From the Saturday, November 17, 2007, front page and pages A16-17, an article about the changes in the Arctic because of global warming:

Arctic in Peril

Within 60 years, climatologists predict most of the Arctic will be free of summer ice, just as it was 1 million years ago when giant beavers and camels roamed the North, Ed Struzik, this year's Atkinson Fellow, travelled the remote region to explore how Canadians can adapt to and even exploit this precarious return to warmer times

THE NEW COLD WAR

Ed Struzik

Atkinson Fellow

Devon Island, Nunavut - In the summer of 1985, helicopter pilot Paul Tudge was flying over Axel Heiberg Island in the High Arctic when he spotted what he thought were tree stumps near the edge of a giant ice cap.

When Tudge reported the sighting to scientists, they were skeptical. The nearest tree was 2,500 kilometres south. Nevertheless, geologist James Basinger flew up the new year to have a closer look. It didn't take him long to realize he had found the Holy Grail of Arctic paleobotany.

Not only were tree trunks sticking out of the permafrost,some buried below were more than 2 1/2 metres wide and five metres long.

What really amazed Basinger was the realization that these trees were 45 million years old. Many of the nuts, seeds and cones were so perfectly preserved they look as if they had just fallen to the ground.

By the time Basinger finished excavating the site 14 years later, he had assembled a picture of a dawn redwood swamp filled with royal ferns and cypress that flourished downstream from pine, spruce and walnut trees. The High Arctic, Basinger concluded, was once as warm and lush as the Carolinian forests of Georgia in the United States are today. Several scientists have since discovered evidence that the Arctic was warm for a very long time after that.

*  On Devon Island, Richard Grieve and a team of scientists unearthed, among other fossils, remains of a primitive rhinoceros in and around a 39-million-year-old meteorite impact site. While not as warm as it was 45 million years ago, Grieve says it was warm enough to sustain a mixed conifer-hardwood forest. The mean annual temperature was between 8 and 12C.

*  On Ellesmere Island, there's a 4.5-million-year-old beaver pond site where Dick Harington and a team of scientists from the Canadian Mueum of Nature spent more than a decade unearthing fossils of miniature beavers that were preyed upon by ancestral black bears, weasel-like carnivores and Eurasian badgers. Some of the fossils were so detailed they were able to determine what tundra bunnies were eating at the time. Temperatures then were at least 10C warmer in the summer and 15C warmer in winter than they are today.

*  Remarkably, Haringon did this after he and Peter Lord, a Gwich'in native from Old Crow in the western Arctic, unearthed fossil remains of six-foot-tall beavers that shared part of the Yukon and Alaska with scimitar cats, American camels, mastodons and woolly mammoths between 70,000 and 90,000 years ago.

These are heady times for climatologists. The more they learn about the Arctic past, the better they are creating models that will predict the future.

In the next 15 to 60 years, they're predicting, most of the Arctic will be free of summer ice just as it was 1 milllion years ago.

When that occurs, the polar world could be beyond the "tipping point" - the term climatologist Mark Sereze uses to describe what happens when sea ice becomes so thin and vulnerable that winter's deep freeze will no longer be able to manufacture enough ice to offset the melting that occurs in summer.

The climate change that killed primitive rhinoceros, scimitar cats and American camels could be equally devastating to current species, even is this time the Arctic is warming once again, not cooling.

"The rest of the world will be in for a few surprises," predicts Serreze, a senior research scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Col. "What happens in the Arctic matters to the rest of the world. If we ignore what's going on, it's going to bite us down here, and it's going to bite us hard."

Unless the rest of the world finds a way of mitigating or adapting to the myriad effects of climate change, many scientists agree that history will be kind to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who was recently awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on publicizing the issue.

For Canada, one of the world's dominant Arctic nations, the stakes are even higher. Not only are there risks but also opportunities. Climate change could mean an economic bonanza, allowing shipping through the Northweest Passage enabling mining and oil projects not currently feasible.

The question is, how will Canada manage climate change?

NO ONE KNOWS why the Arctic was so warm for so long previously.

Ocean currents, volcanic activity, methane burps and other natural warming mechanisms may have been responsible. But the fossil evidence found in ancient lake beds, ice cores and permafrost suggests a cooling began after large mammals replaced the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This gradual cooling, interspersed as it was by periods of warmth, continued until the time Harington's miniature beavers were avoiding predators on Ellesmere Island.

Then rapid-fire fashion - at least in geologic time - the cold wiped out the forests, the tiny beavers and, on the other side of the Arctic, the woolly mammoths, American mastodons, scimitar cast and giant beavers.

Now that the polar regions are warming rapidly, scientists fear there will be a similar catastrophic impact on the fish and wildlife and the people who inhabit the Arctic today. With sea ice melting, glaciers receding and Arctic storms getting harsher, many coastal communities are becoming vulnerable to flooding and erosion. A warmer and shorter ice season also means less time for polar bears to hunt seals and more time for mosquitoes and blackflies to afflict caribou, musk oxen and nesting birds. Beluga whales and narwhal, which hide under the ice to avoid killer whales, could also be threatened.

