The Arctic is melting: 18 reasons to care

Arctic sea ice has once again smashed all kinds of records - for extent, area and volume. Every year a huge amount of ice melts in summer and refreezes in winter, but the trend over the last few decades has been strongly downwards, especially during the summer months. In fact, this year, the extent of ocean with at least 15% sea ice cover declined to a level less than half of what it used to average just twenty years or so ago. Through it is harder to measure, the volume of summer sea ice is down by about three quarters from what it used to be. I posted an introduction to sea ice area, extent and volume back here.

When compared to our best reconstructions of the history of Arctic sea ice over the last 1450 years, the last few decades are, well, unusual. The graph above, which shows the ups and downs of summer sea ice extent over the years gives a sense of just how staggeringly quickly this part of the world is changing. Indeed, the collapse in sea ice is so rapid that it continues to stun even the scientists who have been watching it closely for decades. Back in 2007, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report said that it was unlikely the Arctic would be seasonally free until after 2100.* Now, the UK Met Office says it is likely sometime between 2040 and 2060, most other Arctic organisations speak about sometime around 2030, while a handful of individual experts warn that, depending on weather conditions, it could be as early as the next Olympics in Rio. There is almost no evidence that this has occurred for at least the last few hundred thousand years (estimates range from 700,000 to 4 million years). *There are different definitions for what "ice-free" means. The most common is when extent drops below one million square kilometres, meaning that there might still be some ice clinging on around the north Greenland coast or in bays and inlets in the high Canadian Arctic, but effectively, the main ocean is free of ice.

Whatever the precise timing, why do we care? So what if some polar bears drown? Why does it matter to me what is happening thousands of miles away in the middle of an ocean amidst a deserted wilderness? Because the Arctic is closer than you think. The effects of declining summer sea ice are many. Here are eighteen reasons to care about the likelihood of a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean in the coming years. Only one is polar bears:

1. Polar bears: And walruses, seals and all the other unique Arctic wildlife that depend on sea ice. Seasonal sea ice loss threatens the unique and endemic Arctic biota. The polar bear is an photogenic icon, and as the largest terrestrial predator it instantly commands widespread respect and attention, but there is so much more at stake than simply polar bears.

2. Cultural loss. The loss of sea ice undermines the way of life of various indigenous groups in the Arctic, who rely on hunting and the ice for their livelihood and culture.

3. Infrastructure damage: As the Arctic region is warming, the permafrost that covers the land is both melting and being rapidly eroded. There are many structures and roads built on the permafrost that are already suffering severe damage.

4. Albedo change: Less floating white ice means more exposed dark water, which absorbs more solar radiation, increasing the total incoming heat flux of the planet, and specifically of the Arctic Ocean. The reflectivity of the planet's surface is called its albedo, and the decrease in albedo caused by loss of Arctic ice during the period when it is receiving 24 hours of sunlight is considered by many scientists to be the greatest single threat on this list.

5. Permafrost methane: A warming Arctic Ocean and atmosphere speeds the melt of permafrost in Canada, Siberia and Alaska, not only threatening infrastructure (see #3), but also releasing stored methane (CH₄), a highly potent greenhouse gas that degrades into carbon dioxide, making it both a short term climate nasty and a long term headache. The total amount of frozen methane is vast and although it unlikely to all melt quickly, it is soon likely to become a significant and sustained drag on efforts to cut emissions. More emissions from thawing permafrost means less room and time for us to make our own transition away from carbon-intensive energy systems.

6. Submarine methane: Warmer waters increase the rate at which vast submarine deposits of methane clathrates found along the Siberian continental shelf destabilise and are released to the atmosphere, giving a further kick to warming. Some observers are petrified this "clathrate gun" could end basically all life on earth in matter of years through a catastrophic self-perpetuating release. As I've noted previously, scientists are yet to see a convincing geophysical mechanism for this being a sudden and catastrophic release (with consequent spike in global CH₄) rather than a progressive leak resulting in an elevation of CH₄ with rising CO₂. This represents further drain on our carbon budgets, though the precise scale and timing of these emissions are less understood than those from terrestrial thawing.

