Give us this day our daily bread

The Coming Famine: The global food crisis and what we can do to avoid it by Julian Cribb. The world has consumed more food than it has produced in nine of the past 10 years and food crises are likely to become more common.

FT: Water in the desert, some Gulf cities are quickly running out. Globally, groundwater depletion rates are accelerating.

NYT: Bleaching is back in fashion, coral bleaching that is, with disastrous effects on already stressed fish populations.

Climate central: Arctic sea ice loss, why does it matter? (though fortunately, there is good news on that front). Rolling Stone also has a good article on the future of ice, including this quote: "If you look at all these dramatic changes, water is doing it all. The vulnerability the ice sheets have to heat from the ocean is the key to all of this. And there's orders of magnitude more than enough heat in the ocean to kill the ice sheet, on whatever time scale the ocean and atmosphere conspire to deliver that heat. It's not at all about subsequent warming or future warming of the oceans. We don't have to warm up the ocean any more at all. The vulnerability is really from climate change altering the atmospheric circulation and how much that's going to alter the ocean circulation. The ice sheets have no defense against warm water. They don't really stand a chance."

Science Daily: Beetle populations responsible for massive pine forest die-off likely to keep rising.

US Clean Air Act has benefits forty times greater than costs of regulation. This Act has some impressive credentials under its belt after forty years, and it inspired a number of other similar bills elsewhere.

Guardian: Good thing the UK has the greenest government in history.

Hot Topic: Have the climate wars begun?

Scared of the dangers of massive untested geoengineering projects? We've been doing them for some time.

SMH: And in Sydney, we've decided to start fracking next to Warragamba Dam. Seriously.

Choking on coal

Washington Independent: coal related health effects cost the US $100 billion each year, including over 13,000 deaths. I imagine that even prior to considerations of climate change, if the public health effects of burning coal are taken into account, renewable energy is more affordable than such dirty combustion. Meanwhile, the head of BHP Billiton has said that Australia needs to move beyond coal. And finally, images of coal ash in China.

Independent: UK government to adapt to inevitable warming, yet without spending any more money.

Mongabay: Amazon.com vs the Amazon: paper trails and deforestation.

Deep-sea trawling damages an area twice the size of the contiguous USA each year.

And just to show that sometimes simultaneous disasters can dilute rather than amplify each other: Scientific American reports on research showing that hurricanes help save thermally-stressed coral reefs by cooling water temperatures; Skeptical Science points out that in New York, higher rainfall doesn't necessarily mean more flooding due to drier soil from higher temperatures; and NASA satellites reveal that the incidence of wildfires is no higher in dead forests killed by mountain pine beetle infestations (which have reached epidemic proportions due to warmer winters enabling more beetles to survive) since green needles of live trees are more flammable than brown needles of dead ones.

These points vaguely remind me of the story of a man who wanted to kill himself and so decided to do a thorough job. He hung himself over a lake after taking poison and brought along a gun to make sure. His shot missed his head and severed the noose, dropping him into the water which diluted the poison. Since all the other methods had failed, he decided he wanted to live after all and so swam to shore and survived. I'm not sure we're going to be so lucky.