly overrun by an encroaching Gulf of Mexico, Cajun Country is in full retreat from its historic home in the deep swamps of southern Louisiana.

Now, a bold plan put forward by the US Army Corps of Engineers – and currently being discussed in the new Congress – would build a semipermeable "Great Wall of Louisiana" from the Mississippi River to Texas to block the advancing Gulf and, at the same time, do the opposite of what a levee is supposed to do: Allow water through to keep marshlands from drowning in the kind of brackish backwaters that are killing off Louisiana's signature swamps at the rate of more than 30 acres a year.

For some 120,000 people along Louisiana's blue-collar coast, the "Morganza-to-the-Gulf" levee – a sort of intertidal Maginot Line – is seen as salvation, especially since the 2005 storms. But critics say that such a "leaky levee" is a false hope, a taxpayer-funded Louisiana hay wagon that is scientifically unproven and even detrimental to both the region's ecology and economy.

What is certain, however, is that this storm-blocking proposal promises to test the political fortitude of lawmakers and scientific wisdom of the nation's levee-builders, with deep ramifications for this ancient delta.

"The idea is to plan for protection and restoration together, and [the Morganza plan is an example of] where the two ideas can benefit each other," says Windell Curole, of the South LaFourche Levee District, who manages the levees there. "But there are also places of conflict."

from the Christian Science Monitor

U.N. climate panel to project wrenching change

A U.N. climate panel will project wrenching disruptions to nature by 2100 in a report next week blaming human use of fossil fuels more clearly than ever for global warming, scientific sources said.

A draft report based on work by 2,500 scientists and due for release on February 2 in Paris, draws on research showing greenhouse gases at their highest levels for 650,000 years, fuelling a warming likely to bring more droughts, floods and rising seas.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may have some good news, however, by toning down chances of the biggest temperature and sea level rises projected in the IPCC's previous 2001 study, the sources said.

But it will also revise up its lowest projections.

from Reuters via Scientific American

When the levees broke: lessons from '97

Rain-soaked farmers patrolled their levees in the middle of the night. Families waited for the floodwaters to spit up their ruined homes. And when they did, the search was on for pets missing in the mud.

The floods of January 1997 are one decade past. But the lessens learned have not aged one day.

"I tell people, sometimes you go through something that was so intense that you measure your life before and your life after," said Ron Baldwin, who heads San Joaquin County's Office of Emergency Services. "For me, that was the flood. It was just so intense."

Warm rains that New Year's had melted much of the Sierra snowpack, sending torrents of water down the San Joaquin River and other streams throughout the state.

First the levees boiled. Then they broke. Over a period of weeks, more than 600 homes were damaged or destroyed in the San Joaquin County area alone. At least 4,500 people were evacuated. Thousands of acres of farmland were submerged. It was a "countywide crisis from Thornton to Vernalis," Baldwin said.

from the Stockton Record

Deadly wheat disease 'a threat to world food security'

A virulent wheat disease now on the move from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula could devastate world wheat crops and threaten food security, warn scientists.

Known as Ug99, this new form of stem rust has spread from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda over the Red Sea to Yemen. Most wheat crops are susceptible to stem rust.

The Global Rust Initiative (GRI) — a partnership of international agricultural research centres — and the Agricultural Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture confirmed infected crops in Yemen, with evidence of further infections in Sudan.

The Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) predicts that windborne spores could easily spread to India, Pakistan, the Middle East and North Africa, which together grow about 25 per cent of the world's wheat. The annual losses could total some US$3 billion.

M. E. Tusneem, chairman of Pakistan's Agriculture Research Council, warned that the disease would have a "major impact" on food security if not controlled. Global wheat stocks were, he noted, at a historic low.

In a CIMMYT press release, US wheat scientist and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug is quoted saying, "We know what to do and how to do it. All we need are the financial resources, scientific cooperation and political will."

from SciDevNet

Immigrants in New Orleans face health issues

The waves of Hispanic immigrants who poured into New Orleans in the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters receded to help rebuild the city now are facing a torrent of health- and work-related issues, a panel of local and national experts said Friday.

