Deniers stating that climate change is a threat for the distant future forget that air pollution from coal fired plants, industry and vehicle exhausts are just a huge threat to our present as well.
Droughts
Could Australia axe its carbon tax ?
For the past weeks I have collected quite an impressive amount of articles on Australia, as its recent elections have brought to power a Conservative Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.
A climate denier backed by fossil fuels interests, Mr Abbott is willing to axe the country’s carbon tax. As the Guardian reported, this would cost the Australian economy a massive $6 billion to remove over the next four years.
Additional costs of increased catastrophes and extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and floods would also have to be borne afterwards by Australians.
World Water Day : focus on rainwater harvesting
Today is World Water Day. I would like to pick the occasion to write about access to water as 800 million people still lack it. A massive forty percent of the African population is still without it. Luckily, there are plenty of solutions, one of them is rainwater harvesting. An article [Fr] from the Syfia … Read more
2011 rewrote the record books on climate
Here is a rundown of all the extreme weather we witnessed in the past few months around the world and the numerous calamities that struck all continents without exception… To The Guardian : ” The year 2011 was another ecologically tumultuous year with greenhouse gases rise to record levels, Arctic sea ice nearly equalling 2007’s … Read more
Climate change and extreme weather are linked
I have previously written that the link between extreme weather events and climate change wasn’t clear. It isn’t the case anymore as the latest research from the IPCC proves. As Cleantechies notes : ” A new report says that an increase in heat waves is “virtually certain” as a result of global warming and that … Read more
Global weirding and warming at my doorstep
I wanted to write about how I am witnessing the weirding and warming climate myself. So far, France has seen an incredibly dry spring with dramatic droughts to the point of endangering many cultures. Then, summer came, with rain, a lot of it. It was one of the rainiest summers I had seen. You would … Read more
The Amazon rainforest starts emitting CO2
To TreeHugger : ” Last year, the Amazon rainforest experienced the worst drought on record, reducing normally flowing rivers to sun-baked stretches of dried mud and pushing the fragile ecosystem to the brink. “
” (…) As a result of 2010’s Amazon drought, experts say, some 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere — more than is produced by India’s entire population in a year. “
The more we put greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the more our Planet answers back and carbon reserves like the Russian permafrost or the Amazon Rainforest start emitting even more…
A weirder and weirder climate…
To Climate Progress : ” Is the “Global Weirding” of 2010 and 2011 the new normal? (…) Any one of the extreme weather events of 2010 or 2011 could have occurred naturally sometime during the past 1,000 years. “ ” But it is highly improbable that the remarkable extreme weather events of 2010 and 2011 … Read more
Scary climate stories from Asia
While writing my selection of tweets for May, I found three really scary stories about how global warming is already dramatically affecting the most populated continent in the world, Asia as well as its two most populated nations. From the 1,400 dry water reservoirs in central China caused by a five-month drought to the absolutely … Read more
Global weirding is already a reality in the USA
To the Huffington Post : ” Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a “new normal” of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday. “It’s a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe … Read more
A dry and hot April over Europe
France and the whole European continent are currently at risk of a huge drought as little to no rain fell in April. This could have serious implications for harvests as Bloomberg notes :
European wheat and rapeseed crops are “in jeopardy” after an “incredibly dry” April, agricultural weather forecaster said. (…) Wheat and rapeseed in France, Germany and the U.K. are ready to deteriorate rapidly, without rain.”
One of my oldest and best friends is thinking – jokingly, as always – about rain dancing. Let’s hope we won’t have to resort to these kinds of things for water in the near future.
How India is threatened by climate change
To the Huffington Post : ” A new report says India could be 2 degrees Celsius warmer than 1970s levels within 20 years – a change that would disrupt rain cycles and wreak havoc on the country’s agriculture and freshwater supplies.”
(…) ” More flooding, more drought and a spreading of malaria would occur, as the disease migrates northward into Kashmir and the Himalayas, according to the report by 220 Indian scientists and 120 research institutions.”
Heavily reliant on coal for its electricity, it is ready to invest no less than $2.3 trillion in low carbon technologies. Here is a country that understood how critical acting on climate change is.