European Union nations on Monday approved proposals for military
action against people smugglers who helped refugees cross the
Mediterranean, authorizing a plan that called for the seizure and
destruction of boats to break up smuggling networks operating out of
Libya.
The E.U. had launched a naval mission in July that conducted
intelligence gathering, but the new ruling makes it legal to stop and,
if necessary, destroy boats which are found to be involved in people
trafficking.
"The conditions have been met," an unnamed European diplomat told Agence France-Presse.
More than 100,000 migrants have reached Italy via boat this year;
However, the second phase of the operation limits authorization for
E.U. naval activities to international waters.
The third phase would
involve military action against people smugglers inside Libyan
territorial waters.
The third phase would require authorization from the U.N. Security
Council and preferably an agreement with the Libyan government.
Russia,
current president of the Security Council, has said that a resolution
authorizing military activity in international waters could be adopted
this month.
The tragic journey of about 500 migrants who died seeking to reach Europe (IOM) IBTimes
An internal document on the proposed military action warned that
"non-compliant boarding operations against smugglers in the presence of
migrants has a high risk of collateral damage including the loss of
life,” EUObserver reported.
The decision comes as E.U. nations struggle to deal with a massive
influx of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Africa. E.U.
interior ministers are set to meet later in the day to agree on quotas for redistributing refugees among member countries, a proposal that several nations have strongly condemned.
Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other nations
have boosted security along their border, taken steps to keep refugees
out or move them into other countries, or expressed their intent to
object to the quota plan.
Germany, which had so far championed the cause of taking in refugees
and announced plans to resettle over 800,000 this year, said Sunday that
it would implement controls along its border with Austria, contradicting the open borders mandated in the Schengen agreement
European Union officials authorized a plan to take naval action against people smugglers bringing thousands of refugees across the Mediterranean.
In this photo, a Syrian refugee holding a baby in a lifetube swims towards the shore after their dinghy deflated some 100m away before reaching the Greek island of Lesbos, on Sept 13, 2015.
Reuters/Alkis Konstantinidis
The International Organization of Migration said last week that an unprecedented number
of migrants have made the risky crossing across the Mediterranean by
boat so far in 2015.
The agency reported 432,761 had reached Europe by
sea this year, more than double the number of the year before. Nearly
3,000 have lost their lives in the passage.
E.U.-led efforts to help broker a national unity government in Libya
have not borne fruit, but special U.N. envoy Bernardino Leon said Sunday that progress was being made.
Links :
Rusi : Five Reasons Why Militarising the EU Migration Plan Will Not Work Work
Seas could rise as fast as three centimeters a year if fossil fuel consumption continues at its present rate.
Such increases would amount to ten times the current rise of roughly three millimeters annually.
But Antarctica's vast ice sheets may substantially melt and accelerate the rise of seawaters should the burning of fossil fuel continue unabated, according to new computer simulations of climate change’s future impact.
Scientists had previously thought that East Antarctica's massive ice sheets were relatively safe, requiring thousands of years to pass before warming global temperatures would begin to melt them.
Unchecked fossil fuel use will see the larger east Antarctic ice sheet melt, as well as the west one, causing devastating sea level rise, say scientists.
Photograph: DMS Team/Nasa
But the new simulations, published in Science Advances on September 11, suggest Antarctica's ice is much more vulnerable—and thus sea level rise could be a lot worse.
"Humanity can indeed melt all of Antarctica's ice, if we were to burn all of the fossil fuels," says Ricarda Winkelmann, a physicist by training who now works on computer models at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
"What we do today by emitting greenhouse gases within just a few decades triggers changes that will be felt by many, many generations to come."
Ricarda Winkelmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Antarctica.
"If we burn it all, we melt it all," she said.
Credit Maria Martin/Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
To explore the long-term implications of global warming for Antarctica, Winkelmann teamed up with climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, who attributes his interest in climate science in part to a 1979 New York Times article warning of "widespread floods" caused by the loss of South Pole ice.
Using a computer model developed by Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol that simulates how the atmosphere and ocean respond to increasing levels of greenhouse gases, the team fed rising temperatures from various amounts of total pollution into an ice sheet model developed by Anders Levermann of Potsdam University.