A warm Arctic gives diseases normally killed by the cold the opportunity to move north and infect species that have no immunity to them.

Heat threatens Arctic species in other ways, as well. There's evidence that caribou, Arctic fox, char and other Arctic species may not be able to compete if deer, red fox, and Pacific salmon continue to migrate north into their territory. The possibility is no longer science fiction. In recent years, Pacific salmon species that are declining on the West Coast have been showing up in Inuit nets.

Theoretically, a polar meltdown could shut down the ocean "conveyeor belt" that brings warm water into the North Atlantic and moderates the climate of Great Britain and northern Europe. The cold water moving south could compromise important fisheries in the North Atlantic just as it did in the early 1990s.

Rising sea levels brought on by this meltdown could also displace the 104 million people who live in coastal areas that are within a metre of the ocean surface.

Those who live on higher ground won't escape the changes that are coming. Polar ice is the genesis of cold fronts that bring rain and snow to much of the world. If it shrinks, droughts could worsen, as could heavy rains.

The rest of the world will also be vulnerable to forest fires caused by lightning strikes in the hotter north. Few people in Toronto may realize it, but part of the suffocating smog that the city endured in the summer of 2004 was fallout from fires in Alaska and the Yukon. Five per cent of Alaska and the Yukon burned that record hot year.

Serreze cautions skeptics who think there's time to adjust. So far, he notes, the climate models that he and others have put together have seriously underestimated how quickly the changes that have happened already would occur.

Yesterday in Spain, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change backed that view. The IPCC - which share the Nobel with Gore - completed a scientific summary that is to be released today that says the damage from global warming may be "abrupt or irreversible."

Already, the latest data shows that the Arctic ice cap was 20 per cent smaller this year than it was in 2005, a record year.

"It's not so much what we know that's a problem," says Serreze. "It's what we don't know. The paleo-climate record tells us that the system changes very, very quickly, on the order of just 10 years. I suspect that there are surprises ahead that we won't be ready for."

UNTIL THIS SUMMER, John Falkingham, chief of Forecasting for the Canadian Ice Service, was reluctant to push the button so hard. But this summer, the ice retreated so far beyond all expectations that he was left shocked. Not only was the ice cover at record lows inthe Arctic, the so-called "mortuary" of old ice that normally chokes McClintock Channel in the Northwest Passage was almost all gone. What's more, Viscount Melville Sound, "the birthplace" of a lot of Arctic ice, was down to half of its normal summer cover. That's why a Russian ship was able to deliver a load of fertilizer to the Port of Churchill in October - a first.

"The ice is no longer growing or getting old," says Falkingham, who then echoes Serreze's choice of words. "Ten years from now, we may look back on 2007 and say that was the year we passed the tipping point,"

The big challenge is what to do about it.

Reducing greenhouse gases is one solution because it's accepted that carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity, are a big driver of the warming. But even if world leaders muster the will to do something meaningful in the coming years, it will take a century or more to stop or even slow the warming that is already melting the polar world.

Many think that adaptation is the key. Not only do governments like Canada's have to control emissions, they need to develop strategies that will mitigate, exploit and help communities and ecosystems adjust to the changes that are coming. A new environmental state requires a new way of managing it.

The View From the North

Edmonton journalist Ed Struzik has been writing about Canada's Arctic for 28 years.

In July, he set off on the first of nine northern journeys to examine the implications of climate change as part of the 2007 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.

He travelled by plane, icebreaker, snowmobile, dogsled and skis, making his way from Churchill, Man., to Ellesmere Island, and from the Alaskan border to the coast of Greenland. Struzik saw first-hand evidence that the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world. The change, he determined, offers economic opportunities for Canada, but also poses special risks. Watch his video at thestar.com/arctic. 

One reason I like to follow green business articles is because of the many innovative ideas. From the Business section of the Saturday, December 29, 2007, Toronto Star, page B4:

HOT PAVEMENT TAPPED FOR HEAT AMONG SOLAR-POWER INNOVATIONS

Dutch engineering firm siphons reuable energy from roads, parking lots

Arthur Max

Associated Press

Scharwoude, Netherlands - If you've ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know how asphalt absorbs the sun's rays. Now, a Dutch company  is siphoning the heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices.

As climate change rises on the international agenda, the system built by civil engineering firm Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV doesn't look as wacky as it might have 10 years ago when it was first conceived.

Solar energy collected from a 200-metre stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit, four-storey apartment building in the northern village of Avenhorn. A 160,000-sq.-ft. industrial park in nearby Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 sq. ft. of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base supply heat for its hanger.

And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.

The Road Energy System is one of the more unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun, the single most plentiful, reliable, accessible and inexhaustible source of renewable energy - radiating to Earth more watts in one hour than the world can use in a whole year.