7. More available heat: To convert ice at 0ºC to water at 0ºC takes energy, even though the temperature has not changed. The considerable energy involved in this phase change is called latent heat. Without ice in the ocean sucking up extra energy during summer, the solar energy that previous went into melting ice can go into the oceans (and later be released to the atmosphere). This is like removing a handbrake, though my back of the envelope attempts to quantify it suggest it will be significantly smaller effect than albedo change (#4). I'd like to see these calculations made by someone who knows what they are doing.

8. Wacky weather: This is something of a wild card and could prove to be the biggest danger to human society. Losing the ice is already changing wind patterns around the Arctic, which in turn affect the weather throughout the northern hemisphere. There is some evidence that more exposed water in the Arctic and a decreased temperature difference between the equator and pole (since the Arctic region is warming much faster than further south) is increasing the amplitude of the meanders in the jet stream. In turn, this slows down progression of the meanders, leading to "blocking patterns", where one region gets "stuck" in a certain weather pattern, whether heatwave, drought or flood. The 2010 Moscow heatwave that killed 11,000 people and sent the price of wheat skyrocketing (in turn helping to spark the Arab Spring), the 2010 Pakistan floods that displaced 20 million people, the 2010/11 record cold winters in Europe and parts of the US and the 2012 US heatwave and drought have all been linked to unusually persistent blocking patterns. Losing the ice may mean we see more of these kinds of things. The jury is still out on this theory, but if not precisely like this, the loss of Arctic sea ice will almost certainly affect wind circulation patterns and so weather both regionally and hemispherically.

9. Greenland melt: Over the long term, this may be the biggest change. The warmer the Arctic Ocean gets, the warmer Greenland is likely to get, and the faster its glaciers slide and melt into the sea. While floating sea ice doesn't affect sea levels (and there's relatively little of it anyway), there's enough ice on top of Greenland to raise sea levels by 7.2 metres (on average). As I read it, glacial draining and calving of the ice sheet is a larger sea level rise contributor than straight melting (thus the recent fracas over dramatic surface melt may not be the key issue for Greenland - remember, this recent melt event cut centimetres off a sheet that averages over two kilometres thick). The real danger is the acceleration of ice flow dynamics (i.e. the ice cube is more likely to slide off the table before it has finished melting). And the largest boost to glacier acceleration is from warming oceans meeting marine terminating glaciers. No one is entirely sure how long this will take, but it is a process that once it is underway in earnest, is likely to have a momentum of its own, meaning that our descendants will be committed to ever rising sea levels for centuries to come. The somewhat good news is that it is also a process that (on present understandings) is assumed to have some physical constraints due to friction (i.e. there are speed limits for glaciers, even in very warm conditions). The West Antarctic ice sheet, being largely grounded on bedrock well below sea level is actually more plausibly in danger of catastrophically sudden break-up, though warming in the Antarctic is currently only a fraction of what is being observed in the Arctic.

10. Resource conflict: An increasingly ice-free Arctic opens up a geopolitical minefield as nations scramble to take advantage of the resources previously locked away under the ice. The starter's gun for this race has well and truly fired, with various oil companies sending rigs to begin drilling for oil and gas this season. As one signal of the seriousness with which this is now taken, meetings of the Arctic council (comprised of nations bordering the Arctic) now attract Hillary Clinton rather than a minor government official.

11. More oil: The presence of significant amounts of oil and gas under the Arctic Ocean has been suspected and known for some time. Less ice means that fossil hydrocarbons that were previously off limits now become economically viable to extract, thus increasing the pool of available carbon reserves and so worsening the challenge of keeping most of them underground.

12. Fishing: Another resource now increasingly able to be exploited due to the loss of seasonal sea ice. Pristine (or somewhat pristine) marine ecosystems are thus exposed to greater exploitation (and noise pollution).

13. Shipping lanes: The fabled North West passage through the remote islands of Canada has been open to commercial shipping without icebreakers only four times in recorded history: 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007. The North East passage has also been open in recent years. These previously inaccessible Arctic shipping routes reduce fuel needs of global shipping by cutting distances (a negative feedback) but also brings more diesel fuel into the Arctic region, leaving black soot on glaciers (a positive feedback). I'm not sure which is the larger effect overall.

14. Toxin release: For various reasons, certain toxins and heavy metals from human pollution seem to accumulate in Arctic sea ice. As it melts, they are being released once more into the environment.

