Government launches map to highlight global warming threat
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AFP/Getty Images
Foreign Secretary David Miliband at the launch of the map at the Science Museum
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A nightmare in the not-very-distant future: the map below shows the enormous temperature rises which British scientists believe the planet may be experiencing in as a little as 50 years from now if global warming remains unchecked.
Released by the Government today, it illustrates a rise in global average temperature of four degrees Centigrade by 2060, and as such represents a dramatic acceleration of previous forecasts made as recently as 2007 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The point of the map, launched by the Foreign Secretary David Miliband and the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, his brother Ed, is to show that a four-degree average temperature rise over the whole globe (which takes into account the seas as well as the land surface) equates to very much greater rises over the land alone, especially at higher latitudes – as one goes north or south towards the poles. The darker the colour, the higher the heat increase.
Thus, although Britain may see an average rise of three degrees – which itself would have very damaging consequences in terms of drought and extreme heatwaves – Siberia and northern Canada may experience an immense rise of 12 degrees or even more. Scientists believe this may trigger a climate “tipping point” – the melting of the permafrost under the northern tundras which, if it happened, would release large amounts of trapped methane gas, which in turn would boost global warming yet further.
Over the Arctic Ocean in the far north, the rise might be a colossal 15 or even 16 degrees, which would mean the complete disappearance of all the Arctic ice in summer and spell extinction for ice-dependent wildlife such as polar bears and walruses.
But wildlife is the least of it. The map shows rises of five degrees in Asia, seven degrees in Africa and parts of the US and eight degrees in the Amazon rainforest, all of which will have devastating consequences for some of the world’s poorest people. Rises like this are likely to lead to maize and wheat yields falling by 40 per cent across the world, and rice yields in China, India, Banglasdesh and Indonesia falling by 30 per cent – all at a time when world population is expected to grow from 6.9 billion today to more than 9 billion people.
Water resources are likely to be severely affected by a 70 per cent reduction in run-off around the Mediterranean, southern Africa and large areas of South America, forest fires are likely to be much more dangerous everywhere and warming-induced sea-level rise will affect millions more people in low-lying nations such as Bangladesh.
The IPCC’s latest forecast, issued in 2007, suggested an average rise of 1.8 to four degrees by 2100, but recently Hadley Centre scientists have revised both the extent and the timescale, suggesting that if global warming remains unchecked, a four-degree rise is now possible as early as 2060 – very much in the lifetime of people born today. This is because emissions of carbon dioxide are rising around the world far faster than was anticipated even a few years ago.
In essence, the map represents what researchers now think likely to happen if emissions are not controlled by the world community, which is meeting at Copenhagen in December to try to construct a new global climate treaty.
Speaking at the Science Museum, where the map was launched, the Foreign Secretary warned of a “high pressure” future of water and food shortages, mass migration and conflict if the world failed to tackle the problem. “The reason for publishing this map is that for many people, not only in our own country but around the world, the penny hasn’t yet dropped that this climate change challenge is real, it's happening now,” David Miliband said. The effects were not in “some far flung future” but 4C rises could happen in his children’s lifetime, he said, adding: “And the penny hasn’t dropped that Copenhagen is the chance to address the challenge – on a global scale.”
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Comments
Global population is rising fast. It tripled in the last 50 years or so. Agricultural productivity is falling. Fish stocks are collapsing. These are statements of fact, not hypothesis. A couple of days ago the FAO announced that global food production needs to rise by 70% to meet the demand predicted for 2050. That's in many people's life times. That's going to require cutting down a lot of forest. Here in Brazil, where I live, the preferred method is still to burn it all... though they cut rather a lot in Rondonia.
Still, I know you like to ignore things so, forget the forest, forget the sun's warming of the land that burning it will cause, forget the failure of rain, and of course forget global warming. Just consider food.
Now recall what Argentina is currently doing. The populace got angry at the price of meat, so the government banned exports to feed the local people in favour of greater profits from exporting for land owners.
Now you need to recall World War II. Remember the rationing? Remember the gardens planted with vegetables? Remember the difficulty feeding people? What was the population at the time? A little over 47 million.
Can you see where this is going?
What is the current population of the UK? Roughly 62 million and rising faster than at any time in the last 100 years. Predictions are that it will reach 71 million by 2033.
What is the current area in the UK currently under cultivation? Roughly 6 million hectares. That's 100 metres square per person.
Now recall that I mentioned that fish stocks are collapsing world wide, and especially so in Europe where fishermen lobbying lawyer politicians have been allowed to act like idiot farmers who cut their trees down to pick the fruit.