Those issues include exposure to asbestos, lead and other toxins; lack of health insurance and mental health counseling; cultural and linguistic barriers in the health-care arena; scarce prenatal care for pregnant immigrant women; and housing challenges.

The bottom line, the speakers said, is that Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states were not adequately prepared to serve their pre-Katrina immigrant communities or the influx of immigrant day laborers who arrived after the storm.

“Whether it’s a hurricane or a public health crisis, we need to be prepared,’’ said Janet Murguia, president and chief executive officer of the National Council of La Raza, the largest national Hispanic civil-rights and advocacy organization in the United States.

“A community can only recover if it’s a healthy community for all, documented and undocumented,’’ NCLR board member Andrea Bazan-Manson added during a roundtable discussion — titled “Latino Health Status in the Wake of Katrina — on the campus of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

from the LA Times

New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size

The empty streets, deserted avenues and abandoned houses prompt a gnawing question, nearly 17 months after Hurricane Katrina: Is this what New Orleans has come to — a city half its old size?

Over and over, the city’s leaders reassure citizens that better days and, above all, more people are in the future. Their destiny will not merely be to reside in a smaller city with a few good restaurants and curious local customs, the citizens are told.

But some economists and demographers are beginning to wonder whether New Orleans will top out at about half its prestorm population of about 444,000, already in a steep decline from its peak of 627,525 in the 1960 Census. At the moment, the population is well below half, and future gains are likely to be small.

“It will be a trickle based on what we know now,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a consultant and demographer based in Shreveport, La. “Low tens of thousands, over three or four or five years, something in that range. I would say we could start losing people, especially if the crime problem doesn’t get high visibility.”

The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood. Rather, crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city’s failure to thrive.

from the NY Times

Road Home seldom leading out of state

Unlike most Arabi homeowners displaced by the 2005 hurricanes, John and Diane Johnson don't face the stress of rebuilding their destroyed property during an interminable wait for state aid.

The Johnsons are among a small proportion of Road Home applicants who have simplified their lives by choosing the program's buyout option, meaning they will turn over their destroyed property to the state for the same amount of money they would have gotten to fix it. Unlike the vast majority of Road Home applicants who plan to fix their destroyed properties, those choosing the buyout can use the award to pay off mortgages and buy new homes.

"This is doing exactly what it's supposed to do; it's almost making me whole," said John Johnson, who retired from BellSouth after Katrina and has since bought a home between Mandeville and Madisonville. Johnson, like almost all other applicants, hasn't yet secured his grant, which he said would be about $54,000. But he's financially well-off enough to have moved on without it, for now. Also like almost all applicants -- and to the delight of Road Home officials -- he's staying in Louisiana.

from the Times Picayune

Going under

We were going to see the sinking island, the tiny five-square-kilometre piece of land wrapped by the Hooghly and Baratala rivers as they flow into the sea in the western part of the Sundarban delta in West Bengal. We were going to the land of the `hungry tide', to witness the great human tragedy of homes and farmlands washed away by rivers and creeks that carry the salty waters of the sea they flow into. It was only a four-hour journey from Kolkata, by bus up to Kakdwip and then by boat to the Ghodamara (pronounced `ghoramara', with the tongue rolling over the first `r' sound) island; but it seemed to take us several worlds away.

We started meeting the people we were looking for as soon as we got on the boat, around 9 a.m. on a sparkling November morning. They were returning home on the first of the only two motorised boats that ferry every day to and from Ghodamara and Kakdwip, the island's closest point of contact with the mainland. Most of them were fishermen and farmers, wiry men and women with sunburnt faces. Almost all of them said that their families once owned "a lot of land" now swallowed up by the angry waters that surround their existence. A media team immediately arouses interest in this part of the world, not least because it seems to come from a mysterious world of the written word, from the city that is so close and yet so far. As we sailed further away from the mainland, moving across a river so wide that the bank soon became invisible, they warmed up to the story of their sinking island.

