This is the main reason global warming will devastate biodiversity. There is no place to migrate to as in the past during climate shifts (the non-man made variety).


In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Also, there are by now numerous examples of ecosystems in mountains being greatly stressed, and the cause is not directly related to "urbanization."  In Arctic regions, the much-commented-on peril of polar bears is not directly related to "urbanization," nor is the rather less well-known competition between the highly adaptive red foxes, whose range is shifting northward, and the rather more delicate and specialized Arctic foxes, whose range is basically up against a wall.

As for this, at the very end:
<<
"Because changes in the climate system are likely to persist into the future regardless of emissions mitigation, adaptation is an essential response for future protection of climate-sensitive ecosystems," it said.
>>
"Changes persisting into the future, regardless," is another important concept, which we all need to pay attention to.  But I wonder what the authors have in mind, regarding adaptive protection of ecosystems.  It sounds great; but thus far, I have read of "adaptation" only with regard to human population centers, never with regard to "ecosystems."  Perhaps, though, I have not been reading carefully enough ...

Anyway, this is a fascinating, disturbing piece of journalism.  I was especially struck by that bit about the anonymous officials who are angry that this report is only now going to be released, after a delay of over a year.

Best wishes to you all at Orion, Erik.  I agree, very often the power of a story is delivered especially by the images that accompany it.  In this case, though, I think the quality of the writing is unusually interesting.

Not as though no one had ever thought this before, but surely W.'s presidency is going to be remembered as the most disastrous presidency in history.

"History": Will there be anyone to write history, in a few years?  Will there be any way to record it?  Will there be anyone to read it?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

On the other hand, regarding Wikipedia, it just goes to show, it can indeed use some tweaking from time to time, and we see here a fine example.  The main heading, in any reasonable encyclopedia, would not be "Grima," it would be "Wormtongue."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

======

The Climate-Change Precipice

By David Ignatius
Washington Post
Friday, March 2, 2007; A13

The scientific debate about whether there is a global warming problem is pretty much over. A leading international group of climate scientists reported last month that the evidence for global warming is "unequivocal" and that the likelihood it is caused by humans is more than 90 percent. Skeptical researchers will continue to question the data, but this isn't a "call both sides for comment" issue anymore. For mainstream science, it's settled.

The question now is what to do about global warming. This is a political problem more than a scientific one. The solutions (if we can agree on any) will require political will and imagination -- and also pain. That was my only reservation about the Oscar night celebration of Al Gore's leadership on this issue. The gowns and black ties and the celebrity back-slapping made it look like dealing with global warming will be fun, a walk down the red carpet. But it's more likely to be about catastrophe and how to share the pain.

These issues come into focus in a startling new report by futurist Peter Schwartz. He turns the usual discussions upside down: Rather than starting with detailed estimates of climate change (how much temperatures will increase; how much sea levels will rise; what new diseases will be spawned), he looks instead at systems that already are vulnerable to such stresses.

What Schwartz discovers with his stress-testing makes climate change even scarier: The world already is precarious; the networks that maintain political and social order already are fragile, especially in urban areas; the dividing line between civilized life and anarchy is frighteningly easy to breach, as the daily news from Iraq reminds us. We look at the behaviors of butterflies and migratory birds as harbingers of climate change. But what about early effects on human beings? "The steady escalation of climate pressure will stretch the resiliency of natural and human systems," writes Schwartz. "In short, climate change pushes systems everywhere toward their tipping point."

Schwartz's report, "Impacts of Climate Change," was prepared by his consulting group, Global Business Network, for a U.S. government intelligence agency he doesn't identify. The text of the report is available at the online discussion forum PostGlobal ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/postglobal). Here's a brief trek through the ravaged landscape Schwartz describes.

A first set of disasters waiting to happen involves stressed ecosystems. Human actions -- deforestation, overfarming, rapid urbanization -- have created special vulnerabilities to catastrophic natural events that are likely as the climate changes globally. In an interview, Schwartz cited the example of Haiti, which because of deforestation and loss of topsoil is "an ecosystem at the edge." A prolonged drought or a devastating hurricane could tip Haiti over that threshold -- and produce a refugee crisis of tens of thousands of boat people fleeing a devastated country.

Or take the problem of rising sea levels: Climate scientists are uncertain how fast the icecaps will melt and the seas will rise. But in Bangladesh, where millions of people live at or near sea level, even a small increase could produce a catastrophe. In a severe monsoon, 60 million to 100 million people could be forced to flee inundated areas, Schwartz warns, producing "the single greatest humanitarian crisis we have ever seen."

Lack of water may be as big a problem as flooding. Schwartz notes that more than 700 million people now live in arid or semi-arid areas. Climate change could tip this balance, too, producing severe water shortages and even "water wars." Tens of millions of people may become water migrants. The world's feeble political systems can't cope with existing migration patterns, let alone this human tide.

And finally, there is the problem of maintaining social order in a stressed world. You don't have to go to Baghdad to see how quickly the social fabric can be shredded; just look at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The stresses come in part from rapid urbanization. Schwartz notes that in 1900, one in 20 people lived in cities; today it's about half, and the percentage is rising fast. Without strong and supple governments, this could become a world of vigilantes and militias, desperate to control scarce resources.

The big problems in life aren't the ones that hit you by surprise but the ones you can see coming. That's surely the case with climate change: We can measure it, we can imagine its catastrophic effects. But can we do anything to stop it? If we let ourselves visualize how bad it could get, as Schwartz does in this report, will we make changes that might reduce the disaster? That's the real stress test: It's coming at us. What are we doing about it?

The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.


The 5% Project

When Al Gore showed all those charts with the CO2 going up, up, up and had to get in the E-Z-Lift to be tall enough to show us how big it is.

Well, how come none of these charts do that?   I mean, did that already happen...or, what that like 2004, or what?

And then there's the very real risk of releasing trapped mass stores of C02 and even methane, which these charts don't even acknowledge.

'Global Warming Is Lies' Claims Documentary

Accepted theories about man causing global warming are "lies" claims a controversial new TV documentary.

'The Great Global Warming Swindle' - backed by eminent scientists - is set to rock the accepted consensus that climate change is being driven by humans.

First of all, Al Gore actually disproved that because at the point the CO2 started to skyrocket, temperature did not.

If anything it looks like some kind of exponential relationship, however with CO2 being the dependent variable on small changes in global temperature!

Second, looking at these projections, even the worse of them (Bush's) shows only an 8% increase.   The "enviro-friendly" version has a 4% increase.   Again, I wish someone would offer some model here at grist that estimates what AGWers think will happen to temperature if the CO2 goes up by so much.

I already bet the guy who does the "Skeptics' Guide" a beer on that.