Environmental Law Prof Blog

Spirit of the Eagle

This blog is devoted principally to the professional or academic aspects of environmental law, policy, science, and ethics.  But like any blogger, I do have a life.  Anyone interested in the slightly less academic side of me is welcome to visit Spirit of the Eagle, my personal blog.

The Economics of Global Warming

The world would have to give up only one year's economic growth over the next four decades to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to  stave off the threat of global warming. Consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers offer a "green growth plus" strategy, combining energy efficiency, greater use of renewables and carbon capture to cut emissions by 60% by 2050 from the level reached by doing nothing. Nuclear energy, it says, can play a role, but it is not crucial.

This scenario, which involves little real sacrifice in terms of economic growth, could be achieved only if embarked upon without delay.  "If countries adopt a 'business as usual' approach, the result could be a more than doubling of global carbon emissions by 2050," said John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PwC.  "Our analysis suggests that there are technologically feasible and relatively low cost options for controlling carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Estimates suggest that the level of GDP might be reduced by no more than 2-3% in 2050 if this strategy is followed."

PwC envisages the Group of Seven leading economies taking the initiative, cutting their emissions by about half by 2050, while the fast-growing E7 countries - China, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey - could still increase their emissions by 30% over the period.   The PwC projections see China overtaking the United States as the world's biggest emitter of CO2 by 2010 while total E7 emissions would be more than double G7 emissions by 2050, with the "big three" - China, the US and India - accounting for just over half, up from 45% today.  The European Union could cut its share of global emissions to under 9% by 2050 from 15% now, while Britain's should fall to 1% from 2%.

A shift to a much less carbon-intensive fuel mix would more than double the current non-fossil fuel primary energy share to about 30% by 2050. That alone would be sufficient to reduce carbon emissions by 25%. PwC's view that renewables could do the job without having to use nuclear technology could undermine Tony Blair's argument that atomic power is crucial.  Increasing energy efficiency gains to 2.6% a year from today's 1.6% would reduce emissions by a third, while carbon capture and storage - pumping power station emissions into disused gas fields underground - could achieve a further 20%.  The report says a combination of all these measures will be necessary to stabilise global CO2 levels at 450 parts per million, the figure scientific opinion judges to be broadly acceptable.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange
/story0,,1883753,00.html

Dynamite Quick Reference for Students

Tomorrow the Economist will publish its survey on climate change  "The Heat is On." Economist link  I heartily recommend it for anyone who wants to bring their students or themselves quickly up to speed regarding the science, technology, economics, and law of climate change  -- about 15 pages, incorporating much of the climate research I have blogged this year.   As of yesterday, you can buy a PDF for $5 (or read/print each article in the online version if you have an Economist online subscription). 

Sometimes its hard to keep things in perspective.  The rumor is flying around the blogosphere that the environmental situation in Lebanon is as serious as the Exxon Valdez spill.  Although Exxon Valdez taught us a lot about how long-lasting the natural resources damages from oil spills can be, I would not analogize a 110,000 barrel spill to an 11 million barrel spill.  As the graphic below illustrates the  Exxon Valdez spill extended about 470 miles --  which my metrically challenged brain thinks is roughly 750 kilometers -- greater than the length of this slick by a factor of 10.

AP report:
Environmental Disaster Looms;  Oil spill threatens Mediterranean after power plant hit;  Cleanup along Lebanon's coast can't begin until fighting ends
BEIRUT — Endangered turtles die shortly after hatching from their eggs. Fish float dead off the coast. Flaming oil sends waves of black smoke toward the city.

In this country of Mediterranean beaches and snow-capped mountains, Israeli bombing that caused an oil spill has created an environmental disaster. And cleanup can't start until the
fighting stops, the United Nations said.

Pools of oil disfigure a beach in the bay of Byblos, 42 kms north of Beirut. Lebanon's greens launched an international appeal for help to combat an environmental crisis caused by a huge oil spill south of Beirut, more than two weeks into an Israeli air war.(AFP/File/Nicolas Asfouri)

World attention has focused on the hundreds of people who have died in the three-week-old conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The environmental damage has attracted little attention but experts warn the long-term effects could be devastating. Some 110,000 barrels of oil poured into the Mediterranean two weeks ago after Israeli warplanes hit a coastal power plant. One tank is still burning, sending clouds of thick black smoke across Lebanon. Compounding the problem is an Israeli naval blockade and continuing military operations that have made any cleanup impossible. "The immediate impact  can be severe but we have not been able to  do an assessment," said Achim Steiner, executive director
of United Nations Environment Program, in Geneva. "But the longer the spill is left untreated, the harder it will be to clean up." The oil has slicked  about one third of Lebanon's coast, an 80-kilometre stretch centred on the Jiyeh plant, about 20 kilometres south of Beirut, Lebanese Environment Minister Yaacoub Sarraf said. It has also drifted out into the Mediterranean, already hitting neighbouring Syria. Experts warn that Cyprus, Turkey and even Greece could be affected.

Sarraf said Israeli planes "purposely hit the tanks which are the closest to the sea," and knocked out the berms designed to prevent any ruptured tanks from flowing into the waters. "As long as there is no ceasefire and as long as we  don't have access to the sea, not only can we not start the treatment but we cannot even access or get the data which is essential," Sarraf said. "Chances are, our whole marine ecosystem facing the Lebanese shoreline is already dead. What is at stake today is  all marine life in the eastern Mediterranean." Israel's Environmental Affairs ministry in Jerusalem declined comment, referring questions to the Foreign Ministry, which did not immediately return phone calls.
Lebanon, whose flag features a cedar tree and which is known by many as Green Lebanon for its forested mountains, is one of the few countries in the Arab world that pays attention to pollution. Mini-buses  that run on diesel have been banned, while  factories are forced to abide by strict rules. Now, large parts of the country's sandy and rocky beaches, visited in the past by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, are covered with thick black layers of oil. Many fishermen have been forced out of business, and people are getting scared to eat any fish at all. Baby turtles, usually born in late summer, die after they swim into the polluted water shortly after hatching from eggs. Syria was already  experiencing similar problems, said Hassan Murjan, who heads the environment department in the Syrian city of Tartous. "The oil pollution has caused serious environmental damage because our coast is rocky and this is very dangerous for marine life," Murjan told the official news  agency SANA. The first country to rush and
help Lebanon was Kuwait, which suffered a similar disaster during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But three truckloads of cleanup supplies the country sent in are stuck in Beirut, with crews waiting for the fighting
to wane before beginning their work, said Beirut's mayor, Abdel Monem Ariss. "We have no access to Lebanon territorial waters," Sarraf said. "This means we are already 10 days delayed and in terms of oil pollution, 10 days is a century." Three local environmental organizations demanded a ceasefire to no avail. "Cleanup operations should start as soon as possible otherwise most of the damage will be irreversible," warned Wael Hmaidan, head of the assessment group on the ground. "The more time we allow the oil to settle into the sand, rocks and seabed, the harder it will be to clean it up." Sarraf estimated it will cost between $34 million and $57 million to clean up the shorelines, and possibly 10 times that much for the entire effort. Optimistic assessments suggest it will take at least six months for the shore cleanup and up to 10 years for "the re-establishment of the ecosystem of the eastern Mediterranean as it was two weeks ago," he said. In Geneva, the UNEP's Steiner said the agency has teams on standby to move to Lebanon as soon as the conditions permit. "Oil and marine diversity do not mix well," Steiner said. "We are immediately concerned for marine life  in the area." Sarraf likened the disaster to the Erika spill off France in 1999, when the oil tanker split in two and dumped 70,000 barrels of oil into the Atlantic that  washed up along 400 kilometres of French shoreline.  But this case carries the added problem of the
burning tank, smoke from which has reached Beirut, he said.

Movie Review: The Great Warming

Here's another entry in the world's best global warming films contest!  The current contestants are Brokaw's Global Warming, Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and now The Great Warming.  For my earlier review of the former two, see 7/2/06 Movie Review: Brokaw and Gore.  I reviewed Brokaw based on a screening copy: now everyone wants to know where to get one.

The Great Warming is a film documentary, produced by Stonehenge, sponsored by Swiss Re, narrated by Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves, and aired this spring in Canada by the Discovery Channel.  It was screened in Salem today at First Congregational Church, U.C.C.

The Great Warming is a relatively comprehensive look at global warming science, with plenty of experts.  It documents the impacts of far more modest El Nino events on Peruvian fishing villages, the incredible difficulties facing nations like Bangladesh that lie 80% within the flood plain, the impact that adding another 4 billion people will have on energy use, and the pressing need for China, India, Brazil and other developing countries to adopt a better energy path than the disasterous fossil fuel path that developed countries have followed.  It provides plenty of scenic photography, discussion of innovative technologies, and practical solutions. 

