Global warming could make your faucets run dry?

Not likely, but restrictions are on the way. See your future in Australia.

In Australia, which is the driest piece of continent on the planet, we already have permanent water restrictions. It quickly went from level 1 to level 3. In some rural parts of the country it is level 4 already.

Many of our water storages are lower than 30% and we would need several years of normal rain-fall for them to recover.

Global warming could make faucets run dry, expert says | CNET News.com

Fusion - bring the Sun down

The sunlight is harmful and dangerous? So let's bring the Sun down. No, not literally.

I talk about the energy of a fusion reactor of course. The time-frame is unresolved, bu the milestones are set. Currently the largest one being buit South of France in Cadarache (ITER) is still for experimental reasons. The amount of energy needed to trigger fusion will be far larger than the energy generated. But we know that the equation begins to tilt in favor of feasibility if a fusion power station is sufficiently large. The one in Cadarache will be around 500 MWatt at full capacity.

Still, a commercilly feasible fusions station is some time away. At today's knowledge, the year this is expected is no earlier then 2025-2030, some 25 years away.

Bio-diversity - lost forever in language

Scientists estimate that a staggering amount of visible species has not even been classified and the knowledge once existed about them is about to be lost.

Over 80% of visible species doesn't even have a written record. Yet the languages of those who closely observed those species have all kinds of verbal records.

Trouble is, languages are dying out at an alarming rate. With them goes the knowledge about much of biodiversity that has been reposited in those languages.

Climate Change - How to stay alive

"The latest discovery on Earth will be to figure out how to actually stay alive and survive." (Robert Swan)

The Leadership on The Edge education program starts streaming next week from an uninhabited antarctic shed.

Swan fell in love with the Antarctic at a tender age of 11. Says Swan: The Antarctic is one of those places where the signs of change are most striking. Climate is clearly milder than 10 years ago, and the level of precipitation has also increased.

http://www.2041.com

The Ozone hole. Visual, and what's eating it

Visually it makes it much easier to imagine the Ozone Hole when there are good images and real-life comparisons. So thanks to Cquest University Toronto for making it so much more clear. accoring to their content in 2003 it measured about 11.1 square miles, roughly three times the size of the US.

And if you want to learn more about what's been eating away at the Ozone hole where it is in the stratoshpere, just visit the nice web at the CQUEST, UToronto.
http://www.cquest.utoronto.ca/env/env200y/know/ozone.html

The Gulf slowing, but Why? And Why bother...

A crucial and far-reaching feedback in global warming and subsequent climate change is the slowing down of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation colloquially known as the Gulf stream.

If the Gulf current weakens further...

When it happened before ( and it happened - according to native Americans memories) the midland drought on the American continent lasted 40 continous and relentless years. Currently we could be in about the third...

Kuro-siwa and Gulf

The two most important oceanic streams known are the Kuro-siwa in the Pacific and the Gulf Current in the North Atlantic. Both already weakened and continue to weaken. The first is getting diluted by ice melting in the Antarctic and the second - by the ice melting in the Polar Ice cap and the Greenland ice sheet.

Out of the two the Gulf may be at larger risk. In the picture below you can see streams along the coast lines. The blue and green streams are deep ocean currents carrying heavy and more salty cold water. The orange and red ones are the warm surface currents. Between the two are yellow streams.

There are many things that effect circulation, but here we'll concentrate on two. One is the heavy salt that makes cold water sink so it can remain cold while it journeys back to the Mexican Gulf. The second is the many multitudes of smaller streams around the Greenland plain that constitute mostly the cold back-flow. If there is no back flow - there is no current.

Warm surface water carries warm air above. That constant supply of warm air is responsible for the relatively mild climate of Northern Europe. The sun doesn't heat this area sufficiently, so without the Gulf circulating there would be no warm air here. The Gulf is the guardian angel of moderate climate in this region.

Imagine it slowing and slowing to the point where just the jagged edges of Greenland alone would pose a significant barrier to that flow. The South Pacific section of the Kuro-siwa is much less hampered by such impediments. That is quite a reason why the Gulf may be at a larger risk.

Now let's take a look at just how deep those cold currents are.

Very deep. This is a section across the Atlantic. To the left is the East coast with Florida, no mistake there. To the right are the Skandinavian peninsula, the UK, Spain and Africa. At the top is Greenland.

Beginning to have an idea of how the Gulf works? Great. Now take a closer look at where the sinking of cold water takes place? These points are called the Atlantic overturning points. The significant portion (the left part) of the Gulf sinks just off the coast at West Greenland. And what makes it possible? Salty water that is heavier than freshwater.

That is the same area where very significant build-up of fresh water reserves has been detected. Source? Melting Greenland freshwater ice sheets - there could be other reasons, but this is most compelling to consider. Important back-flowing section (the sinking part) of the Gulf is being bombarded by freshwater bombs breaking up the sinking stream into yet smaller streams. Coincidentally, the Gulf has been weakened. It has already slowed down about 30%.

