Beef, dairy products, and lamb produce the most greenhouse gases of 20 popular meat, fish, dairy, and vegetable proteins, according to a new study by the non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG).

Analyzing the entire life cycle of food production, the EWG said in its newly released Meat Eater's Guide that beef generates more than twice the CO2 emissions of pork, nearly four times that of chicken, and 13 times that of vegetable proteins, such as beans and lentils. Production of lamb and dairy products also caused high greenhouse gas emissions, the study said. The study showed that 20 percent of the emissions involved in meat production resulted from meat being wasted and thrown away.

The EWG, working with renowned chef Mario Battali, recommended that consumers not eat meat one day a week for an entire year, an action that cumulatively in the U.S. would equal taking 7.6 million cars off the road. The report also recommended that consumers eat grass-fed and pasture-raised animals whenever possible since those methods of meat production produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fattening livestock in feedlots.

Photo by CeresB/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The shipping industry has become the first global business sector to agree to mandatory carbon dioxide emissions reductions. At a meeting of the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization, member countries agreed to set CO2 emissions standards on new ships beginning in 2019, with the goal of improving energy efficiency by 30 percent by 2024.

The member countries also agreed to more modest efficiency improvements and emissions reductions in the world’s 60,000 exiting ships. Of the world’s top 10 shipping nations, only China voted against the agreement. Brazil, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Chile also opposed the accord, and it remains to be seen if these countries will adhere to the majority decision. The agreement allows developing nations to apply for a waiver from the rules until 2019, and the Clean Shipping Coalition warned that the agreement could result in most new ships registering with countries that get a waiver.

Overall, however, environmental advocates said the agreement was a positive step that could reduce CO2 emissions from shipping by 50 million tons by 2020. Shipping accounts for about 3 percent of human CO2 emissions.

Photo by Daniel Ramirez/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Zachary Shahan

UK climate secretary Chris Huhne warns of increased war and violence from climate change.

Some of the key threats currently facing society result from the schism in our mind between humans and nature. On some fundamental level, we, as a society, don't seem to realize that considerably altering the natural environment and atmosphere can create many concerning human and societal implications. Yes, we may have had some "environmental revolutions" over the past half century, but we still rank the environment and climate relatively low on our list of priorities or concerns.

With this being the case, one of the clear tasks of climate change and environmental professionals is to clarify and share how environmental and climate changes are tied to human society. UK climate secretary Chris Huhne is one such person and made a pretty huge speech along these lines this week. Addressing defense experts, Huhne reportedly made clear that climate change will increase the risk of war and violence (in particular, against the UK, but this statement applies to countries all over the world).

"Climate change is a threat multiplier. It will make unstable states more unstable, poor nations poorer, inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely," according to Huhne. "And the areas of most geopolitical risk are also most at risk of climate change."

This risks reversing progress made in prosperity and civilization since the industrial revolution and Huhne warned that humans could increasingly suffer through "nasty, brutish and short" lives in a "Hobbesian" world over the coming century if we don't address climate change quickly.

While we have made great societal strides forward over the past century, nothing can replace a livable climate and access to food and water, all of which are currently threatened if we don't change course and stop emitting global warming pollution fast.

The effects of global warming go beyond extinguishing more and more endangered plants and animals. They reach very clearly into the everyday lives and security of humans.

UK a Climate Action Role Model for US

While the UK is not perfect in its response to climate change, especially with "conservatives" in power, it seems to be a league ahead of the United States on this matter. It has done such things as cancel the expansion of London Heathrow airport to address climate change, while U.S. Republicans in Congress have largely stifled any significant climate action at all.

UK prime minister David Cameron recently accepted the "fourth carbon budget." Under this plan, the UK would cut its global warming emissions in half by 2025, a greater cut than any other developed country is aiming for. This is a far greater federal move than we can even dream of in the US if a large number of Republicans are not removed from office in 2012.

