Richard Heinberg - Geopolitical Implications Of “Peak Everything”

From competition among hunter-gatherers for wild game to imperialist wars over precious minerals, resource wars have been fought throughout history; today, however, the competition appears set to enter a new—and perhaps unprecedented—phase. As natural resources deplete, and as the Earth’s climate becomes less stable, the world’s nations will likely compete ever more desperately for access to fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water.

Nations need increasing amounts of energy and raw materials to produce economic growth, but the costs of supplying new increments of energy and materials are burgeoning. In many cases, lower-quality resources with high extraction costs are all that remain. Securing access to these resources often requires military expenditures as well. Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning political power balances throughout the world.

This game of resource “musical chairs” could well bring about conflict and privation on a scale never seen before in world history. Only a decisive policy shift toward resource conservation, climate change mitigation, and economic cooperation seems likely to produce a different outcome.

Read More:

http://www.postcarbon.org/article/660520-geopolitical-implications-of-peak-everything

George Monbiot - Why Libertarians Must Deny Climate Change

Over the Christmas break I read what I believe is the most important environmental essay of the past 12 months. Though it begins with a mildly unfair criticism of a column of mine, I won’t hold it against the author. In a simple and very short tract, Matt Bruenig presents a devastating challenge to those who call themselves libertarians, and explains why they have no choice but to deny climate change and other environmental problems.

Bruenig explains what is now the core argument used by conservatives and libertarians:the procedural justice account of property rights. Briefly stated, this means that if the process by which property was acquired was just, then those who have acquired it should be free to use it as they wish, without social restraints or obligations to other people.

Their property rights are absolute and cannot be intruded upon by the state or by anyone else. Any interference with or damage to the value of their property without their consent – even by taxation – is an unwarranted infringement. This, with local variations, is the basic philosophy of the Republican candidates, the Tea Party movement, the lobby groups which call themselves “free market thinktanks” and much of the new right in the UK.

Read More:

http://www.monbiot.com/2012/01/06/why-libertarians-must-deny-climate-change/

Christine Shearer - Will Fossil Fuel Companies Face Liability for Climate Change?

In a recent article in National Journal, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) President Tim Phillips said there is no question that AFP and others like it have been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science: “We’ve made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you … buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril.”

AFP is a section 501(c)(4) organization, meaning it does not have to disclose its donors, but has been tied to significant funding from the Koch Family Foundations - founded by the billionaire Koch brothers of Koch Industries – as well as smaller donations from companies like ExxonMobil. Koch Industries and ExxonMobil are among the largest funders of studies questioning climate change science, often drawn upon by conservative politicians to legitimize their view that regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is not needed because the science is still under debate.

Read More:

http://cchronicle.com/2011/12/will-fossil-fuel-companies-face-liability-for-climate-change/

Mark Hertsgaard - Deniers-in-Chief: How the Most Powerful Leaders in the World Just Guaranteed Us a Climate Disaster

By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation

Posted on December 15, 2011, Printed on December 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153459/deniers-in-chief%3A_how_the_most_powerful_leaders_in_the_world_just_guaranteed_us_a_climate_disaster

The following article first appeared on the Web site of the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for its email newsletters. 

A different and more dangerous breed of climate denier commanded the stage at the recently concluded international negotiations in Durban, South Africa. These were not the usual cranks blathering fossil-fuel-industry talking points about how the science is all rubbish aimed at fostering a liberty-crushing world government. No, this breed is even more frightening, precisely because its members are not wacko outsiders. Rather, they are Serious People who actually run governments, or at least negotiate on behalf of those who do. They are lawyers, diplomats and government ministers, and they would be very surprised to hear themselves described as climate deniers.

After all, men such as Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing, the top two US negotiators in Durban, and Xie Zhenhua, who headed China's delegation, understand the basics of climate science well enough. They know that burning fossil fuels, leveling forests and other types of human activity are dangerously overheating the planet. They know that far-reaching action must be taken if their countries and humanity as a whole are to escape encroaching disaster. They even know--for they explicitly endorsed it at the last round of major climate negotiations in Copenhagen two years ago--that 2 degrees Celsius is the absolute maximum temperature rise that can be allowed if there is to be any chance of avoiding catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate change.

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terradaily.com - Climate Change May Bring Big Ecosystem Changes

by Staff Writers

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Climate_Change_May_Bring_Big_Ecosystem_Changes_999.html

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 19, 2011

By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface and will drive the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type - such as forest, grassland or tundra - toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modeling study.

