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Many Muscovites are getting out of town

The World — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:25:22 +0000

Global climate change is partly to blame for the abnormally hot and dry weather in Moscow, cloaked in a haze of smoke from wildfires, say researchers. The fires continue to burn in central and western Russia and the smoke and pollution has become unbearable for many in Moscow, and as Jessica Golloher reports, many are gettin’ out of town. (Flickr image: RiMarkin) Download MP3

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World. Wildfires continue to burn in central and western Russia. Economists suggest that the fires could reduce the country’s national output by up to 1%. The smoke and pollution has become unbearable for many in the capital, Moscow. And so, as Jessica Golloher reports, many are getting out of town.

JESSICA GOLLOHER: Patience is wearing thin as everyone from babyshkas to kids cram onto an already packed express train. Destination, Domodedova Airport. Many of the passengers say they’re headed out of the pea soup like acrid smoke of Moscow for better, cleaner and more breathable air. American Charlotte Turner is one of them. She says she’s ecstatic to be finally headed home to Boston after spending time in what she describes as Smogeddon.

CHARLOTTE TURNER: It’s like walking through a campfire. Everywhere is just smoky. You can’t see. Before I left, it wasn’t as bad. I came back last night and it’s been just hard to breathe and really terrible. Can’t even see 100 yards. It’s like smoking a pack of cigarettes on the street for four hours.

GOLLOHER: Standing outside the United check-in at Domodedova Airport in a Northwestern Law t-shirt, Derek Linkous looked relieved to be going back to Chicago. He says the Moscow smog ruined his vacation. He even tried to go home early, but everything was booked.

DEREK LINKOUS: There was just nothing to do in Moscow cause you would just – there’s nothing to do. You just sort of sit in your hotel room, maybe run out to the cafe and hope the cafe isn’t too smoggy. But I mean if you’re just going to sit in a hotel room you may as well just go home.

GOLLOHER: Muscovites commonly flee the city during the summer months. They take vacations just like everyone else. But aviation officials say people this season were desperate to leave. More than 100,000 people flew out of Moscow on Sunday. The highest volume so far this year. Travel agents reported package tours to destinations popular with Russians such as Egypt and Turkey were completely sold out. And an online check found that nearly 95% of trains from Moscow to St. Petersburg were completely sold out over the weekend. Lena Ivanova lives in the Moscow region. She says she’d love to get on a plane or take a vacation to get away from the toxic chemicals, but she can’t afford it. So she and her husband have packed up the car instead.

RUSSIAN SPEAKING

GOLLOHER: She says it’s dangerous here. It’s like we’re at war. She says we can’t breathe, we’re really frightened and we’re going to get out of here. Despite Ivanova’s readiness to flee the smoke and toxic fumes, her neighbor Vasiliey Ivanovich says he’s not budging.

RUSSIAN SPEAKING

GOLLOHER: He says it’s my home. I’m not going anywhere. Where would I go? I’m not scared of anything. I know these firefighters are working around the clock to get these fires under control. I know the fires will stop soon. And with that, Ivanovich turned on his heels and walked into his house, disappearing through a cloud of thick smoke. The government may need more than Ivanovich’s positive approach. Officials have recently acknowledged that they can’t get the blazes under control and President Dmitry Medvedev has accepted aid such as planes and troops from several other countries. Some forecasters predict that the giant cloud of smoke covering the Moscow region won’t abate for at least several days. Making matters worse, temperatures are expected to remain near 100 degrees for at least a week with no rain in sight. For The World, I’m Jessica Golloher in Moscow.

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Lizard extinction and oil in the deep ocean

The World — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:37:53 +0000

In the science podcast we’re looking at a new study suggesting the world’s lizards are increasingly threatened by climate change. And a scientist on board a research vessel tells us what he’s seeing around the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Science Magazine: erosion of lizard diversity
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Lizards in peril

The World — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:29:06 +0000

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In recent decades, scientists have documented serious threats to frog species across the globe. Frogs and other amphibians have vanished from many areas. The exact cause is in question. It might be an infectious disease, or pollution, or habitat destruction. A study published by the journal Science suggests the world’s lizards are also in peril. And what’s threatening lizards is climate change. The World’s science correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee has the story.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. Scientists know of serious threats to frog species across the globe. They’re vanishing from many areas, though the exact cause is in question. It could be disease or habitat destruction. Now a study published by the Journal of Science suggests the world’s lizards are in peril because of climate change. The World’s Science Correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee has the story.