Reprinted with permission from Ecopolitology

by Timothy Hurst

In the summer of 2009, U.S. and Australian climate politics had a similar look and feel. The lower houses of legislature in each country had passed climate bills and were waiting on their respective senates to act. While the U.S. House's wide-ranging cap-and-trade bill didn't stand much of a chance in the Senate, many believed at the time that conservatives in the Australian Senate were on the verge of giving the go-ahead to an equally ambitious plan. But after a leadership challenge in the opposition Liberal Party, conservatives reversed their official position on the climate plan, putting the country back on par with what was happening in Washington. After twice failing on votes in the Senate, in 2010, Prime Minister Rudd ultimately backed away from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an issue that was a core component of the Labor Party policy agenda. Many cite the move as leading to his demise as prime minister.

Two years later, a climate bill is again on the table in Australia after Prime Minister Julia Gillard Sunday outlined a plan to reduce the country's annual carbon emissions by 159 million tons 2020. "We are moving from the days of words to deeds," Gillard said, in a subtle reference to her former boss Kevin Rudd's failure to stick with the carbon reduction scheme in 2010.

As prime ministers go in Australia, Gillard is not exactly popular. To be precise, she is the most unpopular prime minister in 13 years. But Gillard and her Labor Party colleagues learned a few lessons the last time they pushed a climate bill and now are bringing forward a cautious yet ambitious plan emphasizing the qualities of simplicity, certainty and viability. And while the Obama administration has no intention of moving on a broad climate plan any time soon, U.S. lawmakers who hope to revisit the climate issue one day—along with state legislators—might consider taking a page from their Australian colleagues' playbooks.

Climate politics: Lessons in simplicity, certainty and viability

The nearly fifteen hundred-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, better known as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, was anything but simple. Economists love the idea of simplicity in taxation because it can have a more direct impact on behavior. Want people to smoke less? Tax cigarettes. Want companies to emit less carbon? Tax carbon. But too many taxes and too confusing a code can muck up a well-intentioned bill. Although it is officially being referred to as a fixed-price carbon trading scheme, for the first three years of the plan, the Australian plan will operate basically like a simple carbon tax. Under the plan, starting in 2012, facilities generating 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, provided they are not in the excluded agricultural or forestry sectors, will pay a fixed price of roughly $25 per ton of carbon emitted. Simple.

And what carbon taxes have been lauded for by liberals and libertarians alike is their financial certainty. Businesses like knowing how much taxes are going to be and what regulations they must follow so they can plan and budget for the future. Talk to any industry likely to be hit hard by climate legislation in the U.S., the one thing they all clamor for is certainty. The fixed price will rise 2.5 percent over the two following years before switching to a market-based pricing system in 2015. Companies will still be able to trade pollution permits in the first phase of the program, but the real trading and market opportunities won't really take root until the government releases control of the carbon price. The fixed price at the outset of the Australian plan provides the kind of financial certainty that business interests are always asking for. Putting all your eggs into a marketbasket with a free-floating price from the outset can be dangerous. Just ask the Europeans, or Matt Taibbi.

Recognizing that they have no chance of passing a bill in Australia without helping the constituencies likely to be hit hardest by it, the Labor Party made several changes to the plan to boost its political viability. First of all, it made the plan smaller. Some 500 companies are estimated to fall under the Gillard carbon reduction plan, roughly half the number of companies that would have been covered by the even more ambitious Rudd plan.

And what did Labor do to deal with the powerful agricultural interests that certainly killed the bill last time in the Australian Senate? It exempted agriculture from the new plan. And to score some support from the general public, more than half of the revenue raised by the scheme will be returned to lower and middle income Australians via tax credits and direct payments as a buffer against rising cost of energy and other commodities. Another $9 billion in funds will also be directed to help heavy polluting steel and aluminum industries and help the country's booming liquified natural gas industry adjust to the price increases. The danger, of course, is that sweetening the bill with so much viability can make it ineffective as policy. It can also backfire and turn off the very constituencies who supported the bill in the first place.