Haldia was once so close to Ghodamara that people could carry out shouted conversations across the river, said Nasir Mia, son of a schoolmaster but himself a school dropout who goes out to fish on the high seas to feed his family. But now the river has widened, claiming huge chunks of the island, and Haldia is just a speck in the horizon. Later that day, villagers on Ghodamara would point to ships far out in the mouth of the Hooghly, close to the Haldia port, and say that they sailed over what once were paddyfields. That was probably not an exaggeration; experts say that by 2001, Ghodamara was reduced to 59 per cent of what its size was in 1969.

Researchers say the island will go under in another 14 years, as two other smaller islands - Lohachara and Supuridanga - have done in the past 20 years. Supuridanga was not inhabited, but the sinking of Lohachara displaced 6,000 people, mostly marginal farmers and fishermen. The prediction is that the rising sea level will sink a dozen (six of them inhabited) more islands in 15 years, creating thousands of environmental refugees. Ghodamara has been steadily sinking for the past 25 years, though local residents say the erosion has slowed down in the recent past. Fifteen to 20 years ago, the island had a population of about 20,000 people; according to the 2001 Census, it has 5,236 people.

from Frontline (India)

New Orleans feels pain of mental health crisis

Sixteen months after Hurricane Katrina tore this city apart, a hidden sort of damage is emerging. Local officials see it in reports of suicides, strokes and stress-related deaths. They see it in the police calls for fights and domestic violence. They see it in the long waiting lists for psychiatric care that they have no way to provide.

These days, life in the Big Easy isn't easy at all. Everyone from the mayor to the people staffing the public health clinics sees it: New Orleans is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis — and the city has no way to deal with it.


The obvious problems only fuel the more subtle ones. About half of the city's 450,000 pre-Katrina residents have yet to return, according to the mayor's office, and entire neighborhoods remain filled with boarded-up homes and businesses. For those who have come back, everything is hard, and the challenges seem endless: lining up contractors, getting basic services restored, even finding neighborhood places to buy groceries, clothes and gasoline.

Now, many fear the situation could worsen. "This couple of months is our most critical time period. … New Year's, Mardi Gras, Easter, and if people need (mental health) services right now, there really is almost no place to go," says Kevin Stephens, director of the city Health Department.


"We've got families that have been split up for months, families that lost their homes, crammed in small trailers. … People have lost their jobs, their support system," he adds. "There's a heaviness. And we're seeing a much, much higher incidence of mental illness."

How bad is the situation? The suicide rate in the first four months after Katrina rose almost 300% over pre-storm levels, according to coroner's office statistics. In a survey after the hurricane by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 26% of respondents said at least one person in their family needed mental health counseling — but less than 2% were getting any. Even now, police data show that emergency calls involving people who need psychiatric treatment continue to come in at a rate about 15% higher than before Katrina.

from USA Today

Lake Chad fishermen pack up their nets

Muhammadu Bello and his nine children used to depend on Lake Chad for their livelihoods.

But the former fisherman became a farmer as the waters vanished eastwards from the shores of his village in north-east Nigeria.

Experts are warning that the lake, which was once Africa's third largest inland water body, could shrink to a mere pond in two decades.

A recent study by Nasa and the German Aerospace Centre blames global warming and human activity for Africa's disappearing water.

from the BBC

Terror on the Tracks

Let's say the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter really was a terrorist.

What if those were bombs he was placing on the chemical placard of a rail car inside the Thatcher Chemical Co. plant in suburban Las Vegas, and not his business cards?

Instead of a camera recording lax security over some of the deadliest chemicals ever produced, he held a detonator? And the string of chlorine gas cars trundling down Union Pacific Railroad tracks in the heart of Vegas was his prey?

