GEO #009 - 21st, the Century of Drought

I used to think that WW3, if it happens, would be an oil war, or energy war of some kind, but I see that, as time goes by, water will surpass oil as the most precious finite resource, and WW3 could well be a water war.

Several factors will lead separately to this same collective conclusion:



1. Glaciers: There are about 100,000 glaciers in the world: 25,000 in North America, South America, Europe, and New Zealand, and over 34,000 in the former Soviet Union and China.


The Himalayan range alone encompasses about 15,000 glaciers, which store about 12,000 cubic-kilometers of freshwater. They feed 8 major rivers, including the Huang Ho (China), Yangtze (China), Indus (India), Ganges (India) and Mekong (Vietnam). Altogether, they provide water to 1.5 billion people. Unlike American agriculture, which is by and large rain fed, Asian agriculture is by and large river-fed via irrigation. Dry up these rivers and not only will there be no water, there will be no food. Where are these 1.5 billion people, then 2 or 3 billion, to go? What are they to do? Migration is not an option, because water and food will be in short supply everywhere in the world.



2. Drought: "Hot and steamy" is mostly on movie screens, inside tropical rainforests and on the streets of low-latitude coastal cities. Unfortunately, New Orleans and Miami may soon both be underwater, the Amazon may turn to desert by century's end, and movie screens may not survive the collapse of civilization. The new catch phrase is "HOT and DRY", where it really counts - the agricultural areas in the temperate and tropical regions, where rainfall will diminish.







In combination with a burgeoning human population - more mouths to feed with a dwindling food supply on an already over-stretched planet - famine in diverse places will be the result.



Why hot and dry? Because warmer air can "hold" more moisture before saturation, and the warmer it gets, the farther from the dew point it will rise, and the lesser it will rain.





3. Rising demand:

Rising population x rising per capita consumption = UNSUSTAINABLE.





4. Use by sector

To which sector do you belong?




5. Water stress and security risk

Stress x security risk can = WW3




6. Water pollution - mining

In 2008, I flew over 6 Alberta tar sands mines for 2 hours and took these pictures, as well as talked to the native people there about their sky-high cancer rate.








7. Water pollution - animal agriculture

This is on top of the methane emitted into the atmosphere which eclipses the emissions of the entire global transportation system by some 25% in CO2 equivalent.






8. Food crisis and famine

Rise in population X fall in agricultural production = Food crisis and famine.












Anthony Marr, Founder and President
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)
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GEO #008 - Sun vs Man, Global Warming Denial 2

Global Warming Denier #1 Sarah Palin

I'm about to move on to the detonation of the M-BOMB, Doomsday Machine, but by this juncture, the Global Warming Deniers (GWDs) have probably jumped back in and said, "Fine, so the planet is undergoing a warming phase, but it is due to natural forces, solar activities to be exactly, not human action." I call this a Level-2 Global Warming Denier, who is just a little stickier to dislodge than his Level 1 counterpart.

Global Warming Denial has 2 levels:
Level 1 (L1): that GW does not exist, and
Level 2 (L2): that GW does exist, but it is not caused by humans.
In [GEO #002], I dealt with L1. Now, in [GEO #008], it is L2's turn.

The L2-GWDs have 2 types:
L2A. those who believe that GW is not caused by humans, and
L2B. those who believe that GW is caused by humans, but for some reason deny it. The most common reason is, for want of a lowlier term, Bribery, the most common currency of which being Oil.

One of the most common angles of attack by an L2 is to say that whatever global warming there has been is due to the irregularities in the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) impacting the Global Average Temperature (GAT), while using graphs to demonstrate the correlation between the two.





My answer to this argument is:
1. that it is a matter of course, and it stands to simple reason, that an increase in the TSI will raise the GAT, and
2. that the information in the last picture about the TSI on the right hand side of the graph is incorrect; the TSI has been declining since the 1990s, yet the GAT continues to increase.



3. that the GAT corresponds just as well and as closely to the Atmospheric CO2 Concentration (ACC), and


4. that the GAT is not influenced exclusively by either TSI or ACC, but by the two combined.

The following graph is the perfect illustration for #4. Note that on the right hand end of the graphs, denoting the last decade, the TSI curve dips down markedly, while the GAT curve keeps on sharply rising, showing that the ever-rising ACC has taken over from the waning TSI in leading the warming process. But both combined determine the GAT as a whole.



I hope that the L2A-GWDs have seen enough sense in this answer to re-evaluate their belief. As for the L2B-GWDs, what they need is a lie-detector test.

