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	Errant Climate signal of Climate Breakdown by AP / Climate Progress USA   Aug 2010   Floods, fires, melting ice, and feverish heat — from smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It is not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.   The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says, although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.   The specialists see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia’s heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They will discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under UN, US, and British government sponsorship.   “There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.   He said modelers of climate systems are eager to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak havoc on the weather.   The UN’s network of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves and more intense rainfalls.   In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends “have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.   Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day’s weather.   Stott and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it is better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for heat waves, for example. “That is exactly what’s happening," Schmidt said, “a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."   The World Meteorological Organization pointed out that this summer’s events fit the international scientists projections of “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming." In fact, in key cases they’re a perfect fit.   Russia   It has been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia, with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time. Russia’s drought has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing Moscow with a toxic smog that lifted yesterday after six days.   The Russian capital’s death rate doubled to 700 people a day at one point. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.   The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires in dry years. It also said that Russia would suffer large crop losses.   Pakistan   The heaviest monsoon rains on record, 12 inches in one 36-hour period, have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside, flooding thousands of villages. It has left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected and killed 1,500.   The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history.   A warmer atmosphere can hold and discharge more water. The 2007 report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia’s monsoon region.   China   China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the World Meteorological Organization says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,100 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away, or buried beneath mud and debris.   The Intergovernmental Panel reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961 and that floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century. Visit the related web page
	Russian heat wave a wake-up call to the World by IPS / Earth Policy Institute   Aug 2010 (IPS)   A wind turbine on an acre of northern Iowa farmland could generate 300,000 dollars worth of greenhouse-gas-free electricity a year. Instead, the U.S. government pays out billions of dollars to subsidise grain for ethanol fuel that has little if any impact on global warming, according to Lester Brown.   "The smartest thing the U.S. could do is phase out ethanol subsidies," says Brown, the founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, in reference to rising food prices resulting from the unprecedented heat wave in western Russia that has decimated crops and killed at least 15,000 people.   "The lesson here is that we must take climate change far more seriously, make major cuts in emissions and fast before climate change is out of control," Brown, one of the world"s leading experts on agriculture and food, told IPS.   Average temperatures during the month of July were eight degrees Celsius above normal in Moscow, he said, noting that "such a huge increase in temperature over an entire month is just unheard of."   Moscow reached 37 C when the normal temperature for August is 21 C. It was the 28th day in a row that temperatures exceeded 30 C.   Soil moisture has fallen to levels seen only once in 500 years, says Brown. Wheat and other grain yields are expected to decline by 40 percent or more in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine - regions that provide 25 percent of the world"s wheat exports.   Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would ban all grain exports.   Food prices will rise but how much is not known at this point, says Brown. "What we do know, however, is that the prices of wheat, corn, and soybeans are actually somewhat higher in early August 2010 than they were in early August 2007, when the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices began."   Emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2 from burning fossil fuels trap more of the sun"s energy. Climate experts expected the number and intensity of heat waves and droughts to increase as a result. In 2009, heat and fire killed hundreds in Australia during the worst drought in more than century, which devastated the country"s agriculture sector. In 2003, a European heat wave killed 53,000 people but as it occurred late in the summer crop, yields were not badly affected.   If a heat wave like Russia"s were centred around the grain- producing regions near Chicago or Beijing, the impacts could be many times worse because each of these regions produce five times the amount of grain as Russia does, says Brown. Such an event could result in the loss of 100 to 200 million tonnes of grain with unimaginable affects on the world"s food supply.   "Russia"s heat wave is a wake-up call to the world regarding the vulnerability of the global food supply," he said.   The global climate is warming and most food crops are both heat and drought sensitive. Rice yields have already fallen by 10-20 percent over the last 25 years in parts of Thailand, Vietnam, India and China due to global warming, new research has shown. Data from 227 fully-irrigated farms that grow "green revolution" crops are suffering significant yield declines due to warming temperatures at night, researchers found.   "As nights get hotter, rice yields drop," reported Jarrod Welch of the University of California at San Diego and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).   With such pressures on the world"s food supply it is simply wrong-headed to use 25 percent of U.S. grain for ethanol as a fuel for cars, said Brown. "Ethanol subsidies must be phased out and real cuts in carbon emissions made and urgently," he said. Visit the related web page
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