I think you will accept that, without any speculation, we can reasonably surmise that the UK cannot feed itself. I think we can safely assume that as other food exporting nations' populations grow, & food prices grow, (remember that the populations of the USA, Canada and Brazil have all more than doubled in the last 50 years) that local governments will favour feeding local voters affordable food before allowing it to be exported to prop up an irresponsibly large population of Britons. What they do sell will go to the highest bidders, and with the UK economy in the state it is in that is likely to be India and China's billions.
Perhaps you should read about the stupidity of the Easter Islanders' demise before next you think to suggest that environmental concerns are scaremongering.
The issue we all have with climate change is it is a distraction from what is really going to hit us. The data is flawed and hopelessly presented and re-marketed every year. It is like a company with a failed product trying to get it accepted. Your examples are fine, but they are not part of the IPCC script.
The real issue is water:
1. Drinking water. It needs oil to pump or desalinate. Each year it takes more oil just to find and deliver the new oil never mind finding new water sources.
2. Irrigation for agriculture in arid areas. Aquifers are all drying up. See mid US and Australia.
3. Rivers are being diverted to supply towns and never reach the sea. Russia especially.
4. River dams to stop flood water silt deposits needed to compensate for the over exploitation by farming. East Anglia soil erosion uncovering ancient trees.
5. The lack of breeding grounds for fish in lower rivers.
6. The pumping of sewage and hot power station cooling water into rivers to replace extraction.
7. The lack of the pure water flowing into certain sea areas, which sets up the currents that rotate the oceans.
8. The lack of the cool river water into the Gulf. Changes weather patterns.
If you want to know about water and evaporation then try studying the 2004 Tsunami. No models needed, it was the biggest climate experiment yet. The weather did something amazing after it evaporated all that water thrown onto the lowlands. Now just think what all the irrigation is doing in areas that were once desert.
By their concentration on invisible CO2 and its probable, maybe, highly unlikely, consequences they ignore or divert the attention from the real issues of unsustainable population growth.
Way before any effects of CO2 are seen, we are going to run out of water. Water wars have already been won and lost in the Australian farming areas. The farmers lost to the towns.
All of the items you list are the challenges that need to be tackled. You did miss out energy security and the cooling planet which will devastate agriculture more than global warming would.
If you bother to read further than what you've been spoon fed, you'd note that their is still a healthy debate about the drivers of climate change.
I believe CO2 is THE WRONG driver for the changes that need to be made to our industrial society.
Remember these are the same British scientists that predicted in April that the UK would experience a barbecue Summer this year.
If red faces could cause global warming then planet would be boiling by now.
I'm surprised that Millipede thinks that anyone is still listening to him anyway.
The Brothers Milliband are clearly in the first rank of scientific ignoramuses; a level of incompetence matched only by their performance as politicians.
For every protagonist of the AGW hypothesis there is a body of scientific opinion that is concerned about the way data has been manipulated, misrepresented and used to further political agendas; unfortunately their "incorrect" views as surpressed by the BBC and others who should better. Planet Earth was much warmer during the Middle Warming period than it is now; moreover the key component in the so-called greenhouse gases is water vapour, not CO2.
Perhaps the IPCC should launch a programme to plug all active volcanoes? As an exercise in futility it should rank with all the carbon capture and wind farm initiatives so beloved of supposed environmentalists.
Save us please....
Please tax me some more in your man made global warming SCAM.....
Call me a denier.....Use your propganda on me some more you lying snake.....
Er... have you heard that before? This is one characteristic of human nature that has existed throughout human history and always will. Every generation has its own scare, always something different.
It has little to do with science.
Agricultural productivity and world population
Then consider Britain's ability to feed itself and it's right to demand that other countries feed it.
Life expectancy is high as its ever been.
Average standard of living is hig as its ever been.
Any human born into the world today, now has the highest prospects of quality of life, education, life expectancy than ever before in human history. This would not be the case without human development. Its not all bad. We've found solutions to many world problems - that is the single reason why the population is at high as it is, we're not dying as quiclkly as we used to - and we're pretty good at finding solutions. Far from perfect.
Yes, many, many problems remain. (Urban pollution, malaria, lack of safe drinking water, malnutrition,Aids, etc, etc) We will never free the world of problems, But this idea that we're falling off a precipice is simply nonsense. And as I say is simply the 'end of the world is nigh' syndrome.
Some 40% of the world's agricultural land is seriously degraded. Among the worst affected regions are Central America, where 75% of land is infertile, Africa, where a fifth of soil is degraded, and Asia, where 11% is unsuitable for farming.