Global Warming Denier #2 Rick Perry


Anthony Marr, Founder and President
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)
Anthony-Marr@HOPE-CARE.org
www.HOPE-CARE.org
www.facebook.com/Anthony.Marr.001
www.facebook.com/Global_Anti-Hunting_Coalition
www.myspace.com/AnthonyMarr
www.youtube.com/AnthonyMarr
www.HomoSapiensSaveYourEarth.blogspot.com
www.DearHomoSapiens.blogspot.com
www.HOPE-GEO.blogspot.com
www.ARConference.org

GEO #007 - CO2, deadly Fuse of the M-BOMB

It never fails to amaze me, and dismay me, that the world's best and brightest, gathered in one place, at the 2009 climate convention in Copenhagen to be exact, that they would be so off-target.


It should be obvious to them that the M-BOMB is the greatest threat we face today and of all time. But while they devoted volumes to the fuse, only the following few lines were about the bomb itself:


"Sci­en­tists are express­ing par­tic­u­lar con­cerns about:
- run­away global warm­ing dri­ven by pos­i­tive feed­back loops between melt­ing per­mafrost, methane hydrates, and methane releases poten­tially capa­ble of increas­ing mean global tem­per­a­ture by 10°C [New Sci­en­tist, 28 March 2009. p32];
- polar ice ­cap insta­bil­ity and asso­ci­ated sea level rises of sev­eral to tens of metres; and
- increas­ing oceanic acid­ity and asso­ci­ated adverse impacts on: coral reefs [bleach­ing, loss of bio­di­ver­sity]; shell­fish; and krill, the base of the food chain on which cetaceans [whales, dol­phins] depend. An acidic ocean largely devoid of life is a sober­ing possibility."


Well, true enough, but is this all there is to it? Is this all they have in mind, and to say, and to act, in saving the planet from the most destructive process it has ever seen since the End-Permian Mass Extinction (Mass Extinction #3, 251 million years ago, which by the same "doomsday machine" caused the extinction of 75% of all land species and 95% of all marine species)? To put this in perspective, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 64 million years ago (Mass Extinction #5) terminated "only" about half of the species of the End-Cretaceous period.


Now, Mass Extinction #6 is about to equal or possibly surpass Mass Extinction #3, the only difference being that while ME3 was caused by geological activities in the early fragmentation of the then supercontinent Pangaea, ME6 is being caused by humans.


It is too late to prevent ME6 from happening, since it is already well under way, and accelerating, currently at the rate of over 100 KNOWN species per DAY, plus an unknown number of unknown species per HOUR. What we must do now is to prevent ME6 from becoming the catastrophe that ME3 was.



What we must first attempt to do is to prevent the M-BOMB from detonating, which does involve disarming its fuse.


Where the M-BOMB is concerned, CH4 (methane) is the bomb, CO2 (carbon dioxide) is only the fuse. To defuse the M-BOMB, we must control and, ASAP, end carbon emissions into the atmosphere from all human sources, be it in the form of CO2 from the transportation system or in the form of CH4 from the meat and dairy industries, the latter actually worse than the former by about 25% in CO2 equivalent.

Per capita CO2 emission

CO2 emission by country
About CO2, the first thing to remember other than that it is the most voluminous of all greenhouse gasses, is that while CH4 is short-lived, half-life in terms of years, CO2 is long lasting, half-life in terms of millennia. What is already in the atmosphere is here to stay, and it will continue warming the planet and acidifying its oceans for centuries to come, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels yesterday.



Second, the last 500,000 years have seen major global average temperature fluctuations 4 times, and at fairly regular intervals. As a rule, the temperature corresponded almost exactly to the atmospheric CO2 concentration of the time. The important point to note is that at no time did the CO2 concentration fall below 200ppm or rise above 300ppm. This had held true all the way to as late as the year 1880 AD, the demarcation point of the human-caused Industrial Revolution, when the CO2 was at a very sustainable 280ppm. Today, 130 years hence, the CO2 concentration has risen to 390ppm, increasing at about 1ppm per year, and accelerating.


It has been determined that 350ppm is the maximum the planet can sustain without global warming escalating into Runaway Global Heating. We already are in dire straights as to how to reduce the current 390ppm back down blow 350ppm, when, just last week, the oil nations proclaimed a target of 450ppm minimum - a suicide scenario. Long before 420ppm, the Arctic ice cap will have disappeared in the summer, the Arctic Ocean temperature will have risen enough to melt the surrounding permafrost for hundreds of miles inland, releasing the methane (CH4) hitherto frozen therein, thus detonating the M-BOMB, Doomsday Machine.


Our current course of ecocide is also one of biocide and, yes, suicide.


Reverse course, if we want to live.


Anthony Marr, Founder and President
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)
Anthony-Marr@HOPE-CARE.org
www.HOPE-CARE.org
www.facebook.com/Anthony.Marr.001
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www.myspace.com/AnthonyMarr
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www.HomoSapiensSaveYourEarth.blogspot.com
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www.HOPE-GEO.blogspot.com
www.ARConference.org