RHITU CHATTERJEE: The European common lizard is a slender creature with a brown back and brightly colored belly. And as its name implies, it’s found across Europe. In the 1980′s scientists had documented the lizards in many parts of the Pyrenees mountain range in France. But when ecologist Barry Sinervo of UC Santa Cruz went back to those locations in the 1990′s, he was surprised by what he found.

BARRY SINERVO: I was in fact shocked. They were extinct at many locations.

CHATTERJEE: Sinervo couldn’t find an obvious reason why the lizards had vanished from these areas. The lizards do still live in some parts of the Pyrenees and the sites where they went extinct were pristine; undisturbed by development. But there was something different about the areas that had lost their lizards.

SINERVO: They were all concentrated in the southern part of the range and at low elevation.

CHATTERJEE: In other words, these were relatively warm areas at the edge of the species range. Maybe these areas were getting too warm. Sinervo wondered if these lizards were dying off due to global warming.

SINERVO: So I thought well that’s interesting but it’s not like a global pattern.

CHATTERJEE: Then in 2006 Sinervo went to Mexico. And he found the same pattern of local extinctions. Mountain dwelling lizards were disappearing from the warmer edges of their ranges. But was it really the heat that was killing them off? Biologist Donald Miles of Ohio University examined that question. He measured the air temperature of the sites where the lizards had vanished. And indeed, for part of the year, these places were too hot for the lizards to survive.

DONALD MILES: The extinct sites were thermally inhospitable so we got the smoking gun.

CHATTERJEE: Miles, Sinervo and their team wondered what these findings meant for lizards worldwide. They scoured the literature for data on other lizards. They applied what they had learned in Mexico and combined it with projections of future temperature increases. And from that they made some predictions. If nothing is done to curb global warming, nearly a fifth of all lizard species may go extinct by 2080. Raymond Huey is a herpetologist at the University of Washington. He calls the new study solid and important.

RAYMOND HUEY: This is the first major paper to show that extinctions of lizards are not just for the future, but they’re here now. I don’t think anyone had an appreciation of that on a global scale.

CHATTERJEE: And scientists say that it’s not just the lizards that are in trouble. The problem is many species live in mountain ranges. And as the temperature warms, these animals will have to move higher and higher up the mountains to find a more comfortable climate. And soon, they could be left with nowhere else to go. Stuart Pimm is a conservation biologist at Duke University. He says the planet could warm by two degrees Celsius or more in the coming decades and that could cause large scale extinctions.

STUART PIMM: The very substantial fraction of species around the world, maybe 25%, live within two degrees of their nearest mountain top, and that means those species are going to be in very serious trouble and it’s a very significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity.

CHATTERJEE: For now, these are only projections. The big unknown is what the world will do to control the emissions that scientists say are already threatening species and entire ecosystems. For The World, I’m Rhitu Chatterjee.

UN chief establishes climate panel review

The World — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:42:12 +0000

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UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has appointed an independent panel to review the operations of the IPCC, the UN’s climate science panel. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, but critics have identified a number of small errors in its reports. The World’s Katy Clark reports.

DAVID BARON: I’m David Baron, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. The secretary general of the United Nations has begun a review of the way the UN’s climate science panel works. The inter-governmental panel on climate, or IPCC is a collaboration of thousands of scientists from around the globe. It won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work. But recently some people have been questioning its credibility. The World’s Katy Clark has more.

KATY CLARK: The IPCC’s massive 2007 report has been hammered by critics in recent months. They’ve seized on a number of small errors to challenge the credibility of the entire agency. In announcing the review yesterday, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon made it clear he believes that the science behind climate change remains solid.

BAN KI-MOON: The threat posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC work.

KATY CLARK: But the secretary general acknowledged a few errors that had undermined public confidence in the IPCC. For instance, the agency failed to pick up a mistake in its estimate of how quickly the Himalayan glaciers are melting. So Ban Ki-Moon is turning to an independent panel to evaluate the IPCCS’s operations in hopes of avoiding such mistakes in the future. IPCC chairman R.K. Pachauri says he welcomes the review.

R.K. PACHAURI: In recent months, we have seen some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that, and we are doing something about it.

