Tornado strikes Joplin, Missouri, USA - Current death toll: 116

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Volcanic eruptions affect Asian rainfall [in SE Asia]

2010-11-04
ANI (India)

A new research has revealed that volcanic eruptions affect rainfall over the Asian monsoon region, where seasonal storms water crops for nearly half of earth's population.

Tree-ring researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory showed that big eruptions tend to dry up much of central Asia, but bring more rain to Southeast Asian countries including Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar.

The growth rings of some tree species can be correlated with rainfall, and the observatory's Tree Ring Lab used rings from some 300 sites across Asia to measure the effects of 54 eruptions going back about 800 years.

The researchers also have done a prior study of volcanic cooling in the tropics.

"We might think of the study of the solid earth and the atmosphere as two different things, but really everything in the system is interconnected. Volcanoes can be important players in climate over time," said Kevin Anchukaitis, study's lead author.

Large explosive eruptions send up sulfur compounds that turn into tiny sulfate particles high into the atmosphere, where they deflect solar radiation. Resulting cooling on earth's surface can last for months or years.

The tree rings showed that huge swaths of southern China, Mongolia and surrounding areas consistently dried up in the year or two following big events, while mainland southeast Asia got increased rain.

However, the researchers also maintained there are many possible factors involved, and it would speculative at this point to say exactly why it works this way.

"The data only recently became available to test the models. Now, it's obvious there's a lot of work to be done to understand how all these different forces interact," said Rosanne D'Arrigo, one of the study's co-authors.

Ultimately, said Anchukaitis, such studies should help scientists refine models of how natural and manmade forces might act together to in the future to shift weather patterns-a vital question for all areas of the world.

The study appeared in the online version of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Asia’s Water Crisis

August 30, 2010
Mong Palatino
The New Nation (Bangladesh)

As the contradictions of Asia's water challenges have been laid bare this summer-with millions affected by flooding while others are hit by droughts-one thing has been made clearer: the coming water crisis could exacerbate already simmering domestic and regional tensions.

Heavy monsoon rains have produced the worst flooding in Pakistan's history, with more than three weeks of flooding leaving at least 1,500 dead and more than 4 million homeless. Millions of Pakistanis already require humanitarian assistance, yet the likelihood that many more could be added to this list has grown with the announcement that 200,000 have been evacuated as flood waters continue to rise in Singh Province in the country's south.

Meanwhile, flash floods and mudslides have submerged some villages in China's Gansu Province, killing hundreds and leaving more than a thousand missing. Today, Chinese state media announced 250,000 had been evacuated in the north of the country after the Yalu River burst its banks.

But while attention has been focused on disasters in Pakistan in China, South-east Asia has been hit by its own torrential downpours. Last month, Singapore suffered three major floods-an unprecedented number for the prosperous city state-with even the shopping and financial districts hit in the first serious flooding disaster in the city since 1978.

Vietnam has also been affected, with many parts of Hanoi under water last month after a major storm struck the country. What added insult to injury in Vietnam's case is that the flooding came after a nine-month dry spell that disrupted the country's power supply (about a third of Vietnam's power source comes from hydroelectric power plants whose operations have been adversely affected by falling water levels in the Mekong River).

And Vietnam hasn't been the only country in the region to face the twin curse of droughts and flooding. The Philippines (recently ranked by the Belgium-based Center for Research and Epidemiology Disasters as the most disaster-prone area in the world) was last year hit by 14 meteorological and 9 hydrological disasters, the most devastating of which was last September's typhoon, which unleashed the worst flooding in Metro Manila in 40 years.

This year, although floods have been a regular occurrence in Manila since the start of the wet season, the June-July rainfall was insufficient to increase water levels at the Angat Dam-the principal source of fresh water in the country's capital. The result has been both tragic and somehow comic: Residential homes are flooded, but there's no water in the faucets.

To top all this, Thailand is also this year experiencing a longer than usual dry season and was forced to postpone the rice planting season for a month, which will have knock-on effects around the region as Thailand, like Vietnam, is among the world's top rice exporters.

It's an alarming pattern-both flooding and dry spells across Asia are becoming more intense, and occurring more frequently, each year.

So how should Asian governments respond? For a start, they can do better than simply blaming God or Nature, arguments rolled out by one Singaporean minister to explain the massive flooding there.

Flash floods, landslides, and other symptoms of climate change are also in part man-made disasters. In the case of Singapore, for example, some experts blame excessive property development in the city for rising floodwaters, while the Gansu landslide in China has been linked to massive deforestation, mining activities and the construction of several hydropower plants in the area.

