Global Warming....

Rising Tide: The Trouble with Too Much Water
Greenpeace UK

Rising sea levels, melting ice caps, floods, storms, droughts … Climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is already with us, and threatens to change our relationship to water in dramatic, irreversible ways.

Scientific assessments are stark: The United Nations has predicted that by 2025, increasing drought will mean that 5 billion – 2 out of 3 people in the world – will lack sufficient water, and millions more will starve.

Global warming isn’t just about heat waves. Flooding will become more frequent in many parts of the world, and not just in coastal areas; in Europe, river flooding will increase over much of the continent. Already in the United Kingdom and the United States, some insurance companies no longer insure those living in flood-prone areas; even multi-million dollar oceanfront estates.

Glaciers and polar ice caps are set to continue melting, so that we may lose the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets completely. New, coldwater influxes from the Arctic into the ocean could trigger a slow down or diversion of the Gulf Stream that gives most of Europe its relatively mild climate. And it is these melting glaciers, along with the thermal expansion of the ocean, that are causing sea levels to creep up year after year.

As sea levels rise, many coastal areas will suffer further flooding and erosion, loss of wetlands and mangroves, and seawater intrusion into freshwater sources. Meanwhile, some coastal ecosystems, including coral reefs, atolls, reef islands, and salt marshes could disappear.

The greatest impacts – of both lack of water and excess of it – will be (and already are) on the world’s poorest people in parts of Africa and Asia, those least able to protect themselves from rising sea levels and increased drought and disease.

In the summer of 2003, heat waves were followed by severe flooding in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, India, China, and Pakistan.

In Bangladesh, researchers fear that the increased rains and floods are the reason that malaria – once eradicated in that country – has returned.

The leaders of Tuvalu – an island country in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia – have conceded defeat in their battle with the rising sea, announcing that the population will abandon their homeland.

As the sea level has risen, Tuvalu has experienced lowland flooding. Saltwater has intruded into groundwater and contaminated drinking water and cropland. Coastal erosion is eating away at the nine islands that make up the country.

Paani Laupepa, Tuvalu’s assistant minister for the environment lays the blame firmly at the door of George W. Bush, who pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the only international agreement to reduce carbon emissions: “By refusing to ratify the Protocol, the U.S. has effectively denied future generations of Tuvaluans their fundamental freedom to live where our ancestors have lived for thousands of years,” he said.

In 2002, Tuvalu – along with its neighbors Kiribati and the Maldives – announced plans for legal action against the Western nations and corporations which they say are responsible for the global warming that is raising the Pacific’s level. Tuvalu’s Prime Minister explained: “Flooding is already coming right into the middle of the islands, destroying crops and trees which were there when I was born 60 years ago. These things are gone. Somebody has taken them. And global warming is the culprit.”

Tuvalu is the first country that people have been forced to evacuate because of rising seas, but it almost certainly will not be the last. After Australia balked and refused to accept any Tuvaluan refugees, New Zealand agreed to take in the entire population of 11,000. Australia, like the U.S. has refused to sign on to Kyoto. But a further 310,000 people may be forced to leave the Maldives, and millions of others living in low-lying countries may soon join the flow of climate refugees. Where will they go?

The outlook is certainly bleak, as increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere start to throw our climate and weather patterns off balance, with often catastrophic effects. Yet there are solutions to climate change, and it is water we must turn to for many of the clean alternatives to fossil fuels.”

When we think of renewable energy, we tend to think of solar panels and turbines. Energy from water however doesn’t have to mean large, destructive dams. Wave and tidal power have significant potential to meet our needs, and the cutting edge of renewable energy research is currently focusing on these technologies. The remote Scottish island of Islay is home to the world’s first commercial wave-power station, generating clean electricity from the mighty waves crashing against its rocky coast. Meanwhile, the UK has just joined pioneers Denmark and Sweden by building its first major wind farm at sea.

Climate change is already showing us that we cannot master nature. But we can harness the power of nature, and the energy within our waves and tides, to stop this problem we have created getting any worse. We must set ourselves on a new path, to replace oil, coal, and gas with clean sources of energy.

 

GLOBAL ENERGY USE TRENDS

Someone arrives home and flips a switch, wanting only light in the darkness and not thinking about what this involves beyond the walls of the house. For most people, electricity is an invisible force that flows in magically and silently to brighten a room, cool a refrigerator, heat a stovetop, or bring a television to life. Between monthly utility bills, most people give it little thought.

Yet the moment someone flips a light switch or turns on a computer, a chain reaction is set in motion. Current flows into the building from transmission lines that stretch across open land and city streets to bring electricity from distant power plants. Along the way, much of this energy is lost to resistance in the transmission lines and dissipates as heat.
To create electricity, in much of the world enormous piles of coal move by conveyor belt to be pulverized into fine powder and then fed into a blazing fire in the power plant's furnace. The fire produces steam from water, which turns a generator to produce an electrical current. In the process, the plant emits pollutants that cause acid rain and smog, as well as mercury and carbon dioxide (CO2), a global warming gas. At most, 35% of the coal's energy converts to electricity, meaning that nearly two thirds of it is lost as waste heat, benefiting no one and often harming surrounding ecosystems. And all this coal must be transported to the power plant, but rail or barge from places like the Appalachian Mountains of southern West Virginia.

Whether in the form of gasoline to fuel a car or uranium to generate electricity, the energy required to support our economies and lifestyles provides tremendous convenience and benefits. But it also exacts enormous cost on human health, ecosystems, and even security.

The type and amount of energy that people use is influence by a number of factors, including income, climate, available resources, and corporate and government policies. Through taxes and subsidies, regulations and standards, and investments in infrastructure, governments influence how, where, how much, and what form of energy we use. But we as consumers are not powerless bystanders. It is consumers who choose what to buy and how to use it, and thus it is consumers who can drive change.
Between 1850 and 1970, the number of people living on Earth more than tripled and the energy they consumed rose 12-fold. By 2002, our numbers had grown another 68 percent and fossil fuel consumption was up another 73 percent. Before the first global oil crisis, many economists thought that using more energy was a prerequisite for economic growth. But when oil price suddenly leaped skyward in the early 1970s, governments and consumers react by setting efficiency standards and conserving fuel. Between 1970and 1997, global energy intensity declined 28% as economic output continued to rise.
According to energy analyst Amory Lovins, energy efficiency measure enacted since the mid-1970s saved the United States an estimated $365 billion in 2000 alone.

With only 2% of global reserves and 4.5 percent of total population, the U.S. remains the world's largest oil consumer.

Written by: Janet L. Sawin