But today, solar power provides just 0.04 per cent of global energy, held back by high production costs and low efficient rates.

Solar advocates say that will change within a few years.

Other renewable sources have drawbacks: Not every place is breezy enough for wind turbines; waves and tides are good are good only for coastal regions; hydroelectricity requires rivers and increasingly objectionable dams; biofuels take up land needed for food crops.

"But solar falls everywhere," says Patrick Mazza of Climate Solutions, a Seattle consultancy group.

Compared with other energy sources, "solar comes out as the one with the real heavy lift. It's the one we really need to get at," he said.

Ooms' thermal energy system is too expensive and inefficient to solve the world's energy problems. It was actually a spin-off of a method to reduce road maintenance.

A latticework of flexible plastic pipes, held in place by a plastic grid, is covered over by asphalt, which magnifies the sun's thermal power. As cool water in the pipes is heated, it is pumped deep under the ground to natural aquifers where it maintains a fairly contant temperature of about 20. The heated water can be retrieved months later to keep the road surface ice-free in winter. The same system pumps cold water from a separate subterranean reservoir to cool buildings on hot days.

Though it doubles the cost of construction, the system's first benefits are a longer life for roads and bridges, fewer ice-induced accidents and less need for repaving.

"We found we were gathering more energy in summer than we needed, so we asked ... what we can do with the extra energy," said commercial manager Lex an Zaane. The answer was to construct buildings near there and pipe hot water under the floor.

The water usually must go through an electric-powered heat pump for an extra boost, Van Zaane said. The installation cost is about double that for normal gas heating, but the energy required is about half of what would otherwise be needed. That translates into lower heating bills and a 50 per cent savings in carbon emissions..

I don't know whether you saw the documentary March of the Penguins. Now I know scientists don't like people attributing human characteristics to animals. However, it is hard not to when you see the father penguins so anguished when the egg they keep warm on their feet while the mother goes to get food, slips off onto the ice, freezes and kills the baby penguin inside. That was one of the saddest things I have seen.

The World Wildlife Federation says we are putting penguins at risk by not addressing climate change. Here is an article from the Wednesday, December 12, 2007, Metro newspaper, metronews.ca, page 12:

PENGUINS WILL DECLINE

The emperor penguin will march toward drastic decline if the brakes are not put on climate change, wildlife advocates announced in the United Nations conference on the topic in Bali, Indonesia, yesterday.

Already, melting sea ice and a shrinking food supply are threatening the four penguin species that live entirely on the Antarctic continent - including the celebrated star of the Academy Award-winning documentary March Of The Penguins - the World Wildlife Fund's study reveals.

:This is happening before our very eyes because of the fossil fuel pollution, we're pumping into the air," WWF Canada's director of global threats Julia Langer said yesterday from Toronto, admonishing Canada's stance at the climate talks as "not very helpful."

"We don't have time for political posturing,"

While increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming temperatures around the globe, it is most extreme at the poles.

Torstar News Service

In addition to dealing with the long-term effects of climate change in trying to mitigate its effect by reducing green-house gases, etc., there need to be adaptability plans for the short-term, in which temperatures will continue to rise. Here is an article posted November 25, 2007, in AlterNet, listed in a newletters I received from Climate Changes News Digest, http://www.climatechangenews.org/.

We Face Worldwide Drought with No Contingency Plan

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 25, 2007.

As droughts reach record levels from Atlanta to Australia, no one is asking the tough question: What happens when there is not enough water to go around?

Georgia's on my mind. Atlanta, Georgia. It's a city in trouble in a state in trouble in a region in trouble. Water trouble. Trouble big enough that the state government's moving fast. Just this week, backed up by a choir singing "Amazing Grace," accompanied by three Protestant ministers, and twenty demonstrators from the Atlanta Freethought Society, Sonny Perdue, Georgia's Baptist governor, led a crowd of hundreds in prayers for rain.

"We've come together here," he said, "simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm." It seems, however, that the Almighty was otherwise occupied and the regional drought continued to threaten Atlanta, a metropolis of 5 million people (and growing fast), with the possibility that it might run out of water in as little as eighty days or as much as a year, if the rains don't come. Here's a little summary of the situation today:

Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15 to 30 percent. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5 percent of their capacity.

Oops, that's not Atlanta, or even the Southeastern US. That's Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.

Sorry, let's try that again. Imagine this scenario:

Over the last decade, 15 to 20 percent decreases in precipitation have been recorded. These water losses have been accompanied by record temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have been growing rapidly. A fierce drought has settled in -- of the hundred-year variety. Lawns can be watered but just for a few hours a day (and only by bucket); four-minute showers are the max allowed. Car washes are gone, though you can clean absolutely essential car windows and mirrors by hand.

Sound familiar? As it happens, that's not the American Southeast either; that's a description of what's come to be called "The Big Dry" -- the unprecedented drought that has swept huge parts of Australia, the worst in at least a century on an already notoriously dry continent, but also part of the world's breadbasket, where crops are now failing regularly and farms closing down.