15. Invasive species: Melting ice reconnects marine ecosystems that were previously separated by ice, enabling migration of species into new regions, with unpredictable ecosystem changes as a result. This is already occurring.

16. Ocean circulation? These last three points are more speculative and I'm yet to see studies on them. But loss of sea ice could well change the patterns of ocean currents in the great global conveyor belt known as thermohaline circulation. This drives weather patterns throughout the entire globe.

17. Acidification acceleration? By increasing the open ocean surface area for atmosphere-ocean gas exchange, the rate of ocean acidification could slightly increase. Would this make any difference to ocean capacity to act as CO₂ sink or rate of acidification? This could well be irrelevant, but it is a question I have.

18 Political tipping point? The loss of virtually all perennial Arctic sea ice would be a highly visual and difficult to dispute sign of rapid and alarming climate change, representing a potential tipping point in public awareness and concern. If we are waiting for that, however, before we make any serious efforts to slash emissions (especially if it doesn't occur until 2030 or later), we'll already have so much warming committed that we'll pretty much be toast. At best, therefore, this point might consolidate public support for massive rapid emissions reductions already underway. These eighteen reasons can be summarised in five broad headings:

1. Direct effects upon local wildlife, human communities and infrastructure (1, 2, 3, 12, 14, 15);
2. Positive feedback affects that accelerate the warming process (4, 5, 6, 7, 11);
3. Changes to human economic and political systems through the opening up of previous inaccessible resources and routes (10, 13, 18);
4. Disruptions to the great atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns that shape the experience of billions of people directly (8, 16);
5. Acceleration of long term threats (9, 17).

The loss of Arctic sea ice will not suddenly be the end of the world, but it represents a major milestone on the path to self-destruction along which we are currently hurtling with accelerating speed.

UPDATE: My opening graph needs some important further clarification. The unamended graph is a 40 year smoothed average, while the additional material displays year-on-year changes and so is not comparing apples to apples. However, using only 40 year averages to capture the dramatic changes of the last few years is also likely misleading. There is further discussion of this image here, here and here.

People and Planet: a new report and other stories

Royal Society report (Summary and recommendations) calls for both population stabilisation and big cuts in consumption to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills". This is a significant contribution to the discussion of the relationship between population and consumption (which I discussed back here). I haven't had a chance to read the full report yet, but the conclusions seem to be broadly consistent with the points I made: that both population and consumption need to be addressed, but the latter can be addressed faster, further and with fewer ethical conundrums and so ought to be the primary immediate focus.

Guardian: IEA warns of 6ºC rise. It is hard to get a handle on just how catastrophic 6ºC would be. Let's just say that if we get to 6ºC, I don't think we'll be doing cost-benefit analyses anymore. David Roberts reflects on whether 6ºC is alarmist or realistic and points out that science alone can't tell us how bad climate change will be - because the most important unknown is just how we are all going to act and react over the next couple of decades. Those who think that 6ºC by 2100 is entirely unrealistic implicitly assume either (a) massive global co-ordinated action to mitigate through aggressive emissions reductions across the board or (b) global and long term economic collapse arriving sooner rather than later.

Mongabay: Organic agriculture has lower yields than industrial farming, according to a new study in Nature, especially for grains, though that is not the whole story, since there are various downstream costs of industrial agriculture that reduce yields elsewhere (and elsewhen).

ScienceDaily: Plastic in ocean underestimated by at least a factor of 2.5 due to the effects of wind pushing pollution beneath the surface, rendering measurements and calculations based on skimming the surface inaccurate.

SMH: India's border fence. Not with Pakistan or China, but the 4,000 km militarised fence on the border with Bangladesh, in the face of a rising tide of people fleeing, amongst other things, a rising tide. Though speaking of that rising tide...
H/T Donna.

ABC: Australasia at hottest for (at least) 1,000 years (also in the Guardian and the original study is here). This is a significant finding since most temperature reconstructions have focused on the northern hemisphere, where a greater number of proxy records mean more data is available.

Science: Some good news from Greenland. A review of ten years of satellite data appears to indicate that we are not on track for the "worst case" (i.e. 2 metre) sea level rise by 2100. Of course, "good" is relative; even a rise of a few feet will lead to massive headaches, but multi-metre rises probably mean infrastructure vulnerabilities worth trillions. Sea level rise is one of the most serious long term effects of climate change, though I suspect that over the next few decades it is not going to dominate in comparison with, for example, concerns over food security.