But good policy sometimes requires good politics.

Reprinted with permission from Ecopolitology

The Australian government has unveiled a proposal to tax its heaviest carbon dioxide emitters as of July 2012, a plan that would make Australia the first nation to put a price on carbon.

The plan, which is expected to pass both houses of parliament before the end of the year, would require the nation’s 500 biggest CO2 emitters to pay $24.60 (AU$23) per ton of carbon dioxide, with that price increasing by 2.5 percent annually until July, 2015. At that point, an emissions trading scheme will be introduced. By 2020, government officials say, the carbon tax would reduce Australia’s carbon emissions 5 percent below 2000 levels; by 2050, the plan will reduce emissions by 80 percent, officials said.

About AU$10 billion of the anticipated revenue will be funneled into energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. “Failing to do so means that we would be passing on lower living standards to our children and grandchildren,”said Prime Minister Julia Gillard. With a population of about 22.6 million, Australia produces about 1.3 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.

Photo by keith011764/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

By Joshua S. Hill

The American Midwest and northern Plains are preparing for continued flooding, with the threat of above average rainfall expected to continue through the summer, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service, who believe that flooding this year could rival the Great Flood of 1993.

Rivers are already running high, and the soils are saturated with water, which means that even a little bit of rain could trigger further flooding in and around locations which have already seen flooding this year.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is also forecasting above-normal rain for most of these vulnerable areas in the next two weeks, and above-normal rainfall in much of the region in the one- and three-month outlooks.

In addition, with increasing temperatures expected over the Rockies, the water melt from the remaining snowpack will makes its way down the mountains and into the already swamped rivers.

“The sponge is fully saturated – there is nowhere for any additional water to go,” said Jack Hayes, Ph.D., director of NOAA’s National Weather Service. “While unusual for this time of year, all signs point to the flood threat continuing through summer.”

In 1993, flooding wracked the upper Midwest and saw record-breaking floods persist through April to August, causing $25 billion worth of damages (adjusted for inflation) in nine states.

“The flooding that many Americans have already experienced this spring is a crucial reminder of just how devastating floods can be,” said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.

“As this forecast tells us, the response to this year’s flooding is going to be a long effort – but we will be standing with all of the affected states, communities and families every step of the way. And this will continue to be a team effort – with the government working hand in hand with all of our partners, including states, tribal and local governments, non-profits, the private sector and most importantly, the public. If you haven’t already, visit ready.gov to learn more about how you can protect your loved ones, homes and other properties from flooding, including by purchasing flood insurance.”

The areas most in danger of flooding include;

- North Central U.S. including Souris River (North Dakota) and Red River of the North (border of North Dakota and Minnesota), Minnesota River (Minnesota), Upper Mississippi River (Minnesota and Iowa), and Des Moines River (Iowa)
- Lower Missouri River from Gavin’s Point (Nebraska and South Dakota border) downstream along the border of Nebraska and Iowa, continuing through the borders of Kansas and Missouri then through Missouri to the Mississippi River
- Tributaries to the Lower Missouri including the James and Big Sioux Rivers in North Dakota
- Lower Ohio River Valley including the White, Wabash and lower Ohio River
- East of Rockies: North Platte River in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska and Yellowstone River in Wyoming and Montana
- West of Rockies: Utah and Colorado

NOAA is offering the following flood safety tips:

- Determine whether your community is in a flood-risk area and continue monitoring local flood conditions at water.weather.gov
- Visit www.ready.gov for flood preparedness advice to safeguard your family, home and possessions and for more information about the National Flood Insurance Program.
- Purchase a NOAA Weather Radio receiver with battery power option to stay apprised of quickly changing weather information.
- Study evacuation routes in advance and heed evacuation orders.
- Turn Around, Don’t Drown – never cross flooded roads, no matter how well you know the area or how shallow you believe the water to be.

Given the many factors that have set the stage for this expected flooding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been working with states for months to prepare and respond to the expected flooding.