If he was a terrorist, and his goal was to release a potentially catastrophic cloud of deadly gases, explosives and caustic acids -- in unguarded cars, left abandoned -- then a U.S. Department of Homeland Security's planning scenario might apply: 17,500 people dead, another 10,000 suffering injuries and 100,000 more flooding trauma wards, convinced they've been poisoned. The environmental damage would take weeks to clean up, forcing the evacuation of as many as 70,000 residents from a city built on sin, military might and heavy industry.

read more

Global warming scenario sobering

f the Earth warms another two or three degrees, the sea level along North Carolina's coast is projected to rise by as much as two feet, accelerating erosion, destroying recreational beaches and possibly inundating parts of the Outer Banks.

"I think this issue is probably the most pressing issue to North Carolina as well as the other coastal states," Jeffress Williams, a coastal marine geologist with the U.S. Geologic Survey, said Friday to a state panel studying the effects of global warming.

The panel is working on recommendations to be presented to the General Assembly, including some that might be ready for the coming session.

Sea level rose about eight inches on North Carolina's coast during the 20th century, Williams said. As temperatures warm two to three degrees and glaciers melt, the ocean is projected to rise more than twice that much -- from 18 inches to two feet -- by 2100, based on projections by an international panel of climate change experts established by the United Nations. The average temperature increased about one degree between 1900 and 2000.

"We in North Carolina need to pay a lot more attention to the potential impacts of sea level rise and do a lot more planning than we are doing," said Rep. Joe Hackney, co-chairman of the state Commission on Global Climate Change and the likely speaker of the House.

from the News and Observer

EU warns of climate change chaos

The European commission yesterday stepped up the EU's campaign to lead the fight against climate change by warning that global warming was so catastrophic that it could trigger regional conflicts, poverty, famine and migration.

Setting out a strategy to combat global warming and improve Europe's energy security at the same time, it said the secondary effects of climate change, such as conflicts elsewhere, would inevitably affect even a less vulnerable Europe.

In the wake of last year's Stern report in the UK, the commission forecast severe impacts on certain ecosystems, with some species and habitats disappearing, and a decline in global food production, with the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.

from the Guardian UK

Climate change brings malaria back to Italy

Sandwiched between temperate Europe and African heat, Italy is on the front line of climate change and is witnessing a rise in tropical diseases such as malaria and tick-borne encephalitis, a new report says.

Italy was declared free of malaria in 1970, but it is making a comeback, said the Italian environmental organisation Legambiente. Tick-borne encephalitis, a virus which attacks the nerve system, is also on the way back. While only 18 cases had been reported before 1993, 100 have been since, mostly around Venice.

from the Guardian

EU’s grim climate change warning

A dire set of predictions of the consequences of global warming in Europe is contained in a report for the European Commission. It forecasts that by 2071 climate change will cause droughts and floods that will kill 90,000 people a year while damage from rising sea levels will cost tens of billions of euros.

The Commission will endorse the report next week and use it to back its case for action to limit the rise in the world’s average temperature to 2 degrees centigrade above 1990 levels. Ironically, those countries most committed to combating climate change, such as the UK and Sweden, would gain, with warmer temperatures bringing bigger crop yields and fewer deaths from cold.

Those around the Mediterranean who have been slow to act to curb greenhouse gas emissions, such as Italy and Spain, would suffer most from “drought, reduced soil fertility, fire and other climate-change driven factors,” according to the study, a copy of which has been obtained by the Financial Times.

The report, which draws on existing material and new information from the Commission’s Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security satellite mapping project, posits two scenarios. One envisages a 2.2 degree temperature rise, the other a 3 degree rise.

Crop yields would rise by up to 70 per cent in northern Europe but fall by up to a fifth in the south, depending on the temperature increase.

from the Financial Tiems of London

Ancient global warming was jarring, not subtle, study finds

Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at UC Davis said Thursday.

The global transition from ice age to greenhouse 300 million years ago was marked by repeated dips and rises in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and wild swings in temperature, with drastic effects on forests and vegetation, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

"It was a real yo-yo," said UC Davis geochemist Isabel Montanez, who led researchers from five universities and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. "Should we expect similar but faster climate behavior in the future? One has to question whether that is where we are headed."

The provocative insight into planetary climate change counters the traditional view that global warming could be gradual and its regional effects easily anticipated.

