Please excuse the link farm. I should be back with something of more substance in a day or two.
ENVIRONMENT-CHINA: Record Drought Exposes Water Woes:
A once-in-a-century drought in south-west China has sparked concern over how China, which has one-fifth of the world’s population but just 7 percent of its water, has managed its water supply and growing network of hydroelectric dams.
In South-east Asia, where a number of countries have also been hit by the drought, the blame has fallen squarely the thirsty neighbour to the north, where many areas have not seen rain since October. Around 24 million people in Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces – totalling roughly 48,280 square kilometres of farmland – are short of water.
The drought has caused an estimated 3.5 billion U.S. dollars in agricultural losses, fuelled price rises and highlighted China’s chronic water problems.
Since September, rainfall has been less than half normal levels. In Yunnan, which is normally temperate, reservoirs have evaporated and river levels have dwindled. Much of the farmland is too dry to plant crops. Hydroelectric resources are stretched, and in Guizhou province about 90 percent of hydropower stations are paralysed, according to state media reports.
Leaders from China and other countries that share the Mekong River – Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam – met at a summit in Thailand to discuss the drought in early April. Thai government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn said his country will be requesting “more information, more cooperation and more coordination” from China. In Thailand, the drought has impacted 7.6 million people and some 14,000 villages.
Bye-bye, global cooling myth: Hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record:
It was the hottest March in both satellite records (UAH and RSS), and tied for the hottest March on record in the NASA dataset. It was the hottest (or tied for hottest) January through March in all three records.
The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of anthropogenic global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.
NASA’s prediction from last month is standing up: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.? Actually, NASA made that prediction back in January 2009:
Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.”
Of course, there never was any global cooling – see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira – “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the warming went right where scientists had predicted – into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening”):
See the post (by Joe Romm) for copious links.
Massive Arctic ice cap is shrinking, study shows; Rate accelerating since 1985:
Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.
A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary’s Arctic Institute of North America, reports that between 1961 and 1985, the ice cap grew in some years and shrank in others, resulting in an overall loss of mass. But that changed 1985 when scientists began to see a steady decline in ice volume and area each year.
“We’ve been seeing more mass loss since 1985,” says Sarah Boon, lead author on the paper and a Geography Professor at the University of Lethbridge. The reason for the change? Warmer summers.
Images of disappearing glaciers:
Melting glaciers have become a well-known symbol of climate change.
Why? “It’s one of the simplest indicators of climate change,” says Eric Rignot, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Glaciers melt when temperatures are increasing. It’s just basic physics.”
We also have access to numerous images of disappearing glaciers. Yet sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what the pictures are showing.
Below are some of the best photos that glaciologists say illustrate what they are seeing – a worldwide retreat in glaciers due to warming temperatures. The photos represent what is happening both in an individual glacier and in the various regions around the world.
“You don’t need to be a scientist to appreciate the magnitude of change of these glaciers,” says Rignot. “There shouldn’t be any doubt about these images.”
Click through to see the images. Be prepared to the the sharp-intake-of-breath thing.