In fact, on my way along the parched path toward Atlanta, Georgia, I found myself taking any number of drought-stricken detours. There's Moldova. (If you're like me, odds are you don't even know where that small, former Soviet republic falls on a map.)

Like much of southern Europe, it experienced baking temperatures this summer, exceptionally low precipitation, sometimes far less than 50 percent of expected rainfall, failing crops and farms, and spreading wildfires. (The same was true, to one degree or another, of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, and -- with its 100-year record scorching of Biblical proportions -- Greece which lost 10 percent of its forest cover in a month-long fiery apocalypse, leaving "large tracts of countryside...at risk of depopulation.")

Or how about Morocco, across the Mediterranean, which experienced 50 percent less rainfall than normal? Or the Canary Islands, those Spanish vacation spots in the Atlantic Ocean known to millions of visitors for their year-around mild climate which, this summer, morphed into 104-degree days, strong winds, and fierce wildfires. Eighty-six thousand acres were burnt to a crisp, engulfing some of the islands in flames and smoke that drove out thousands of tourists?

Or what about Mexico's Tehuacán Valley, where, thousands of years ago, corn was first domesticated as an agricultural crop. Even today, asking for "un Tehuacán" in a restaurant in Mexico still means getting the best bottled mineral water in the country. Unfortunately, the area hasn't had a good rain since 2003, and the ensuing drought conditions have made subsistence farming next to impossible, sending desperate locals northwards and across the border as illegal immigrants -- some into Southern California, itself just swept by monstrous Santa Ana-driven wildfires, fanned by prolonged drought conditions and fed tinder by new communities built deep into the wild lands where the fires gestate.

And Tehuacán is but one disaster zone in a growing Mexican catastrophe. As Mike Davis has written, "Abandoned ranchitos and near-ghost towns throughout Coahuila, Chihuahua and Sonora testify to the relentless succession of dry years -- beginning in the 1980s but assuming truly catastrophic intensity in the late 1990s -- that has pushed hundreds of thousands of poor rural people toward the sweatshops of Ciudad Juarez and the barrios of Los Angeles."

According to the How Dry I Am chart of "livability expert" Bert Sperling, four cities in Southern California, not parched Atlanta, top the national drought ratings: Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, and Riverside. In addition, Pasadena has had the dubious honor, through September, of experiencing its driest year in history.

Resource Wars in the Homeland

"Resource wars" are things that happen elsewhere. We don't usually think of our country as water poor or imagine that "resource wars" might be applied as a description to various state and local governments in the Southwest, Southeast, or upper Midwest now fighting tooth and nail for previously shared water. And yet, "war" may not be a bad metaphor for what's on the horizon.

According to the National Climate Data Center, federal officials have declared 43 percent of the contiguous US to be in "moderate to extreme drought." Already, Sonny Perdue of Georgia is embroiled in an ever more bitter conflict -- a "water war," as the headlines say -- with the governors of Florida and Alabama, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, over the flow of water into and out of the Atlanta area.

He's hardly alone. After all, the Southwest is in the grips of what, according to Davis, some climatologists are terming a "'mega-drought,' even the 'worst in 500 years.' " More shockingly, he writes, such conditions may actually represent the region's new "normal weather."

The upper Midwest is also in rainfall-shortage mode, with water levels at all the Great Lakes dropping unnervingly. The water level of Lake Superior, for instance, has fallen to the "lowest point on record for this time of year." (Notice, by the way, how many "records" are being set nationally and globally in these drought years; how many places are already beginning to push beyond history, which means beyond any reference point we have.)

And then there's the Southeast, 26 percent of which, according to the National Weather Service, is in a state of "exceptional" drought, its most extreme category, and 78 percent of which is "drought-affected." We're talking here about a region normally considered rich in water resources setting a bevy of records for dryness. It has been the driest year on record for North Carolina and Tennessee, for instance, while eighteen months of blue skies have led Georgia to break every historical record, whether measured by "the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, [or] inches of rain."

Atlanta is hardly the only city or town in the region with a dwindling water supply. According to David Bracken of Raleigh's News & Observer, "17 North Carolina water systems, including Raleigh and Durham, have 100 or fewer days of water supply remaining before they reach the dregs." Rock Spring, South Carolina, "has been without water for a month. Farmers are hauling water by pickup truck to keep their cattle alive." The same is true for the tiny town of Orme, Tennessee, where the mayor turns on the water for only three hours a day.

And then, there's Atlanta, its metropolitan area "watered" mainly by a 1950s man-made reservoir, Lake Lanier, which, in dramatic photos, is turning into baked mud. Already with a population of five million and known for its uncontrolled growth (as well as lack of water planning), the city is expected to house another two million inhabitants by 2030. And yet, depending on which article you read, Atlanta will essentially run out of water by New Year's eve, in eighty days, in 120 days, or, according to the Army Corps of Engineers -- which seems to find this reassuring -- in 375 days, if the drought continues (as it may well do).

