Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes

Unchecked global warming could bring a severe temperature rise of 4C within many people's lifetimes, according to a new report for the British government that significantly raises the stakes over climate change.

The study, prepared for the Department of Energy and Climate Change by scientists at the Met Office, challenges the assumption that severe warming will be a threat only for future generations, and warns that a catastrophic 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060 without strong action on emissions.

Officials from 190 countries gather today in Bangkok to continue negotiations on a new deal to tackle global warming, which they aim to secure at United Nations talks in December in Copenhagen.

"We've always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise," said Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who will announce the findings today at a conference at Oxford University. "People will say it's an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it's also a plausible scenario."

According to scientists, a 4C rise over pre-industrial levels could threaten the water supply of half the world's population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.

A 4C average would mask more severe local impacts: the Arctic and western and southern Africa could experience warming up to 10C, the Met Office report warns.

The study updates the findings of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said the world would probably warm by 4C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The IPCC also listed a more severe scenario, with emissions and temperatures rising further because of more intensive fossil fuel burning, but this was not considered realistic. "That scenario was downplayed because we were more conservative a few years ago. But the way we are going, the most severe scenario is looking more plausible," Betts said.

A report last week from the UN Environment Programme said emissions since 2000 have risen faster than even this IPCC worst-case scenario. "In the 1990s, these scenarios all assumed political will or other phenomena would have brought about the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by this point. In fact, CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating."

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Filipinos Document Their 'Katrina' Online

In the immediate aftermath of the devastation caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana, which hit the Philippines in force on Saturday, the country’s government blamed victims for not heeding its warnings and suggested that its disaster relief efforts were not as bad as those of the American government during Hurricane Katrina. The storm, also called Ondoy in the Philippines, has killed at least 140 people and displaced about 150,000, according to the latest report.

The American disaster was invoked by critics of the government response as soon as images of Filipinos stranded on rooftops started circulating on Saturday — on television, on YouTube, in slide shows, on newly-created blogs and through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

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How Much Human Activity Can Earth Handle?

The scientific name is the Holocene Age, but climatologists like to call our current climatic phase the Long Summer. The history of Earth's climate has rarely been smooth. From the moment life began on the planet billions of years ago, the climate has swung drastically and often abruptly from one state to another — from tropical swamp to frozen ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, however, the climate has remained remarkably stable by historical standards: not too warm and not too cold, or Goldilocks weather. That stability has allowed Homo sapiens, numbering perhaps just a few million at the dawn of the Holocene, to thrive; farming has taken hold and civilizations have arisen. Without the Long Summer, that never would have been possible.

But as human population has exploded over the past few thousand years, the delicate ecological balance that kept the Long Summer going has become threatened. The rise of industrialized agriculture has thrown off Earth's natural nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, leading to pollution on land and water, while our fossil-fuel addiction has moved billions of tons of carbon from the land into the atmosphere, heating the climate ever more.

Now a new article in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature says the safe climatic limits in which humanity has blossomed are more vulnerable than ever and that unless we recognize our planetary boundaries and stay within them, we risk total catastrophe. "Human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state," writes Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Environmental Institute and the author of the article. "The result could be irreversible and, in some cases, abrupt environmental change, leading to a state less conducive to human development."

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A new crop of eco-warriors take to their own streets

It is 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Along streets of grimy stucco bungalows with bougainvillea, American flags and "Beware of Dog" signs on chain-link fences, a couple of residents are hosing down lawns.

It ought to be quiet, but it's not.

Behind the garden walls of Astor Avenue, there's a chugging and a hissing and a clanking and a squeaking. Two yellow locomotives, hooked to cars piled high with metal containers, idle on the track of the Union Pacific. Their stacks spew gray plumes of smoke.

"We call this cancer alley," said Angelo Logan, who grew up on the city of Commerce street. "And we're fed up."

Logan, 42, is part of a new generation of urban, blue-collar environmentalists. The son of a janitor and the youngest of five children, he dropped out of school in 10th grade and went to work as a maintenance mechanic in an aerospace factory.

Now he is executive director of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, with a paid staff of four and 200 members who join for $5 a year. They recruit door-to-door in Commerce, Bell Gardens, Montebello and East Los Angeles, where more than three-quarters of residents are working-class Latinos.

East Yard operates from a storefront on Commerce's Atlantic Avenue, a street lined with cheap motels and fast-food joints. It has no celebrities on its board, no publicity staff churning out press releases, no in-house attorneys to go toe-to-toe with $500-an-hour corporate law firms.

But in California, where Latinos, African Americans and Asians now collectively outnumber non-Hispanic whites, political power is shifting. Here especially, but also across the country, mainstream foundations, which had long supported environmental groups led by white lawyers and policy wonks, have begun to channel grants to community organizations run by Latinos and blacks who see clean air and water as civil rights.

In the Southland, these environmental justice activists, as they are called, wage war in the dense corridor that runs from the massive ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach through neighborhoods that line the 710 Freeway -- Wilmington, Carson, Compton, Huntington Park, Commerce-- and on through Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with their vast distribution warehouses.

