International
California plans to boost water supply as drought bites
AFP
More than two decades of devastating drought worsened by man-made climate change mean California must harvest, recycle and desalinate much more water, the state’s governor said Thursday.
Unveiling an “aggressive” new strategy to combat a dwindling water supply, Gavin Newsom said he wants to bolster ageing infrastructure to keep pace with the rapidly changing environment.
“Climate change means drought won’t just stick around for two years at a time like it historically has,” Newsom said in a statement.
“Drought is a permanent fixture here in the American West and California will adapt to this new reality.”
The blueprint unveiled Thursday calls for more above-ground storage, as well as better ways to capture the billions of gallons of rain that usually just run into the ocean.
It also includes plans to recycle much more water and to desalinate seawater.
The American West is more than 20 years into its worst drought in over a millennium.
As part of efforts to ride out the drought, residents in southern California have been told not to water their lawns more than once or twice a week — the cause of much grumbling among some of the area’s wealthiest homeowners.
Scientists predict that California’s already-stretched water supplies will dwindle a further 10 percent over the coming decades, with the current drought believed to be part of a long-term aridification of the region.
That process is being hastened by global warming, where humanity’s unchecked burning of fossil fuels continues to pump insulating gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The planet has already warmed by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and is expected to get even hotter, even if governments meet their pollution reduction targets.
The higher temperatures exacerbate the effects of the drought, with more moisture evaporating from the soil even as plants try to suck more of it up — leaving less to flow into rivers and streams.
“Regardless of drought or flood, in this changed climate there will be less water available for people to use,” the state’s 16-page plan says.
“To match the pace of climate change, California must move smarter and faster to update our water systems. The modernization of our water systems will help replenish the water California will lose due to hotter, drier weather.”
“California must capture, recycle, de-salt, and conserve more water… to put to use water that would otherwise be unusable, stretch supplies with efficiency, and expand our capacity to bank water from big storms for dry times.”
International
Chile’s distant paradise where scientists study climate change
AFP | Alberto Peña
Hidden inside pristine forests in Chile’s deep south, known as the end of the world, lie potential early warning signs of climate change. Puerto Williams on Navarino island, which is separated from the South American mainland by the Beagle Channel, is the world’s southern-most town.
Far from the pollution that blights major urban and industrial centers, it is a paradise that provides unique conditions to study global warming.
“There is nowhere else like it,” Ricardo Rozzi, director of the Cape Horn International Center for global change studies and bio-cultural conservation in Puerto Williams, told AFP.
It is “a place that is especially sensitive to climate change” as average temperatures do not rise above five degrees Celsius. This cold and windy area is the last inhabited southern frontier before reaching the Antarctic.
The ethnobotanical Omora park is home to an immense variety of lichens, mosses and fungi that scientists study by crouching down onto their knees with magnifying glasses.
In the crystal clear Robalo river, minuscule organisms act as sentinels of the changes produced by global warming. In both the park and river, the alarm bells are ringing.
Moss and lichen on the move
At this latitude — 55 degrees south — climate change has an exponential effect on flora that react by seeking out low temperatures, said Rozzi, 61. “The most obvious aspect of climate change is the rising temperatures,” he said. “These lichens cannot survive” if a certain threshold is passed. To escape the higher temperatures, they move.
“In the case of (mosses) we’ve noticed that they have moved. Before they were between 50 and 350 (meters above sea level) and now they are between 100 and 400,” said Rozzi. He says Omora has more diversity per square meter of lichens and mosses than anywhere else in the world. They also help to absorb carbon dioxide.
Another aspect is the elevational diversity gradient, an ecological pattern in which biodiversity changes with elevation.
The 700-meter high Bandera hill’s biodiversity changes every 200 meters and there is a mammoth 1.5 degrees Celsius difference in temperature between top and bottom.
“We can see what changes happen in the high mountains and in the area close to the sea in a very short distance, and we can see how the temperature affects the biodiversity that lives in this river,” Tamara Contador, 38, a biologist at the Cape Horn International Center, told AFP.
She studies the gradients themselves. If the height difference between gradients rises or falls on the mountain, scientists can determine whether there has been a global change in temperature. They say there has been.
Avoiding ‘extermination’
“On a global level, the polar and subpolar ecosystems are the most affected by climate change, so we are in a place where climate change has a much bigger effect on biodiversity than other places,” said Contador.
River organisms also form part of the alert system.
“The organisms that live here are also indicators of water quality and global environmental change,” added Contador.
River organisms move about and have already increased their reproductive cycle, says Rozzi. This confirms there has been a small change to the climate in the area that could have been much greater elsewhere on the planet.
“Some insects that have an annual eggs to larvae to adulthood cycle are now having two cycles because the temperature has risen,” said Rozzi.
By studying these organisms and learning from them “we can avoid crossing the threshold that brings us to the extermination of humanity and other life forms,” he added.
International
Hurricane Orlene headed for Mexico
AFP
Powerful Hurricane Orlene headed Sunday toward Mexico’s Pacific coast, where it is expected to make landfall on Monday night, the US National Hurricane Center said.