Brazil has recently started a project to try to recondition some its 165,000 square kilometres of deforested and then abandoned pasture. That's an area much bigger than England and Wales combined. Two months ago the government here agreed to sell off (read burn) an area of the Amazon the size of France (675,000 square km). The same abandonment awaits that land too.
An epidemic of stem rust on wheat caused by race Ug99 is currently spreading across Africa, Asia and most recently into Middle East and is causing major concern. Unlike other rusts, which only partially affect crop yields, UG99 can bring 100% crop loss. Up to 80% yield losses were recently recorded in Kenya.
Kenya recently admitted that its major rivers are drying up because of the cutting of 100,000 hectares of the Mau highland forest. 10 million people, 8 wildlife parks and 6 lakes depend on them the rivers. Park wardens have resorted to pumping water from well for wildlife but the aquafers are drying up. Lake Nakuru and the River Njoro have dried up.
"The last time I saw real rains was 1998." Kiprotich, Nairobi, Kenya
"Sometimes i feel tears in my eyes when I visit my rural home in masinga, ukambani… This water is no longer there, the pipes are dry." Reuben mwaana mbuve, Nairobi, Kenya
"I came back to Kenya for holidays with my friends from Dubai, and was shocked when I enquired about the campsite, located near LAKE NAKURU and to my utter dismay, was informed that it no longer existed." Muchui Maingi, Dubai, U.A.E
"For instance the Njoro river which i once had a chance of swimming in when i was a small boy while visiting my grandmother who lives in that area, prompts me to shed tears... a dry bed is all that is left for us to see." John Njoroge Ng'ang'a , Tehran, Iran
"We are paying dearly for our mistakes, imagine the Maasai Mara without the Mara river, the waters in Mara river were so low this time an it really affected the spectacular migration of the wildebeest from the Serengeti to Mara, our hippos, crocodiles and other animals will starve." David, Kilgoris, Kenya
"Europeans must become aware of their complicity because the well-financed flower industry that supplies European consumers is helping to drain the bird watching lakes with their expansive Kenyan operations." Dr. Tim Foresman, Formerly Nairobi - now Baltimore, Maryland USA
The farmers I know personally, here in Brazil, are all complaining of the sharp rises in the cost of fertiliser and are using less as a result. The University of Sao Paulo is completing an investigation into the use of sewage to compensate.
The current rate of extinction makes this is the fastest known mass extinction event known to science.
Read about farmer problems due to bee shortages worldwide as a result of Colony Collapse Disorder.
I could go on and on... I haven't even mentioned the disaster that is world fisheries. It is worrying to see so many lemmings here, lining up for the cliff ahead.
But your suggestion that the world will fall apart tomorrow is, as I have said, little different from what Man has worried about throughout human history. We are pretty good at finding solutions to problems, which is THE reason why population is at high as it is. It seems you would prefer we return to a time where life expectancy was <40, where mothers died in child birth, when we had smallpox, typhoid, cholera, high infant death rates, another good First World War, etc, etc. Of course some parts of the world continue to have such problems, but life expectancy is improving in most locations. And of course we create new problems along the way - such as declining fish stocks. We need to work hard on such problems. But our best chance of this is to focus on scientific realities rather than a populist politically correct approach to our problems. The hype of manmade global warming is unfortunately a tragedy for scientific progress. We must not 'do nothing', we must do a lot, but do the right things.
That science came to the rescue in the past is no guarantee that it will be able to come to the rescue in the future... the low hanging fruit has already been picked.
Science solving problems for 1 billion people on a planet is very different from solving the stresses associated with seven times that number.
There is no doubt in my mind what-so-ever that the world's population has exceeded the carrying capacity of the world's environment. The only speculation now it by how much and with what consequences. Very high levels of mortality are now inevitable.
New Zealand did some research into what it's scientists considered a safe, long term population size. They concluded that it was 5 million. New Zealand is the same size as the UK but less environmentally degraded.
What really matters is the explosion of world population 3bn. in 1950 well over 6bn in 2009. Let our disgusting politicians address reality not this nonsense - they won't, as it's beyond them.
I am not anti progression. A member below mentioned returning to the <40 average life 'dark ages' lifestyle. I think that you may just be afraid of losing what luxuries we have now. The luxuries I most certainly enjoy come at a terrible price. My idea of progression is living in a sustainable way that we can progress in. What’s the point of progressing into a doomed world? Now if you honestly know that a technological solution is near on the horizon for these issues then I apologise. I don’t however think there is one.
Copenhagen may deliver some positivity it may not. The hard line is that we have to change - (if projections are correct) the trends I read about seem to support the hypothesis of major environmental and climatic change. Logic in my opinion dictates action.