The Great Warming also has a particularly interesting slant.  It highlights, in particular, the growing concern in the American Evangelical community about global warming.  It has received endorsements from Rev. Richard Cizik for the National Association of Evangelicals [Rev. Richard Cizik ], Paul de Vries, Dean, New York Divinity School [New York Divinity School], Fr. Jon-Stephen Hedges [St. Athanasius Orthodox Church], the National Council of Churches, Evangelical Environmental Network and the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life.

The film contains frank, hard-hitting comments from scientists, health providers, and other opinion-makers taking America’s  leadership to task for failing to address what is certainly the most critical environmental issue of the 21st century.  The film analogizes the current era of Great Warming to the era of the Great Depression.  And reminds us that our children and grandchildren will ask why we didn't do something about it.

This film does discuss the faith perspective, which may not be satisfactory for all students.  But, it is a great primer on global warming science, the impacts of climate change, and possible solutions.

THE GREAT WARMING
www.thegreatwarming.com

So, what is the bottom line.  Except for the evangelical angle, I'd chose the Great Warming over the other two.  But, given law student reaction to anything that smacks of spirituality or religion, I still think Gore did the best job with the science.

Welcome to Environmental Law Prof Blog

WELCOME to Environmental Law Prof Blog.  Please feel free to use this post as an open thread to raise issues relevant to environmental law, policy, science, and ethics.                                                                        

The royalties from this blog and my other professional royalties are devoted to assuring that everyone in the world has clean safe drinking water.  This is my part helping meet the Millenium Development Goals.  Our children's children will thank you if you find a way to achieve the MDGs.  Even now, they are watching....

Find YOUR way to make the Millenium Development Goals reality!

Places to Start:
ONE: www.one.org
MILLENIUM PROMISE: www.millenniumpromise.org
MILLENIUM CAMPAIGN: www.millenniumcampaign.org

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The US blocks a UN resolution deploring the Qana attack, softening the language. The US opposes an immediate, unconditional cease-fire.  Lebanon says thanks, but no thanks to a visit by US Secr. of State Rice. Deadly Israeli Air Strike

Shell States Moral Objection to Biofuel from Food Crops

 

Planet Ark World Environmental News: Royal Dutch Shell, the worlds top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels "morally inappropriate" as long as there are people in the world who are starving...Eric G Holthusen, Fuels Technology Manager Asia/Pacific, said the company's research unit, Shell Global Solutions, has developed alternative fuels from renewable resources that use wood chips and plant waste rather than food crops that are typically used to make the fuels...Holthusen said his company's participation in marketing biofuels extracted from food was driven by economics or legislation."If we have the choice today, then we will not use this route....We think morally it is inappropriate because what we are doing here is using food and turning it into fuel. If you look at Africa, there are still countries that have a lack of food, people are starving, and because we are more wealthy we use food and turn it into fuel. This is not what we would like to see. But sometimes economics force you to do it." <> The world's top commercially produced biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel.  Ethanol, mostly used in the United States and Brazil, is produced from sugar cane and beets and can also be derived from grains such as corn and wheat. Biodiesel, used in Europe, is extracted from the continent's predominant oil crop, rapeseed, and can also be produced from palm and coconut. <> Holthusen said Shell has been working on biofuels that can be extracted from plant waste and wood chips, but he did not say when the alternative biofuel might be commercially available... Shell, in partnership with Canadian biotech firm Iogen Corp., has developed "cellulose ethanol", which is made from the wood chips and non-food portion of renewable feedstocks such as cereal straws and corn stover, and can be blended with gasoline.

The Millenium Village Experiment

There are many obstacles to achieving the Millenium Development Goals, pessimism, inadequate financing, corruption, armed conflict, political and social instability, and global warming among them.  But a recent Nature editorial on Jeffrey Sachs' Millenium Village project highlights the lack of data, analysis, and learning that has plagued development efforts.  The Millenium Village project hopes to overcome that obstacle.  The Nature editorial underscores the significance of the MVP data collection and analysis effort:

    The issues that hinder development in sub-Saharan Africa are many and complex, but one factor that stands out for scientists is the dearth of reliable data on the decades of development projects there.
    A lack of information on what has worked and what hasn't has contributed to a lack of accountability among donor nations, host nations and even development professionals. Donors in particular have learnt little from past mistakes, and are impatient. When a project fails, as so many do, the tendency has been to move straight on to the next idea.

When a project fails, the tendency has been to move straight on to the next idea.

<>

    Development specialists know this, and today data and analysis are prized. In this issue we examine the early progress of one notable experiment in Africa. It involves the support of 12 African Millennium Research Villages, which are receiving a package of interventions, at a maximum cost of US$110 per person per year, tailored to lift them out of poverty and onto a sustainable path.
    The approach has won support from the African governments involved and from private philanthropists, who have pledged $100 million to a charity, called Millennium Promise, that aims to expand the programme to an additional 78 villages in the next year.
    The administrators of the village projects intend to measure 27 important indicators of project performance, mainly by closely monitoring the progress of some 300 households in each village.
    They hope to learn three things: whether each intervention works, whether the links between various interventions can be exploited, and whether the community is ultimately better placed to manage its own future. This last involves 'softer' measures of capacity and sustainability, and will be the hardest both to monitor and to achieve.
    It is early days yet — the longest-running project, at Sauri in Kenya, is just two years old — and few hard data are available so far. But it is crucial that the schemes deliver on their research goals and that they absorb lessons, positive or negative, from the data.

Sarah Tomlin's report in Nature on the Millenium Village project:  Development: Harvest of Hope

S. TOMLIN

Hyacinthe Mukaritaganda of Kagenge village helped build a communal water tank, as part of the Millennium Villages project.

Celestin Ndahayo smiles broadly at me from below the corn (maize) that towers a metre or more above him, his daughter Annalita clutching his hand. This is the first corn harvest he has seen here in almost ten years. There was a smaller harvest of beans and sorghum in 2001; last year there was nothing. In the years without good rains, the people of Kagenge (sometimes called Mayange) in Rwanda survive the best they can. Some walk four nights and three days to reach a more productive region. Ndahayo sometimes takes construction jobs to support his wife and four children.

Hyacinthe Mukaritaganda's husband is one of those currently working elsewhere, leaving her to manage their land and look after three children on her own. This season she planted corn on one-fifth of their land, a short walk from Ndahayo's homestead. Thanks to the rains, she is expecting a good harvest, which should provide enough seeds to plant all 2.5 hectares next year. Then, she hopes, her husband will stay at home to help.

The rains, though, are not the only things bringing hope to Kagenge. In 2005, the village was chosen to take part in the Millennium Villages project. Led by the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, the project is applying a range of poverty-slashing interventions to 12 sites across Africa (see map). The idea is not just to show that interventions in a number of different areas, properly coordinated and financed, can make a sustainable change to the lives of the world's poorest communities. It is to show how that can be done quickly in a way that can be replicated easily.

Donald Ndahiro, an agronomist trained in Uganda, is the project's agriculture coordinator for Rwanda. He says that when he arrived in Kagenge late last year conditions were desperate. "The villagers were emaciated." They wanted food aid more than they wanted the agricultural advice, drought-resistant seeds, fertilizer and new techniques that the project was offering. "They thought we were making fun of them," Ndahiro says. "We were telling them how to plant, how to harvest, but they were saying they were never getting any good rains. We told them to get organized."

D. NDAHIRO

Fertilizer, seeds and advice are being given to 12 villages in Africa, to demonstrate how properly coordinated interventions can make a sustainable difference to people's lives.

Five months later and the villagers are getting organized. Ndahayo is a member of the agriculture committee that will decide what to do with the surplus from this year's corn harvest. Mukaritaganda is helping to clear land for a tree nursery (villagers sometimes walk ten kilometres to gather firewood) and was part of the team that just built a communal tank to collect rainwater. She invites me with pride to a ceremony in which certificates are awarded to her and the 25 other villagers who worked on the tank.

Leading the way

The Millennium Villages project aims to provide improved resources and techniques not only in agriculture, but also in health, education, transport, energy and water provision, and financial management. The plan is to achieve the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (see box) for the 5,000 or so people in Kagenge, and for the tens of thousands of people in the 11 villages elsewhere within 5 years — 5 years ahead of the UN target date.

The eight goals, committed to by 189 heads of state in 2000, include halving the number of people living on less than US$1 a day and controlling malaria by 2015. Progress so far has been limited, especially in Africa — far too slow for the impatient economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Millennium Project and the Earth Institute. Sachs wants the 'research villages' and the data that they provide to offer ways of picking up the pace: "The idea is to demonstrate a practical path and to mobilize governments."

