We know that glaciers are melting and shrinking around the world. That raises the question of what happens to the lakes and streams that depend on those glaciers for their source of water?

Water levels on the world’s highest navigable lake have dropped 81 cm (2.6 ft) in just seven months, since April this year, according to the Binational Lake Titicaca Authority, ALT.

Over the past four years, the seasonal rainfall and the flow into Lake Titicaca from the feeder rivers has not been sufficient to compensate for the loss of water from evaporation and the discharge of water from the lake into the Desaguadero River.

It’s getting to the point where fish and other life in the lake are threatened by the drying of the lake. Which raises the question of what happens to 1.2 million people when the water source they depend on evaporates away?

That remains to be seen.

The fight over a climate bill in the Senate is going to be fun. Senator Barbara Boxer set the tone today when she decided that Republican attempts to delay a vote were unreasonable, and her committee simply went ahead and passed the bill without them.

I bet that pisses them off. There’s nothing a blowhard hates more than simply being ignored.

Heaven forbid the United States Senate should actually tackle two big issues at once.

Climate change has slipped so far down on the agenda that at least one key committee chairman has suggested it might have to wait until after the 2010 elections.

A number of factors are conspiring against the Senate version of the bill: a Republican boycott on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a new EPA analysis that could take at least five weeks and wide-ranging disagreements among six competing Senate committee leaders who have jurisdiction.

Democratic leaders also seem unwilling to expend much political capital on climate change when they aren’t even sure when health care reform might get done.

“We’re not going to be bound by any timelines” on health care, Reid told reporters after a closed-door lunch meeting with Senate Democrats.

The more time health care takes, say supporters, the further a climate bill most likely gets pushed back.

The thing about adopting a delaying strategy, as the Republicans are doing on almost all bills, is that the U.S. Senate, as an institution, is designed from the start to aid that strategy. Still, leadership could find a way, and if a climate bill gets put off in the Senate the Democratic leadership will be the first in line for the blame.

Two stories in the news today about climate change and what we might be able to do about. First, on the political front, we now have the text of the complete bill now making its way through the Senate.

Senator Barbara Boxer released a 923-page draft of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act over the weekend, the Senate version of climate and energy legislation, for the first time specifying emissions allocations and costs proposed in the bill.

“We’ve reached another milestone as we move to a clean energy future, creating millions of jobs and protecting our children from dangerous pollution,” Boxer, chairperson of the Environmental and Public Works Committee, who wrote the bill with Senator John Kerry, said on Friday.

In terms of emissions allocation, the Senate bill in many respect mirrors provisions in the House version passed last summer (H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.)

There are links in the original that will take you to the complete texts of both the House and Senate bills as they are now configured. The other news indicates that focusing on emissions from energy plants, industry, and automobiles could be only about half of the solution.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food account for 51% of annual emissions caused by humans and should be given higher priority in global efforts to fight climate change, World Bank Group experts argue.

The authors recognise that the 51% figure put forward “is a strong claim that requires strong evidence,” but stress that if their argument is right, “it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives” would have far more rapid effects on the climate than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

This partly due to significant reductions in the amount of methane, produced by enteric fermentation from cattle. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, 37% of human-induced methane comes from livestock. Although methane produced by enteric fermentation from cattle warms the atmosphere much more strongly than CO2, its half-life in the atmosphere is only about eight years, compared to at least 100 years for CO2.

Before anyone decides that what this means is that animals are just as responsible for greenhouse gases as we are, consider this:

“Livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe,” they state.

Another factor involved is the amount of forest land cut down and cleared to make pastures for grazing animals. That not only releases CO2 from the soil, it reduces the forest’s capacity for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

What this all makes apparent is that climate change is a global problem not only in the geographical sense, but also in the sense that it’s a consideration in our entire lives, from the cars we drive, the way we heat our homes and light our cities, even to the kinds of food we eat and how it’s grown. The bills now working their way through Congress are focused on energy and transportation, maybe it’s time to get the Agriculture Committee involved, too.