Persistent rainfall last summer and fall, a large winter snowpack across much of the upper Midwest, an unusually cool and wet spring adding extra snowpack to the higher portions of the Rockies and the further saturated soil in lower elevations and in the northern Plains, and above-normal to record river levels for this time of year in the at-risk levels have had FEMA working hard.

Through its regional offices in Colorado, Missouri and Illinois, FEMA is continuing to closely monitor ongoing and potential flooding in these states, and is also working closely with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Weather Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, among others.

FEMA is providing approved federal disaster assistance for Missouri, North Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota.

FEMA also currently has staff embedded in state emergency operations centers in Wyoming, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri to coordinate federal support efforts as needed. In addition, FEMA has field offices set up in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri to respond to ongoing and potential flooding, and has deployed commodities to North and South Dakota, in case they become needed. In preparation for this flooding season, FEMA also pre-staged commodities, including water, meals, and blankets, in strategic locations close to the flooding in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, that may be requested for use by states. To learn more about FEMA’s efforts, visit blog.fema.gov/search/label/Floods.

Reprinted with permission from PlanetSave.com

by Alister Doyle

Tighter limits on soot and smog provide a quick and easy way to fight global warming while protecting human health and raising crop output, a U.N. study said on Tuesday.

It outlined 16 measures, ranging from plugging leaky gas transport pipelines to improving wood burning stoves, to limit "black carbon" -- soot -- methane and tropospheric ozone, which is a greenhouse gas that is a big component of smog.

"A small number of emission reduction measures ... offer dramatic public health, agricultural, economic and environmental benefits," Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, said in a statement of the report.

The study, urging actions beyond a normal focus on curbing carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, said the recommended actions could lop 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) off rising temperatures.

That would help the world reach a goal adopted by 200 nations in Mexico last year of limiting the rise to below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times. World temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 degree C, and are headed upwards.

Even before accounting for wider benefits, there were often low costs or even savings.

"For many of the measures, especially the methane ... there are cost savings," Johan Kuylenstierna of the Stockholm Environment Institute told a news conference in Bonn on the sidelines of June 6-17 climate talks.

PADDY FIELDS

To reduce methane, it called for better ventilation of coal mines, better use of gas associated with oil and gas production, reduced leaks from pipelines, better recycling of waste and reforms to agriculture such as better management of rice paddy fields.

To limit black carbon, it called for adoption of diesel particle filters at European Union standards, cleaner-burning stoves and a ban on the open-field burning of farm waste.

Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organization, said the WMO would step up monitoring of the impact of the air pollutants on the climate.

The report expanded on preliminary findings from February.

It reiterated that less air pollution could avoid 2.4 million premature human deaths a year and the annual loss of 52 million tonnes, or about 2 percent, of world production of maize, rice, soybean and wheat.

The researchers, backed by a $200,000 grant from Sweden, would work out an action plan to try to work out costs and areas where the biggest gains could be made.

They also said benefits would be felt strongly in ice-covered regions of the Arctic or the Himalayas. When soot settles on ice, it darkens the surface and allows it to soak up more heat, adding to a thaw that further stokes global warming.

The report estimated that the measures could slow warming in the Arctic by about 0.7 degree Celsius by 2040, almost two-thirds of the projected warming in the region.

The report said it focused on heat-trapping pollution. Some polluting particles have the opposite impact of reflecting sunlight into space and so contributing to cooling.

Reprinted with permission from Reuters

by Rhett Butler

In recent years, palm oil development in Malaysia and Indonesia has devastated tropical forests there. With Brazil on the verge of its own palm oil boom, can sustainable cultivation of the crop actually help save the rainforest, rather than hastening its destruction?

The rapid expansion of palm oil plantations across Malaysia and Indonesia has left a wide swath of destruction through some of the planet’s most extensive and important rainforests. Now, with Brazil announcing plans to dramatically scale-up palm oil production in the Amazon, could the same fate befall Earth’s largest tropical forest?