The man in charge of making such a demonstration is Josh Ruxin, a Columbia University public-health expert and the project's director in Rwanda. Ruxin, imbued with an impressive energy and passion, was initially sceptical of the village-by-village approach: he wanted to target a millennium country not an isolated village. But Ruxin is encouraged by the Rwandan government's own ambitious poverty-reduction strategy, known as Vision 2020.

The idea is to demonstrate a practical path and to mobilize governments.

Jeffrey Sachs

Ben Karenzi, the Rwandan health ministry's secretary general says "We believe it's possible, especially with the focused leadership we have and the commitment of our people, to make Rwanda a mid-level income country by 2020." In the context of that commitment, Ruxin is confident that with the help of the Millennium Villages project, Rwandans can succeed in not just turning round one village, but in transforming life for poor farmers across the country.

Money cares

Part of Ruxin's confidence comes from an assessment of the government. In the aftermath of the genocide of 1994 and the resettlement of some two million returnees from neighbouring countries, 64% of Rwanda's population was living in poverty (on less than US$1 a day) in 2000. But despite its internationally criticized role in the Congo war, the government of Paul Kagame is widely seen as committed to poverty reduction, and as embodying principles of good governance from the top down (for example, all ministers are required to declare their annual income).

Ruxin believes that good governance will be an important factor in the long-term success of the millennium villages. Those running the project have deliberately avoided what they see as the worst African regimes. But they say that even in corruption-prone nations, such as Ethiopia and Kenya, the research villages so far remain free of corruption. Sachs points out that if you focus on supplying commodities, such as seeds, fertilizer and nets for protection against malaria, "there's very little money that changes hands". That said, Sachs is less worried than many about corruption; he knows people criticize this lack of concern, but doesn't care. "Corruption is way down the list of practical issues," he argues, Africa's miserable roads, poor soil and endemic disease burden are at the top.

Indeed, the road from Kigali, Rwanda's capital, to Kagenge in the Nyamata district, throws up choking red dust in the dry season and can be impassable in the rainy season. Although the land looks green from the air, the rains can be infrequent and Ndahiro confirms that the soils are poor. Some 70% of the patients at the village's clinic have malaria and the district has one of the country's highest levels of HIV, at about 13%.

As well as suffering from Sachs's top three problems, Kagenge has its own particular sadnesses. The local mayor, Gaspard Musonera, lost three-quarters of his family in the 1994 genocide. "Nyamata district lost more than half of its population," he says. "The implications and consequences of that you can imagine for yourself."

S. TOMLIN

Angelique Kanyange is one of a handful of doctors working in rural Rwanda.

Kagenge itself is a community created since the genocide. Half the households live in settlement housing — or umudugudu — built by the government for survivors and returnees. Ndahiro is himself a returnee, living in Nyamata near the church where 10,000 people were murdered in 1994 — the blood stains on the walls and altar cloth remain as a memorial. He recalls how lifeless the town was when he arrived in 1997. People were bitter, he says; some didn't want to continue living.

Grand plan

Musonera sees the Millennium Villages project as a sign of hope for the most vulnerable people in his district, and a big test for poverty-reduction measures. "If it can be done here, it means it can be done elsewhere," he says — and that indeed is the point. The project is not just about breaking the cycle of poverty in 12 villages, but about learning how to do it in 1,200 or 12,000. Sachs's plan is to show that with a five-year investment of about US$550 per person — $50 a year from the project, $30 from government, $20 from other donors and $10 from the villagers — an integrated package of low-cost interventions can produce long-term financial sustainability in a way that not only can be repeated but can also be scaled up. The project plans to grow to 78 villages this year by creating clusters around the 12 original research villages. The expansion is being funded by the US Millennium Promise charity, which has so far raised $100 million to support Sachs's vision.

Not everyone is convinced that the Millennium Villages project will succeed. Ecologist Ian Scoones at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, is a member of the Future Agricultures Consortium, which was put together by the UK Department for International Development to focus on African agriculture and development. Scoones points to the Integrated Rural Development and 'villagization' schemes that tried to boost African agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s. "They created little islands of success but when donors pulled the plug they all collapsed." Scoones says he is very pleased that the millennium villages are putting African agriculture back on the map, but he is afraid of old mistakes being repeated, and worried about things moving too quickly. "India launched its green revolution in the mid-1960s on the back of decades of solid investment and research," he points out. "It didn't happen overnight."

For his part, Sachs sees patience, like a well-developed sensitivity to the issue of corruption, as an overrated virtue. He has no worries about moving too fast. "It happens to be an emergency," he says. And he has no illusions about the projects working as examples simply by word of mouth. "This is not viral. You can't do it without resources," Sachs notes — as ambitions grow, so must spending. The biggest risk, he says, is for official donors to sit on their hands.

The goal is not to do without large transfers of money to Africa, it is to work out how to make those transfers more effective. After all, the individual interventions used in the Millennium Villages project are tried and tested methods, even if they haven't been applied all together in one location before. Asked about the target of reaching the millennium goals in five years, Celina Schocken, an international-affairs fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations, says "I absolutely believe they will succeed. I don't see how they can't."

But she's less convinced about how scale up will be achieved. "What good is an island of prosperity anyway?" she asks. Scoones agrees that the big question is: "How, without that external support, do you replicate?"

D. NDAHIRO

Donald Ndahiro, an agronomist working for the Millennium Villages project, has helped to transform conditions in Kagenge in just five months.

That is the question Sachs, Ruxin and their colleagues are trying to answer. By documenting all the inputs and outputs for each research village they hope to tease out the synergies between overlapping interventions. Measuring 35 indicators for the 8 goals across several hundred households in 12 villages is time consuming and costly, but it is necessary to show not just that the investments work, but also how they work, and how they can work better. Only then can they be scaled up to the truly monumental level envisioned by Sachs, who wants to see development aid change the course of history. "I think the biggest challenge is the defeatist attitude of the official donor community," says Sachs. Such rhetoric reinforces the suspicion that Sachs is unwilling to learn from lessons of the past. "People in the development community see some benefit in the publicity Jeff Sachs gets," says Schocken, who used to work with Ruxin in Rwanda, "but they've seen these ideas before."

Skill shortage

In Kagenge, the villagers assembled for the water-tank certificate ceremony are briefly reminded of the international debate over their future. "This is an important day for the project," Ruxin tells them during a short address, "You are now the teachers for us and for the world." Some of the farmers I met in the fields yesterday have donned suits and ties for the occasion. Each villager who received training from visiting Kenyan water specialists receives a signed certificate — the expectation is that they will take the skills they have learned and pass them on to others. After many more speeches by village leaders, the villagers distribute soft drinks and, for those who can stomach it, fermented sorghum, the local brew.

In the weeks before the corn is harvested, the contrast between Kagenge and the surrounding area is already striking. An emergency feeding centre supported by the UN Children's Fund UNICEF and the World Food Programme was set up in Kagenge in early March, in response to reports of serious malnutrition following last year's drought. Four hundred people from the wider local population are still receiving weekly rations, but not those of Kagenge. The bean crop and corn picked straight from the fields before the harvest mean that they have enough to eat.

They also have a functioning health centre, which serves Kagenge and four neighbouring communities of similar size. The centre now has its own doctor, Angelique Kanyange, known to everyone as Dr Angelique, and its nursing staff has doubled in number. Dr Angelique is zealously improving the nurses' cleaning procedures with demonstrations of the use of a broom and disinfectant. Today, the clinic is seeing more than 35 patients a day, as well as some 50 mothers bringing children for immunization. One of the new patients is Musabyimana, an 8-year-old boy who is blind and in pain because of severe cataracts. His mother noticed his poor sight when he was three months old, but this is his first visit to the clinic. Dr Angelique is not sure what caused the cataracts, but there is hope, she says, because Musabyimana seems to be able to detect some light and colour. She will refer him to a specialist for treatment. For now, the project will fund it; the mother, a widow, could never afford it.

Rural parts of Rwanda have community medical insurance schemes, but only 12% of families in Kagenge have cover. The goal of the Millennium Villages project is to get 100% coverage, with the hope that as the clinic becomes more useful to patients, more will join the scheme.

From village to province

It is here, though, that scaling up looks harder than it does in agriculture. Buying more fertilizers is easier than making more doctors. "Angeliques are hard to come by," admits Ruxin. Indeed, Dr Angelique is the first government-appointed doctor in a rural health centre, demonstrating the government's commitment to the Millennium Project but also, perhaps, the project's weakness. "The president of Rwanda says 'I want this village to work', so they are going to get the best," says Schocken. There are currently about 200 doctors in the country. The medical schools may be able to produce 60 or 80 a year, but the country has a long way to go to reach the World Health Organization's minimum recommended level of one doctor per 5,000 people.