This means that more and more of its activity is in the inner circle that just circulates warm water and air between the East Coast and Africa. Here, coastal surface water now often reaches an unbelievable 35 degrees centigrade. And when it does, it serves a perfect brewing ground for large and fast tornadoes.

Global Climate Change as a Complex Problem of a Complex System

footnote:
Conventional sciences tend to focus on isolated systems under controlled circumstances. Decision support sciences must often deal with real world problems, the complexity of which far exceeds the complexity of the problems typically studied in conventional sciences. This realisation has lead to the designation of a new class of problems, complex problems, which includes issues such as global climate change, ... and stratospheric ozone depletion.
Complex problems are characterized by one or more of the following properties
(adapted from NRC, 1988; van Asselt, 2000; Funtowicz et al., 1999; Holling, 2001;
UNESCO, 2005):

• There is not one problem, but a tangled web of related problems;
• The underlying processes interact with one another within some sort of hierarchy;
• The dynamics of the systems studied are not necessarily regular, but are characterized by synergistic and/or antagonistic relationships, indirect relationships, long delay periods between cause and effect, thresholds or non-linear behaviours;
• The issue lies across or at the intersection of many disciplines, i.e., it has economic, environmental, socio-cultural and political dimensions;
• There are a number of different, equally legitimate and plausible, perspectives on how the problem should be conceived.

The hierarchical relationships encountered in complex systems may be hierarchies of inclusion and scale, as in a watershed that includes streams, ponds, rivers, lakes and the sea, at ascending levels. Alternatively, they may be hierarchies of function, as in an organism that is comprised of a number of separate organs, each performing a function subordinate to the overall function of the organism, which itself may be sub-ordinate to the overall function of an ecosystem.

Environmental systems may also include human and institutional sub-systems, which are themselves systems. In complex systems, causes and effects are not always obviously related. Pushing on a complex system "here" often has effects "over there" because the parts are indirectly dependent of one another. Similarly, the future conditions in a complex system may not always follow closely on the conditions in the past.

When a particular threshold is exceeded, the system can abruptly shift away from a period of relative stability in one state, to another, fundamentally different state. An example is that of the impacts of climate change on thermohaline circulation, the large-scale ocean circulation that currently transports heat from the mid-latitudes to the high latitudes. Geological analysis and model experiments suggest that these currents can be on or off, and that the two states are characterized by drastically different environmental conditions in Western Europe (Broeker, 1997; Cusbasch et al., 2001). Similar dramatic regime shifts have now been documented for a wide range of environmental systems (Scheffer et al., 2001; Scheffer & Carpenter, 2003).

Because of the hierarchical, indirect, synergistic and non-linear relationships that can characterize complex systems, any attempts at reductionist analysis will be inherently incomplete. The concepts used to represent the functionings of the system will necessarily be rough approximations. The empirical data required may not be available, or may only be available in a form that requires interpreting or massaging to make it relevant to the problem at hand.
...

An approach inherent to conventional sciences is that of reductionism, whereby an overall system is understood as an assembly of sub-systems. By studying and understanding each of the sub-systems, an understanding of the overall system is achieved.

While the reductionist approach has led to many great achievements in Western science, the properties of complex problems, ... greatly reduce the effectiveness of the [reductionist] approach. Systems that are complex are not merely complicated; by their nature they involve deep uncertainties ...

MR2005-202.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Precautionary paradigm

footnote:
One of the profound implications of the Precautionary paradigm is its bearing on the legitimacy of regulatory decisions. In ... [the current] system where regulators are meant to be the value-neutral administrators who base all of their decisions on facts, what may justify regulatory interventions and what kinds of interventions are justifiable, in situations where the facts are uncertain? The problem is that this is the case with nearly all environmental and public health issues, which leads to a situation where regulators cannot act, and/or a façade of objectivity is constructed to justify action. The challenge is thus to conceive the regulatory process in a way that ensures the ability of regulators to act in an open and accountable manner in situations of uncertainty.

Although many still perceive science as the provider of the objective truth, it is now increasingly being recognised that science is a social process of knowledge production, subject to its own social and cultural biases. As society becomes more aware of the complexity of the problems it faces and of the difficulties of studying these problems through the scientific approach, it can be expected that the precautionary paradigm will gain in influence, slowly displacing the modern paradigm.

---

My comments

Statistical reasoning or demanding the facts is not enough:
A new way of dealing with various levels of uncertainties is needed. According to this study, these various levels are: Statistical Uncertainty (known outcomes, known causes and certainty); Scenario Uncertainty (known outcomes, but unknown causes and certainty); Recognised Ignorance (unknown outcomes, unknown causes); Total Ignorance (nothing is known)

MR2005-202.pdf (application/pdf Object)