Who Will Pay The Costs Of Climate Change?

Coastal regions worldwide facing rising sea-levels are beginning to practice triage

It's easy to think that sea-level rise is some remote and distant threat only faced by far away people who live in places like the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific which is having to evacuate to New Zealand as tidal floods increasingly cover their crops in seawater.

But right in the Bay Area, the Sacramento Delta has just joined those low-lying coastal regions that are the early victims of sea level rise. It's a typical suburban American area with some great salmon fishing and home to one of the stars of the UC system, CalDavis, renowned for its environmental study programs.

A CalDavis Public Policy Institute of California study has found that it will become increasingly beyond the ability of California taxpayers to keep shoring up levies to save parts of it next time it floods, and that these areas should just be abandoned.

While conceding that this is a very difficult and controversial conclusion for property owners who have been helped previously, study spokesman Professor Jay Lund says "I don't see any way they are not going to be losers, so the state policy should be that we all quit losing." Land owners would lose their property under the plan.

When a delta levee collapsed in 2004, the State and the Federal government spent a combined $75 million to repair land worth only $22 million. Richard Howitt, a UC Davis economist who helped put together the study felt that this was an irresponsible use of taxpayer money:

"We wanted to put a lot of work into what really amounts to a triage list - and say which islands, if they collapse, we say, "Sorry about that" but you don't repair them or pump them. You adjust to a new ecology." The participants making this tough collective decision were from diverse disciplines: civil engineering, climate science, economics, hydrology and biology. They established the boundary between the areas that should be saved and the places that would be left to go under.

Triage decisions like this one are already being practiced by other coastal low-lying coastal regions facing rising sea levels and costly climate change defenses. Seaside resorts on the coast of the UK are made an almost identical cost/benefit analysis. The whole town moved.

The financial issue is coming to the fore. Who will pay? Who should pay relocation costs? The Brazilian town of Atafono has been swallowed by the ocean. In Alaska, Kivalina is filing a lawsuit against oil companies for redress. The Sundurbans were already a lost cause in 2003, but little financial assistance has been forthcoming.

Ten percent of the world's population (600 million people) live in coastal areas that are less than 33 feet above sea level. These people are being being bandoned by their insurers, even when they live in the nice upscale coastal suburbs in America, from Florida and the Louisiana Gulf, and up to New York.

Furthermore, these direct climate change costs are in addition to the heavy costs we already collectively bear, as nation, of the damage caused by natural disasters like hurricanes and floods.

Disasters have increased four-fold in the last two decades, as worldwide temperature averages have increased.

Artwork by Dutch Artist Jaap Vliegenthart

From MIT Tech Review

For Matternetwork Read more...

Virgin Amazon Partly Manmade

The Amazon was apparently clear-cut in the 13th century to build densely packed towns, villages, and hamlets far more organized than medieval Europe.







An anthropologist has uncovered dozens of organized, densely packed towns, villages and hamlets dating to the 13th -16th centuries hidden in the Brazilian Amazon. After 15 years of mapping it all out, Heckenberger and his international colleagues report their findings in the journal Science this week.

They found that vast swathes of apparently "pristine" rain forest had been cleared for elaborate settlements across an area the size of New Jersey prior to the arrival of European colonists.

The repeated patterns within and among settlements across the landscape suggest a more highly ordered society than contemporary medieval towns in Europe. There was clear evidence of a sophisticated man-made landscape.

The planned structure of the settlements showed regional planning and political organization only found in urban societies: Heckenberger noted that while rural landscapes that grew up in medieval European settlements were randomly oriented, by contrast, here things were all oriented at the same angles and distances across the entire 8,000 square mile landscape.

Larger towns, placed at cardinal points from the central seat of power, were walled much like a medieval town. Between the settlements was a patchwork of agricultural fields for crops such as manioc along with dams and ponds likely used for fish farms. The whole landscape is gridded off like latticework.

Each town had its own central plaza and was protected by an earthen wall. They were surrounded by smaller, non-walled residential hamlets. The towns, villages and hamlets were interlinked by roads, the largest of which followed the direction of the sun at the mid-year solstice.

These indigenous peoples from the Amazon had little stone close at hand. They built with earth and, after they were wiped out, the forest reclaimed the land, leaving little trace.

The World Without Us imagines what will happen to remains of our own structures after we are gone. This gives us an example of that concept.

The discovery forces a rethink of the long-held assumption that these parts of the Amazon were virtually untouched before colonization. Similarly, research published in January found that what has long been thought of as the "original" New England landscape had in fact created by British settlers in the 17th century.

So, the virgin Amazon rain-forest... it's partly man-made.

From National Geographic
Contemporaneous portrayal of comparatively chaotic European village life by Pieter Brueghel The Elder

For Matter Network Read more...

Refilling Dead Sea With Red Sea Could Make Gypsum

By introducing water of a different density and composition to the Dead Sea, engineers may drastically alter the very thing they are trying to save.

From Worldchanging we get news of an attempt to refill the shrinking Dead Sea by piping water in from the neighboring Red Sea.

The Dead Sea is unique. More salty than the oceans, it is now actually a lake, like none other in the world. But it has shrunk by a third in the last 30 years. Nearly 100% of the Jordan, virtually its only tributary, has been diverted for agriculture. Excessive mineral mining for potash and magnesium chloride is removing water at a rate of 150 million cubic meters per year. Now water levels are dropping a meter per year.