Sachs claims recruitment problems can be overcome with decent salaries. Although the project is mostly about spending money on physical resources, he is in favour of top-up payments for doctors. But even with targeted salary increases, a country such as Rwanda suffers skill shortages in every sector.

Kagenge currently has a team of ten dedicated people who work long hours to motivate the villagers and document their progress. Detailed accounts were not made available to Nature, but in its first year the Kagenge project will spend as much on personnel as on materials. The budget for the cluster villages being set up in addition to the original 12 is smaller, and they will have much fewer support staff. "Research on top is extremely expensive," notes Ruxin, explaining that in future, and in villages that aren't research focused, costs should be much lower. But Sachs's claim that "the science behind this is broadly transferable without needing large teams" has yet to be put to hard tests.

The budgets matter to Theoneste Mutsindashyaka, a former mayor of Kigali and the governor of Rwanda's eastern province, which includes Nyamata and covers a quarter of Rwanda's population. He is a great fan of the Kagenge project, in part because it fits so well with the government's Vision 2020. He wants the figures so that he can roll out projects informed by the experience more widely. "The documentation is very important to me because I have to negotiate with partners," he says. He is impatient to get moving on the next stage of the project: "We want a millennium province, not just a millennium village," he says.

We want a Millennium province, not just a Millennium village.

Theoneste Mutsindashyaka

Within the next year, Mutsindashyaka wants to set up a Kagenge-like village in each of his provinces' seven districts. "We are going to move village to sector, sector to district, but you have to have money," he says. And he is certain he can sell the idea to his friends all over the world, from Quincy Jones to Donald Kaberuka, the president of the African Development Bank. And although scaling up to 3,600 villages is daunting, the governor says he only needs the numbers from Kagenge to get started: "I am total 100% confident that the project will succeed."

From Sachs to the president to the governor to the mayor, the ambitions for transforming the country are vast. But in Kagenge, despite the good rains, the villagers themselves remain wary. They are not as confident that they will achieve rapid progress as the project leaders. Anxiety about what to do with the harvest surplus is high. Celestin Ndahayo and other farmers worry about whether they can really afford both to sell corn and store enough for food security; they are not sure they believe Ndahiro's forecasts for the yields of their smallholdings. And what if the rains don't come next year? In his experience, says one umudugudu farmer, when a project is here, then the rains come. Back in 2001, an organization helped them to plant cassava and sweet potato and the rains came. But when they left the rains stopped. So as long as the Millennium Villages project is here he believes it will rain again. He doesn't believe, yet, that his village can learn to flourish in the project's absence.

Related links

RELATED STORIES

• Heavyweights act to tackle the 'big three' diseases
• Can we score the millennium goals?
• Science & Africa:  A message to the G8 summit
• Africa 2005

EXTERNAL LINKS

• MVP
• Millennium Promise page for MAYANGE
• MDG indicators
• Rwandan Ministry of Health
• Future Agricultures website

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Movie Reviews: Tom Brokaw's Global Warming: What You Need to Know and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth

On July 16, 2006, 9-11 pm ET/PT, Discovery Channel, BBC News and NBC News present a two hour special on global warming hosted by Tom Brokaw.

On Friday, I previewed the Discovery Channel special and saw An Inconvenient Truth.  Below I review both from a teaching perspective.

The bottom line of both Global Warming and An Inconvenient Truth are the same -- global warming is threatening to massively change our planet with severe impacts on our lives and the rest of creation; we have the knowledge and technology to reduce those changes; the real question is whether we have the collective will to do what we need to do before it is too late.

Both Global Warming and An Inconvenient Truth seek to acquaint the audience with the fundamentals about global warming: the causes of global warming, the evidence that convinces scientists why this is not simply part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling, the magnitudes of impacts that we can expect,  the technical solutions that can slow global warming, the outrageously large contribution of the U.S. to the problem, and the loomingly enormous potential of China and India if they pursue our development path.

Neither program makes the mistake of trying to be "balanced" in presenting the "skeptics" point of view.  Brokaw notes the change in scientific opinion over the last two decades and the agreement of 99.9% of scientists that global warming is real.  Gore uses the results of the sample of scientific literature on climate -- where the score is roughly 978 to 0 -- every study assumed that global warming is occurring.

Global Warming is a powerful statement in three respects.  First, it is presented by a respected journalist rather than a respected, but partisan, politician.  Second, it has an absolutely amazing, all star cast of scientists to help narrate the story.  Third, it has some great footage of glacial rivers, rainforests, pacific islands doomed to disappear, and most of all, cute, little polar bear cubs who, along with the rest of their species, are destined to die within the next few decades as the polar ice disappears.

An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, has other wonderful qualities.  First, it gains traction from Al Gore's droll sense of humor (yes, really) as well as his deep, visible commitment to the issue.  Second, it has some incrediblely vivid footage interspersed between the Gore narrative of his life and the Gore global warming slideshow.  Third, it conveys the scientific information in more depth, addressing the questions that people have, and illustrating answers with extremely sharp graphics on how temperature tracks CO2, the 650,000 year natural cycles of both temperature and CO2 and how dramatically the present CO2 levels and temperature exceed historical levels, how hurricanes and other natural storms gain intensity from warming temperatures, how global warming can bring both droughts and floods, how El Nino works, how the ocean conveyor belt works, and how the North America glacier melt affected Europe's climate.  Fourth, it has some unforgettable visual models of the 2002 collapse of Larson B in Antarctica and what will happen to sea level in NY, Florida, Shanghai, Bangladesh, and elsewhere if either a significant portion of Greenland or Antarctica melts [in the only obvious scientific error of the movie, Gore mixed up the sea level change expected from Greenland melting with that of the Antarctic].

So, which one would I have my students see?  Both...they both have unique aspects that are worth a student's while.  I'd give An Inconvenient Truth an edge on content, but only if students can get past the fact that An Inconvenient Truth is a great commercial for why we should all wish that the Supreme Court had selected Al Gore, instead of George Bush as our President.

What I wish someone would do is blend both -- take Gore's slideshow, the great scenic footage from both, the Hansen discussion and other scientists from Brokaw and put them together...but, lacking that, see them both!

Scientists Galore in Global Warming

The Discovery Channel special presents an impressive array of international experts discussing the current realities of global warming and the future of the planet, featuring Dr. James Hansen, Chief, NASA Institute for Space Studies; Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University; and Dr. Stephen Pacala, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University.

Hansen is the world's most prominent climate modeler.  He is perhaps best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s, which helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. Dr. Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and he received the prestigious Heinz Environment Award for his research on global warming in 2001.  The Bush Administration recently created an outcry when it attempted to rein in his public appearances. 

Oppenheimer has researched potential effects of global warming, including the impact of warming on atmospheric chemistry, ecosystems, the nitrogen cycle, ocean circulation, and the ice sheets.  Oppenheimer and other scientists organized two UN workshops that helped catalyze negotiations on the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol. He co-founded the Climate Action Network and co-authored Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect.Pacala has focused on problems of global change with an emphasis on the biological regulation of greenhouse gases and climate. He is co-director of the Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative and directs the Princeton Environmental Institute. His writing includes research on maintenance of biodiversity, ecosystem modeling, ecological statisticsand the dynamics of vegetation and animal behavior.

Other scientists presented in the special include: Dr. Daniel Nepstad, Ecologist, Amazon researcher, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center; Dr. Mark Serreze, Senior Research Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center, National Center for Atmospheric Research;  Dr. Greg Holland, Director, Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division, NCAR; Dr. Nick Lunn, Research Scientist, Canadian Wildlife Service; Dr. Stephen Harrison, Director, Climate Change Risk Management, Glaciologist/Senior Research Associate, Oxford University Centre for the Environment; Professor Bob Spicer, Director of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space, and Astronomical Research; Professor Peter Cox, Science Director, Climate Change, Center for Ecology and Hydrology, Execter; Dr. John Hunter, Researcher, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, University of Tasmania; Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Marine Biologist, University of Queensland; Professor Lin Er Da, Director, Agrometeorological Institute, China Academy of Agricultural Sciences; and Hila Vavae, Senior Meteorologist, Director of Meteorolgy Office, Tuvalu Island.

The Contents of Global Warming

The Discovery Channel special aims to

"decode the buzzwords and arm viewers with an arsenal of clear definitions and visual depictions to explain the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide emissions, CFCs, and effects on weather and rising sea levels. Visceral CGI and cutting edge climate computer models will help viewers see into the future at a world significantly changed by unchecked global warming." 

