Climate change challenging China's Yangtze: Report

Rising temperatures will expose China's Yangtze River basin to extreme weather such as severe floods, drought and storms that could
threaten cities such as Shanghai, a new report has said.

In the coming decades, global warming will increase glacier melt in the Himalayan reaches of the Yangtze, diminish food production in the basin and lead to rising waters in coastal regions, said the World Wide Fund for Nature, which co-authored the report with Chinese research institutes.

"Extreme climate events such as storms and drought disasters will increase as climate change continues to alter our planet," Xu Ming, lead researcher on the report, said in a statement released Tuesday.

"If we take the right steps now, adaptation measures will pay for themselves." Up to 400 million people live in the Yangtze River basin, which cuts a swathe through the middle of China and includes some of the nation's most productive agricultural lands.
Over the next 50 years, temperatures in the basin will climb by an average of 1.5-2.0 degrees Celsius (2.7-4.0 degrees Fahrenheit), leading to an increased number of natural disasters, the report said.

The basin has already seen a spike in flooding, heat waves and drought over the past two decades as temperatures rose by an average of 1.04 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2005, it said.

Meanwhile, sea levels at Shanghai rose 11.5 centimetres (4.6 inches) over the last 30 years and will rise by an additional 18 centimetres by 2050, threatening the city's water supply, it said.

"Climate change will make coastal cities like Shanghai more vulnerable to sea level rises, extreme climate events, as well as natural and human-induced disasters," the report warned.

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After the Recession, an Energy Crisis Could Loom

Here's the bad news about the global recession's potentially coming to an end: the recovery could spark a massive energy crisis with increased demand for fossil fuels from China and other developing countries, tighter oil supplies and skyrocketing oil prices. And this is just in the near future. The longer-term picture looks even more daunting. If the world continues to guzzle oil and gas at its present pace, global temperatures will rise by an average of 6°C by 2030, causing "irreparable damage to the planet."

The warning from the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental energy watchdog based in Paris, could add extra weight to the negotiations leading up to the climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month, when leaders will attempt to come to an agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol's limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. "Saving the planet cannot wait," reads the agency's annual World Economic Outlook report, which was released on Tuesday. "The time to act has arrived."

But the energy crisis may be even more critical than what the IEA is saying. According to a report in the Guardian on Tuesday, the agency, under pressure from the U.S., has in past reports deliberately underestimated just how fast the world is running out of oil. The newspaper quoted an unnamed senior IEA official as saying that the U.S. encouraged the agency to "underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chance of finding new reserves."

The official questioned the prediction in last year's World Economic Outlook that oil production could be raised from the current level of 83 million bbl. a day to 106 million bbl. a day, saying the estimate was higher than is feasible. This year's report lowers that prediction to 105 million bbl. a day. But critics of the IEA have long said the world has passed its peak in oil production and that such levels are unrealistic.

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Coping With Climate Change: Which Societies Will Do Best?

Following the disastrous tsunami of December 2004, the government of Bangladesh embraced upgraded storm-alert systems that warn communities in a coordinated way and improved social support networks, resulting in a drastic reduction in typhoon deaths. In neighboring Myanmar, by contrast, deaths from natural disasters have risen in recent years. Indeed, the deaths that occurred there last year in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis cannot be separated from the fact that Myanmar has an authoritarian regime that prevents international assistance from reaching those in need, rendering its citizens unable to cope with extreme weather disasters – events that are expected to become more frequent with climate change.

The stark contrast between Bangladesh and Myanmar, both likely facing serious threats from rising sea levels and more intense typhoons as the world warms, is a striking example of a key measure of how different parts of the world are going to cope with climate change in the coming century: whether societies are “climate-fit” or “climate-weak.” In fact, how different societies fare as temperatures rise will have as much to do with political, social, technological, and economic factors as with a changing climate.

That global warming will exact a human toll is undisputed, but the extent of its predicted impacts is uncertain. So how can we best identify those most at risk? Applying Darwinian principles, climate change, like any other assault on our species, is about survival of the fittest. We need to recognize what makes a community “climate-fit,” and how to improve fitness in “climate-weak” populations.

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Medina to go green

Speaking at the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) conference at Windsor Castle, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, said Islam teaches its followers to protect the Earth.

He announced the plans for Medina as part of a seven year plan to make the faith more environmentally friendly by teaching about climate change in Islamic schools, using renewable energy in mosques and encouraging green habits in places of pilgrimage.