The simulation suggests how ice will flow and dwindle as it melts in response to temperature changes in the atmosphere and ocean, whether increased snowfall as a result of warming or the additional melting as a glacier loses height.
The researchers modeled carbon increases ranging from an additional 93 gigatons (representing another decade of fossil fuel consumption at the present rate) to as much as 12,000 gigatons (the total amount of carbon available from already discovered and recoverable deposits of coal, oil and natural gas) over the next few centuries.
A gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons of carbon, and current fossil fuel burning results in about 10 billion metric tons of carbon—10 gigatons—entering the atmosphere each year.
The simulations suggest that if another 500 gigatons of carbon end up in the atmosphere—an amount that would require a transition off fossil fuels by the end of this century—seas would rise by more than a meter within a thousand years.
In the worst-case scenario, wherein all the fossil fuels are burned over the next few centuries, the seas could rise as fast as three meters per century, and as much as 50 meters within 10,000 years—equivalent to the height of more than 50 Niagara Falls.
Not only is that unprecedented in the 10,000-odd years that human civilization has flourished, but it would doom coastal cities such as New York, Hamburg, Lagos, Shanghai, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro, where more than a billion people currently live.
"Each ten gigatons of carbon leads to more or less three centimeters of sea level rise in 1,000 years," Caldeira notes.
Glaciers and mountains in West Antarctica are seen on Oct. 29, 2014,
during an Operation IceBridge research flight. Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger
Like their human counterparts on coasts around the world, the inhabitants of Antarctica—seabirds, penguins and seals among them—would lose the ice that provides their only home.
While some of these animals might find homes in zoos, the majority of ice-dependent species would face potential extinction in the wild in the next millennium.
And speculative techniques to preserve the ice, such as lacing the stratosphere with sulfuric acid to mimic the cooling effect of a volcano, most likely will not help.
"Ice sheets, once they go, are hard to get back," says Caldeira, who has also studied such climate interventions, sometimes called geoengineering.
This animation shows the change in the mass of the Antarctic Ice Sheet between January 2004 and June 2014 as measured by the pair of GRACE satellites
It could already be too late to save portions of the ice in West Antarctica.
Recent research suggests that the ice sheets of the Amundsen Basin may have passed the point of no return as warmer ocean waters slip up under the vast glaciers.
Thus, even if no more excess carbon dioxide were to build up in the atmosphere, that ice would continue to melt.
As a result of that meltdown, along with the dwindling of Greenland's ice sheet and mountain glaciers and the expansion of warming seawater, rising sea levels—fast or slow—will be with us for millennia to come.
The simulation further revealed that if more than one trillion metric tons of carbon are dumped into the atmosphere, East Antarctica could face the same fate.
"What I was startled by was the speed at which the East Antarctic ice sheet could melt," Caldeira says.
"It took around 10,000 years for the big northern hemisphere ice sheet to melt at the end of the last ice age, so I assumed it would take 10,000 years to get substantial melt out of East Antarctica." Instead, extensive melting could take place within 200 years, depending on how much carbon is ultimately emitted.
However, if temperature increases can be held to no more than 2 degrees Celsius—roughly equivalent to another 500 gigatons of carbon, or one trillion metric tons in total—then sea level rise could top out at about two meters.
How these scenarios play out in the future will be profoundly affected by concrete regional infrastructure choices being made today.
The decision of which type of power plant to build today in Florida, for instance, could determine whether the majority of the state disappears underwater in a matter of centuries.
"Avoiding emissions is really the only practical path," Caldeira says.
By Mapping Specialists.Originally produced for "The Unquiet Ice,"
The simulations have practical implications for billions of coastal residents as well.
If the seas rise only slightly this century, one effective form of adaptation would be to build seawalls.
However, should sea levels swell at a rate of three centimeters a year, no seawall will suffice and coastal retreat becomes the more viable option.
An unstoppable meltdown could be in store for Antarctica's ice—and all of the other ice sheets around the globe—unless people stop dumping CO2 in the atmosphere like a sewer.
Carbon dioxide, once emitted, can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, trapping extra heat like a smothering blanket.
"It is much easier to know that an ice cube in a warming room is going to melt eventually than it is to say precisely how quickly it will vanish," Winkelmann says.