The special features global warming hot spots most affected by climate change: sub-surface rivers in Patagonian glaciers, the drought-stricken Amazon river basin, and the Great Barrierl reef.  The special presents a graphical timeline of global warming throughout history, addresses the contention that current global warming is simply part of the natural warming and cooling climate cycles, and demonstrates the contribution of the average American family to global warming.  It identifies the mega-technical solutions from ocean CO2 injection to building green cities or "ecopolis."  It also address the small fixes -- what ordinary Americans can do to slow global warming.

Here's an interesting perspective on Gore from a conservative Christian perspective: God, Gore and Global Warming by Ken Connor Posted Jul 03, 2006 in Human Events It is pretty rare for a documentary to make a million dollars at the box office, so the fact that Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" has already brought in more than $10 million is impressive. Not only that, but Gore's movie will probably be one of the five best-selling documentaries of all time by the end of its run. The former Vice President clearly sees himself as a prophet, and he is warning Americans that the end is near. Is it true? Are we living in the end times—not so much because of an impending Rapture, but because of melting ice caps? At CJS, we certainly don't have the scientific expertise to assess rival global warming claims. Nevertheless, one thing is for sure: the debate should be settled on the basis of merit, not personality. Some conservatives will dismiss Al Gore's arguments simply because he is Al Gore. That would be a mistake. Christians are often concerned about the lazy relativism that has become so popular in America. To compete against the post-modern mentality, we often talk about "truth-claims," and challenge others to take our truth-claims seriously. Al Gore is making a set of truth-claims, and many scientists support his theories. That does not necessarily mean Gore is right, but we should also resist the urge to let politics get in the way of an honest assessment. Our responsibility as citizens is to look at all the evidence and make the best assessment we can. After collecting and interpreting the data, what if we determine that global warming is not a threat, or that humans are not responsible for increased temperatures? Does that automatically mean that we should proceed with the environmental policies we have now? Not at all. Whether or not we face impending doom, Christians need to remember that human beings have a responsibility toward the environment. In the last few decades we certainly have not been as conscientious about taking care of our natural resources as we should be. Like it or not, Al Gore is helping to remind Christians of an important duty. The great evangelical apologist, Francis Schaeffer, wrote a book in the 1970s called Pollution and the Death of Man. In it, Schaeffer carefully analyzes the claims of the environmental movement. Basing his arguments on some profound theological truths, Schaeffer argues that Christians have an important obligation to the environment. For example, Schaeffer reminds Christians that God created the material world—including trees and chipmunks and flowers and whales—and that upon creating these things he called them good. In other words, God saw something worthwhile in these things, in and of themselves. The material world is valued in God's eyes, it ultimately belongs to Him, and therefore we should treat it with a measure of reverence. Schaeffer recognizes that the environment, along with everything else, has suffered as a result of the Fall. Pollution, disease, and even global warming, are evidence of a fallen world. However, we should keep the three-part Christian worldview in mind: Creation, Fall, Redemption. Christians are always and everywhere called to be agents of Christ's redemption. Though the earth groans, we have an opportunity to work with a resurrection mentality, for Christ has made all things new. Along the same lines, Schaeffer reminds us that mankind has a certain union with the creation, since we are actually a part of the creation. Along with sparrows and lilies, we are all the handiwork of the same God. For this reason, we ought to have some sense of solidarity with the created world. Beware, however: this point can be abused, as we've seen with the Spanish effort to confer fundamental human rights upon apes. While we enjoy exalted status as creatures made in God's image (Gen. 1:27), we also have a sobering responsibility that accompanies this status. Under the so called "dominion mandate" (Gen 1:28), God has placed His global garden in our hands, and he has given us the charge: "Take good care of the world until I return." That is a major responsibility, and Christians should be especially concerned about disappointing the Gardener who created this garden in the first place. We live in a consumer driven age, and selfishness abounds. It is easy to fall into the consumer mentality ("me, me, me, take, take, take"). Even Christians have been tempted to consume resources without considering future generations or our responsibility to God. Al Gore's prophesies may or may not be true, but they do provide us with an opportunity to stop and think about whether or not we—individually and collectively—have been faithful stewards of the environment. This is a discussion worth having, and at the very least we can thank Al Gore for inspiring it. Mr. Connor is chairman of the Center for a Just Society. He is a trial and appellate attorney, known for his successful representation of victims of nursing home abuse and neglect. He is a past president of the Family Research Council.

Some of the Materials from Global Warming

The Facts About Global Warming

WHAT IS IT?

• Global warming is the gradual rise of the earth's surface temperature, thought to be caused by increased emissions of greenhouse gases (the “greenhouse effect”), specifically from human activities. -Environmental Protection Agency

• A mere six degrees of global warming was enough to wipe out up to 95 percent of the species alive on Earth 251 million years ago. -Peopleandplanet.net, Bristol  Univ.

• Sun provides the Earth with the heat it needs to support life, but a drop of only 1/10^th of 1% of the amount of the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth can spawn an Ice Age.

THE HEAT IS ON

· The average temperature in the U.S. in 2005 was almost one degree above the 1895-2004 mean, which will make 2005 one of the 20 warmest years on record for the country. -NOAA (based on preliminary data)

· Of the top 20 hottest years on record, 19 have occurred since 1980.

· Computer models suggest that average global surface temperatures will rise between 2.5°F and 10.4°F by the end of this century, a rate much larger and faster than any climatic changes over the past 10,000 years. -National Academy of Sciences

· Many scientists believe that temperatures are rising so fast, the Earth’s climate may reach a threshold – the tipping point – when there will be nothing we can do to ‘undo’ global warming.

AROUND THE WORLD

· In 1980, sea ice covered nearly 1.7 billion acres of the Artic, about the size of the

United States

. In the last two decades alone, the Artic has lost an area roughly twice the size of

Texas

. If the melting continues at this rate, computer models predict that by 2060 there will be no sea ice at all during the Artic summer.

· One hundred years ago, there were more than 150 glaciers at 

Glacier National Park in Montana.  Today there are fewer than 30.

· The Patagonian glaciers at the Southern tip of South America

have lost 10% of their ice in the last seven years.

· If just the Greenland

icesheet melts into the ocean, it could raise global sea levels by 23 feet over the next few hundred years. Coastal cities, including  New York and London, would be completely flooded. Low lying countries such as Bangladesh – with much of its land mass at sea level – would be nearly wiped out.

· Every year, nearly a thousand square miles of farmland in China

turns to desert. Since the 1950s, the rate has doubled.

· In a study of the polar bear population in the Arctic town of Churchilll,

Manitoba , the number of bears has declined from about 1200 back in the 1980s to less than 950 today. This 22% decline is directly related to early break-up sea ice in the region.

FACT OR FICTION:

· Some scientists argue that the increase in greenhouse gases has not made a measurable difference in the temperature. They say that natural processes have caused global warming. –World Book Encyclopedia

· “There is no reason to believe that this 10,000-year-old cycle of solar-induced warming and cooling will change, said Dr. Sallie Baliunas, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I believe that we may be nearing the end of a solar warming cycle. Since the last minimum ended in 1715, there is a strong possibility that the Earth will start cooling off in the early part of the 21st Century.” National Center for Public Policy Research

FUELING THE FIRE: GREENHOUSE GASES

· Earth’s greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon that helps regulate the temperature of our planet. The sun heats the Earth and some of this heat, rather than escaping back to space, is trapped in the atmosphere by clouds and greenhouse gases, keeping the Earth at a sustainable temperature for human life.

· While many greenhouse gases occur naturally, human activities are adding gases to the natural mix at an unprecedented rate.

· More than 5 million acres of Amazon rainforest are lost every year to loggers and farmers.

· In the century between 1850 and 1950, human activities burned up 60 billion tons of carbon fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas. Today we burn the same amount every 10 years.

· The  United States pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country in the world. Each of us contributes about 22 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, whereas the world average per capita is about 6 tons. - Environmental Protection Agency

· Right now the U.S.makes up only five percent of the world’s population, yet we are responsible for a staggering 25% of the carbon dioxide that’s released into the atmosphere.

· Unless we reduce emissions and develop new energy alternatives, the blanket of greenhouse gases that surrounds the planet will double in the next 50 years, and triple in the next hundred.

WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

· Alternative energy sources that do not emit carbon dioxide include the wind, sunlight, nuclear energy, and underground steam. Alternative sources of energy are more expensive to use than fossil fuels. However, increased research into their use would almost certainly reduce their cost. -World Book Encyclopedia

· Everyday steps:

o High-efficiency appliances can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 450 pounds a year.

o Recycle aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic, cardboard, and newspapers. Recycling can reduce your home's carbon dioxide emissions by 850 pounds per year.

o When running errands, combine trips so that you are not using your car for single-purpose trips.

o Carpool: Leaving your car at home just two days a week will reduce your carbon dioxide emissions by 1,590 pounds per year. - Environmental Protection Agency

o Turning the thermostat down three degrees not only saves money – it keeps one ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

o If every American household switched just one traditional light bulb to a long lasting energy-efficient fluorescent bulb, it would be the equivalent of taking one million cars off the road.

Global Warming Timeline

254 Million Years Ago

• Global warming of just a couple of degrees at the end of the Permian era led to mass extinction.

55 Million Years Ago

• A several degree warming period at the end of the Paleocene era triggered a mass extinction.

10,000 Years Ago

• During the last ice age, the Earth was just 9-16 degrees cooler than it is today.

1896

• A Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius coined the term “greenhouse effect” when he hypothesized in an article that global temperature is related to the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

1950s

• Climatologist Charles Keeling was the first to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on a continuous basis, and he was the first to report that global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were rising. His documentation was graphed, and became known as the Keeling Curve.

1980s

• At this time, the science of global warming consisted of a few determined scientists   whose predictions about the fate of our planet were either furiously debated or widely ignored.

• The four strongest El Niños on record have all happened since 1980.

1995

• Temperatures in Chicago reach over 100 degrees and kill 739 people in five days

2002

• Larson B is the largest expanse of ice on earth, located on the eastern end of the Antarctic Peninsula.  This plate of ice has been in deep freeze for the last 12,000 years. During periods of warmth, parts of the shelf have melted away, and small icebergs have splintered from its edges. But in the summer of 2002, something unprecedented happens. A chunk the size of Rhode Island falls into the sea.

• Northern China has been gripped with severe drought since 2002.

  China inhabits 21% of the Earth’s population, yet the country only has 7% of the world’s water.

2003

• More than 30,000 perish when a record-breaking heat wave grips an ill-prepared

  Europe

2005

• January 1: Across Southern Australia, the New Year blasts its way into the record books. In the capital of

  Sydney, temperatures top 113 degrees. By the end of January, the most destructive brush fires in 20 years rage throughout the country, killing nine people.
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  August 29, 2005: Katrina is the strongest hurricane to ever hit the

  Gulf States reaching speeds of 175 miles an hour and ravaging 100 miles of coastline. In only a few hours, the tourist town of Gulfport,Mississippiis nearly leveled by the category 4 storm. Nearly 80% of the city of New Orleans floods. Thousands are killed.
• Australia recorded the hottest year on record.
• The Amazon rainforests recorded the driest year on record.
• The worldwide record for number of hurricanes is smashed with 28 officially designated storms, including the most deadly to hit the U.S. in nearly 100 years.
• The Kyoto Protocol is ratified by more than 160 nations. It sets legally binding target dates for many industrialized countries to cut their global-warming emissions. Despite the United State’s role in drafting the treaty, the current administration has yet to sign the Kyoto treaty. Also reluctant to sign is Australia, the 14^th largest producer of greenhouse gases, and the world’s largest exporter of coal.

2006

• February: The island ofTuvalu in the South Pacific saw the highest tide they’ve ever seen at 11 feet. If the oceans continue to rise, many of these small island countries will simply vanish into the sea.

• April 16: A sandstorm blows more than 300,000 tons of sand on the capital of Beijing

• May: Canadian wildlife officials were astonished to find the first polar bear/ grizzly hybrid in the wild.

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  Glacier

  National Park in northern MT is seeing the ice melt faster than at any time in recorded history. As the ice melts, more ground is exposed. That ground absorbs more of the sun that used to be reflected by the ice. As the ground warms up, the ice melts even faster.
• The Great Barrier Reef experiences the third bleaching event in the last eight years. Three thousand individual reefs join together to cover more than 135,000 square miles of the ocean floor. Currently, the warm temperature of the water is preventing the algae from provided the nourishment and protection the corals need. The coral is repelling the algae, resulting in a colorless, dying coral reef.
• Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere today are higher than anything we’ve seen in the past 600,000 years. Never, since human beings first walked the Earth, have carbon dioxide levels been this high. This shows that the present day climate is very unusual.

2100

• If temperatures continue to rise at their current rate, in 2100 the Earth may hit the 4-degree mark, known as the tipping point. This is the point at which Earth’s climate will reach the threshold of no longer being able to ‘undo’ global warming. [see Tipping Point post]

Oregon State Rules!

In case any of you have been out of the loop or failed to watch the big game, humble Oregon State just won the College World Series!!!  Go Beavs!

Global Warming Attitudes

Americans express relatively little concern over global warming, especially when compared with publics of other major nations. Barely half of the Americans who have heard of global warming say they personally worry about the issue a great deal (19%) or a fair amount (34%). Nearly as many say they worry only a little (26%) or not at all (21%). The Japanese express the highest level of concern over global warming among the publics of major industrialized nations. Fully 66% of Japanese say they worry about this a great deal, while another 27% say they worry a fair amount. In France, a combined 87% express a great deal (46%) or fair amount
(41%) of concern. Roughly the same percentage in Spain (85%) says they worry at least a fair amount about global warming.  Smaller percentages in Great Britain (67%) and Germany (64%) voice significant concern about global warming. The American public is deeply divided politically in
concerns over global warming. Only about a third of Republicans (34%) say they worry a great deal (10%) or a fair amount (24%) over global warming, based on those who have heard about the issue. About two-thirds of Democrats (66%) and 57% of independents express at least a fair amount of concern over global warming. Roughly four-in-ten white evangelical
Protestants (41%) express have at least a fair amount of concern
about global warming; that compares with 53% of white mainline Protestants, and 64% of seculars.  Pew Global Attitudes Survey

World Scientists Address Disease Surveillance and Energy

The national science academies of 12 nations [G8 nations, Brazil, China, India, and South Africa] issued two joint statements to the leaders of the G8 countries who meet at their annual summit in Russia next month. One endorses reinvention of the world's disease surveillance system; the other urges major expansion of energy research to address the global crisis in energy supplies.

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The academies argue that global efforts in both infectious diseases and energy sourcing are tremendously inadequate given the scale of the problems. Current systems of national and international disease surveillance are fragmented and uncoordinated.  The world needs a tightly coordinated global system with animal and human health experts working closely together, in light of the bird flu and other pandemic threats that we are likely to face.  Similarly, the academies argue that G8 must address serious inadequacies in funding and incentives for energy research.

    In particular, the academies recommend:

Reinventing disease surveillance

Efforts to coordinate disease surveillance across national and international agencies and research bodies

Independent audit to recommend how to develop global surveillance

Research into more rapid vaccine production methods

Greater cooperation between human- and animal-health communities

Better collection and sharing of clinical and epidemiological data Investing in energy R&D

Investing in energy R&D

Highlight 'reality and urgency' of global energy supply

Big, long-term infrastructure investments in cheap, clean, sustainable energies

Boost developing countries' capacity in innovative energy technologies

Incentives to develop clean fossil, nuclear and renewable technologies

Focus public research and technology efforts on energy efficiency, non-conventional hydrocarbons and clean coal, innovative nuclear power, distributed power systems, renewable energy sources, and biomass production.

The academies' statements seek to build on the seeming influence that their statements had last year on G8 commitments for African aid.

The joint statements are described in more detail and linked below.
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[environment]" rel="tag">[environment]</a>

WHO links 25% of all disease to environmental degradation

WHO reports that 13 million deaths annually and nearly a quarter of all disease worldwide—including 33 percent of illnesses in children under age five—are due to environmental causes that could be avoided or prevented.  The four main diseases caused by environmental factors are diarrhea, lower respiratory infections, various forms of unintentional injuries, and malaria. These disease could be prevented by providing safe drinking and domestic water supplies, promoting better hygiene, using cleaner and safer fuels, reduced use and better management of use of toxic substances, and better water resource management.  The report
"shows very clearly the gains that would accrue both to public health and to the general environment by a series of straightforward, coordinated investments. We call on ministries of health, environment and other partners to work together to ensure that these environmental and public health gains become a reality." Video message by Dr. Maria Neira, Director, Public Health and Environment, World Health Organization

WHO report - Preventing disease through healthy environments: Towards an estimate of the environmental burden of disease

The Science of Global Warming: Are we reaching the "tipping points?"

