Climate 411

Part 4 of 5: Drought and Violence

By Bill Chameides / Published: May 3, 2007

The second installment of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment on Climate Change, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, was released on April 6, 2007. In recognition of this report, I’m doing a weekly series called “Climate Dangers You May Not Know About“.

1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. Melting of the North Pole

What happens when there isn’t enough food and water for the people who need it? Fighting can ensue. And when drought and famine extend over a wide area, the fighting can escalate to civil war. This is what’s happening today in Darfur, a country in the sub-Saharan (or "Sahel") region of Africa.

We can’t say for sure that the Darfur droughts were caused by global warming, but there’s evidence it was a significant factor (for example, see this recent study of the Sahel drought [PDF] by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory). But whether those past droughts were caused by global warming is not the main issue. We know that global warming will cause more and more severe droughts in the future, especially in the Sahel region of Africa.

The story of Darfur cautions that events triggered by global warming can lead to a human tragedy of global proportions.

Posted in News / Read 2 Responses

Mercury Poisoning from Light Bulbs?

By Erica Rowell / Published: May 1, 2007

Erica Rowell, today’s guest blogger, is a Web Editor and Producer at Environmental Defense, and our resident expert on compact fluorescents.

Last year, in converting my apartment to energy-saving compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), I broke two. I opened the window, swept up the fragments, wiped the floor with a damp paper towel, put the towel and the broken CFLs in a plastic bag and tied it. My super disposed of the bag. I’m not worried about mercury exposure – they broke a couple of months ago, and my cats and I are fine. A similar incident in Maine was a different story.

When Brandy Bridges shattered a CFL spiral in her daughter’s bedroom, aware that it contained trace amounts of mercury, the concerned mother looked into proper disposal. After a mishmash of good and bad advice, she ended up with a $2,000 clean-up bill and a lot of fear (read full story).

What can we learn from Ms. Bridges? Know some basic facts.

Posted in Health / Read 15 Responses

The Old Global Cooling Scare

By Bill Chameides / Published: April 30, 2007

I was in Ohio last week visiting with folks in Cincinnati and Columbus. Most of the discussion focused on business opportunities for Ohio in the new low-carbon economy, but I also got interesting questions about global warming science.

I was especially impressed to learn what the city of Columbus is doing to go "green" (details are on the Columbus city site). We heard from Andy Darrell last week on Mayor Bloomberg’s vision for New York City, and it’s great to see that New York isn’t the only city thinking of a greener future.

But I most wanted to share with you a science question from the visit.

Posted in News / Read 2 Responses

Slicing the greenhouse gas pie: Where from?

By Bill Chameides / Published: April 26, 2007

In the previous post, I described which gases are important and what activities they come from. But we can also learn a lot by looking at regional patterns in how those gases are emitted.

For example, most deforestation occurs in poor tropical countries (in fact, in many of these countries deforestation is a much larger source of CO₂ than fossil fuel use). In contrast, most CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel use come from the developed countries.

As I described in an earlier post, the U.S. is the largest emitter in the world, both today and historically. Next let’s take a closer look at the U.S. greenhouse gas pie.

Posted in Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Read 5 Responses

Slicing the greenhouse gas pie: What gases?

By Bill Chameides / Published: April 26, 2007

We keep talking about the need to reduce the greenhouse gas we produce. But how do these gases get in the atmosphere? To answer that question we need to look at what I like to call the “greenhouse gas pie,” and it turns out there are lots of ways to slice it up.

One way is to slice the pie up by the type of gases we’re talking about. There are dozens of human-produced greenhouse gases, three of them get special attention: carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O). Here’s why.

Posted in Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Read 6 Responses

Part 3 of 5: Shifts in Lifecycle Timing

By Bill Chameides / Published: April 25, 2007

1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. Melting of the North Pole

Spring is finally here, and lifecycles are on display all around us — flowers are blooming, birds are migrating, eggs are hatching. The signs of spring may seem simple, but actually they’re intricately choreographed. Flowers bloom when insects are around to pollinate them; migrating birds and newborns normally arrive when there is food for them to eat. Life’s fragile choreography is based on signals from the environment, such as light or warmth. As global temperatures rise, what happens to all those cues?

Posted in Plants & Animals / Read 5 Responses

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