Inadequate government planning is also a major reason for the rising human casualties. The Philippines drafted comprehensive flood control measures as early as 1976 but failed to implement the proposed engineering solutions to minimize the harmful impact of the annual floods. Water rationing is now being undertaken in Manila precisely because previous governments have failed to develop or tap other sources of clean water. If Malaysia doesn't learn from the mistakes of the Philippines, it's estimated that it too could encounter a water crisis in 2014.

But swiftly addressing these problems is about more than the immediate goal of saving lives in individual countries-doing so can also help prevent regional disputes. For example, the construction of several dams in China along the Mekong River has been pinpointed as one reason for the drop in water levels along the river, which is vital for servicing the water needs of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (though of course China resents any suggestion that its damming activities are causing environmental problems for its neighbours).

There's potential for such disputes to turn into conflict. For countries like Singapore confronted with scarce water supplies, it's crucial that sustainable water agreements are inked with adjacent countries. Singapore has a water agreement with Malaysia, but the deal comes to an end next year. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad pondered in a blog entry whether it's time to charge Singapore for the water it buys from Malaysia at adjusted market prices. This comes at a time when Malaysia is blaming Singapore's land reclamation project for flooding in the Sungai Johor area. Could Malaysia and Singapore end up battling over clean water next year?

This isn't, of course, the only potential flashpoint over water in Asia-India and Pakistan have already been widely cited as two countries at risk of conflict over Himalayan water sources.

But it's still unclear whether there's any urgency to take a more broad-based approach to tackling these problems.

Regional governments find plenty of time to meet and discuss trade imbalances, poverty and terrorism. But recent crises have demonstrated that it's time they also stopped seeing problems such as the floods in Pakistan as simply national, internal issues and started taking a regional perspective instead. Failure to do so may well prove nothing short of disastrous.

Archaelogists have breakthrough regarding the decline of Angkor

25 June 2009
The University of Sydney (Australia)

One of archaelogy's greatest mysteries has been solved. According to soon-to-be published paper by a team headed by Professor Roland Fletcher, the great medieval city of Angkor was destroyed by the combined effects of a mini ice age, and over-development of its complicated water system.

The findings were based on new pollen and tree-ring-dating evidence that uses long-lived species in the region such as the 900-year-old po mu tree. Evidence that extreme weather conditions had occurred from 1362 to 1392 and from 1415 to 1440 was found in the annual growth rings of the tree.

At its height from the 9th to 15th centuries, the elaborate city of Angkor had about 750,000 citizens and was the most comprehensive urban development of the preindustrial world. By the 16th century, the city was in ruin.

The archaelogical team investigating the phenomena of Angkor includes the University of Sydney's Professor Fletcher, and paleoclimatologist Dr Dan Penny; and paleoclimatologist Brendan Buckley of New York's Columbia University. It is part of the Greater Angkor Project, an international, multidisciplinary research programme studying the decline of urbanism at Angkor, in Cambodia.

The Greater Angkor team will hypothesise in its paper that the decline of the city was due to extensive problems with its vast and complicated water system and the compound effect of a series of droughts and monsoonal floods in the mid-14th to late 15th centuries.

In an article in The National Geographic Professor Fletcher said, "Angkor really had no fat to burn. The city was more exposed to the threat of drought than at any other time in its history. Prolonged and severe droughts, punctuated by torrential downpours, would have ruined the water system."

The findings have important lessons for contemporary readings of climate change. As experts debate the effects of human-made climate change, the tree rings of the po mu tree around Angkor reveal that even natural variations in weather can bring about catastrophe.

Contact: Sarah Stock
Phone: 02 9351 4312 or 0419 278 715
Email: sarah.stock@usyd.edu.au

The errors of Angkor

June 25, 2009
The Australian

But planners are not making the same mistakes, except in NSW

EXPLAINING one of history's great mysteries, University of Sydney archeologists, reported in The Australian yesterday, say the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor collapsed because it grew too big and was overwhelmed by extreme weather. Its fate, they say, has implications for modern cities. Indeed it does, but not the ones that enemies of the great Australian backyard will claim. Rather than expanding, perhaps Angkor's problem was that it was run by ancient equivalents of the NSW state government. Angkor's administrators did not adapt their infrastructure to changing circumstances. They let their city expand but did not maintain services to support it.

Sound familiar? It will to anybody who lives in the northwestern suburbs of Sydney, where a repeatedly promised and much-needed suburban railway has not been built and the roads are utterly inadequate. But the damage done by official incompetence is not the message inner city activists will draw from Angkor's fate.

This sort of research is easily misused by deep green ideologues who dislike people because they believe our presence pollutes the natural environment, activists who use Jared Diamond's theory of what happened when the people of Easter Island over-used their resources as a metaphor for the modern world. Such arguments suggest we are doomed to repeat Angkor's experience, that we cannot repair infrastructure and do not know how to use engineering to address climate change, that we must not allow people to live where they like. Of course they are wrong ... apart, of course, from NSW.