Gabrielle Walker reported in Nature last week on whether we are reaching the tipping point in climate change.  The phrase "global warming" suggests to the uninitiated a gentle, linear increase in temperature with predictable linear effects on the earth.  But both the complex system that is climate, and the more subtle and difficult to identify biological systems affected by climate, cannot be captured by neat linear equations.  They have non-linearities: cliffs that are points of no return and tipping points when internal dynamics start to propel changes and small changes produce exponential impacts.  See Real Science post on tipping points. (tipping point post)  Are there tipping points or cliffs in climate change?  When will they be reached?  When and if they are reached, are they not just tipping points, but cliffs -- points of no return? 

Although there's no strong evidence that the climate as a whole has a point beyond which it switches neatly into a new pattern, individual parts of the system could be in danger of changing state quickly, and perhaps irretrievably. And perhaps the most striking of these vulnerable components are in the Arctic. Farthest north is the carapace of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean. South of that is the vast ice sheet that covers Greenland. And then there is the ocean conveyor belt, which originates in a small region of the Nordic seas and carries heat and salt around the world.  All three seem to have inbuilt danger zones that may deserve to be called tipping points. And the outside forces pushing them towards those points are gathering.

Even as it published the piece on tipping points, Nature noted in its editorial that there are dangers in focusing on those concepts:

there are three dangers attendant on focusing humanity's response to the climate crisis too much on tipping points. The first is the uncertainty of the science; the second is the tendency of such an emphasis to distort our responses; the third is the danger of fatalism.

The models through which our understanding of the climate system are channelled into assessments of how it might behave in the future are impressive by the standards of human investigation, but crude with respect to the details of the Earth system. All sorts of phenomena, from the formation of clouds to the respiration of soils, are hard to capture accurately, and it is on such details that an understanding of possible tipping points depends. Anyone claiming to know for sure when a particular tipping point will be reached should be treated with suspicion — and so must anyone who suggests that no tipping point will ever be reached.

The second problem is that an emphasis on tipping points not yet reached increases the focus on the future. Such an increase tips the balance away from adapting to climate change and in favour of trying to avoid it. A rational response to the challenge of the twenty-first century's climate is to do both: to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases force climate change, but at the same time build up the ability to cope with adverse climates.

The third issue is that tipping points can induce fatalism. The concept may encourage the belief that a complete solution is the only worthwhile one, as any other course may allow the climate system to tumble past the crucial threshold. This sort of all-or-nothing approach is already over-stressed in climate policy by the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which calls for the complete avoidance of dangerous anthropogenic climate change, rather than the more reasonable and more feasible goal of minimizing and controlling it.

The first tipping point is Artic ice, which shrank 20% in the last 20 years of the 20th century:

"There is near-universal agreement that we are now seeing a greenhouse effect in the Arctic," says Mark Serreze from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.  Serreze studies sea ice, the member of the arctic triumvirate that has had most recent attention. In the winter, sea ice more or less covers the Arctic Ocean basin. Summer sun nibbles at the pack ice, shrinking it at the edges and creating patches of open water within. Open water reflects much less sunlight than ice — it has what is known as a lower albedo — so the greater the area of dark open water, the more summer warmth the ocean stores. More stored heat means thinner ice in the next winter, which is more vulnerable to melting the next summer — meaning yet more warmth being stored in the open water in the following year, a cycle known as the 'ice–albedo feedback'. "Once you start melting and receding, you can't go back," says Serreze.  It seems that some of this process is under way. Serreze and his colleagues have found that the summer sea ice has shrunk by an average of 8% a decade over the past thirty years². The past four years have seen record lows in the extent of September sea ice, and in 2005 there was 20% less ice cover than the 1979–2000 average, a loss of about 1.3 million square kilometres, which is more than the area of France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined. It was this finding that triggered a raft of alarming headlines.  The ice's volume, rather than its extent, would be a more useful figure, but this is hard to estimate. Radar measurements showing how proud the ice sits with respect to nearby water would help, but the European Cryosat mission intended to provide these data was lost on launch in October 2005. A reflight is planned, but at present the only way to determine the pack thickness is from below. In 2003 Andrew Rothrock and Jinlun Zhang of the University of Washington in Seattle analysed results from a series of submarine cruises from 1987–97 and concluded that the ice thinned by about one metre during that period³.
 
  A natural swing in wind and weather known as the Arctic Oscillation may have played a key role in the decline.In 1989, this index began to approach its positive mode,in which a ring of strong winds circles the pole. Zhangand his colleague Roger Lindsay, also at the University of Washington, believe these winds flushed large amountsof thick ice out of the Arctic through the Fram Strait, eastof Greenland. Last year, they published a model suggesting that because the replacement ice was thinner and morevulnerable to the ice–albedo feedback, this extra loss pushed the Arctic over the edge. Their paper's title: "The thinning of Arctic Sea Ice, 1988–2003: Have We Passed a Tipping Point?"⁴.

But given that sea ice was disappearing even before the Arctic Oscillation lurched into its positive state, it is unlikely to have been the sole trigger. "The Arctic Oscillation was a strong kick in the pants," says Serreze, "but if we hadn't had it we would still have seen the ice loss."

Whatever the precise mechanisms, the decrease in ice seems to be warming the atmosphere, as heat pours from the open water into the air above it. Springtime temperatures began rising throughout the Arctic basin in the 1990s⁵. This year, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard experienced a remarkable heatwave. January was warmer than any previously recorded April, and April was more than 12°C warmer than the long-term average.

Lindsay and Zhang suggest that the ice–albedo effect has indeed passed a tipping point, with the internal dynamics more important than external factors. But neither observations nor models suggest that the effect will now run away without outside help. According to climate modeller Jason Lowe of the UK Met Office in Exeter, the relationship between sea ice and temperature is reassuringly linear. "When you plot sea ice against temperature rise, whether from observations or models, it forms a remarkably straight line," he says. "It's not a runaway effect over the sorts of temperature ranges that we're predicting here." Lowe says that although the planet will almost certainly lose more ice, it does not have to lose it all. But if current trends in greenhouse-gas emissions and global warming continue, a planet that used to have two permanent polar caps will have only one.

Losing the sea ice would be bad news not only for polar bears and other charismatic megafauna, but also for some of the Arctic's smaller inhabitants. Photosynthetic plankton that live in pores and channels within the ice are the foundation of the area's food supply, and are not well adapted to ice-free life. Open-ocean plankton might benefit, but the Arctic is so poor in nutrients that this would probably not be much compensation⁶.

Compared with the overall scale of human-induced climate change, the additional warming expected if the ice–albedo feedback goes all the way would not be immense. The 4.5% of the Earth's surface above the Arctic Circle is simply too small to make a radical difference to the planet's energy balance. There are, however, some hints that the loss of sea ice may have more far-reaching effects beyond the simple number of watts absorbed per square metre. Tim Lenton, an Earth-systems scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, points out that our current, relatively stable pattern of winds, which is caused by three circulatory air systems in each hemisphere, depends in part on a white and cold North Pole.

Sinking air in the Arctic is an integral part of an air system called a Hadley cell; there is another Hadley cell over the tropics. Between these two cells are the fierce westerlies and the high-altitude jet streams that drive storms around the middle latitudes. "If any part of the current structure broke down, that would be profound," says Lenton. "If the system starts to switch seasonally between three cells and a less stable structure, you change the position of the jet streams, you change everything." Models of this possibility are scarce, but Jacob Sewall and Lisa Sloan of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have shown that an ice-free Arctic could shift winter storm tracks over North America, drying the American west⁷.

The second tipping point, with much more potential to dramatically change life on Earth, is the melting of Greenland ice.

The local warming caused by less sea ice could also affect the second tipping point, the size of the Greenland ice sheet. Here the effects could be dramatic, although delayed by centuries; there is enough ice on Greenland to raise sea levels by seven metres. "After hurricane Katrina, the deepest water in New Orleans was six metres," says glaciologist Richard Alley from Penn State University. "Greenland is more than that for all the coasts of the world. Do you move cities, do you build seven-metre walls and hope they stay, or what?" Until recently, nobody had painted a convincing portrait of how Greenland is responding to Arctic warming. A glacier here may recede while one over there grows; ice may be accumulating inland and eroding near the coast. But in the past couple of years, almost all of the indicators have started to point in the same direction. Greenland is melting...

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Although satellite measurements of Greenland's interior suggest that snow has recently been accumulating there, the margins are receding⁸. Laser measurements taken from planes suggest that this coastal melting is probably enough to outweigh the build-up of snow inland⁹. Also, Greenland's glaciers seem to have been speeding up. A few months ago, Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and Pannir Kanagaratnam of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, published satellite evidence that between 1996 and 2000, Greenland's more southerly glaciers had begun to accelerate, and that by 2005 the northerly ones had followed suit¹⁰. They estimate that over the past decade this lurching has more than doubled Greenland's annual loss of ice, from 90 to 220 cubic kilometres per year....
"In the past decade there has been a lot of warming," says Alley. "There's plenty of room to argue whether that's a natural fluctuation or not, but there's a clear relation between Greenland getting warmer and Greenland getting smaller."