As mentioned at the start I know little and can only look at what’s happening around me to base an opinion, not with how I want things to be to benefit my existence. The fact for me is I’m 21 living in a mightily complex world with a very bad diagnosis of ill health. What’s the answer ladies, gentlemen boys and girls?
You are left to wonder about his understanding of climate. I do.
>> You are left to wonder about his understanding of climate. I do. <<
It's just posturing, boosting his position for when they finally dump Gordy out of the back of a truck off the Tay Bridge. The loathsome creep Milly believes that we can somehow forget that AIPAC pull his strings, that he masterminded the torture of British detainees at Gitmo (no wonder he is so keen to keep that under wraps!), and that he sucked the toes of Georgian Ultra-Rightist Yankee Proxy, Mikhail Psycho-shvili and his American-funded military assault against, ehem, his very own civilian population.
A population's size is limited by its most limiting resource. In the time of Henry VIII it was noticed that there were limited numbers of oak trees with which to build boats and houses. The King decreed that more be planted and declared a moratorium on cutting for firewood.
UK population at the time: 2 million.
The only reason the world's population is as high as it is, is because we have proved very good at solving problems - malnutrition, health care, water borne diseases, agriculture, etc, etc. Are you suggesting its better if more people die of ill health and malnutrition. Is this what should save the world? The good news is that despite all the population growth scares of the 1960s, 80s, we find that for developed societies growth seems to stabilise and even drop in some cases.
I am just a layman but all this information was available to me long before the invention of the internet.
So the question has to asked, "why didn't the governments of the world react 2 decades ago?" The answer of course is simple and you don't even need an 11 plus in politics to know it.
That the buffoon of a foreign secretary should now proclaim such wonder of something that government has known about since he was still wearing nappies beggars belief. Actually it doesn't, it just confirms everything intelligent people have always known!
Presumably the writer has not noticed the all-time October low temperature records shattered in North America in the past two weeks, or the record October snowfalls in Eastern Europe.
Not to mention the sun which remains in deep solar minimum long after it should have recovered. Last time it behaved like this, the planet cooled seriously.
We have moved from distortions to outright lies and this has accelerated since we aquired Al Gore's former environment adviser as Chief UK Climate Alarmist, Professor Bob Watson. The Met office has become a joke.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2322
subsequent hockeysticks debunked
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6932
water scarcity misrepresented by ipcc
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/20
knowledge about climate feedbacks misrepresented by ipcc
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6590
climate models show extreme poor correlation with reality
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/06/sherw
Friends of the Earth (FoE) The Green Party, many other NGO's and Climate Scientist have been saying this for how long?
This government knows nothing about the Environment neither do the Lib Dems or green Dave of the Conservative party who flew to his destination, how green is that, cycles to work with his car behind him for the media and well the list goes on.
My main gripe is the head in the sand citizens ( or climate change deniers) of this country and the world, they have no grasp at all of how imminent this really is, they are going to be the ones suffering for not taking any notice.
It especially makes me mad when people fly to conferences especially Climate change conferences with a good bit of planning they could use public transport to get to their destination, they would have to put plans in place to travel over a longer period but it can be done, or why not use video conferencing, there is absolutely not need to fly at all.
It is happening already! luckily people like myself and many others are already prepared for it, so get your head out of the sand people, soon you will have no choice.
I'm almost tempted back to voting Labour - IF and that's a big IF - they can priorities this priority no matter what the short-term economic consequences. They must - and I know it's potential political suicide - think long term. The alternative is humanicide.
Let's do it! Start by listing planning restrictions on wind turbines. Then, let's take it from there.
Here we go!
Copenhagen is a dead duck and Miliband and troops are simply trying to puff some life into it -hopeless.
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Probably the only place never to recover from the coming conference of hot air is Copenhagen itself, unlucky as it is to be branded for notoriety by this use as a totally inappropriate and emotive keyword.
Miliband yet another political lightweight who believes we're all 5 year old, perhaps even younger, as he produces something similar to a CBBC colour chart, perhaps he'll produce a Blue Peter style model using 'sticky back' plastic, toilet roll cardboard tubes & tin foil in a further attempt to illustrate what is still only a theory with the substance sadly lacking.
Why not try us with some facts & figures & HOW ARRIVED AT? Could it be this would actually open up a debate with people of similar expertise yet with a differing view? Possibly a debate that might reduce the projected tax revenues from this theory.
I note the Indie suggest Miliband might be offered a job in the EU, presumably in charge of compliance as he plainly expects this of the UK electorate without offering anything of substance to reinforce his graphics other than a video from one of the biggest global political meltdowns Al Gore, or is that just an Inconvenient Truth.
Anything that is warmed up expands, regretably this theory seems no exception to the rule.
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