Grist: What would it look like for media to take climate seriously? A very interesting conversation between two journalists about media coverage of the climate threat.

Peak when? We've already passed it

ArsTechnica: When is peak oil? We've passed it. Welcome to the downslope.

CP: How much of recent global warming has been caused by human activities? Most likely more than 100%. How can we have caused more than 100% of something? Without human activity, it is likely that we would have experienced a slight cooling trend and so our activities are primarily responsible for both overcoming this natural trend and the observed warming.

NYT: A case study in overfishing - the collapse of jack mackerel in under a decade. A single super-trawler theoretically has the capacity to catch more jack mackerel annually than the most optimistic estimate of the global sustainable catch. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated (based on 1998 data, now hopelessly out of date) that global fishing fleets "are 2.5 times larger than needed." The latest estimate of total global subsidies for fishing fleets (back in 2003) was US$25 billion to $29 billion per annum (mainly in fuels). Let us therefore choose between fish and the fishing industry; we cannot save them both.

Physorg: Wheat can't stand the heat. A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that "a 2.0 Celsius increase above long-term averages shortened the growing season by a critical nine days, reducing total yield by up to 20 percent."

NASA: Greenland, the world's northern mirror, is rapidly growing dimmer, with some areas seeing a drop in reflectivity of almost 20% in a few years.

Stephen Leahy: Toxic pollution is a public health problem on a similar scale to malaria. A new study claims that more than 100 million people have their productive life span shortened by an average of 12.7 years. Some of the causes may be encircling your finger, resting in your pocket or illuminating your eyeballs right now, though the victims may well live on the other side of the world.

Onion: Scientists reveal how to achieve sustainability overnight, though wisely leave open the policy questions.

Every second of every day

Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second. But we're doing our best to mitigate this problem by removing 9-10,000 tonnes of fish from the ocean every hour. And, of course, by dumping 62,500 tonnes of heat-trapping emissions into the earth's atmosphere every minute. The radiative forcing of the carbon dioxide human activities have put in the atmosphere is the equivalent of adding the energy of more than ten Hiroshima bombs every second.

Climate Central: Extreme events related to climate change threaten three US nuclear facilities.

Guardian: UK oil and gas rigs creating spills at least once a week in 2009 and 2010. Remember, the UK claims to have some of the world's highest standards in regulation of off-shore drilling safety. Now take these operations into freezing Arctic waters, where microbes won't be so quick to deal with spills as there were in the tropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and where extreme conditions prevent the kind of response available there. Arctic drilling is doubly suicidal: It brings new risks to relatively untouched ecosystems and ensures more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere for thousands of years. And the only reason these waters are opening up to this exploitation is the decline of the sea ice caused by the combustion of fossil fuels in the first place.

Grist: In the worst drought in Texas history, 13.5 billion gallons of water used for fracking. Fracking is the controversial process used to exploit reserves of shale gas, a fossil fuel touted in some circles as a cleaner alternative and as a silver bullet solution to US energy security, but which is worse than coal or conventional oil when gas leaks are included (since natural gas is a very potent greenhouse gas and degrades over time into more carbon dioxide), has been associated with the poisoning of groundwater, and which may well prove commercially unviable much faster than expected according to a recent NYT report (while Stoneleigh offers an even bleaker outlook).

Independent: The plight of the big cats. According to Dereck and Beverly Joubert, leading big cat conservationists, "There were 450,000 lions when we were born and now there are only 20,000 worldwide. [...] Leopards have declined from 700,000 to 50,000, cheetahs from 45,000 to 12,000 and tigers are down from 50,000 to just 3,000."

CP: Food prices hover at historic highs.

IPS: Rising temperatures melting away food security. The impacts of climate change on food production are not limited to heat stress on crops (which may suppress global yields by 5-10% per degree of warming), but also include disruptions to precipitation patterns (i.e. floods and droughts), inundation (or salination) by rising sea levels, loss of glacial melt water (a critical factor, according to this article), increased erosion and shifting distribution of pests and invasive species.

