As we have seen over the past year, drought can take an emotional, as well as financial toll on farmers, placing individuals, families and local communities under extraordinary stress.
Helping people cope under such pressure is essential but the challenges of a changing climate demand a visionary new approach in the way Australia deals with drought.
Read the rest of the ABC News article, ‘Drought: secure today, but prepare for tomorrow.’
Thanks to Luke Walker for this article.
The Spanish company Pharmamar explores the depths of the oceans in search of marine products for the treatment of cancer. Their first success, a drug for the treatment of soft tissue sarcomas, has just got European-wide approval.
The oceans hold 34 of the 36 phyla of life, some of them (i.e. Ctenophora, Echinodermata, Porifera, Phoronidea, Brachiopoda and Chaetognata) are restricted to the oceans. In addition, due to the special ecological conditions they have to cope with, marine organisms display multiple exclusive physiological processes and a complete collection of biochemical novelties.
In 1986 Spain was joining the European Union and Jose María Fernández decided that his company would require some original and innovative projects to face this new and challenging scenario. He was a biochemist with some previous experience in biotechnology. This was the background that led him to create Pharmamar, a biotech company aimed at the discovery and development of novel marine-derived drugs for the treatment. Last July, Pharmamar got its first important success. At last, its leading drug Yondelis got approval from the European Agency of cancer. Yondelis is an isoquinolone alkaloid originally isolated from the Caribbean colonial tunicate Ecteinascidia turbinata. Its approval is a milestone in the history of this company and the first serious reward for 20 years of work, €400 million of investment and not a single euro of revenue yet. Hopefully, it also opens the gate to further future development.
Today many other companies and research institutes around the world are exploring the pharmacological potential of the sea. Hundreds of new marine therapeutic entities are described every year and there are even some specialized journals periodically publishing findings in this field.
Read more by saving the pdfs of pages 50, 51 and 52 from the Lab Times article,
‘20,000 Leagues under the Sea.’
The UN has released it’s ‘Global Environment Outlook’ or ‘GEO4’ report.
It can be downloaded via the BBC News website. It’s 22MB so you may have a bit of a wait.
Also on the BBC website is the ‘State of the planet, in graphics:’
Globally human populations are growing, trade is increasing, and living standards are rising for many. But, according to the UN’s latest Global Environment Outlook report, long-term problems including climate change, pollution, access to clean water, and the threat of mass extinctions are being met with “a remarkable lack of urgency”.
Rainforest Action Network issued the invitation to the former Vice President, according to RAN executive director Michael Brune. The San Francisco-based group has a twenty-year history of protesting against destructive logging practices and other causes of climate change; it specializes in targeting corporations as much as governments.
Read the rest of the article, ‘If Gore Were Arrested… ‘
Collectively, the current IPCC computer modelled scenarios for the iconic doubling of atmospheric CO2 range from 1.1C to 6.4C, with a ‘most likely’ range of 2C to 4.5C. Higher estimates have a much lower probability of being accurate.
In this week’s Science magazine there are two related papers that discuss climate sensitivity:
Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?
Gerard H. Roe* and Marcia B. Baker
Uncertainties in projections of future climate change have not lessened substantially in past decades. Both models and observations yield broad probability distributions for long-term increases in global mean temperature expected from the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, with small but finite probabilities of very large increases. We show that the shape of these probability distributions is an inevitable and general consequence of the nature of the climate system, and we derive a simple analytic form for the shape that fits recent published distributions very well. We show that the breadth of the distribution and, in particular, the probability of large temperature increases are relatively insensitive to decreases in uncertainties associated with the underlying climate processes.
Myles R. Allen and David J. Frame
Over the past 30 years, the climate research community has made valiant efforts to answer the “climate sensitivity” question: What is the long-term equilibrium warming response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide? Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) concluded that this sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 2° to 4.5°C, with a 1-in-3 chance that it is outside that range. The lower bound of 2°C is slightly higher than the 1.6°C proposed in the 1970s (2); progress on the upper bound has been minimal.
In a nut shell, the limits have been reached for model estimations of the upper bound and therefore even more complex models will be unable to resolve the greater uncertainty of higher bound estimates, so it’s time to “call off the search.”
New Scientist’s take is:
Climate is too complex for accurate predictions
Excerpt: “This finding reinforces not only that climate policies will necessarily be made in the face of deep, irreducible uncertainties,” says Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. “But also the uncomfortable reality – for climate modellers – that finite research dollars invested in ever more sophisticated climate models offer very little marginal benefit to decision makers.”
Personally, I disagree with the statement made in Science magazine that “This persistent, high-temperature tail of low probability has been one impediment to political action, as policy-makers have been reluctant to formulate policies to address climate change when the range of uncertainty is so large.” If this is true, then I haven’t noticed.
Any day now, the rainforests of the Daintree will resound of the arrival of the Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfisher Tanysiptera sylvia.
They are very punctual, arriving in the last week of October, first week of November, each year. The males industriously excavate upwardly climbing tunnels into terrestrial termite mounds and upon breaching the internal cavity, rely upon the resident colony of termites to congeal the inner wall of the would-be incubating chamber. The female kingfisher will reject the proposal unless the termites have played their part.
As we walk past these mounds over the summer months, kingfisher chicks can be heard inside calling for food. When they ultimately fledge, the parent birds return to PNG, leaving the abandoned juveniles in a state of distress. For about three weeks they hang around the nesting site, before heading off to New Guinea on their own; having never been before.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
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