True Costs of Shipping

According to the article in the Guardian, the true costs of shipping are much worse than previously suspected. They include not only the damage to the environment from the massive pollution they cause with oil spills and other toxic leaks, but also an immense addition to global warming, much more than most folks knew or guessed. Well, I sort of guessed.

snippet:

The true scale of climate change emissions from shipping is almost three times higher than previously believed, according to a leaked UN study seen by the Guardian.

It calculates that annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO₂, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions of the main greenhouse gas.

The report suggests that shipping emissions - which are not taken into account by European targets for cutting global warming - will become one of the largest single sources of man made CO₂after cars, housing, agriculture and industry. By comparison, the aviation industry, which has been under heavy pressure to clean up, is responsible for about 650m tonnes of CO₂emissions a year, just over half that from shipping.

For the rest of this rather damming article, go here.

How many hints does it take till we know that too many creatures have died?

"When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?"

Another US & World Water Crisis Report

From Alternet, one of my daily news sources, comes this report:

How Global Warming Will Affect the Water Crisis

Posted by Tara Lohan, AlterNet at 3:50 PM on February 7, 2008.

Here's an important heads up: Things are going to get more bleak in the U.S. when it comes to available fresh water.

Here's what the UK's Telegraph had to say:

An impending crisis in America's water supply is signalled by a study that concludes more than half of the recent decline seen in the west can be linked to human activities. Scientists have been documenting significant changes in water flow in the western United States for the past 50 years. Now it has been found that to 60 percent of the changes in river flow, snow pack and winter air temperatures in the region during this period can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

Dr Tim Barnett of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues conclude that for the inhabitants, from Seattle to Los Angeles, the results "are not good news" and call for immediate action to secure future supplies.

The report came from the journal, Science, and it also said there would be shifts in water supply worldwide. That's the funny thing about climate change. The winners would likely be "Eurasia, Alaska, Canada, and some tropical regions," with more water. Losers, where there would be substantial decline in water availabity, would be "southern Europe, the Middle East, southern Africa and southwestern North America."

For the rest of the article, go to the above link.

Not a surprise, I would say, to those of us following the global warming/world water supply situation. Still, it is another piece of news for the USA and the world to digest. It also helps to explain to me why Maine has become the new England(or Oregon),with milder wet weather dominating the daily weather scene yet again this winter. Keeps getting weirder every day, every season, every year.