We Have Met The Enemy....

Down at the radio station I've made Thursdays my day to cover science, environmental and global warming news. I felt it was more effective to put it all together and make it all of a piece. Sadly today's stories all put together create an alarming picture of where we are headed.

 Starting with this speech given by Maude Barlow, a former UN Senior Water Advisor, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project, about global warming and its effect on our water systems.

Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.

If that's not sobering enough, she makes the case that we are in the process of polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death.

Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet.

She makes the point convincingly that carbon markets and the like are false solutions which, essentially, privatize the atmosphere by creating a new form of property rights over natural resources. Go read the whole thing over at alternet.org and prepare to be alarmed.

 If that's not enough to make you wonder whether or not you'll ever have grandchildren, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) uses 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions and provides analysis of  predicted and extended droughts headed our way as a result of unceasing unrestricted emissions and warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path at this point.

The detailed analysis concludes that warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.

Climate change is having a dramatic impact on the tropics by pushing their boundaries towards the poles at an unprecedented rate not foreseen by computer models, which had predicted this sort of poleward movement only by the end of the century.

You can go over to ClimateProgress.org and read Joe Romm's post 'Putting the "hell" in Hell and Highwater,' which has the links to a host of articles related to this story.

 If all of this wasn't bad enough, warming is also affecting our oceans and marine eco-systems in ways that are potentially devestating.

Scientists studying Caribbean reefs say that 2010 may be the worst year ever for coral death there. Abnormally warm water since June appears to have dealt a blow to shallow and deep-sea corals that is likely to top the devastation of 2005, when 80% of corals were bleached and as many as 40% died in areas on the eastern side of the Caribbean.

Go over to the WWF climate blog where you can find more information about the devastating effects that global warming is having on the Coral Triangle which has been called ...the planet’s crown jewel of coral diversity, and what its loss will mean to ecosystems, people and societies.