Over several million years, carbon dioxide in the ancient atmosphere increased from about 280 parts per million to 2,000 ppm, the same increase that experts expect by the end of this century as remaining reserves of fossil fuels are burned.

No one knows the reason for so much variation in carbon dioxide levels 300 million years ago, but as modern industrial activity continues to pump greenhouse gases into the air at rapid rates, the unpredictable climate changes that took millions of years to unfold naturally could be compressed into a few centuries or less today, several experts said.

from the NY Times

New Orleans Repeats Mistakes as It Rebuilds

By ones and twos, homeowners here are reinhabiting neighborhoods, even the most devastated ones, and many view their return as a triumph over adversity.

But experts involved in the rebuilding believe that the helter-skelter return of residents to this low-lying metropolis may represent another potential disaster.

After Katrina, teams of planners recommended that broad swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods be abandoned. Yet all areas of the city have at least some residents beginning to rebuild. With billions of dollars in federal relief for homeowners trickling in, more people are expected to follow.


Moreover, while new federal guidelines call for raising houses to reduce the damage of future floods, most returning homeowners do not have to comply or are finding ways around the costly requirement, according to city officials.

"It's terrifying: We're doing the same things we have in the past but expecting different results," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a former New Orleans resident who served as a member of the National Science Foundation panel that studied the city's levees.

from the Washington Post

Hurricane center chief issues final warning

Frustrated with people and politicians who refuse to listen or learn, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield ends his 34-year government career today in search of a new platform for getting out his unwelcome message: Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared with the big one yet to come.

Mayfield, 58, leaves his high-profile job with the National Weather Service more convinced than ever that U.S. residents of the Southeast are risking unprecedented tragedy by continuing to build vulnerable homes in the tropical storm zone and failing to plan escape routes.

He pointed to southern Florida's 7 million coastal residents.

"We're eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster," he said. "I know people don't want to hear this, and I'm generally a very positive person, but we're setting ourselves up for this major disaster."

from the LA Times

Sea Change In Insurers' Coastal Coverage

Major insurance companies are throwing cold water on America's new passion for living near the ocean and by the bay.

Recently, the biggest companies in the homeowners insurance business announced that they will stop writing new policies in some coastal areas of the mid-Atlantic and will otherwise limit coverage there. They have already reduced their coverage in states more prone to hurricanes.

Some real estate agents say they expect the situation will make it harder to sell second homes and investment properties on the waterfront. "We've already been experiencing problems since last year getting insurance for second-home buyers and the investment class, because many times the properties are more than five miles from the firehouse and there aren't any fire hydrants around, although they could just throw a hose in the pool or in the river," said Schuyler Benson, an owner of Benson & Mangold Real Estate, a brokerage on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

from the Washington Post

World faces hottest year ever, as El Niño combines with global warming

A combination of global warming and the El Niño weather system is set to make 2007 the warmest year on record with far-reaching consequences for the planet, one of Britain's leading climate experts has warned.

As the new year was ushered in with stormy conditions across the UK, the forecast for the next 12 months is of extreme global weather patterns which could bring drought to Indonesia and leave California under a deluge.

The warning, from Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was one of four sobering predictions from senior scientists and forecasters that 2007 will be a crucial year for determining the response to global warming and its effect on humanity.

Professor Jones said the long-term trend of global warming - already blamed for bringing drought to the Horn of Africa and melting the Arctic ice shelf - is set to be exacerbated by the arrival of El Niño, the phenomenon caused by above-average sea temperatures in the Pacific.

Combined, they are set to bring extreme conditions across the globe and make 2007 warmer than 1998, the hottest year on record. It is likely temperatures will also exceed 2006, which was declared in December the hottest in Britain since 1659 and the sixth warmest in global records.

Professor Jones said: "El Niño makes the world warmer and we already have a warming trend that is increasing global temperatures by one to two tenths of a degrees celsius per decade. Together, they should make 2007 warmer than last year and it may even make the next 12 months the warmest year on record."

from the London Independent