Yale360: Wasting phosphate. "It takes one ton of phosphate to produce every 130 tons of grain, which is why the world mines about 170 million tons of phosphate rock every year to ship around the world and keep soils fertile. [...] We could hit “peak phosphorus” production by around 2030. [...] Presently, there simply are no substitutes for phosphorus."

Reuters: As CO2 levels rise, land becomes less able to curb warming, claims new study in Nature.

Mongabay: The unexpected effects of removing top predators. Another new Nature paper claims that "The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature".

Energy Bulletin: Dilithium crystals and tomorrow's energy needs.
Image by CAC.

On thin ice

Guess the graph competition answer
Last Wednesday, I posted this graph and asked for guesses as to what it represented. Aside from a few humorous suggestions, most answers were in the right ballpark, suggesting it had something to do with our melting cryosphere. This is perhaps one of the best known effects of climate change (or that part of climate change known as global warming), yet there is widespread confusion about the details.

The correct answer is that the graph represents the Arctic sea ice volume over the last few decades. The worrying downward trend is accelerating, but, unlike the graphs for Greenland or Antarctica, which are also heading down, the number on the y-axis are absolute figures. That is, while Greenland and Antarctica are losing increasing amounts of ice, compared with their total volumes, the amounts currently being lost are miniscule. For them to completely melt would be catastrophic, raising sea level tens of metres, but this is likely to take centuries, if not longer. However, the Arctic Ocean is getting seriously close to "ice-free" in summer,* an event most of us are likely to see within our lifetimes, and which we may well witness this or next decade, according to some experts. Certainly, extrapolating those trend lines points to an early grave for our planet's white top. The lines are unlikely to simply follow that curve, for various reasons, but scientists can identify no reasons to think the trend will reverse anytime soon.
*As long as Greenland still has significant amounts of ice, a residual amount of sea ice is likely to survive. "Ice-free" is usually qualified as largely ice-free. This is different again to an ice-free North Pole, which simply means that there is no sea ice cover at the North Pole, while there might still be some polar ice cap remaining.

What is Arctic sea ice?
It is important to highlight that we are talking about sea ice, that is ice that floats on top of the Arctic Ocean and which expands in winter and contracts in summer. It is generally not nearly as thick as people imagine (averaging just a metre or two) and any given piece of ice is unlikely to be more than a few years old, since it is constantly in motion due to wind and ocean currents and each summer much of it melts. Nonetheless, there has been permanent sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean for at least somewhere between the last 700,000 and 4 million years, allowing the evolution of unique and endemic species (i.e. not found elsewhere). Since the ice is floating, the concern is not that melting will directly raise sea levels, both because the actual volume of ice is pretty miniscule compared with Greenland and (especially) Antarctica (for comparison, while Arctic sea ice is generally at most a few metres thick, Greenland's ice sheet is generally more than 2 km thick, and over 3 km at points. Antarctica is about ten times greater in volume again) and because floating ice displaces an almost identical volume of water to that contained in the ice (melting ice in a glass of water doesn't cause it to overflow).

Why are people worried?
Concern about the loss of Arctic sea ice is eightfold.

First, it is a canary in the goldmine: a visually dramatic sign of temperature changes that is relatively easy for the public to grasp.

Second, it threatens the unique and endemic Arctic biota (of which polar bears are of course the poster child).

Third, this in turn undermines the way of life of various indigenous groups in the Arctic, who rely on hunting and on the existence of sea ice for their livelihood.

Fourth, less floating white ice means more exposed dark water, which absorbs more solar radiation, increasing the total heat budget of the planet, and specifically of the Arctic Ocean.

Fifth, a warming Arctic Ocean and atmosphere speeds the melt of permafrost in Canada, Siberia and Alaska, not only threatening infrastructure built on it, but also releasing stored methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas that degrades into carbon dioxide, making it both a short term climate nasty and a long term headache.

Sixth, and perhaps of even greater concern, warmer waters increase the rate at which vast submarine deposits of methane clathrates destabilise and are released to the atmosphere, giving a further kick to warming. There is some debate about whether this process is likely to be slow and gradual or whether it might occur relatively suddenly, a process somethings colloquially called a "clathrate gun".