Okay, so let's try again:

Across the region, fountains sit "bone dry"; in small towns, "full-soak" baptisms have been stopped; car washes and laundromats are cutting hours or shutting down. Golf courses have resorted to watering only tees and greens. Campfires, stoves, and grills are banned in some national parks. The boats have left Lake Lanier and the metal detectors have arrived.

This is the verdant Southeastern United States, which, thanks in part to a developing La Niña effect in the Pacific Ocean, now faces the likelihood of a drier than ever winter. And, to put this in context, keep in mind that 2007 "to date has been the warmest on record for land [and]... the seventh warmest year so far over the oceans, working out to the fourth warmest overall worldwide." Oh, and up in the Arctic sea, the ice pack reached its lowest level this September since satellite measurements were begun in 1979.

And Then?

And then, there's that question which has been nagging at me ever since this story first caught my attention in early October as it headed out of the regional press and slowly made its way toward the top of the nightly TV news and the front pages of national newspapers; it's the question I've been waiting patiently for some environmental reporter(s) somewhere in the mainstream media to address; the question that seems to me so obvious I find it hard to believe everyone isn't thinking about it; the one you would automatically want to have answered -- or at least gnawed on by thoughtful, expert reporters and knowledgeable pundits. Every day for the last month or more I've waited, as each piece on Atlanta ends at more or less the same point -- with the dire possibility that the city's water will soon be gone -- as though hitting a brick wall.

Not that there hasn't been some fine reportage -- on the extremity of the situation, the overbuilding and overpopulating of the metropolitan region, the utter heedlessness that went with it, and the resource wars that have since engulfed it. Still, I've Googled around, read scores of pieces on the subject, and they all -- even the one whose first paragraph asked, "What if Atlanta's faucets really do go dry?" -- seem to end just where my question begins. It's as if, in each piece, the reporter had reached the edge of some precipice down which no one cares to look, lest we all go over.

Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted that the Bush Administration hasn't the slightest desire to glance down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others, top Administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009 without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government, shouldn't somebody be asking? Shouldn't somebody check out what's actually down there?

So let me ask it this way: And then?

And then what exactly can we expect? If the Southeastern drought is already off the charts in Georgia, then, whether it's 80 days or 800 days, isn't there a possibility that Atlanta may one day in the not-so-distant future be without water? And what then? Okay, they're trucking water into waterless Orme, Tennessee, but the town's mayor, Tony Reames, put the matter well, worrying about Atlanta. "We can survive. We're 145 people but you've got 4.5 million there. What are they going to do?"

What indeed? Has water ever been trucked in to so many people before? And what about industry including, in the case of Atlanta, Coca-Cola, which is, after all, a business based on water? What about restaurants that need to wash their plates or doctors in hospitals who need to wash their hands?

Let's face it, with water, you're down to the basics. And if, as some say, we've passed the point not of "peak oil," but of "peak water" (and cheap water) on significant parts of the planet ... well, what then? I mean, I'm hardly an expert on this, but what exactly are we talking about here? Someday in the reasonably near future could Atlanta, or Phoenix, which in winter 2005-2006, went 143 days without a bit of rain, or Las Vegas become a Katrina minus the storm? Are we talking here about a new trail of tears? What exactly would happen to the poor of Atlanta? To Atlanta itself?

Certainly, you've seen the articles about what global warming might do in the future to fragile or low-lying areas of the world. Such pieces usually mention the possibility of enormous migrations of the poor and desperate. But we don't usually think about that in the "homeland."

Maybe we should.

Or maybe, for all I know, if the drought continues, parts of the region will burn to a frizzle first, à la parts of Southern California, before they can even experience the complete loss of water? Will we have hundred-year fire records in the South, without a Santa Ana wind in sight? And what then?

Mass Migrations?

Okay, excuse a terrible, even tasteless, sports analogy, but think of this as a major bowl game, and they've sent one of the water boys -- me -- to man the press booth. I mean, please. Why am I the one asking this?

Where's the media's first team?

In my own admittedly limited search of the mainstream, I found only one vivid, thoughtful recent piece on this subject: "The Future Is Drying Up," by Jon Gertner, written for The New York Times Magazine. It focused on the Southwestern drought and began to explore some of the "and thens," as in this brief passage on Colorado in which Gertner quotes Roger Pulwarty, a "highly regarded climatologist" at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

The worst outcome...would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado's largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime.

Mass migrations, exfiltrations ... Stop a sec and take in that possibility and what exactly it might mean. After all, we do have some small idea, having, in recent years, lost one American city, New Orleans, at least temporarily.

Or consider another "and then" prediction: What if the prolonged drought in the Southwest turns out, as Mike Davis wrote in The Nation magazine, to be "on the scale of the medieval catastrophes that contributed to the notorious collapse of the complex Anasazi societies at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde during the twelfth century"?