The storm lost some strength as it moved across the water, falling from Category 4 to 3, the agency said.
But it is expected to be a strong hurricane when it passes near or over the Islas Marias archipelago, and remain a hurricane when it reaches southwestern Mexico, the NHC said.
The NHC forecast that the storm would pass over the Islas Marias Sunday night or Monday morning, and reach the mainland by Monday night.
Mexico’s National Water Commission (Conagua) predicted that the storm would be a Category 1 or 2 hurricane by the time it moves onto land.
The storm will generate wind gusts of up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour and waves of up to 16 feet (five meters) on the coasts of Nayarit and Jalisco states, Conagua added, urging the inhabitants of at-risk areas to take refuge in temporary shelters.
The Ministry of the Navy has closed the ports of Nayarit and Jalisco.
Authorities are keeping a close eye on the storm’s track as they mull whether to evacuate tourists from Mexican beach resorts to temporary shelters, Víctor Hugo Roldan, director of Civil Protection in Jalisco, told the press.
Tropical cyclones hit Mexico every year on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, usually between May and November.
In October 1997, Hurricane Paulina hit Mexico’s Pacific coast as a Category 4 storm, leaving more than 200 dead.
International
Inconclusive vote: Brazil wakes up to four more weeks of uncertainty
AFP | Mariëtte Le Roux
After an inconclusive first round of presidential elections, Brazilians woke up Monday to another month of uncertainty in a deeply polarized political environment and with renewed fears of unrest.
Seeking to make a spectacular comeback, ex-president and frontrunner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 76, failed to garner the 50 percent of votes plus one needed to avoid an October 30 runoff against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, 67.
Lula got 48.4 percent of the vote in Sunday’s first round, followed by Bolsonaro with a much closer-than-expected 43.2 percent that seemed to signal a high level of enthusiasm for his conservative brand of “God, country and family” politics.
Lula had gone into Sunday’s first round with 50 percent of polled voter intention, and Bolsonaro with 36 percent.
The divisive president’s surprise performance likely spells a difficult time ahead, analysts said.
“I think it will be a very stressful campaign,” Leonardo Paz, Brazil consultant for the International Crisis Group, told AFP.
“Bolsonaro and Lula will come… for each other, and I think Bolsonaro will double down on… saying that the system was against him.”
Bolsonaro has repeatedly sought to cast doubt on Brazil’s electronic voting system and has questioned the validity of opinion polls that have consistently placed him a distant second.
Now, with real-life results seeming to bear out his claims, “more people… may believe in what Bolsonaro is saying,” said Paz.
‘Emboldened’
The incumbent president has repeatedly hinted that he would not accept a Lula victory, raising fears of a Brazilian version of the riots last year at the US Capitol after former president Donald Trump refused to accept his election loss.
Bolsonaro “will be very emboldened,” by Sunday’s electoral performance, said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank.
“It will give him some momentum because he’s beaten the expectations… He will play on that the experts were wrong: ‘I’ve got the momentum and I’ll defy expectations again in the second round’.”
Late Sunday, Bolsonaro proclaimed to journalists: “We defeated the opinion polls’ lie.”
Passions will be high on both sides for the next four weeks.
Lula’s failure to pull off a first-round victory leaves Bolsonaro with “an extra month to cause turmoil in the streets,” political scientist Guilherme Casaroes of the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s (FGV) Sao Paulo School of Business Administration told AFP.
“Any kind of doubt that he casts upon the electoral system will work in his favor… demobilizing voters not to go vote for Lula.”
This would mean hammering on Lula’s flaws, including his controversial conviction for corruption — since overturned in court, but not necessarily in the court of public opinion — and the 18 months he spent in jail.
“Certainly he (Bolsonaro) is very capable of revving up his base and they could interpret that (as the all-clear) to go after Lula supporters… You can’t rule it out,” said Shifter.
“There’s just a lot of rancor and a lot of hate and a lot of distrust and it would not be surprising if some of that leads to some unrest,” he added.
Any violence, however, was likely to be in the form of isolated incidents and not organized, just like it has been so far, analysts said.
Headed for an upset?
Sunday’s election outcome also suggested Bolsonaro cannot be written off.
“Lula’s chances of being elected seem considerably slighter,” said Casaroes.
A ‘Bolsonarist’ wave energized by the first-round results “will boost the president’s campaign and may help demobilize the non-convinced voters of Lula.”
It also means Lula will have to “court centrists and even conservatives much more aggressively during the next four weeks,” said the FGV’s Oliver Stuenkel, possibly hurting his standing with more radical leftist supporters.
Conversely, the disappointing result for Lula supporters might also serve to fire them up ahead of the next round.
“People that perhaps did not… vote because they thought that Bolsonaro would lose… they might go” vote in the next round, said Paz.
Added Casaroes: “Those who really care for democracy in the country will have to get off the couch. Occupying the public space against a strengthened Bolsonarism may be difficult, but it is the only way to prevent Bolsonaro’s long-run authoritarian project from consolidating at all levels.”
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