DK GreenRoots

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In this weekly series we have been discussing the benefits of a vegetarian diet including: better health, animal rights , frugal living, food safety , world food crisis and the huge contribution of meat production to global warming.

Who could resist this message from Rep. Dennis Kucinich?

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A catastrophic water shortage could turn out to be a much bigger threat to mankind this century than wars, soaring food prices and the ever relentless consumption of known sources of energy. The annoying thing is either water is so abundant (in some parts of the world) that it can be used leisurely and foolishly (amusement parks, fountains, golf) or it's so scarce that you fight wars over it. Which region will be most affected? I'll tell you over the jump.

Nicholas Stern, author of the Government's Stern Review on the economics of climate change, warned several years ago that underground aquifers could run dry at the same time as melting glaciers play havoc with fresh supplies of usable water. That report, dated October 2006, (lauded by such luminaries as Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs) states clearly that fresh rainfall is not enough to refill the underground water tables and that water is not a renewable resource. BTW, the very same Stern later this year will publish another huge UN study - dubbed the "Stern for nature" which will attempt to put a price on global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. I can't wait.

Here's the part of Stern's telling report that really worries me:

"The glaciers on the Himalayas are retreating, and they are the sponge that holds the water back in the rainy season. We're facing the risk of extreme run-off, with water running straight into the Bay of Bengal and taking a lot of topsoil with it. A few hundred square miles of the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia - the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Sutlej, among others - where 3bn people live. That's almost half the world's population."

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Climate change will do more than make life on Earth a bit warmer. Even a 5th-grader can tell you that. The problem with people like James Inhofe is that they are not smarter than 5th-graders.

If things don't change (for the better) quickly, we are looking at major die-off of the world's trees. If the trees go, we are not far behind.

From the ultra-liberal hippies at NASA:

Underlying Cause of Massive Pinyon Pine Die-Off Revealed
October 10, 2005

The high heat that accompanied the recent drought was the underlying cause of death for millions of pinyon pines throughout the Southwest, according to new research.

The resulting landscape change will affect the ecosystem for decades. Hotter temperatures coupled with drought are the type of event predicted by global climate change models. The new finding suggests big, fast changes in ecosystems may result from global climate change.

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Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have published a study, Evidence for a recent increase in forest growth, suggesting that climate change can quite literally be measured by treehuggers. Like the average American citizen, American trees look to have had increasingly bulging middles in recent decades. Having spent their careers quite literally hugging trees, SERC scientists Geoffrey Parker and Sean McMahon have written a study documenting

evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change.

For over 20 years, Parker has gone into a set of forests in the mid-Atlantic, tape measure in hand, and giving them a hug to measure their size. Parker's own hugging has been extended with a robust group of volunteers conducting regular measurements of specified trees. (The boy scout to the right, while in a SERC forest, isn't engaged in actual measurements for the study.) Some 250,000 hugs later, he has quite a database in hand.

The results of analyzing hugs surprised these researchers. Based on the data from these 100,000s of hugs, Parker's and McMahon's analysis documents

that the forest is packing on weight at a much faster rate than expected. ... on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually. That is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year.

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You may remember that in the middle of the snow storms, Senator James Graft Inhofe (R - OK) constructed an "igloo" in Washington, DC and posted a sign reading "Honk if you heart global warming." That other clown, Senator Jim DeMint -bleated- tweeted "It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries uncle." Chiming in like a pair of demented marionettes Rush Limbaugh and Hannity blathered on with story after story distorting the facts to fit their dishonest narrative and Murdoch's bottom line.

Today's main feature in the Guardian has some revealing facts, undeniable facts:

World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates.

Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment

Dig into those companies and you'll discover, well, the usual suspects!

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I have walked in a few rainforests in my lifetime, mostly in Australia and Indonesia. I would never forget the time I spent trekking through the majestic Kakadu National Park trails and being entranced by the amazingly luscious layers of its tropical rainforest, teeming with life and fragile ecosystems. I have witnessed the long-tailed Balinese Macaques playing with one another and trying to steal my lunch in the Ubud santuary, a short visit to Sumatra took me to the Harapan rainforest which is home, among other species, to an astounding array of charismatic butterflies....but I have never been to the Yasuni National Park in the north-east of Ecuador and that's what I want to discuss in this diary.

There are far too many reports of environmental injustice suffered here and around the world. Governments can be the problem and even when it can be the solution, lawmakers tied up with corporate interests deny real remedies for years. As Martin Luther King, Jr. stated so eloquently, we don't have to remain in neutral waiting for governments to take action. All it takes is one person who believes we are joined in "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" to reach out to others. It is just one person who stood up to provide access to potable water to tens of thousands, two people who succeeded in protecting indigenous lands from corporate eco rapists, one person who introduced functional bamboo bikes to villages and just one person who decided the people needed a simple device to monitor corporate polluters.

Disturbing reports describe how precious water supplies are reacting to continued human abuse and climate change. Water resources are Drying, Drying, Disappearing…. "Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is less than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years." The disappearance of this lake will impact the livelihoods of 30 million people, cause more hunger and pose a "massive threat to peace and stability."

From just the past few days, common themes in climate change news include how deniers continue to lie while politicians bicker or offer counterproductive proposals as a new study shows literally the speed of climate change spreading globally. Meanwhile, a power company thinks it is rational to strip mine a river to obtain coal.

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Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow.
The only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears.

- Do they know it's Christmas?

Warming sounds nice.

Ya know, warm & fuzzy, a glass of warm milk, a warm-hearted person, etc.

But the gruesome truth of climate change is this: Our planet's supply of fresh water is disappearing.

Obama, States Take Lead On Climate Change

TOP STORY

While there has been disappointing news from Copenhagen, and Congress drags out climate change legislation, President Obama has been working to address climate change reform in federal regulatory programs:

The Obama administration is quietly and methodically inserting ambitious climate-change and renewable-energy requirements into a vast array of federal regulatory programs. At the White House's direction, federal regulators are grappling with such diverse problems as how to respond to drought-induced water shortages, whether to require publicly traded corporations to disclose financial risks linked to global warming, and how to anticipate the national security problems that may well be triggered if rising sea levels devastate densely populated developing countries.