Cape Town heads for 'Day Zero' as water supplies dwindle

itv.com - The water supply in Cape Town will be cut off within weeks if residents do not start to ration their usage, officials in the city have warned.

April 12 has been dubbed "Day Zero" - the moment the taps will run dry as South Africa battles to deal with its worst drought in almost a century.

Levels of usable water in the dams surrounding Cape Town have been dropping by 1.4 per cent a day, and currently stand at around 17.2 per cent.

When they hit 13.5 per cent - estimated for April 12 - the pipeline will be shut down and the city's four million residents will have to queue up each day for their supply from one of 200 water collection points.

A number of trial water collection points have been set up already, and are popular with people trying to stock up.

The daily ration has been set at 25 litres. A single flush of a toilet uses around 15 litres.

Strict limits on water usage have been in place for months, asking residents to stick to 87 litres a day - but many people appear to have ignored the warnings.

The limit will fall to 50 litres a day on February 1 - but the city's mayor, Patricia de Lille, said she feared they had reached the "point of no return".

"Despite our urging for months, 60 per cent of Capetonians are callously using more than 87 litres per day," she said.

"It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards Day Zero.

"We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We must force them." ContinueReading

World of heat as southeast Australia swelters

theaustralian.com.au: The western Sydney suburb of Penrith was possibly the hottest place on the planet yesterday (Jan 7), reaching 47.3C as the NSW capital recorded its highest temperature since World War II.

The heat across the peak population centres in NSW was so ­extreme it plunged about 9000 homes into blackouts affecting Bateau Bay and Blue Haven on the central coast and Lane Cove, Gladesville, Bankstown and Punchbowl in Sydney.

The blackouts, according to Ausgrid, were related to “severe weather conditions”.

A heatwave caused by sweltering northerly air across central Australia swept across NSW, Victoria and South Australia at the weekend, prompting authorities to slap total fire bans on several states.

NSW residents were instructed by the Rural Fire Service to “head back home and sit in the aircon”, as temperatures soared in the greater Sydney and Hunter Valley regions.

Cricket fans braved the heat for the Ashes Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground, where the mercury soared to 41C by midday, though a thermometer in the sun on the pitch recorded 57C.

Penrith recorded its hottest day in 80 years at 3.25pm, the hottest place in Australia and potentially the world.

It did not manage to break the hottest record in the area of 47.8C, which was recorded at an old ­observation site in Richmond in 1939 when it was not part of ­greater Sydney.

The Bureau of Meteorology had initially forgotten about the site and had to rescind an earlier announcement of a record for greater Sydney.

BOM duty forecaster Helen Reid said the weekend’s temperatures were well above 40C in central NSW as well as most places west of the ranges.

“We saw a weak trough in the southeast of NSW, in combination with a strong high pressure system over the Tasman Sea,” Ms Reid said. “That combination provided a good flow of hot northerly air in the central part of Australia, which dragged lots of heat through the state.”

Study: Climate change already causing suicides in India as crops fail

Berkeley — Climate change has already caused more than 59,000 suicides in India over the last 30 years, according to estimates in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that suggests failing harvests that push farmers into poverty are likely the key culprits.

University of California, Berkeley, researcher Tamma Carleton discovered that warming a single day by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) during India’s agricultural growing season leads to roughly 65 suicides across the country, whenever that day’s temperature is above 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). Warming a day by 5 degrees Celsius has five times that effect.

While high temperatures and low rainfall during the growing season substantially impact annual suicide rates, similar events have no effect on suicide rates during the off-season, when few crops are grown, implicating agriculture as the critical link.

This study helps explain India’s evolving suicide epidemic, where suicide rates have nearly doubled since 1980 and claim more than 130,000 lives each year. Carleton’s results indicate that 7 percent of this upward trend can be attributed to warming that has been linked to human activity.

Is there a link between climate change and diabetes?

(CNN) Scientists have long warned that rising global temperatures may impact public health in a devastating way because climate change is associated with deadly weather events, the spread of infectious diseases and even food shortages.

Now, researchers are looking at whether climate change might be linked to another public health concern: Type 2 diabetes.

Between 1996 and 2009, as outdoor temperatures rose across the United States, so did the prevalence of diabetes, according to a study published in the journal BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care on Monday.

"We were surprised though by the magnitude of the effect size," said Lisanne Blauw, a researcher at Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands and lead author of the study.

"We calculated that a 1-degree Celsius rise in environmental temperature could account for more than 100,000 new diabetes cases per year in the USA alone," she said. "Future research into the effects of global warming on our health status is therefore of great importance."

However, this observational study simply reveals an association between climate and diabetes, not a causation. Among the factors known to cause Type 2 diabetes are being overweight or obese and having a family history of the disease.

