The Peakist

Calculated Earth is a collaborative effort by Malcolm Burke and Jonathan Burke and arises out of a piece of background research work that lead  them to the many freely available topographical data sources on the net.

The maps and animations are plotted using the June 2006 ETOPO2v2 data set from the US National Geophysical Data Centre.

The maps simply show graphically the selected height across the ETOPO2v2 dataset without interpretation or adjustment. So landlocked areas of the world that are below the selected level will show as being flooded regardless of being without a connection to the sea. No adjustments are made for tides.

Considering the flooding currently plaguing England, plotting the first few metres of sea level rise on this site should make you think about the scale of disaster we are facing if the polar caps continue melting.
http://calculatedearth.com

Howard Kunstler wrote ‘The Long Emergency’ on the premise that in the near future our lives will change dramatically due to a confluence point of simultaineous global problems. The primary issue here being peak oil. A secondary issue he touched on was climate change, to which many are attributing this summer’s uncharacteristic weather patterns.

I believe this is the first micro effects of a confluence of problems that will directly effect the standards of living in the western world.
” In the 40 years between 1950 and 1992, the area of planted arable land increased by 14.5 per cent from 611 million hectares to 700 million hectares; in the same period, grain output rose from 692 million tons to a staggering 1,920 million tons, an increase of 177.5 per cent…….. The ability of agriculture to produce far greater quantities food this century than in previous centuries can be attributed to four factors: advanced plant breeding techniques, the use of intensive irrigation, the availability of fertilizers on a commercial scale, and the development of plant protection products. Applied together, these four technologies have produced a remarkable outcome: although there has been an enormous increase in world population during the twentieth century, and although there are still parts of the world where people are suffering from malnutrition, nowadays, starvation is no longer a common cause of death, as it was in the last century. Nevertheless, because the population of the world continues to rise, 680 million people - or 12 per cent of the world’s population - could be chronically undernourished by 2010, according to FAO projections. This means that the demands on agriculture to be both productive and sustainable are increasing. ” source EFMA

(more…)

Ivan Semeniuk reports in New Scientist on the carbon threat from the US coal mountain: “AT THE back of Ernest Moniz’s mind a clock is ticking. Moniz is director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mental countdown marks the narrowing window of time that remains for the US to address a looming environmental disaster fuelled by the burning of mountains of cheap American coal. (more…)

NewScientist.com news service
Rachel Nowak, Melbourne

The largest carbon burial experiment in the world began in earnest on Thursday when the drilling of a 2100-metre well began in the Otway Basin, on the coast of southern Australia. The project promised the most comprehensive monitoring for leaks to date. (more…)

It’s rare that an opinion is expressed so contrary to one’s own received wisdom by someone of such authority that you just can’t ignore it. So when James Hansen, Director and lead climate scientist of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science says that the remaining oil and gas can be burnt whilst limiting atmospheric CO2 to ~450ppm and incremental temperature increase to only 1°C, it stopped me in my tracks. Hansen famously accused the Bush administration of trying to silence him after calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in 2005 and stated last year, in the context of reporting the results of NASA studies on arctic sea ice loss, ““We have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change – no longer than decade at most” (more…)

The European commission today unveils an energy blueprint that calls for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, more use of renewable sources and increased competition.
Commissioners are expected to endorse a plan that calls for all developed countries to cut 1990-level emissions by 30% by 2020. At the same time, the commission is set to propose that the EU set a target to cut its own emissions by 20% during the same period, with the possibility of increasing that target if the international community agrees to a broader cut. Environmentalists criticised the commission for setting an internal target below the one it seeks for the world as a whole. “We think that this is a political and scientific blunder,” said Mahi Sideridou, the climate policy director at Greenpeace in Brussels.  Source

In the 2006 budget the UK Government introduced the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO)- a requirement on transport fuel suppliers to ensure that, by 2010 5% of all road vehicle fuel is supplied from renewable sources, bringing the UK roughly in line with the 2003 EU biofuels directive. In the US, with federal subsidies for bioethanol production, and in the EU with targets to be met, biofuels are big business. A recent study by the Worldwatch Institute concluded that, for Europe to provide for 5% of its transport fuel needs, a wholly unrealistic 36% of its agricultural land would have to be dedicated to biofuels. While currently British Sugar supplies much of the feedstock for UK biofuels, most of it blended with supermarket forecourt petrol, there is no way to meet the modest 2010 biofuel target utilising crops from European land. Instead the targets will be met with imports of biodeisel and ethanol - both of which currently present huge enviornmental problems and to greater or lesser extent displace the CO2 emissions that are the raison d’etre of the RTFO from European tailpipes to the US grain belt and Indonesian palm oil plantations.

Sasha Lilley reports for CorpWatch on the reality of the “green fuel” ethanol:

“The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a “City of Power and Progress.” If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. (more…)

By the end of today, the average British person will be responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the average person in the world’s poorest countries will produce all year. The startling statement is revealed today in a report by the World Development Movement (WDM), which says that while the least developed countries do not contribute to global warming, the millions who live there are most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Eight days into the new year, the average UK citizen will be responsible for the production of 0.21 tonnes of carbon dioxide - the same amount as the annual tally for a person in countries such as Zambia. (more…)

Study finds enough electric capacity to ‘fill up’ plug-in vehicles across much of the nation

If all the cars and light trucks in the nation switched from oil to electrons, idle capacity in the existing electric power system could generate most of the electricity consumed by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. A new study for the Department of Energy finds that “off-peak” electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of the country’s 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics. (more…)

Meet the world’s top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow. A United Nations report has identified the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs. (more…)

Steve Connor, Science Editor of The Independent writes: “The Arctic could lose virtually all its summer sea ice by the year 2040 - 40 years earlier than previously thought - according to a study by leading climate scientists. A rapid acceleration in the loss of sea ice seen in recent years will be dwarfed by the massive melting, up to four times faster than previously, which could take place within 20 years, the scientists predict. (more…)