Medina, the second holiest city in Islam, will go green by improving public transport, providing clean water from taps so pilgrims do not continue to use plastic bottles and printing leaflets and the Koran on recyled paper.

Faith leaders from all the world's main religions have already declared it is a "moral imperative" for the world to fight climate change. The Archbishop of Canterbury has said going green is "good for the soul" and the Church of England have also announced a range of plans such as putting wind turbines on vicarages and encouraging congregations to recycle more.

But this is the first time that the Islamic faith has made such a strong announcement on places of pilgrimage.

Sheikh Ali Gomaa said it was a "religious duty" to go green.

"It is a religious duty to safeguard our environment and advocate the importance of preserving it," he said. "Pollution and global warming pose an even greater threat than war and the fight to preserve the environment could be the most positive way of bringing humanity together. Environment-related issues ought to be a significant component of educational curricula. It is the duty of all religious scholars to acquaint themselves with the environmental crisis we are facing."

There are 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide and every year at least four million go on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

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Money is the key to the success of Copenhagen

You think it's about greenhouse gases. You think it's about carbon emissions. And it is. But the Copenhagen agreement on climate change that the world community will attempt to sign in December is just as much about money – enormous, mind-boggling amounts of money.

In brutally simplistic terms, the essence of any deal will be to pay the developing countries of the world, led by China and India, to cut back on the carbon dioxide pouring out of their now-mushrooming economies, which will come to represent 90 per cent of all future emissions growth, and the inducement for them to do this will have to be substantial.

It has hardly dawned on the general public just how big are the sums of cash that the developing world is seeking, and that the rich world will have to go some way towards providing, if the vital pathway to keeping global temperature rises below C is to be mapped out.

But they are truly colossal, and the gap between the potential donor countries and the recipients may be unbridgeable; it is finance, rather than the setting of emissions targets, which is more likely to be the deal-breaker in Copenhagen.

Ever since the first UN global warming treaty was signed in 1992, the rich nations have accepted that they have a special responsibility over climate, as we caused the problem in the first place – most of the CO2 that has gone into atmosphere has been put there by 200 years of western industrialisation.

Now we are asking China and its colleagues in the G77 group of poorer nations to grow – and so bring their people out of poverty – in a different low-carbon way from the way in which we grew, which is difficult and expensive; do as we say, not do as we did. And it is accepted on all sides that if they are to do this, we must help them.

They need help for two essential tasks, which in the jargon are mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means cutting back on carbon emissions, by substituting renewable energy projects, say, for coal-burning power stations; adaptation means coping with climate change which is now unavoidable, such as building enhanced flood relief schemes to deal with the threat of climate-change-induced sea-level rise. It is obvious that all of this will be costly.

Just how costly the developing world thought it would be became clear at the end of August, when the G77-plus-China, as the nations are collectively known, put forward a formal proposal for financing a new climate agreement. Their "enhanced financial mechanism" suggested that the rich countries should pay between 0.5 and 1 per cent of their gross national product every year. For the European Union, this would be between $90bn (£55bn) and $180bn annually; for the US, between $70bn and $140bn; for Britain alone, between $13bn and $26bn. The full total would be between $200bn and $400bn, a range from nearly double to nearly four times the amount of all current overseas aid flows. Moreover, it would have to be on top of existing aid, the developing countries said – it must be "new and additional", above all current overseas development assistance.

more from the Independent (UK)

America's Most Toxic Cities

In Atlanta, Ga., you'll find southern gentility, a world-class music scene--and 21,000 pounds of environmental waste. In spite of its charms, the city's combination of air pollution, contaminated land and atmospheric chemicals makes it the most toxic city in the country.

An urban skyline dotted with puffing smokestacks isn't the only measure of a city's cleanliness (or lack thereof). Most major cities suffer from a range of unseen hazards. Contaminants can seep into the ground from bygone chemical spills or shuttered steel mills. Invisible leaks at industrial complexes discharge harmful substances into the air, or the normal course of business requires factories to expel toxins that eventually find their way to the water supply.

While it may be the U.S. metro in the worst environmental shape, Atlanta isn't the only place whose residents contend with contamination. Top spots for toxicity are distributed throughout the country, with Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles right behind it.

Behind the Numbers
To determine which cities are most toxic, Forbes looked at the country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas--geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics--in the country, based on data provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We counted the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites--contaminated areas that the federal government has designated for cleanup efforts--in each metro area's principal city.

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