"I think calorie consumption and weight are probably the biggest by a country mile," said Dr. Adrian Vella, an endocrinologist who has researched Type 2 diabetes at the Mayo Clinic. He was not involved in the new study.

"I think the general message always should be that association studies do not actually imply causation," he said of linking climate change and diabetes.

Currently, about one out of every three Americans will develop Type 2 diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (ontinueReading

Earth Sets Record Temperature in 2016 — for Third Year in a Row

nbcnews.com - Last year was the hottest year ever recorded, marking the third year in a row that average global temperatures hit record-setting levels, NASA and NOAA said Wednesday Jan 18.

"That's pretty unusual, but what's going on is this a long-term underlying trend that's driven mainly by greenhouse gases and the fact that carbon dioxide is continuing to increase," NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt told NBC News.

The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 58.69 degrees Fahrenheit, 1.69 degrees above the 20th century average, NOAA said Wednesday morning.

NASA and NOAA, which separately analyze global temperature data, have both found that global temperatures surpassed records for the past three years. Schmidt described the trend as remarkable.

"This is not what we want, we don't want to be breaking new records every year," Schmidt said. He added that while scientists did not expect every year going forward to be record-breaking, the news was indicative of global warming patterns over the past few decades.

The announcement comes on the same day as Senate confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt.

As attorney general, Pruitt fought hard against environmental regulations imposed by the EPA and even sued the very agency he has been asked to lead. Those actions, and his ties to the fossil fuel industry, have environmental activists and some scientists sounding the alarm.

During his hearing, Pruitt questioned mankind's impact on climate change, but said his personal opinion was "immaterial" to his heading the regulatory agency.

"I believe the ability to measure with precision the degree of human activities impact on the climate is subject to more debate on whether the climate is changing or whether human activity is contributing to it," the Oklahoma attorney general said.

NASA said in its findings on Wednesday that the planet's average temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.1 degrees Celsius, since the late 19th century, a change "driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere."

Some scientists noted that global temperatures were coming "dangerously close" to levels agreed to in the Paris climate change agreement, which more than 190 countries signed in 2015 in an attempt to stave off the worsening impacts of climate change.

The climate deal aims to keep the rise in global temperatures "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and attempt to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees. (ontinueReading

Tornado Outbreaks On The Rise: Is Climate Change Cause For Blame?

- Frequent tornadoes and thunderstorms that kill people and destroy property have become a matter of grave concern. In the United States alone, the insured losses caused by severe thunderstorms have been put at $8.5 billion from the period between January to June 2016.

A new study has tried a linkage between climate change and the increasing incidents of tornadoes. Calling for a deeper study on some meteorological factors, the paper zeroes in on vertical wind shear as an important variable in triggering mega storms.

Led by Michael Tippett, associate professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, the study published in Science scans significant tornadoes and outbreaks lasting for many days. It notes that major tornado incidents had been going up substantially since 1954 though a definite reason could not be given for that.

In the paper, researchers have analyzed the trends in the tornado outbreaks and found extreme outbreaks are increasing at the fastest rate.

"This study raises new questions about what climate change will do to severe thunderstorms and what is responsible for recent trends," says Tippett, who is also associated with the Data Science Institute and the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate.

Offering new insight into the trends in environmental conditions that encourage thunderstorms and tornadoes, the study looks at the convective available potential energy, or CAPE, and storm relative helicity, a measure of vertical wind shear.

With greenhouse gases trapping more energy and heat in the atmosphere air will start holding more water and that opens the scope for extreme storms.

One crucial ingredient in forming violent storms is vertical wind shear, which lifts intensity in sync with altitude. Unlike CAPE, shear does not change much with global warming. (FullText)

2016 ‘very likely’ to be the hottest year on record, U.N. agency declares

- Timed for the ongoing international climate meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has affirmed what many scientists had already considered inevitable — 2016, the agency said, will “very likely” be the hottest year on record. That would mean that the last three years — 2014, 2015, and 2016 — have set ever more impressive temperature records in quick succession.

The agency was able to say as much, despite the year not even being over yet, due to the jaw-dropping heat seen throughout much of the year. Multiple months in 2016 set new monthly temperature records, buoyed by a very strong El Nino event.

Sixteen “of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century,” noted the agency.

Overall, the WMO said, 2016 was 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer on average than temperatures for the pre-industrial Earth. That’s a highly significant number, in that it puts the planet quite close to the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature threshold enshrined as an aspirational goal in the Paris climate agreement. Some scientists have said we could cross 1.5 degrees for good by 2030. (FullText)

Study Links Human Actions to Arctic Sea Ice Disappearance

POLAR BEARS!

voiceofamericanews:

 Ice has been disappearing in the Arctic Ocean since at least the 1960. Each year, more and more sea ice vanishes in the Arctic north, and one study says every one of us is personally responsible.