What if, indeed.

I'm not simply being apocalyptic here. I'm just asking. It's not even that I expect answers. I'd just like to see a crew of folks with the necessary skills explore the "and then" question for the rest of us. Try to connect a few dots, or tell us if they don't connect, or just explain where the dots really are.

As the World Burns

Okay, since I'm griping on the subject, let me toss in another complaint. As this piece has indicated, the Southeastern drought, unlike the famed cheese of childhood song, does not exactly stand alone. Such conditions, often involving record or near record temperatures, and record or near record wildfires, can be observed at numerous places across the planet. So why is it that, except at relatively obscure websites, you can hardly find a mainstream piece that mentions more than one drought at a time?

An honorable exception would be a recent Seattle Times column by Neal Peirce that brought together the Southwestern and Southeastern droughts, as well as the Western "flame zone," where "mega-fires" are increasingly the norm, in the context of global warming, in order to consider our seemingly willful "myopia about the future."

But you'd be hard-pressed to find many pieces in our major newspapers (or on the TV news) that put all (or even a number) of the extreme drought spots on the global map together in order to ask a simple question (even if its answer may prove complex indeed): Do they have anything in common? And if so, what? And if so, what then? To find even tentative answers to such questions you have to leave the mainstream. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, for example, interviewed paleontologist and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery recently on the topic of a "world on fire." Flannery offered the following observation:

It's not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a drought that's almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a global picture. We're just getting much less usable water than we did a decade or two or three decades ago. It's a sort of thing again that the climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single fire event, it's really hard to make the connection, but take the bigger picture and you can see very clearly what's happening.

I know answers to the "and then" question are not easy or necessarily simple. But if drought -- or call it "desertification" -- becomes more widespread, more common in heavily populated parts of the globe already bursting at the seams (and with more people arriving daily), if whole regions no longer have the necessary water, how many trails of tears, how many of those mass migrations or civilizational collapses are possible? How much burning and suffering and misery are we likely to experience? And what then?

These are questions I can't answer; that the Bush Administration is guaranteed to be desperately unwilling and unprepared to face; and that, as yet, the media has largely refused to consider in a serious way. And if the media can't face this and begin to connect some dots, why shouldn't Americans be in denial, too?

It's not that no one is thinking about, or doing work on, drought. I know that scientists have been asking the "and then" questions (or perhaps far more relevant ones that I can't even formulate); that somewhere people have been exploring, studying, writing about them. But how am I to find out?

Of course, all of us can wander the Internet; we can visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has just set up a new website to help encourage drought coverage; we can drop in at blogs like RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress.org, which make a habit of keeping up with, or ahead of, such stories; or even, for instance, the Georgia Drought website of the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; or we can keep an eye on a new organization of journalists (well covered recently on the NPR show "On the Media"), Circle of Blue, who are planning to concentrate on water issues. But, believe me, even when you get to some of these sites, you may find yourself in an unknown landscape with no obvious water holes in view and no guides to lead you there.

In the meantime, there may be no trail of tears out of Atlanta; there may even be rain in the city's near future for all any of us know; but it's clear enough that, globally and possibly nationally, tragedy awaits. It's time to call in the first team to ask some questions. Honestly, I don't demand answers. Just a little investigation, some thought, and a glimpse or two over that precipice as the world turns... and bakes and burns.

From the Thursday, November 22, 2007, Toronto Star, Canada section, The Artic, page A27, is an article about climate change from the perspective of Canada's northern indigenous peoples, the Inuit and a university professor who talked to them about it.

ON THE FRONTIER OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Researcher undertakes 26,000-kilometre trek to meet Inuit, study global warming first-hand

Allan Woods

Ottawa Bureau

Ottawa - Franklyn Griffiths carried out his novel inquiry into global warming in Canada's North is an odd but unavoidable way. Most of the 26,000-kilometre trek was made in an environmentally unfriendly airplane.

But the lesson from observations made in talks with Inuit may be worth its weight in pollutants.

The University of Toronto academic argues the Arctic inhabitants make up the first line of defence in the fight against warming. He says the isolated communities that are speckled across the tundra form the current-day equivalent of the Distant Early Warning line -the string of radar set up across the North during the Cold War to detect incoming Soviet missiles.

The professor emeritus, who transformed himself into an adventurer - a sort of Lawrence of Iqaluit - is not urging Canadians to adopt an Inuit "moral order" based on "doing the right thing" now and being as ethical as possible" to halt the impact of climate change.

"A lot of people have got to change their ways, including me," he said in an interview yesterday, ahead of today's speech in Ottawa. "I burned a lot of gas on this (trip). I'm guilty. It's not good."

Griffiths travelled from northern Labrador to the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories between April and June visiting remote communities and asking local hunters and village elders about climate change and how it has affected their traditional way of life.

