EXTREME RAIN. MONBIOT.

Crappy summer weather?

August was more like November for many across Canada, while the U.S. South was battered by heavy storms, with more to come.

But it isn't just "bad weather". Two scientists from the UK and the U.S. have published a paper in the journal "Science" showing extreme rainfall events are increasing - and they are caused by global warming.

Whenever you hear the phrase "record rain" on TV, or in the newspapers - pay attention. In this program I've collected reports on crazy rainfall events in many parts of the world - just this summer. Many towns and cities in North America, for example, broke records for rainfall in 24 hours, set in the 1800's. Local drainage and sewer systems can't handle it - our infrastructure was not built for the new extreme rain.

The physics is so simple. Warmer air holds more moisture. As the world warms, even slightly, and as the oceans warm - more moisture goes up into the atmosphere.

Naturally, rain continues to fall where rain usually falls, while dry areas can get even drier. So the excess rain comes down by the barrel load. Cape Canaveral got a record 22 inch drowning in 24 hours. Some places got several inches of rain in an hour.

This is happening all over the world, and I think it's one of the under-reported climate stories of the year. Yes we saw pictures of Myanmar (Burma) after a tropical storm wiped out millions of people. That was part wind, part storm surge off the ocean, but also a lot of rain.

And remember, just after the horrible Earth Quake in southern China, and several times since, that area was drenched in unbelievable rain events. Just next door, in Vietnam, same thing. In fact all the countries of the Mekong have been flooding from heavy rains.

Heavy rains, which the UN authorities blame on global warming, also caused a river in Nepal to burst, leading to massive flooding in the Northern India state of Bihar.

We've heard a lot about the threat of rising seas. Now it's time to look at the new climate guest at our doors: extreme rainfall events.

Ooops - I forgot our main event for this Radio Ecoshock Show: George Monbiot. He's a constant columnist in the UK newspaper the Guardian, and a long-time activist against expanded roads, airports, and coal burning. George is also the author of the best-selling book "Heat, How to Stop the Planet Burning" - and now a new book called "Bring on the Apocalypse."

George tells us about the new book. The interview ranges from carbon rationing through global justice all the way to his ideas on eco-incarnation. Monbiot also rates the U.S. Presidential candidates. Don't miss this interview. George doesn't fool around. He loads every answer with strong points, things we need to know and do.

I wrap up with a kind of "where we stand" piece. The situation. How we face it.

We also showcase an old song that most of you don't know: "A Good Planet Is Hard to Find" by Steve Forbert. It's catchy, almost soothing our worries.

Next week: Dr. Peter Ward, author of "Under the Green Sky" talks about past mass extinctions, and whether we are headed for a new one. We'll also chat with Peak Oil specialist Julian Darley. Julian was way ahead of us on oil and gas decline - he founded the Post Carbon Institute to look at life after oil.

We're back for another hard-hitting season - and thanks for the encouragement I've been receiving by email from a lot of loyal listeners.

Hopefully, we'll also come up with more possible solutions this Fall - along with the horror of our times.

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock

GLOBAL DRYING - Super Drought?

Click the title above to hear my 12 minute summary on global drying news.

Don't get me wrong. The science says that a warmer world will hold more water vapor in the atmosphere. And water vapor is also a potent greenhouse gas itself! You can see the positive feedback loop there.

All that water has to come down somewhere, and tons have dropped on the Pacific Northwest lately. I feel like an amphibian here. But that's an exception. A whole belt around the tropics, and extending up into the U.S. Southwest, and the Australian South, are set to dry out into recurring droughts.

That's in the news all over. CNN reports that a leak of the upcoming IPCC report in April (to AP Press) - predicts billions of people - that BILLIONS - could face water shortages by the end of this century.

We're already seeing a super drought in southern Australia. The bush keeps burning up, and former farming land turns into dust. The rainfall there has shifted Southward toward Antarctica, as warming climate disturbs the weather system.

You don't need to be told about the Sahel of Africa. There are already millions of environmental refugees from spreading deserts and drought-lands caused by first-world carbon spewing uncontrolled into the atmosphere. Tim Flannery blames the Darfur tragedy on Europe's smokestacks and tailpipes.

Even the Amazon rainforest has begun to dry out, with reports of rivers shrinking to a fraction of their normal size. The great rainforests may become grass lands - and all their carbon will be released, to our peril.

Then Joseph Romm, author of the blog Climate Progress, writes an article on "the interglacial super drought" in the U.S. Southwest. Agriculture, and eventually who cities of people in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico will be hit by drought.

Even Los Angelese residents know what I am talking about. So do people near the mountains in China. A new article in the journal "Nature" explains that a type of rainfall formerly caused as hot air cools around the mountains, is greatly reduced. That's because the type of smog particles coming from diesel motors, burning bio-mass, and agricultural fertilizers - is inhibiting the formation of raindrops.

Weather experts suspected that smog was reducing rainfall. The mountain-type rain in California has been reduced between 10 to 25 percent in the last 30 years or so. Now there is scientific evidence to prove it.

The study was done in China, where air pollution is so severe. On a particular mountain, blessed to receive the smog of a great city, raindrops were unable to form. The mountian ecosystem, and all the residents of the valley below, lose the rain they need.

Perversely, when human-made dust in the air ("aerosols") travels over the Pacific, picking up larger particles of salt as well - they drop sheets of heavy rain on the Pacific NorthWest. What fails to fall in one area, is moved elsewhere, to provoke heavy flooding.

Heavy rainfall events will increase in some parts of the world, while droughts strike others.

We're just beginning to understand all this. A lot of science is hot of the press, as they say.

James Lovelock has a map of what an over-heated world would look like. Sure enough, the tropics are mostly deserts - both on land, and under the sea! The green habitable areas are much closer to the poles, especially around the Arctic Sea.

The planet has been in that kind of a state before, in cycles that seem to take many millions of years to develop - except we're pushing it that way in just one or two human lifetimes. Apparently, Nature never expected one of its creatures to drag out hundreds of millions of years of carbon, and burn it all!

Dig into this. Global drying will hit in a wide belt, even while other areas experience Biblical floods.

Alex.
www.ecoshock.org