"I certainly hope that mankind will not choose to burn all fossil fuels, simply because I know how enormous the consequences will be."
Links :
NYTimes : Study Predicts Antarctica Ice Melt if All Fossil Fuels Are Burned
National Geographic : Just How Much Could the Sea Rise from Burning Fossil Fuels? A Lot.
The image above, appearing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534.
It was
created by Oronce Fine, the first chair of mathematics in the Collège Royal (aka the Collège de France), and it features the world mapped in the shape of a heart. Pretty great.
People come to know the world the way they come to map
it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of
how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is
attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and
revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is
trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the
physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in
essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.
If you head over to this page,
then look in the upper left, you will see links to three volumes
(available in a free PDF format).
My suggestion would be to look at the
gallery of color illustrations for each book, links to which you’ll find
below.
As governments and industries expand their
use of high-decibel seismic surveys to explore the ocean bottom for
resources, experts from eight universities and environmental
organizations are calling for new global standards and mitigation
strategies.
Their goal is to minimize the amount of sound the surveys produce and reduce risks the surveys and other underwater human noise pollution poses to vulnerable marine life.
Firms and agencies conducting the surveys would benefit from these
new measures, the experts assert, because instead of having to navigate
an assortment of rules that vary by nation or region, they would have a
uniform set of standards to follow.
"In recent years, we've seen an increase in the use of seismic surveys for oil and gas exploration
and research, and for establishing national resource claims on
ever-larger geographic scales. Surveys are now occurring in, or proposed
for, many previously unexploited regions including parts of the Arctic
Ocean and off the U.S. Atlantic coast," said Douglas P. Nowacek, an
expert on marine ecology and bioacoustics at Duke University.
"The time has come for industries, governments, scientists and
environmental organizations to work together to set practical guidelines
to minimize the risks," he said.
Nowacek and his colleagues published their recommendations in a peer-reviewed paper today (Sept. 1) in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Two sperm whales "fluke-up" near the Texas A&M Research Vessel Gyre.
Seismic survey impulses are among the loudest noises humans put into
the oceans, and in some cases can be detected more than 2,500 miles
away.
The increase in ocean noise they cause can mask sounds whales and
other species rely on to communicate, navigate, find food or avoid
predators.
Long-term exposure to the noise can also lead to chronic
stress and disorientation in animals, and auditory damage.
To reduce these risks, the new paper recommends that ocean noise be
recognized globally as a pollutant - something the European Union
already recognizes - and managed through a revision to the existing
International Convention on the Prevention of Pollution from Ships.
This
will allow the establishment of consistent, scientifically based
standards and monitoring programs for ocean noise levels, Nowacek said.
Using empirical data from this monitoring and from ongoing field
studies the convention would support, scientists could more thoroughly
assess surveys' cumulative long-term impacts on marine life and identify
areas where seismic activities should be prohibited or temporarily
limited to protect important habitats or vulnerable populations.
A rising tide of man-made noise is disrupting the lives of marine animals.
Wider use of multi-client surveys could also cut risks.
By collecting
data simultaneously for two or more firms or agencies, these surveys
significantly reduce the number of surveys required in a region, without
forcing clients to share proprietary data. They've been successfully
tested in Norway.
A rare and endangered blue whale offshore near Long Beach, Calif.
Dave McNew/Getty Images
Emerging technologies could further reduce a survey's acoustic
footprint.
Many of these technologies, including the marine vibrator -
which conducts surveys using a steady pulse of low-pressure sound waves
over a longer period - are "not that far away from industrial scale
use," Nowacek said.
The need to implement these new protective measures and scale up
these technologies is urgent, he stressed. As sea ice in the Arctic
Ocean rapidly diminishes, bordering nations are eyeing new underwater
oil and gas exploration and research prospects there. Increased activity
is also proposed for lower latitudes.
"Survey permits are now being considered for oil and gas exploration
along the U.S. East Coast that would allow surveys to occur as close as
three miles from the coast. However, the current draft of the U.S.
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's five-year plan for East Coast oil
and gas exploration
allows oil and gas lease areas to be no closer than 50 miles offshore.
That's a pretty big difference," Nowacek said. "While gathering some
data from beyond a lease area is necessary, allowing these industries to
survey to within three miles of the coast is excessive."