Seventh, the warmer the Arctic Ocean gets, the warmer Greenland is likely to get, and the faster its glaciers slide and melt into the sea. No one is entirely sure how long this will take, but it is a process that once it is underway in earnest, is likely to have a momentum of its own, meaning that our descendants will be committed to ever rising sea levels for centuries to come. Altogether, there is enough frozen water in Greenland to raise global sea levels by more than seven metres.

Eighth, an increasingly ice-free Arctic opens up a geopolitical minefield as nations scramble to take advantage of the resources previously locked away under the ice. The starter's gun for this race has well and truly fired (see video below).

Area vs volume
Another crucial distinction to keep in mind (apart from the difference between wafer-thin and highly vulnerable floating sea ice and gigantic land-based ice sheets that are both more stable and yet ultimately of greater direct threat) is between sea ice area/extent on the one hand and volume on the other. Area/extent is the easiest metric to measure with a satellite image (there is a slight technical difference between these two terms, but they are both basically concerned with a two dimensional account of how much of the Arctic ocean is covered with floating sea ice). Extent has been dropping at a slower rate than volume, which means that the remaining ice is getting thinner. Those only looking at the numbers for area or extent might be fooled into thinking the decline is only worrying, rather than alarming. While summer minimum extent has dropped by about a third over the last thirty years, volume is down by more than three quarters. And human activities are largely to blame.

The road ahead
The Arctic is one of the places where the climate change is already hitting the road. The transformation of the landscape is not merely a computer projection, but observable today. Its consequences are already negative, but the trajectory is even worse. What kind of path are we walking? And where will we find the courage and humility to turn around if we don't like where it is going?
The video at the top of the post is from a recently broadcast BBC programme, covering some of the implications of this story, which also appeared on the BBC news site.

Pity none of these are April Fools' jokes

AAAS conference: 50 million environmental refugees by 2020. This is a connection that we've been seeing in the Middle East and North Africa and is only likely to continue to grow in importance. Climate and ecological damage combine with political and economic conditions to cause food insecurity, leading in turn to political instability in nations closer to the edge and these problems are then exported through migration. Such migrants won't always be labelled ecological or climate refugees, since the proximate causes will include political and economic factors, often focalised or triggered through food issues.

Physorg: Some Greenland glaciers have doubled in speed over the last decade.

Science Daily: Higher CO2 means less transpiration as plants reduce their pores.

Coral reefs are the canaries in the global coal mine. It is likely most won't survive above 350 ppm CO2 for more than a few decades. We're at 390 and rising.

Guardian: Wasting water in a throwaway society. In the UK, "we throw away, on average, twice as much water per year in the form of uneaten food as we use for washing and drinking."

The Australia Institute: Hiding the unemployed (and underemployed), or why the official unemployment rate is the tip of the iceberg.

Shell says we are entering a zone of uncertainty over oil supply. A clever ploy to keep the prices high or a frank admission that the future of oil is declining global production?

One of the most useful pages on Skeptical Science is Ten Indicators of a Warming World (and Ten Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change). But this may be an eleventh: wave height.

Guardian: Time to pledge our "full-throated" support for the monarchy.

OK, so one of them is.

How Genghis Khan cooled the planet

Frank ponders how to give an eco-friendly gift, and ends up discussing the difference between hope and stress.

Ben Myers has stopped blogging about faith and theology and has become a short story writer (briefly). And he is frustrating brilliant at that too! It was bugging me that most of his stories seem to be set in the US. I was about to comment on that trend when I came across this one and I felt right at home.

Amidst all the climate records set in 2010, a new melt record for the Greenland ice sheet was set in 2010.

And Mongabay tells of How Genghis Khan and Hernán Cortés cooled the planet (perhaps Christopher Columbus should get the credit). I'm not advocating that we try that particular strategy of geoengineering.

Water: too little or too much are both bad

A new study investigates the future of drought (and it isn't pretty). Note that when reading the images in this study, figures of -4 and below are considered "extreme drought", rarely experienced before now. Meanwhile, the Amazon is currently experiencing its worst drought in almost fifty years.

At the other end of the world, Greenland ice loss is accelerating. And more on Greenland: the plugs in the bathtub.

Pakistan is not the only place to have suffered record floods this year. Over seven million people in Pakistan remain without permanent shelter as a result of the flooding that began over three months ago.

And linking water to fossil fuels: the water cost of Canada's tar sands.