Population Growth

According to a recent CNN report, the world population is expected to hit 7 billion by the year 2011 with 97% of the growth over the next 40 years occuring in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

In order to appreciate just how massive this growth in population has been over the past 200 years, listen to this brief excerpt from this past Tuesday's Thom Hartmann Show:

As we are discussing health care reform and global warming legislation, I feel these stats must be taken into account. After all, if we think that scarcity of natural resources like food, water, and energy (all of which are essential for life on Earth) and the scale of greenhouse gas emissions are problems now, just wait until we have literally billions of more people to worry about.

India Rejects ANY Emission Caps Until 2020

In an update to a story I posted last week, Jairam Ramesh, the India’s environment minister, went on record today that India would not even discuss signing up for any legally-binding limit on greenhouse gas emissions until at least 2020. This means that both India and China, home of 1.17 billion and 1.31 billion people respectively, have now refused to set any emission limits in the near- or mid-term because "their fast-growing economies should not be hampered when western countries were responsible for climate change."

Don't they see the difference between the United States, who only accounts for 4.5% of the global population, and themselves, home to 37% (almost 2 out of 5) of the global population? I realize that the current situation with our environment is due primarily to the industrialized world (with the US being the number one emitter of greenhouse gases) but what will happen once these massive nations repeat the same mistakes?

I'm anxious to see how this affects the upcoming international climate convention in Copenhagen later this year.

Declassified Satellite Images

Satellite images of polar ice (that had been classified by the Bush administration) that were declassified last week by President Obama show just how devastating and extreme the polar meltdown has been in recent years. You read that correctly: George W Bush classified pictures that gave dramatic evidence of global climate change. I guess it was just another aspect of his War on Science. One amazing image can be seen above.

The photos, and their 1-meter resolution, helped scientists estimate the amount of ice that melted in the summer of 2007, the largest melt on record, at more than a million square kilometers. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has warned that America's satellite fleet is aging and may no longer be effective at monitoring and predicting climate change. This sentiment has also been reflected by the National Academy of Sciences in their warning that the environmental satellite network was "at risk of collapse." NASA had planned to put a high-tech, carbon-monitoring satellite into orbit earlier this year, but it crashed shortly after lift-off.

The good news is that President Obama, in his Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, has already allocated $170 million for climate modelling and the NOAA is looking for an additional $390 million to upgrade its environmental satellite fleet in 2010.

Here are two more of the freshly declassified pictures:

A Potentially Big Step in Carbon Sequestration

It looks like another potentially huge scientific discovery is the result of pure luck, or in this case by leaving stuff sitting out on a lab bench:

[Scientists] were trying to design and create molecules that could capture negatively charged ions, such as chlorides and phosphates, on the surfaces of bioengineered cells. In one experiment, the researchers set aside an alkaline solution of various organic substances to evaporate, says geochemist John A. Tossell, author of the new study. When analyzing the crystals that formed, the team found that the organic macromolecule that made up the crystal unexpectedly contained carbonates, which form in solutions containing carbon dioxide.

This means that the macromolecule they were using has the ability to directly absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide:

Though the carbonate isn’t chemically bonded to the macromolecule, spontaneous absorption of carbon dioxide from the air suggests that the combination is very stable, Tossell says. Theoretical analyses show the macromolecule is a giant ring composed mostly of ring-shaped subcomponents and that the negatively-charged carbonate ion nestles within the positively-charged center of that macromolecule, he notes.

Although the use of this process is most likely too expensive to be used on a wide-scale basis, studying the macromolecule and how it’s made may help future fuel future breakthroughs.

India Rebuffs Hillary

As a follow up to my story on global emissions and their effect on the Amazon, it seems India will not be part of the solution.

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, is on a 5-day trip to India to convince it's leadership to embrace a low-carbon future. The US did not, however, get the response it was looking for:

“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister told Mrs Clinton. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.”

Even though it looks like India will continue to set their own targets, Hillary reassured them that the United States will not stand in the way of the world’s largest democracy’s economic progress.

It seems that both India and China are using the same argument that it isn't fair that the U.S. rose to economic power through buring carbon-based fuels but they cannot. They both argue that it is up to the already-developed nations to clean up the mess they've already made.

The Lesson of the 2005 Amazonian Drought

This could be the most startling story I've read in awhile. The above picture shows one of the tributaries of the Amazon River that completely dried up during the 2005 drought, leaving a ferry boat beached on the riverbed. I had no idea the drought even happened...

By studying the effects of the drought, the Amazons' worst in a century, scientists have released some very sobering news:

"The world’s forests are an enormous carbon sink, meaning they absorb massive quantities of carbon dioxide, through the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. In normal years the Amazon alone absorbs three billion tons of carbon, more than twice the quantity human beings produce by burning fossil fuels. But during the 2005 drought, this process was reversed, and the Amazon gave off two billion tons of carbon instead, creating an additional five billion tons of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. That’s more than the total annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined."

"Significantly, Phillips also found that the 2005 drought was not the result of El Niño, the cause of previous smaller episodes, but of a regional rise in sea temperatures—one of the expected early signs of global warming. Taken together, these findings suggest that climate change could trigger the worst kind of vicious cycle, with climbing temperatures causing the rainforests to dry out and give off massive quantities of greenhouse gases, which in turn causes the planet to warm more rapidly—a dynamic with harrowing implications. An article last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science identified rainforest-wide dieback in the Amazon, along with the melting of the Arctic sea ice, as among the nine most crucial "tipping points" that must be staved off to prevent catastrophic climate change.

As if that’s not enough bad news, new research presented in March at a conference organized by the University of Copenhagen, with the support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that as much as 85 percent of the Amazon forests will be lost if the temperature in the region increases by just 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. To keep from hitting that mark, we will have to curb global carbon emissions by at least 80 percent. At the same meeting, Vicky Pope, a researcher from Britain’s Met Office (a government agency that tracks climate and weather data) showed that a temperature increase of 2.2 degrees above current levels would trigger a 20 to 40 percent Amazon die-off within 100 years. A rise of 5.4 degrees would kill 75 percent of the trees. "The forest as we know it would effectively be gone," she says. Other Met researchers have found that the loss of the forest would be irreversible. "

The good news is that at the most recent G-8 meeting in Italy last week, each of the 8 nations agreed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. However, none of them could agree on any short-term goals. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out at the major meeting on climate change in Copenhagen later this year.