"It was an exploration and it was an arduous trip, and I saw beautiful things and met wonderful people. I saw a lot of problems, and I think I was one of the first to travel and voyage along parts of this new DEW line," he said. "It's not been done before in quite the way I did it - that is, asking people in the small communities what do they think, what do they see? I wasn't talking to government officials ... I was talking to your average person."

With doomsday reports of melting ice, rising temperatures and endangered polar bears, one would presume to find fear running highest at Canada's northernmost regions. But the opinions ranged from extreme worry to more practical concerns about the threat posed to Inuit life, culture and the ability to hunt.

"They consider that the whole climate change discussions is in some way a digression from the main thing, which is keeping culture alive by practising and doing it," he said. "They see this as somebody else's agenda being imposed upon them."

In Tuktoyaktuk, where the Beaufort Sea shoreline is eroding rapidly, a hunter told Griffiths the permafrost thaws to the point where graves in the cemetery can be dug easily with a pick and shovel.

Another hunter in Igloolik, Nunavut, said the sea ice is now thinner, the water less salty and soap lathers more quickly.

In Nunavut, in northern Quebec, they use global positioning systems and satellite phones to navigate the land because they are no longer certain of the ice along traditional hunting routes and sled trails.

From the June 2007 green issue of the Toronto Life, torontolife.com, there is a multi-page section about various green heroes, from which I have included the excerpt about Sarah Harmer.

"They are artists, entrepreneurs and activists - all standouts in their respective fields. Some are lifelong devotees to the movement; others are recent converts. But there's nothing faddish about their endeavours: these local green heros share a fierce and abiding commitment to changing the way we live. And we're finally ready for them."

By Sasha Chapman, Andrea Curtis, Gillian Grace, Jason McBride, Alec Scott and Olivia Stren

GREEN GIANTS

The Vocalist

Sarah Harmer: Songwriter, Activist, Escarpment Love

In March, Sarah Harmer won a Juno for Escarpment Blues, a documentary chronicling her now-famous fight against mining expansion in north Burlington, where her family has lived for 36 years. The award was a well-deserved honour for the folk-rock musician, but it couldn't quite match the good news she'd received two weeks earlier: in a landmark decision, the Ministry of Natural Resources had finally declared the region to be "provincially significant wetlands." While the Niagara Escarpment had long been designated a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, in Ontario, only provincial legislation governs land use, and the decision put a stop to the 80-hectare expansion of an immense limestone quarry. It was a victory for both Harmer and Protecting Escarpment Rural Land, the community group she helped found two years ago, which has doggedly sought to defend the area, already home to 44 pits and quarries. No Lexus liberal (when she has to drive, she drives a Prius), Harmer speaks about water tables and impact studies with the case of an engineer. "I spend a lot of time on it," she says. "But it's really compelling work. I'm grateful it came into my life." She divides her time between the family farm on Mount Nemo, her home north of Kingston and a crash pad in Toronto. She's all about acting locally, praising Toronto's strong sense of community and insisting on the need ofor investment in regional agriculture and renewable energy sources. Inspired by George Monbiot's global warming primer Heat, she's now questioning how far she needs to go on tour, eschewing CO2 emitting airline travel in favour of performance closer to home. Still, when asked how optimistic she is, Harmer says, "I don't want to go around hanging my head. It's my job to be hopeful and positive."

From the StopGlobalWarming.org website,  http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_read.asp?id=6385211172007 , here is a brief summary of the “Synthesis Report” from the International Panel on Climate Change's  Climate Change 2007 report. 

The three other sections of the report are available online to read at the IPCC website, http://www.ipcc.ch/ , or if you are a scientist or independently wealthy from Amazon.com, etc.; (1) The Physical Science Basis;  (2) Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability; (3) Mitigation of Climate Change. I imagine copies will also find their way into libraries around the world, as they are available in many languages.

Key Findings of United Nations' Scientific Report

by: Associated Press    17 November 2007

The following are some key findings in a report issued Saturday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

• Global warming is “unequivocal.” Temperatures have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. Eleven of the last 12 years are among the warmest since 1850. Sea levels have gone up by an average seven-hundredths of an inch per year since 1961.

• About 20 percent to 30 percent of all plant and animal species face the risk of extinction if temperatures increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. If the thermometer rises by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, between 40 to 70 percent of species could disappear.

• Human activity is largely responsible for warming. Global emissions of greenhouse gases grew 70 percent from 1970 to 2004. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far higher than the natural range over the last 650,000 years.

• Climate change will affect poor countries most, but will be felt everywhere. By 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water.

• Extreme weather conditions will be more common. Tropical storms will be more frequent and intense. Heat waves and heavy rains will affect some areas, raising the risk of wildfires and the spread of diseases. Elsewhere, drought will degrade cropland and spoil the quality of water sources. Rising sea levels will increase flooding and salination of fresh water and threaten coastal cities.

• Even if greenhouse gases are stabilized, the Earth will keep warming and sea levels rising. More pollution could bring “abrupt and irreversible” changes, such as the loss of ice sheets in the poles, and a corresponding rise in sea levels by several yards.