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., investigated how Earth's plant life is likely to react over the next three centuries as Earth's climate changes in response to rising levels of human-produced greenhouse gases. Study results are published in the journal Climatic Change.

The model projections paint a portrait of increasing ecological change and stress in Earth's biosphere, with many plant and animal species facing increasing competition for survival, as well as significant species turnover, as some species invade areas occupied by other species.

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NASA - Climate Change May Modify Half Earth's Plants

Published on Friday, December 16, 2011 by Cosmos Magazine

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5097/climate-change-may-bring-big-ecosystem-changes

PASADENA - By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface.

Climate change will also drive the conversion of nearly 40% of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type - such as forest, grassland or tundra - toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modelling study.

"For more than 25 years, scientists have warned of the dangers of human-induced climate change," said Jon Bergengren, a scientist who led the study while a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in the U.S..

"Our study introduces a new view of climate change, exploring the ecological implications of a few degrees of global warming. While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it's the ecological consequences that matter most."

Climate change causes relocations

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology investigated how Earth's plant life is likely to react over the next three centuries as Earth's climate changes in response to rising levels of human-produced greenhouse gases. Study results are published in the current issue of the journal Climatic Change.

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George Monbiot - Why Is It So Easy to Save the Banks – but So Hard to Save the Biosphere?

Published on Sunday, December 18, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/dec/16/durban-banks-climate-change

by George Monbiot

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.

Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government's contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises several more times.

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tr available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.

Much of this was done both unconditionally and secretly: it took journalists two years to winkle out the detail. The banks shouted "help" and the government just opened its wallet. This all took place, remember, under George W Bush, whose administration claimed to be fiscally conservative.

But getting the US government to commit to any form of bailout for the planet – even a couple of billion – is like pulling teeth. "Unaffordable!" the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) shriek. It will wreck the economy! We'll go back to living in caves!

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ScienceDaily - Melting Glaciers Reveal Future Alpine World

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111214094650.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 14, 2011) — In a hundred years trees may be growing where there are now glaciers. The warm climate of the last few years has caused dramatic melting of glaciers in the Swedish mountains. Remains of trees that have been hidden for thousands of years have been uncovered. They indicate that 13,000 years ago there were trees where there are now glaciers. The climate may have been as much as 3.5 degrees warmer than now. In other words, this can happen again, according to Lisa Öberg, a doctoral candidate at Mid Sweden University in a new study.

In her study Lisa Öberg shows that soon after the inland ice receded, about 13,100 years ago, pines colonized high altitudes in the mountains. A few thousand years later there was a massive invasion of both pines and birches at levels up to 600 m higher than today's treeline. Subsequently the treeline for both pine and birch was gradually lowered as a result of ever-lower temperatures, until the climate made it impossible for trees to grow and glaciers began to form, about 4,400 years ago.

"We used to think that the glaciers were remnants of the latest ice age. The fact that trees grew there so recently shows that the glaciers are no older than 4,400 years," says Lisa Öberg

Lisa Öberg's study is based on finds of tree remains from Helags-Sylarna, Tärna, and Abisko. The age of the tree remains shows that the climate warming of the last century is unique in a perspective of several thousands of years. If any melting corresponding to what is happening today had taken place previously, the wood would probably have been degraded.

"The knowledge we gain by exploiting this unique opportunity is important for our understanding of how alpine plant growth may be impacted by the future climate," says Lisa Öberg.

The fact that nearly 10,000 years ago birches grew 600 m above today's treeline in a climate that was some 3.5 degrees warmer than today shows that trees ought to be able to grow at the same level again, if the temperature rises a few more degrees. "By studying where the treeline ran in the past, we can see what it can be like in the future if it continues to get warmer," says Lisa Öberg.

Read the article "Recent Glacier Recession -- a New Source of Postglacial Treeline and Climate History in the Swedish Scandes" by Lisa Öberg & Leif Kullman here:http://www.LandscapeOnline.de

Steve Connor - Shock as Retreat of Arctic Sea Ice Releases Deadly Greenhouse Gas

Published on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 by The Independent/UK

Russian research team astonished after finding 'fountains' of methane bubbling to surface

by Steve Connor

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

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Steve Connor - Shock as Retreat of Arctic Sea Ice Releases Deadly Greenhouse Gas

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/shock-as-retreat-of-arctic-sea-ice-releases-deadly-greenhouse-gas-6276134.html

Published on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 by The Independent/UK

Russian research team astonished after finding 'fountains' of methane bubbling to surface

by Steve Connor

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

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