There’s a UN conference on climate change coming up in six weeks in Copenhagen. I usually don’t pay much attention to these, the kinds of agreements they reach, if any, are usually either watered down to the point where they’re more symbolic than anything else.

But if there’s any form of behavior that could change that, it’s competition. Imagine if the biggest polluters suddenly began to compete to see who could do the most to cut emissions and help solve the problem. get some national pride involved and almost anything could happen.

That’s what makes this report interesting. It’s a good start, but we’ll have to see if it brings about a response from the rest of the world.

Europe attempted to reassert its international leadership in the fight against global warming today, offering to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95% by 2050 and by 30% by 2020 if a climate change pact is sealed in Copenhagen in six weeks’ time.

“This should be seen as a clear message to the world,” said Andreas Carlgren, the Swedish environment minister who chaired the Luxembourg meeting. “We expect to reach an agreement in Copenhagen,” he added, after environment ministers from 27 countries finalised a common EU negotiating position.

Come on everybody, don’t let those Europeans steal the show and set all the standards themselves. Show ‘em we can cut even more emissions than they do! (Cue cheerleaders and band.)

The plight of rainforests and their significance when it comes to global warming is pretty well known. New to most of us, though, is the idea that there are forests under the ocean that are every bit, if not more, important than rainforests when it comes to capturing CO2 and alleviating climate change.

Life in the ocean has the potential to help to prevent global warming, according to a report published today.
Marine plant life sucks 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, but most of the plankton responsible never reaches the seabed to become a permanent carbon store.

Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are a different matter. Although together they cover less than 1 percent of the world’s seabed, they lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor. They are estimated to store 1,650 million tons of carbon dioxide every year — nearly half of global transport emissions — making them one of the most intense carbon sinks on Earth.

Their capacity to absorb the emissions is under threat, however: the habitats are being lost at a rate of up to 7 percent a year, up to 15 times faster than the tropical rainforests. A third have already been lost.

One nightmare scenario, the kind you might find in a good disaster novel, would be that the solution to our global warming problem is out there, but that by the time we find it the plant or animal it depends on is already gone, a victim of the change it may have helped prevent or ameliorate. The oceans harbor so much life, and so much would be lost if we completely screwed them up, that’s it’s not to difficult conceiving the ifea that the solutions we need could be found there, and that it is already to lat to do anything about it.

If you’ve been watching and enjoying Ken Burns’ documentary on our national parks now being shown on PBS stations, and why wouldn’t you, you’ve probably picked up on one of the major themes; that the early history of the parks was often one of a few people managing to establish the parks in the face of misunderstanding and, at times, outright opposition. That the idea of the parks came to be at all is a minor miracle, that they were first established at a time when exploitation of resources was seen by many as the end all and be all of their existence is more of a major one.

Of course, the problems faced by the parks today are different than those encountered in simply trying to get them set up in the first place. Management and use issues tend to dominate conversation about the parks, but there is a looming issue that threatens to change the very nature of the parks themselves. If global warming and climate change prevail, for many of the parks, from the glaciers of Glacier National Park to the Joshua trees the very reasons the parks were established to preserve will disappear forever.

That’s the theme of a report issued last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. As their report shows what Burns characterizes as America’s best idea is in danger of being destroyed not by competing development or over-use, although those are perennial problems, but by a changing climate that could lead to an irreversible change to the very landscape the parks are intended to preserve.

That would be a shame, not just for us but also the wildlife and other species that have come to depend on the presence of the parks to protect the habitat they depend on for life. The problem is serious, but it may not be too late yet to do something about it. For an introduction, including a slide show of the most endangered parks, click here, to go straight to the report, here (pdf file).

It’s been a while since we took a look at conditions on the Arctic ice cap. It would be nice to have some good news to pass along for a change, but that just doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

Out in the Arctic Ocean, about 200 miles (322 km ) north of the nearest human settlement, the future of the world’s climate is written in the patterns of ice patches on the water’s surface.