Dramatic engineering may be necessary in order to save it, and one proposed idea is to refill it with water from the neighboring Red Sea at a cost of $15 billion. Projects of this scale are not unprecedented, especially as water demand grows rapidly in many regions of the world. Egypt planned a similar water transfer project at a cost of $11 billion. Another example of this kind of desperate engineering is the $60 billion Chinese water transfer. Water transfers and withdrawals like this have increased at twice the rate of population growth, per the UN. The chief cause of the need for projects like this is the increase in desertification. Desertification has doubled worldwide within the last 30 years.

The possible untoward results of combining these seas include new algae growth that would also change the buoyancy of the water and alter its blue water to appear red. But the strangest comes from the mineral makeup of the two bodies of water.

Because the Dead Sea is rich in calcium and the Red Sea is rich in sulfate: if we mix them together we could create an ungodly new sea with a surface layer of gypsum.

Photo by Flikr user ccarlstead

For Matternetwork

Read more...

New Ziggurat For A Million Citizens

3000 years after the first ziggurat, a futuristic carbon neutral city will create its own moist weather-system in the desert

Timelinks, a Dubai Engineering firm has created a sustainable design for the largest man-made residential structure on the planet.

With a foundation covering almost a square mile and towering almost a mile high, it dwarfs the tallest tower in the world the Burj Dubai.

But it is more than just the biggest building in the world. This is a design for an entire small city, able to support a million people sustainably. The Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia would be astounded by this luxurious future ziggurat a mere 3000 years into their future. The sheer bravado of this gorgeous concept is just breathtaking.

Using solar and wind power, the mega structure will actually create its own moist internal weather using solar power. Steam generated from solar power and collected through photovoltaic cell panels on the pyramid’s exterior would be piped from the ground level to the uppermost heights of the pyramid’s interior and then released, instantly turning it into a soft drizzle which would fall on the lush garden communities inside the pyramid.

Such an eco system, full of vegetation, mild temperatures and regular rainfall, would make it a highly very desirable city for people living in dry desert conditions. Transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network horizontally and vertically. Private cars would be not needed at all for travel within the city.

Ridas Matonis, director of Timelinks, has created a futuristic vision of sustainable cities grounded in an ancient past. It would require 90 per cent less land than a traditional city. Timelinks has patented the design and technology incorporated into the project and has applied to the European Union for a grant for technical projects.

Timelinks will unveil the concept in Oct at the Cityscape Dubai. A number of eminent professors will be on hand to explain the technicalities of how the Ziggurat project works and how these communities can be integrated in master projects.

Via ecoworldly
For Matternetwork Read more...

Garden Of Eden To Get Rain Again

The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden story could almost be interpreted as an account of catastrophic climate change. Both the Sumerian Epic Of Gilgamesh and genesis stories of the Bible suggest a lush land of plenty, that was much more capable of nurturing civilization during the late Stone Age, than the arid land it became by about 4000 years ago, with drought afflicting Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Even the Sahara was lush and green during the late Stone Age. Starting around 7000 years ago, when rains returned after a 1000 years of drought, bones and artefacts suggest that a large population was able to herd cattle and hunt fish and wildlife. Their burials indicate they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead.

Apparently Climate Change will bring rain back once more to the Euphrates-Tigris watershed. This is land encompassing parts of Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, and north-eastern Iran and the strategically important headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In a detailed study, to be published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, Evans uses regional climate modeling, which can run counter to global climate change averages.

He found that while storm activity over the eastern Mediterranean would decline, moisture-bearing winds would be channeled inland more often and diverted by the Zagros Mountains, bringing an increase of over 50% in annual rainfall to the Euphrates-Tigris watershed.

This would mark a return to the original climate setting in which we began to settle down and farm in the cradle of civilization.

The Fall by Lucas Cranach the Elder: 1533

For MatterNetwork

Read more...

A Lifeform Discovered With Million Year Lifespan

Microbes Devise Superior Evolutionary Strategy

One of the prerequisites for us humans to achieve interstellar travel is faster spaceships.

But what if we could do the opposite: what if instead we could evolve as slower people?

Imagine us with million year lifespans. Imagine if we lived on a geologic timescale.

If we could live a million years, then travel to a star 60,000 light years away would have all the traveltime investment of a bus trip cross town.

Compared to us, a butterfly doesn't seem to get much done in it's tiny two week span. Imagine how much more we would achieve as a species if we could live a million years.

For one thing, locating and colonizing other planets looks a lot easier. So it is exciting news that scientists have found a new life form that looks to be working on exactly this evolutionary feat: learning to live for millions of years.

No doubt this is to make sure that theres a more feasible exit strategy when they evolve to our level and need 5 more planets for all the stuff they make, like we do.

This new lifeform is just a speck of stuff right now, living under the sea floor, but hey, where was your big fancy SUV a billion years ago? You too evolved from a tiny speck of stuff just like these newly discovered lifeforms.

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2008)

Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, according to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic timescale . While the Bacteria Escherichia Coli, as an example, doubles its numbers every 20 minutes, these Archaea double on the order of hundreds or thousands of years and consume very little energy.

"In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards," says House. "They metabolize a little, but not much."

According to House, organisms metabolizing at such slow rates is what we could expect to find in other areas of our solar system because such environments have much less energy available than on Earth. Perhaps, similar organisms may be in hydrothermal vents beneath the ice of Europa -- the second moon of Jupiter -- or in subsurface aquifers of Mars.

"We do not expect the microbes in other places to be these microbes exactly," says House. "But, they could be living at a similar slow rate."

"For example, how do they die?" asks Biddle. "It is a simple question that we cannot answer."

Photo from NASA Read more...