Star Phoenix Base

By David L. Brown

According to Wired magazine’s web site, the dust storm that engulfed Sydney, Australia three days ago was “apocalyptic.” In this image taken from space, that description doesn’t  seem over-the-top. You can see this and another NASA image here. According to the Wired article, the source of at least some of the dust was farmland that has been dried out during several years of severe drought.

Australia has long had a reputation as a desert continent, but more so in recent years. The Murray-Darling river system that provides irrigation water for the nation’s major agricultural region has virtually dried up after three years of dry weather. And  according to environmental journalist Fred Pearce, writing a few months ago in the UK newspaper The Guardian, “the drought has cut the country’s exports of thirsty crops such as rice, sugar and wheat by more than half. And the talk down under is that the drought is a near-permanent consequence of global warming.”

According to Pearce, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of “virtual water,” water that has been converted into food crops for sale abroad. He warns that “as the Murray and dozens of others rivers run dry across the planet, water is becoming the key constraint on food production. More than land, the availability of water now defines how full the world’s granaries are – and what price we pay for our daily bread.” You can read the rest of Pearce’s article, which originally appeared on April 17, at this link.

Water is one of the key elements in agricultural production, and like many other resources it is becoming scarce. The Colorado River, before it reaches the Gulf of California in Mexico, runs dry most of the time. The water is sucked out far upstream to supply  growing cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix, and to irrigate crops on land that would otherwise be unable to produce a crop.

The Colorado is not alone in this, for rivers around the world are running dry. One factor is the diminishing snow pack and glaciers on high mountain ranges, the Alps in Europe, Himalayas in Asia and  Andes in South America. Without a steady flow of meltwater through the summer growing seasons, the rivers flood early and dry up later, creating  havoc among farmers and threatening the world’s food supply.

And as the rivers disappear, the dust rises to fill the  air. Few of us have been around long enough to remember the Dust Bowl days on the 1930s, but we have heard stories of air so thick with dirt that some farmers had to stretch ropes between their houses and barns to keep from becoming lost. On Wednesday the residents of  Sydney had a taste of what that must have been like, with pictures such as this to provide evidence of Mother Nature in a nasty mood. This is a composite of several shots showing the Sydney Harbor Bridge in a very wide-angle view, shrouded in almost-Martian red dust.

For  anyone who doubts that climate change is taking place, and that it poses a real threat to human civilization, events such as this provide a sharp reminder. In his article in The Guardian, Pearce wrote that as our planet grows dryer, it “is turning a series of local water shortages into a global food crunch.” He continued:

Britain is not immune. By my estimate, Britain imports each year about 40 cubic kilometres of virtual water in the form of food (sorry about the unit, but it is more than half the annual flow of the Nile). We like to think we have few water problems, but that’s because we can rely on other peoples’ water. For now.

As the world’s demand for water continues to grow, and as more and more rivers run dry, that doesn’t look so clever. Thanks to rising global demand and the increasing uncertainly of supply due to climate change, water is destined to be a growing food security issue in the 21st century. It is not hard to imagine a future world where countries that still have water will not export it as willingly as they do now. If that happens, importers like Britain could find themselves in trouble.

Food is the bottom-line requirement for human existence. We have heard that it shares that distinction with shelter and clothing, but it takes only a crude hut and a few scraps of cloth to provide those other needs. Without adequate food, no human can long survive. And without adequate water, there will not be enough food to provide for the 6.7 billion human beings now present on Planet Earth.

For more on the dangers to our environment, you may want to read my review of Pearce’s book, “With Speed and Violence — Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change,” posted here on May 12, 2007. Use the search field at the upper right to find that and other related articles.

By David L. Brown

The growing concern about “global warming,” that misleading terminology used to define the climate change that is taking place on the Earth, has yielded a number of proposals to help mitigate the rise of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere that lie at the root of the problem. Many of these ideas revolve around the role of trees in our climate.

For example, it has become the “in thing” for the wealthy to plant trees to “offset” the carbon their activities release into the air. A rock and roll band recently did just that to offset the GHG released by the production and distribution of their latest album. Others have followed suit, “offsetting” their jet-setting lifestyles. These individuals believe that their tree planting efforts make them appear “green” as they continue their profligate lifestyles.

There are, however, some problems with this. First, even if the entire presently unforested areas of the planet’s surface were to be converted to an endless expanse of trees, it would not be able to compensate for the present rate of human produced carbon entering the air.

And, not all areas are suitable for arboriculture (tree farming). Imagine the results when some rock star attempts to plant a thousand hectares of trees in the middle of the Sahara Desert to offset the energy used by his private jet and you will see my point.

Then there is the all-important question of what impact planting all those trees would have on agriculture, that rather necessary activity that stands between humanity and mass starvation. Many of the same areas that might be converted to forests are needed to grow crops of another kind, for food. We humans are not like beavers or termites that can survive by munching on wood. Even the planet’s wide grasslands are needed to sustain wildlife and herds.

Now researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, California have come up with a new climate model that contradicts the idea that trees are a good thing for atmospheric GHG.

(more…)

by Val Germann

There can be little doubt that a world wide drought is well under way.  The American west has been suffering severe water shortages for years, as has most of Australia.  Brazil is in dought, too, and the Amazon under increasing pressure.  But the leader today has to be Africa where drought is killing thousands of people per month and threatening entire cultures, with no end in sight. 

A recent Associated Press report highlights the shocking water problems in Africa, especially for its lakes, which seem to be drying up.  Lake Victoria, the headwaters of the Nile, has been dropping fast, along with Lake Chad and Lake Tanganyika.  Can Star Phoenix Base readers imagine what might happen if the Nile were to be reduced by say, half?  Such a thing is now possible, as is revealed in this article.  

Now, in a yet unpublished report obtained by The Associated Press, an international consulting firm advises the Ugandan government that supercomputer models of global-warming scenarios for Lake Victoria “raise alarming concerns” about its future and that of the Nile River, which begins its 4,100-mile northward journey here at Jinja.

Things are already pretty bad on the lake and the people who depend on it.  And conditions are not improving.

In Jinja, 40 miles east of Kampala, researchers at the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization said falling water levels are the latest blow to the dying biology of Lake Victoria, where pollution has helped kill off scores of unique species of tropical fish in recent decades. Now tilapia, once a prime food fish, are declining because their inshore breeding grounds are vanishing.  “People for many years haven’t seen such a sudden change in the lake level,” said the fisheries office’s Richard Ogutu-Ohwayo, a biologist on the lake for 35 years. “Right now it’s very difficult to say what will happen. It’s a grim scenario, of worldwide climate change.”  

Yes, it is, especially when combined with overfishing and human-generated pollution.  Lake Victoria has been in trouble for many years, biologically, and this latest stress producer is only accelerating well established trends.   Unfortuntely, the situation is the same across most of the continent and its giant lakes. 

An extreme example lies 1,500 miles northwest of here, deeper in the drought zone, where Lake Chad, once the world’s sixth-largest, has shrunk to 2 percent of its 1960s size. And the African map abounds with other, less startling examples, from Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, getting half the inflow it once did, to the great Lake Tanganyika south of here, whose level dropped over five feet in five years.

Where is all of this leading?  Well, with atmospheric warming racing ahead across the globe there seems little doubt that the drying will continue into the indefinite future.   And nowhere is the future more indefinite than in Africa, where all the world’s problems seem to have taken root, with increasing vengeance every year. 

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