From Soup To Cement  

The weather in Western Canada has managed to combine floods quickly followed by drought, which is leading some to predict the creation of a new dustbowl.

MORE than 2.5 million acres of Manitoba farmland that was uncultivated because of spring flooding are now at risk of turning to dust after weeks of dry, hot weather.

Some agriculture experts fear the unprecedented number of barren fields could leave many parts of the province looking like the dust bowl that decimated Manitoba's farming economy in the Depression of the 1930s.

"We've all seen pictures of the dust bowl of the Dirty Thirties," said David Rolfe, president of Keystone Agricultural Producers. "There is the very real risk of a similar situation happening, especially if the heat continues and the soil continues to dry out."

The final onslaught of extractionism continues unabated elsewhere as well, with news that Siberia's permafrost may have reached the tipping point before it rapidly disappears (which, as an added bonus, may accelerate global warming as well).

Siberia feels the heat: It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting.

A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.

Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres — the size of France and Germany combined — has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" — delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.

The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across.

Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years. Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.

Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost, because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws.

Siberia's peat bogs have been producing methane since they formed at the end of the last ice age, but most of the gas had been trapped in the permafrost. According to Larry Smith, a hydrologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.

WorldChanging has a post up on the same topic.

Down in Africa, there is the grim tale of the "Valley of Death" (via Energy Bulletin) which describes the erosion caused by land degradation in Kenya.

Scientists describe it as an environmental catastrophe, while villagers call it the valley of death. Shaped like a crater lake, the Katuk-Odeyo Gulley is as awful as it is intimidating.

At first, frightened elders thought it was a curse. They watched helplessly as it swallowed their farms, livestock, homes and even graves. Twenty meters deep, 15 meters wide and stretching 25 kilometres, the Katuk-Odeyo Gulley in Nyakach, Nyando District is reputed as among the deepest and most devastating in eastern Africa.

In some parts, the gulley is so deep it forced families to move to safer ground. Some parents living near the gully have stopped their children from going to school for fear they would fall into it. The gulley has defied scientists and engineers, and continues to spread fast across the village, leaving in its wake, a massive environmental disaster.

Energy Bulletin also had a link to a homage to the humble potato - "The Spud Of Life".

Finally, Bill McKibben ponders "The Future Of Environmentalism", which he believes isn't dead, in spite of reports to the contrary.

So we have a split between a robust environmental movement taking on the relatively simple problems of old-fashioned pollution and a weak one getting nowhere on preventing the collapse of the planet's stable climate. That will likely continue until something breaks the logjam.

It may be scarcity that does the trick. The currently increasing cost of oil helps (though it does nothing to lessen the temptation of an endless surplus of carbon-laden coal).

Maybe fear will do it. One reason Europe takes climate change so seriously is that 35,000 French and Belgians died in a two-week heat wave the summer before last. Or it may be some wild card: some new metaphor, some new leader. Or, more likely, some new vision.

More and more, for instance, I find myself writing about local economies—in part because their supply lines are shorter, their energy demands smaller. But also in part because the food tastes sweeter, because the deeper community feels good, because electricity from the windmill on your ridge is better than electricity from the wrecked Appalachian mountain or the overstretched Mideast pipeline. ("Buy local"—is that a liberal vision or a conservative one? Who knows? That we can't say for sure is probably a good thing.) It's one possible vision, anyhow, of a world that might not overheat, a vision that owes at least as much to psychology and sociology as to the biology and chemistry that have undergirded most ecological thinking.