The stakes are enormous, as the Brazilian Amazon contains an estimated 850,000 square miles suitable for palm oil plantations — an area four times the size of France. By comparison, Indonesia and Malaysia, which account for nearly 90 percent of global palm oil production, have less than 50,000 square miles of oil palm under cultivation.

Yet even as Brazilian and international firms gear up for a major expansion of palm oil cultivation in the Amazon, there is a conspicuous lack of hand wringing by environmentalists. The reason: done right, oil palm could emerge as a key component in the effort to save the Amazon rainforest. Responsible production there could even force changes in Indonesia and Malaysia, both of which have been widely criticized for their poor records on protecting tropical forests.

Palm oil could ultimately benefit the Amazon for a number of reasons. Planted on the degraded pasture land that abounds in the Brazilian Amazon, oil palm could generate more jobs and higher incomes for locals than the dominant form of land use in the region: low intensity cattle ranching. Rather than destroying more rainforest for still-more cattle pasture, local farmers could go into the oil palm business and benefit from its higher returns.

“At current prices, it can provide a Brazilian smallholder a ticket to the middle class,” said Tim Killeen, a senior research fellow and Amazon expert at Conservation International. “Anybody can do the math: 200 kilos of meat per hectare versus 4 tons of oil per hectare. Plantations create jobs, but a smallholder model creates a middle class.”

Replacing cattle pasture with palm oil plantations also offers significant environmental benefits, as palm trees — though not nearly as valuable ecologically as rainforest — at least sequester carbon and evapotranspirate moisture, which is important to the hydrological cycle of rainforests.

Oil palm expansion in Brazil also could put pressure on Indonesia and Malaysia to clean up their acts. Brazil’s stricter environmental laws mean that, should the country begin to produce large amounts of sustainably produced palm oil, it would place Southeast Asian producers at a disadvantage if they hope to sell to European and American corporations, which are increasingly concerned about buying palm oil associated with forest destruction.

Oil palm is among the most productive and profitable tropical crops. A 25-acre plantation can yield palm oil worth more than $7,000 a year for a planter, far in excess of ranching or farming. But its profitability has spurred unbridled expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia, where more than half of oil palm expansion since 1990 has occurred at the expense of tropical forests. Asian production also has fouled rivers and released billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Producers there have at times run roughshod over traditional forest users, resulting in social conflict. Accordingly, the industry is increasingly battered by criticism from human rights groups and environmentalists.

So why would palm oil in the Amazon be different?

Little oil palm is now grown in Brazil — only 350 square miles. In the Brazilian Amazon today, cattle ranching is the big driver of deforestation. Cattle pasture occupies more than 70 percent of deforested land in the Amazon, obliterating forest and resulting in a near-complete loss of stored carbon and a loss of wildlife. The loss of vegetation reduces transpiration, affecting local rainfall. Where large areas of rainforest have been converted for cattle pasture, it becomes drier and more susceptible to drought and fires, which sometimes spread into adjacent forest areas.

Cattle themselves cause problems, compacting the soil, damaging local waterways, and worsening erosion. Meanwhile processing their hides pollutes rivers and streams with toxic chemicals. In short, cattle ranching, as traditionally produced in the Amazon, is often a menace to the environment.

Palm oil is a much different agricultural product. First and foremost, the oil palm is a tree, meaning that it absorbs carbon dioxide and releases water vapor as it grows. The result is that oil palm stores six to seven times the amount of carbon as cattle pasture. Daniel Nepstad, a scientist who co-founded the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), said that large-scale expansion of oil palm plantations into pasture “would help mitigate regional climate change, exemplified by the severe droughts of 2010 and 2005, by re-establishing year-round evapotranspiration in an important region of the eastern Amazon.”

Oil palm looks even better from an economic standpoint, generating significantly more employment than ranching, mechanized soy farming, or logging. Agropalma, currently Brazil’s largest palm oil producer, employs one worker per 20 acres of plantation. By comparison, an industrial soy farm typically has one worker per 500 acres, while a cattle ranch often has only one worker for every 1,000 or more acres.

