[Peace-discussion] War, peace, climate, Africa

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:27:22 -0400 (EDT)

The evidence continues to mount: climate changes due to human-caused
Global Warming are affecting issues of war and peace. To continue to
ignore this is to linger in the past to the point of irrelevance. Note to those who &quot;already have a theory of war &amp; peace-&quot;
Global Warming is a huge
change of context, but certainly cannot change the nature of
classical imperialists or of modern ones like George Bush &amp; Co.
IMHO. (I find this article to be credible because it references Nature, a reliable peer-reviewed
journal, and because the newspaper has been reliable in the past. Also be
aware that this article is about just one piece in the puzzle, thus its
seeming incompleteness.) &lt;http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22124393-23109,00.html&gt; <div class="article-title">

				<h1><a
href="http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22124393-23109,00.html"><font
size="4">Global warming already changing rainfall</font></a></h1>July
24, 2007 12:24am<br /><div class="storyintro">
	<p>A STUDY has yielded the first
confirmation that global warming is already affecting the world's
rainfall patterns, bringing more precipitation to northern Europe,
Canada and northern Russia but less to swathes of sub-Saharan Africa,
southern India and Southeast Asia.</p>
</div> The changes &quot;may have already had significant effects on
ecosystems, agriculture and human regions that are sensitive to changes
in precipitation, such as the Sahel'', warns the paper released today
by <em>Nature</em>, the British science journal. <br /><br />Scientists
have long said that global warming is bound to interfere with snow and
rainfall patterns, because air and sea temperatures and sea-level
atmospheric pressure - the underlying forces behind these patterns -
are already changing. <br /><br />But, until now, evidence that the
interference was already happening existed anecdotally or in computer
models, rather than from observation. <br /><br />One problem for
researchers has been a lack of accurate, long-term rainfall data from
around the world that would enable them to distinguish between regional
or cyclical shifts in rainfall. <br /><br />Francis Zwiers, a scientists
with Environment Canada, Toronto, found a way around these problems by
using two data-sets of global rainfall pattern beginning,
conservatively, in 1925 and ending in 1999. <br /><br />They compared
these figures with 14 powerful computer models that simulate the
world's climate system and found a remarkably close fit. <br /><br />Over
the 75-year period under study, global warming &quot;contributed
significantly'' to increases in precipitation in the northern
hemisphere's mid-latitudes, a region between 40 and 70 degrees north,
they say. <br /><br />In contrast, the northern hemisphere's tropics and
subtropics, a region spanning from the equator to 30 degrees latitude
north, became drier. <br /><br />And the southern hemisphere's tropics
(equator to 30 degrees latitude south) became wetter. <br /><br />The
study looked at annual average rainfall on the land, not at sea. In
addition, it did not look at extreme weather events - episodes of
drought and flooding - whose frequency and severity are also seen as
likely to increase as a result of global warming. <br /><br />The
investigation will be published by <em>Nature</em> on Thursday. <br /><br
/>Previous
work in the past few years has highlighted the loss of alpine glaciers
and snow cover and the retreat of Arctic permafrost. <br /><br />These
were interpreted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), in a landmark report published this year, as confirmation that
global warming has already started to affect parts of the climate
system.<br />-30-<br /></div>-*-<br />John Atkeison<br />TMobile (302)
345-0607<br />Cingular Only (302) 753-0720<br />john@atkeison.org 
http://Atkeison.org/<br />302 River Road, Building B #10, Wilmington, DE
19809<br /><br />