Each passenger taking a flight from New York to Europe, or driving 4,000 kilometers in a gasoline-powered car, emits enough greenhouse gas to melt three square meters of ice on the Arctic Ocean, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The study calculates that for every metric ton of carbon dioxide put in the air, there are three square meters less of sea ice in the month of September when the Arctic region is least frozen. Using observations, statistics and 30 different computer models, the study’s authors show heat-trapping gases cause warming and the melting of sea ice in a way that can be translated into a simple mathematical formula.

There's "a very clear linear relationship'' between carbon dioxide emissions and sea ice retreat in September, especially at the southern boundary edges, said study lead author Dirk Notz, a climate scientist at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

"It's very simple. Those emissions from our tailpipes and our coal-fired power plants are all going into the atmosphere,'' said study co-author Julienne Stroeve, a climate scientist at both the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and University College, London. "It just increases the warming at the surface. So the ice is going to respond to that. The only way it can do that is to move further north.''

Stroeve and Notz calculated that the average American each year is responsible for carbon emissions that lead to melting around 50 square meters of September sea ice — about the size of small one-bedroom apartment in a U.S. city.

Many animal species in the Arctic heavily depend on sea ice, and it's likely they will struggle to survive with an ice-free Arctic during the summer, Notz said. For example, polar bears, who spend most of their lives on the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean, could be at risk.

As for the future of Arctic sea ice, the study said the international target of 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, as spelled out in the Paris Agreement on climate change that goes into effect Friday, will not be sufficient to allow Arctic summer sea ice to survive. At current carbon emission levels, the ocean around the North Pole would likely be ice-free in Septembers in about 30 years.

Earth stays on track for the hottest year ever

(japantimes.co.jp) GENEVA – The Earth is on track for its hottest year on record and warming at a faster rate than expected, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Thursday.

Temperatures recorded mainly in the Northern Hemisphere in the first six months of the year, coupled with an early and fast Arctic sea ice melt and “new highs” in heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels, point to quickening climate change, it said.

June marked the 14th straight month of record heat, the United Nations agency said. It called for speedy implementation of a global pact reached in Paris last December to limit climate change by shifting from fossil fuels to green energy by 2100.

“What we’ve seen so far for the first six months of 2016 is really quite alarming,” David Carlson, director of the WMO’s Climate Research Programme, told a news briefing.

“This year suggests that the planet can warm up faster than we expected in a much shorter time. … We don’t have as much time as we thought.”

The average temperature in the first six months of 2016 was 1.3 degree Celsius (2.4 degree Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial era of the late 19th Century, according to space agency NASA.

Under the Paris Agreement, nearly 200 governments agreed to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, while “pursuing efforts” for a ceiling of 1.5 degres C — a lower limit already close to being reached.

The last month with global temperatures below the 20th century average was December 1984, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“There’s almost no plausible scenario at this point that is going to get us anything other than an extraordinary year in terms of ice (melt), CO2, temperature — all the things that we track,” Carlson said.

“If we got this much surprise this year, how many more surprises are ahead of us?”

A strong El Nino weather event from 2015/2016 in the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon associated with extreme droughts, storms and floods, contributed to the record temperatures in the first half of 2016 before disappearing in May, WMO said.

“Climate change, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will not (disappear). This means we face more heat waves, more extreme rainfall and potential for higher impact tropical cyclones,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Repeated extremes, such as heat waves, downpours or droughts, could encourage more action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Research shows that for the general public extremes make climate change more tangible, more understandable,” said Joeri Rogelj, a climate expert at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna.

“It could help to motivate people to engage in climate action, and do something.” (FullStory)

The worst drought in 900 years helped spark Syria's civil war

(Mashable) - The drought that played a role in triggering the catastrophic Syrian Civil War was the worst such climate event in at least the past 900 years, according to a new study published this week.

The study bolsters the conclusions from other research that found that because of human-made global warming, the drought was made three times more likely to occur, and that it was one of a number of factors that led to the outbreak of hostilities in 2011.

The new study examined tree-ring records showing the annual precipitation history from recent years back to the year 1100, across an area stretching from southern Europe to northern Africa to the Levant region of the Middle East.

The Levant region encompasses Cyprus, Israel-Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey.

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, found that in the western Mediterranean, recent droughts have not yet departed from their natural variability, but in the east, including Syria, they have.

The conclusion about the Levant drought in particular increases confidence in computer model projections of future climate conditions.