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Modelling by Jonathan Gregory from the University of Reading and his colleagues suggests that it would require an average warming worldwide of 3.1 °C to drive this shrinking to its ultimate conclusion of an ice-free Greenland¹¹. This climatic point of no return is around the middle of the range foreseen by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but is higher than a previous estimate made by the same group¹². ...

But these models do not take into account the dynamism of Greenland's glaciers. In 2002 Jay Zwally from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, found that as soon as summer meltwater appeared on the surface of west-central Greenland, the ice began to slip more quickly¹³. This is surprising, as slip rates should depend on processes at the base of the ice rather than at its surface. But Zwally points out that the great lakes of water produced by the melting could slip down conduits in the ice and be delivered directly to the bed.

This result doesn't necessarily make a big difference to the fate of Greenland, as the increase in the ice's speed was relatively small. But it points to a new way in which the ice sheet could react to climate change quicker than anyone had realized. "In places inland where the ice is frozen to its bedrock, if you warm the surface and wait for heat to get conducted to the bottom it takes 10,000 years," says Alley. "But if you send water down through a crack it takes maybe 10 minutes, maybe 10 seconds." If this process started to move inland, even the interior of Greenland's ice sheet could be vulnerable to warmer air. That could point to the sort of self-sustaining feedback that tipping points are made of.

The models don't incorporate this mechanism, because they can't. The cliff fronts of many Greenland glaciers are shot through with bright blue conduits, but nobody knows how widespread these veins are inside the ice. Still, the responsiveness of Greenland's glaciers makes that point-of-no-return figure of 3.1 °C even less comforting. What's more, a lot of damage can be done without losing all of the ice. The ice sheet did not vanish during the last interglacial, around 130,000 years ago, when temperatures in the north were a few degrees higher than they are today. And yet the latest analyses suggest that meltwater from Greenland increased the sea level by between two and three metres. The only good thing about such an increase is that it would take centuries....

The third tipping point is thermohaline circulation, the ocean conveyor belt that distributes heat and salt in the ocean.

Thanks to its cold temperatures and high salinity, water in the Nordic seas between Greenland and Scandinavia is unusually dense and sinks. Surface water is drawn northwards to replenish this. One result of this flow is that Britain is warmer than its latitude would seem to deserve.

The sinking process sets a global mass of water in motion, transporting vast amounts of heat around the oceans. In the 1980s, models began to suggest that melting ice in the north could weaken this system, by putting a plug of fresh water over the sinkhole. This led to fears of abrupt climate change and snap ice ages in Europe and eastern America. These days most scientists think that the power of this flow to affect European temperatures under current conditions, or in a globally warmed future, has been overestimated¹⁴. But changes in the system could still have far-reaching implications. And models suggest that the thermohaline circulation has its own tipping point.

Comparing the output from 11 different ocean and climate models, ocean modeller Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, has concluded that it would take between 100,000 and 200,000 cubic metres of fresh water per second to shut down the thermohaline circulation — similar to the outflow from the Amazon River¹⁵. And once the circulation is stopped, restarting it would take a lot more cooling than just reversing the system into the conditions in which it was previously working.

The good news is that although the Arctic does seem to be getting fresher, it is nowhere near the danger point. Add together the increased output from disappearing sea ice (which moves fresh water from the point where sea water freezes to the point where the ice melts), the melting of Greenland and increased Arctic river flow and you still have barely a quarter of the lower bound of the model threshold.

However, measurements of flow in the deep ocean suggest that the circulation might be fluctuating in ways not considered by the models¹⁶. And if the melting of Greenland were to gather pace, the thermohaline circulation would be vulnerable. If the lower bounds of the models turn out to be right, a rate of melting that would get through the ice in 1,000 years would trouble the ocean overturning in centuries. "The fate of the thermohaline circulation will be decided by Greenland," says Rahmstorf. "If that goes quickly it will be bad news for the deep-water formation. But if Greenland is stable, the risk of shutting down the circulation completely is very small."

Any such shutdown would probably have only a small effect on European temperatures. But thanks to the Coriolis effect, says Rahmstorf, such a large shift in the ocean circulation would redistribute sea water so that the North Atlantic rose by up to a metre¹⁷. There are also suggestions that Atlantic fisheries could collapse.

But the biggest danger would come farther south. In the past, similar changes in ocean circulation seem to have led to significant shifts in tropical rainfall. "If you switch off the thermohaline circulation, the tropical rainfall belts shift. All the models show this. It's quite simple robust physics," says Rahmstorf. General circulation models, which try to simulate the workings of the climate system as a whole, often including the ocean, predict at least some weakening of the thermohaline circulation by the end of the century, with a knock-on effect on tropical rainfall — the system that provides much of Asia with food. And as with Greenland, the change doesn't have to be complete to have consequences. "Just weakening the system is by no means harmless," says Rahmstorf. "You'd get the same pattern of effects as for a total shutdown, but just a smaller amplitude."

The Science of Global Warming: Surface Water Availability Declines More Rapidly Than Mean Rainfall So Surface Water Supplies Will Drop Across 25% of Africa By the End of the Century

Changes in Surface Water Supply Across Africa with Predicted Climate Change

DeWit and Stankiewicz report in Science that surface water drainage (supply) has a non-linear relationship to rainfall in Africa.  A 10% drop in rainfall in an area with 40 inches (1000mm) of rain will reduce surface water drainage by 17%.   The same 10% drop in rainfall in an area with 20 inches (500mm) of rain will reduce surface water drainage by 50%.  So the rainfall reductions associated with  climate change will affect areas with intermediate rainfall most dramatically.  Deserts may become uninhabitable, but areas of moderate rainfall will  lose enormous quantities of their surface water supplies.  DeWit and Stankiewicz estimate that surface water access will be reduce across 25% of Africa by the end of this century.

    Abstract: Across Africa, perennial drainage density as a function of mean annual rainfall defines three regimes separated by threshold values of precipitation. This non-linear response of drainage to rainfall will most seriously affect regions in the intermediate, unstable, regime. A 10% decrease in precipitation in regions on the upper regime boundary (1000 mm/y) would reduce drainage by 17%, while in regions receiving 500 mm/y such a drop would cut 50% of surface drainage. Using predicted precipitation changes, we calculate that decrease in perennial drainage will significantly affect present surface water access across 25% of Africa by the end of this century.

Bird Flu Mutates

The World Health Organization indicates that as the H5N1 virus mutates, it is becoming more deadly to poultry, but not necessarily more likely to be transmitted to human beings or more risky to human beings.  WHO  <> The virus, which has spread in recent months from Asia into Russia, Africa and western Europe, has so far killed more than 90 people and forced the slaughter of millions of birds.  Western Europe is on high alert - since Germany, Austria, France and Italy have cases in wild birds.  11 nations worldwide reported outbreaks over the past three weeks, an indication that the virus, which has killed at least 92 people, is spreading faster.  "The recent appearance of the virus in birds in a rapidly growing number of countries is of public health concern," it said. "It expands opportunities for human exposures and infections to occur." The danger was increased when the virus jumped from wild to domestic birds, which was easiest when poultry lived in close contact with humans, as in Africa and parts of Asia. Although H5N1 remains difficult for humans to catch, scientists fear it could mutate to be easily passed from person to person and trigger a pandemic in which millions could die.

Bird Flu moves into EU and Africa

Science reports on the movement of bird flu into the EU and Africa.  Many worry that "Beset by disease, poverty, and a lack of infrastructure, Africa is ill-equipped to deal with H5N1."   AVIAN INFLUENZA: H5N1 Moves Into Africa, European Union, Deepening Global Crisis.  On the good news front, the virus does not appear to be evolving quickly, which may make it an unlikely candidate for a human pandemic.

For those of you interested in the topic, see CIDRAP facts on H5N1

Pew Climate Change Action Plan

Last week, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change released a 
comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 
in the United States. 

"The "Agenda for Climate Action" identifies both broad 
and specific policies, combining recommendations on 
economy-wide  mandatory emissions cuts, technology development, 
scientific research, energy supply, and adaptation 
with critical steps that can be taken in key sectors. 

The "Agenda" includes fifteen recommendations 
that chart a climate-friendly path for the United States. 
They have been designed to be both cost-effective 
and comprehensive. Although putting all of the recommendations 
into place will take time,there is a compelling 
need to get started. Further delay will only make 
the challenge before us more daunting and more costly."


Pew Climate Action Plan 

See also US greenhouse gas emissions 1990-2004