"There are no buffer zones," said Gilbert Estrada, a teacher who co-founded the East Yard group with Logan. "We are the buffer zones."

Each year, pollution from ships, trucks and trains that move goods through the region contributes to an estimated 2,100 early deaths, 190,000 sick days for workers, and 360,000 school absences, according to the California Air Resources Board.

At a recent East Yard barbecue in Commerce's Bristow Park, hand-painted signs read "Salud Sí, Diesel No" -- Health Yes, Diesel No -- as a band played Mexican rancheras and trucks roared by on Interstate 5. Between a kids' finger-painting pavilion and a card table stacked with petitions, Logan, a soft-spoken man with a tidy beard, was working the hamburger line.

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What happens next time?

We build stronger houses, prepare better for disasters and wield computer and communications technology that makes 1989's look quaint.

But all that, experts say, would only partially blunt the devastation of another Hugo-sized hurricane - one that might be increasingly likely to strike the Carolinas.

For every step forward in preparedness, they say, a vulnerability also grows:

A half-million more people to evacuate from the coast.

A rising sea lapping at thousands of square miles of low-lying land.

Eroding beaches, the first line of defense from an Atlantic storm.

Hugo left $7 billion in U.S. property damage, mostly in the Carolinas. Because development has intensified, with houses bigger and more expensive, state officials say a similar storm now could triple that amount.

Those calculations could be tested at any time. Atlantic hurricanes are growing stronger, possibly as part of natural cycles, and climate change models say their frequency and ferocity will only grow.

Eight Category 5 hurricanes roiled the Atlantic in the 2000s, more than in any decade since satellite observations began in the 1960s. North Carolina's coastline, jutting into the sea like a taunt, makes it the nation's fourth-most hurricane-prone state behind Florida, Louisiana and Texas.

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Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells

All it took was an early thaw for the drinking water here to become unsafe. There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

In measured amounts, that waste acts as fertilizer. But if the amounts are excessive, bacteria and chemicals can flow into the ground and contaminate residents’ tap water.

In Morrison, more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according to local officials. As parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water, residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and severe ear infections.

“Sometimes it smells like a barn coming out of the faucet,” said Lisa Barnard, who lives a few towns over, and just 15 miles from the city of Green Bay.

Tests of her water showed it contained E. coli, coliform bacteria and other contaminants found in manure. Last year, her 5-year-old son developed ear infections that eventually required an operation. Her doctor told her they were most likely caused by bathing in polluted water, she said.

Yet runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 largely regulates only chemicals or contaminants that move through pipes or ditches, which means it does not typically apply to waste that is sprayed on a field and seeps into groundwater.

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New York City Girds Itself for Heat and Rising Seas

While computer-generated visions of floodwaters sweeping across Wall Street and inundating Manhattan island have come to represent apocalyptic predictions of climate change, the reality is that it won’t take an apocalypse for rising sea levels to threaten the integrity of the complex infrastructures that provide New York and the world’s major coastal cities with water, sanitation, transportation, power, and communications.

Adapting to this reality has become a key part of future planning for London, Rotterdam, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and Seattle, as well as low-lying cities across Asia. In New York City the effort has brought together scientists, government agencies and public and private utilities in an effort to comprehend the effects of climate change on a city with a 570-mile coastline and where 8.5 million people live only about 10 feet above sea level.

With only a foot and a half of sea level rise — a realistic prediction for 2050 — a storm as severe as Katrina could require New York City to evacuate as many as 3 million people. A three-foot rise in sea level — which could well occur by the 2080s — could turn major storms into minor apocalypses, inundating low-lying shore communities in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island; shutting down the city’s metropolitan transportation system; flooding the highways that surround the city; and rendering the tunnels that lead into the city impassable.

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'Kitchen caddies' considered to cut down on compostable food waste

Householders who regularly waste food could be fined by their local council if the government goes ahead with new proposals designed to slash the amount of food that is sent to landfill.

Environment secretary Hilary Benn is considering the introduction of "kitchen caddies" so that households recycle their food waste, or face a fine if they throw it away with the main rubbish. Food would then be sent to specialist recycling plants rather than be dumped in landfill.

It is estimated that British households throw away 4.1m tonnes of food each year — the equivalent of £420 for every home. The bulk of food waste is currently not recycled but is part of the 18m tonnes of household waste sent to landfill each year. According to one estimate, 1bn people could be lifted out of hunger if food waste in the US and UK could be eliminated, because of the knock on effect that extra food has on global food prices.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that it had been studying the results of a study which looked at other countries that had banned certain items from landfill to boost recycling rates. It has launched a consultation to explore the next steps.

The research on bans in other countries was carried out by Green Alliance and looked at how similar bans have worked in Austria, Flanders, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Massachusetts in the USA. It showed, for example, that the amount of waste sent to landfill in Germany reduced from 27% to 1% after a landfill ban was introduced for some materials, such as paper and card. This was alongside a range of other measures to boost recycling.

A Defra spokesman said: "In light of this research a public consultation will be held in the next few months on banning certain materials from landfill in England. The timing of any bans will be an important part of this consultation and has not yet been decided."

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