With palm oil prices hovering around $1,000 a metric ton and the Brazilian government planning an aggressive expansion of the crop, a frenzy of activity is taking place. Archer Daniels Midland, mining giant Vale, and the state-run oil company Petrobras Biofuels have announced major Amazon palm oil deals in the past 18 months. Several other major companies are looking to expand production in the region.

But the Brazilian government’s target of having 19,000 square miles (5 million hectares) under palm oil cultivation may be too high — Agropalma thinks it unlikely that Brazil will be able to plant more than ten percent of that by 2020 because of constraints on seed and labor. Seasonal flooding also would limit palm oil plantations in parts of the Amazon.

Oil palm expansion in the Amazon faces other challenges, yet these constraints may make Brazil’s palm oil industry considerably less damaging than its counterpart in Indonesia and Malaysia. Brazil’s current Forest Code requires landowners in the Amazon to keep 80 percent of their land forested, which means that a company cannot only buy a block of pasture in the Amazon, it must also secure — or pay the cost of — a forest reserve several times the size of the palm plantation. (Brazil’s agricultural lobby is now working to pass a law that would substantially reduce the legal reserve requirement.)

This and other challenges — such as Brazil’s arcane land ownership laws — mean that oil palm in the Brazilian Amazon probably won’t take the scorched Earth approach that has come to represent some palm oil growers in Southeast Asia and the Amazon cattle ranchers. The Brazilian government has also enacted policies to promote more sustainable palm oil production, which limit where oil palm can be grown and prohibit individuals or companies seeking to clear primary forest from receiving low-interest government loans. For all these reasons, Agropalma estimates costs of palm oil production in Brazil to be at least twice those of Indonesia.

All of this suggests that palm oil alone will not be a panacea for the Amazon, but it could help generate income and livelihoods in already deforested areas while stabilizing forest cover and serving as a bulkhead against fire. But Roberto Smeraldi, director of the environmental group Amigos da Terra — Brazilian Amazonia, said that optimism for palm oil will only be justified if the state and federal governments enforce the country’s tougher environmental laws. “There are reasons for concern due to the lack of governance that might make palm oil expansion a risk factor once developed in the region,” he says.

The goal of many Brazilian growers would be to out-compete Indonesian and Malaysian growers on issues of sustainability, which could make Brazilian palm oil more attractive to international food and consumer products companies, such as Unilever. Brazilian producers might even exceed the requirements of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), whose seal of sustainability — bestowed upon dozen of firms in Indonesia and Malaysia — has been given to some undeserving companies, according to critics.

“We’re not going to be a competitor in markets that don’t care about sustainability,” says Marcello Brito, commercial director of Agropalma. “We believe Brazil will be a good producer, but not a big producer.”

Even if Brazil’s palm oil production misses the government’s ambitious targets, it could pressure producers in Southeast Asia and Africa, where oil palm development is fast-increasing. Should Brazil produce just half of its 2020 target of 5 million hectares, the amount of palm oil produced would represent 10 to15 percent of global production, potentially having a commensurate impact on the price of palm oil and reducing the incentive to expand in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia. More importantly, it would send a signal to other producers that being the lowest-cost producer isn’t necessarily the only path for agricultural development.

“Amazon oil palm plantations could mitigate climate change at the global level by depressing the price of palm oil, competing with Southeast Asian firms and potentially suppressing expansion into peat forests,” says Nepstad.

And provided expansion occurs on degraded, non-forest lands, oil palm could help buffer the Amazon rainforest from further destruction.

“If we start a new plantation using RSPO guidelines and following Brazilian laws, we can be part of the sustainable solution to the Amazon,” says Brito. “But a business as usual approach could destroy the Amazon.”