Old, “multiyear” ice — the glue that holds the polar ice cap together and forms the Arctic’s defense against encroaching warming — is slowly disintegrating, a process that is plain to see from the air.

Thick ice floes used to be kilometers (miles) wide just over a decade ago, said Jim Overland, a sea-ice expert with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who has been surveying the site since the 1990s.

Now the narrow floes — with bright-white tops and a blue underwater glow — are just meters (yards) wide, observed Overland as he studied the patterns from the window of a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 aircraft.

The dense, high-quality ice is not coming back, Overland said.

The arctic ice cap is a major component of the entire world’s climate. If it disappears, and all evidence right now is that it’s a matter of when, not if, it could have a profound effect on the balance of weather patterns all around the Earth. That’s a future we are looking at unless real efforts are made to prevent it, and with all the opposition to doing anything from everyone who profits from things as they are, and the people they’ve convinced that global warming isn’t something we have anything to do with or can do anything about, it’s hard to see how that will happen.

I’m becoming more and more afraid that nothing meaningful will be done about what we’re doing to the environment until some major catastrophe occurs, and by then, for millions of people, it will be too late.

Two developments today in the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and begin to combat the effects of climate change. First, legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate today.

The United States today took a big step towards enacting legislation to combat global climate change.

U.S. Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, introduced the Kerry-Boxer bill, formally known as the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act to limit greenhouse gas emissons while putting Americans back to work.

The bill targets a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels, stating that this is “the minimum scientists judge necessary to avert a climate disaster.”

Remember that legislation has already passed the House of Representatives. The Senate bill may be a little stricter than the House version, but it’s pretty comparable and is already attracting criticism from opponents, some arguing it goes too far, some not far enough.

Meanwhile, while Congress deliberates, the EPA keeps moving ahead on its own.

The Obama administration is not waiting for legislation governing greenhouse gas emissions to be approved by Congress, but is proceeding to regulate these gases under the Clean Air Act.

Large industrial facilities that emit at least 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year will have to obtain Clean Air Act construction and operating permits covering these emissions, under a proposal announced today by U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

A similiar rule requires the use of best available control technologies when industrial facilities add generating capacity under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act.

One thing to keep in mind here is that CO2 emissions are measured not in ounces or pounds or even hundreds of pounds. The standards involved are instead thousands of tons per power plant. That’s a lot of pollution, and while on one hand it points out the immensity of the problem, on the other it shows how much room there is for improvement.

Another thing to keep in mind is the irony that while climate change deniers like Senator James Inhofe do everything they can to block legislation, they open the door for the EPA to proceed with regulation.

The scariest thing about climate change and greenhouse gases and global warming and all that stuff is that it seems every time a new study comes out, the problem looks bigger, and is happening sooner.

Global temperatures may be 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the mid-2050s if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue, said a study published on Monday.

The study, by Britain’s Met Office Hadley Center, echoed a U.N. report last week which found that climate changes were outpacing worst-case scenarios forecast in 2007 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Our results are showing similar patterns (to the IPCC) but also show the possibility that more extreme changes can happen,” said Debbie Hemming, co-author of the research published at the start of a climate change conference at Oxford University.

Leaders of the main greenhouse gas-emitting countries recognized in July a scientific view that temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, to avoid more dangerous changes to the world’s climate.

Note that language. Reality is turning out to be worse than even the worst-case scenarios if just a few years ago. And, even as the problem becomes bigger and more immediate, politics, greed, and misinformation from the die-hard deniers prevents us from doing anything meaningful about it.

Die-hard is the right phrase here, because if the forces arrayed against doing anything about climate change have their way, that’s exactly what will happen. People will die. Judging from past human behavior, though, it will take a catastrophe for people to really wake up to the dangers. By then it could be too late, and we will have permanently altered the balance of air, water and temperature that defines the world’s climate.