• _A wide array of tools exist, or will soon be available, to adapt to climate change and reduce its potential effects. One is to put a price on carbon emissions.
  
• By 2050, stabilizing emissions would slow the average annual global economic growth by less than 0.12 percent. The longer action is delayed, the more it will cost.
  

Today, the 17th of November, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the fourth and final report that makes up Climate Change 2007.

The draft report (without final copy editing) is found at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf. The IPCC site is http://www.ipcc.ch/.

Are the governments of the United States, Canada and Australia unaware of the human and environmental and financial consequences of dealing with increasing climate change losses? No.

Each country has scientists and researchers who have been involved for many years in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report, which includes scientific research, and information on adapation and mitigation. The report is easily available online to anyone, even politicians, in full or in a shorter policy version, to anyone who can type IPCC in Google.

So why are the leaders allowing themselves to be led by the nose - by multinationals, their lawyers and lobbyists, trade agreements favouring corporations, corporate contributions to election campaigns, insteading of leading the campaign to slow global warming?

The U.S., Canada, and Australia are three of the largest historic polluters and have a moral obligation, being wealthy, developed nations, to clean up the mess they have caused in the past, without any strings being attached to poorer and less developed nations, who did not create the historic mess.

Forget the next election, gentlemen, your own self-interest or those of your political parties or corporate pals or their lobbyists, needless spending on needless wars instead of the environment, or whatever useless and lame excuse is stopping action. The costs of not doing anything will far outweigh the worth of anything we are spending money on now and they will continue to increase.

The writer of the Global Issues section of the Toronto Star, called the three heads of state the Three Climate Stooges.

Leaders, you have all the information you need to act now. Get out of Iraq (US) and Afghanistan (Canada), don't start a needless war on Iran (US), and the billions saved can be used to solve not only climate change issues, but poverty and other humanitarian issues at home and in the world.

Anything less is not a joke, but a crime against humanity.

This article by David Crane in the Business section of the Toronto Star, Monday, October 1, 2007, page B4, discusses the lack of leadership of three people who govern three of the largest polluting companies in the world:

The Three Stooges of global climate change

David Crane

Global Issues

The urgency of dealing with climate change is not going to go away. It is only going to get worse. Moreover the longer we delay in getting truly serious, the greater the cost of curbing emissions and adapting to the impact of greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere.

While politicians, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, wring their hands over the costs of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, they foolishly ignore the costs of not curbing them.

It was the Swedish Prme Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who told the recent U.N. High-Level Conference on climate change, "we need decisive and global political action to prevent further dangerous changes to our climate system and to adapt to the consequences that are inevitable."

This should be obvious. But there is a Gang of Three - call them the Three Climate Stooges - who are vigorously fighting serious international action to deal with what is perhaps the biggest single challenge facing human society over the next 50 years.

These three conservative leaders, U.S. President George W. Bush, Canada's own Prime Minister Harper and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, were all strong opponents of the Kyoto Accord and have formed a political alliance to fight a straight successor regime to the Kyoto Accord in 2012, one that would include legal caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush, Howard and Harper have something else in common. They lead the three countries with the highest per capita emissions of greenhouse gases among major economies, Australia emits 26 tons of greenhouse gases per person, the United States and Canada 23 tons each. This compares to 5 tons per person in China and 2 tons in India. The European Union emits 10 tons per capita.

A typical Canadian emits nearly 5 times as much greenhouse gas as a typical Chinese and nearly 12 times as much as a typical Indian.

The purpose of the Kyoto Accord was to take the first steps to reducing emissions by putting the heaviest initial burden on the richest countries, which also happened to have accounted for most of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since 1850. The United States accounted for 30 percent of that accumulation and the European Union per cent, while China accounted for just 7 per cent and India 2 per cent.

While Europeans are showing global leadership on the need for further tough action in a new post-Kyoto accord, the Three Stooges of climate change - Bush, Howard and Harper - are showing the reverse. They want aspirational targets for emissions reduction, which countries are free to adopt or ignore, rather than binding emissions caps, which would force serious adjustment, starting with the largest per capita emitters.

Sir Nicholas Stern, in his major report on climate change, says fighting climate change should cost about 1 per cent of annual DGP by 2050, a modest price compared to the benefits. The former chief economist of the World Bank has also stressed that the developed countries - including Canada, the United States and Australia - should shoulder most of the burden, at least individually, since they are responsible for much of the build up to date of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They also have the greatest financial and technology resources.

But as Stern's report made clear, serious change won't happen unless there is a significant carbon tax along with a mandatory cap on emissions to change behaviour and to provide a strong economic incentive for companies to develop and install low-carbon technologies or adopt significant energy efficiency systems.

We've wasted too much time debating the science behind climate change. Now it is up to all of us, including the Three Stooges, to get serious.

David Crane's column on Global Issues appears Mondays. He can be reached at crane@interlog.com .