Photo by a_rabin/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

By Tan Ee Lyn

The researchers matched cholera outbreaks which occurred in Zanzibar between 1999 and 2008 against temperature and rainfall records over the same period and found that the environmental changes were closely followed by disease.

"We found that when temperature goes up by 1 degree Celsius, there is a chance of cholera cases doubling in four months' time and if rainfall goes up by 200 millimetres, then in two months' time, cholera cases will go up by 1.6 folds," Mohammad Ali, a senior scientist at the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, South Korea, said by telephone.

Governments can use these environmental cues to introduce early interventions like vaccinations, he said.

"It can be used as a predictive tool and an early warning system," said Ali, a member of the research team which published their findings in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene on Wednesday.

Cholera has emerged once more as a public health threat because of the dominance of the El Tor strain that causes serious disease. Well adapted to human habitats, it causes longer outbreaks that last for months, even years.

CHOLERA EPIDEMICS LAST LONGER

In Haiti, a cholera epidemic that started in October 2010 after a deadly earthquake has killed 5,000 people and the embattled country is preparing for fresh cholera outbreaks with the start of the rainy season.

Cholera sickened more than 220,000 people around the world in 2009, killing almost 5,000 of them, according to the World Health Organization.

The cholera bacteria reside in sea organisms called copepods. Rises in sea temperature lead to a proliferation of copepods, which in turn helps the cholera bacteria multiply.

"When temperature goes up, cholera bacteria in the ocean environment multiply ... Oceans meet ponds and rivers and then humans (get infected)," Ali said.

Cholera is transmitted through consuming contaminated food and water. It causes severe diarrhea, dehydration and even death if the patient is left untreated.

Peter Hotez of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, who was not involved in the study, said health experts need to reconsider ways to deal with cholera epidemics, which are lasting longer than before.

"This paper implicates that global warming and climate change may have a key role, it also means we need new tools to combat cholera epidemics," Hotez said.

"In the past, the dogma has been there's no time to vaccinate because the epidemic will burn itself out. But now with protracted epidemics, we should stockpile the cholera vaccine," Hotez said by telephone.

Reprinted with permission from Reuters

by Joshua S Hill

Two of Greenland’s largest three glaciers have lost enough ice that they could have filled Lake Erie with the accumulated melted ice water.

According to data compiled at Ohio State University, three glaciers — Helheim, Kangerdlugssuaq and Jakobshavn Isbrae — are responsible for as much as one-fifth of the ice flowing out from Greenland into the ocean.

“Jakobshavn alone drains somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all the ice flowing outward from inland to the sea,” explained Ian Howat, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University.

“Kangerdlugssuaq would have to stop flowing and accumulate snowfall for seven years to regain the ice it has lost,” said Howat.

Howat is one of many scientists who are using Greenland as a laboratory for understanding how climate change is affecting the massive ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica. Currently, researchers like Howat are concentrating on the “mass balance” of glaciers, the rate at which new ice is formed compared to how much ice flows out to sea.

In his study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Howat shows that in the last decade, Jakobshavn Isbrae has lost enough ice to equal 11 years’ worth of normal snow accumulation, approximately 300 gigatons (300 billion tons) of ice.

Unexpectedly, however, the third of the three largest Greenland glaciers, Helheim, has actually gained mass over the same period that its cousins have lost ice, gaining approximately one-fifteenth of what Jakobshavn had lost.

The real value of Howat’s research, however, is in the confirmation that the new techniques Howat and his colleagues have developed are providing more accurate data from which to work with.

“These glaciers change pretty quickly. They speed up and then slow down. There’s a pulsing in the flow of ice,” Howat said. “There’s variability, a seasonal cycle and lots of different changes in the rate that ice is flowing through these glaciers.”

Howat noted that past estimates have only been small glimpses of what was really going on in terms of glacial mass loss. “We really need to sample them very frequently or else we won’t really know how much change has occurred. This new research pumps up the resolution and gives us a kind of high-definition picture of ice loss.”

Reprinted with permission from Planetsave