KATY CLARK: The review will be led by the head of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Robbert Dijkgraaf.

ROBBER DIJKGRAAF: What we have been asked to look at is the general way in which the IPCC works. So it’s processes and procedures, and management structure, the way it deals with peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed literature. How it communicates. So, it’s actually a very broad task. And we also have been asked to see how the approaches towards errors, how they can be avoided. All in all it will be future looking review.

KATY CLARK: That all sounds good to Roger Pielke Junior.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: I guess I’m in the unique position of being one of researchers who publishes in the peer-reviewed literature who has seen his work misrepresented by the IPCC.

KATY CLARK: Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He says the IPCC’s last report came to erroneous conclusions on the links between rising temperatures and the costs of natural disasters. Pielke doesn’t want to speculate why the IPCC didn’t correct its mistake.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: The reasons for the breakdowns in process don’t matter so much as that they’re recognized and changes are made to the policies and procedures of the institution, so they don’t happen again. It’s inevitable that there will be mistakes in a report as massive and as ambitious as the IPCC, but if the institution’s incapable of responding in an effective manner, then institution has some credibility problems.

KATY CLARK: Pielke says he’s cautiously optimistic that the review will address those problems. Oceanographer Katherine Richardson is a climate advisor to the Danish government. She’s also happy that a third party will be reviewing the IPCC’s work. But she harbors no illusions that the review will satisfy people who believe climate change isn’t real.

KATHERINE RICHARDSON: There’s still people saying same thing about evolution. So it would be naïve to believe that this discussion is going to go away simply because we do look at the way IPCC works.

KATY CLARK: The review panel will try to finish its work by August. That would give the IPCC time to implement any recommendations before it begins work on its next report. For The World, this is Katy Clark.

Raising Bangladesh

The World — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:44:00 +0000

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Some of the countries most at risk from climate change are low-lying nations. And chief among them is the South Asian country of Bangladesh. Rising seas threaten to inundate this already disaster-prone land. But Bangladesh is experimenting with new ways to protect itself. One possible solution uses floods to prevent floods. It’s an idea that was forced on the government in a revolt by desperate farmers. Reporter Daniel Grossman has our story. (All photos by Dan Grossman)

In Dhaka the best form of transportation is often a bicycle rickshaw.

Grossman: Bangladesh is crowded. It has a population greater than Russia’s crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. And water is never far away here. The nation sits on a broad coastal plain that’s just above sea level. Civil engineer Ainun Nishat says the country’s geography puts the dense population at risk.

Ainun Nishat: “Bangladesh is nature’s laboratory on natural disaster. We have floods, we have droughts, we have heat waves, we have river bank erosion, we have storm surges, we have cyclones. “

Grossman: And global warming will make things worse, he says. Sea level is expected to rise two or three feet this century. To complicate matters, while the sea is rising, the land is sinking. You see Bangladesh sits on a big delta. This land was built up over thousands of years by sediment washing down the region’s major rivers to their mouths at the Bay of Bengal. But those rivers don’t deposit the sediment on land as they used to. They’ve been constrained by earthen embankments that force the sediment, about a billion tons a year, directly to the sea. Geographer Maminul Haque Sarker says without fresh sediment building up on land, the soil is compacting – it’s sinking – and the country is becoming even more vulnerable to sea level rise.

Maminul Haque Sarker: “If you can manage the sediment better — better way, then it can mitigate some of your losses due to climate change.”

Grossman: That’s what some in Bangladesh are now trying to do… manage the sediment better.

Boats of all sizes and shapes are the used for transport and commerce throughout the waterlogged delta.

Grossman: A heavy-set man in pressed pants and a polo shirt is driving his car through the outskirts of Khulna, the third-largest city in Bangladesh. Shafiqul Islam is director of a small college, a former locally-elected official, and founder of the Pani or water-committee, a grassroots farmers’ rights group. He’s riding an a straight road on the crest of a dike along one of thousands of small rivers that criss-cross the delta. The water is murky, rich with soil washed down from the Himalayas.

Shafiqul Islam: “You need to understand, this is the river, and that is the farmland. Now you can see that the river is full of sediment.”

Grossman: The area around the river was once a mangrove forest. And though more than 50 miles from the sea, it’s so low and flat that the tide used to overflow the low banks of natural channels and flood nearly the entire region with mucky water. In the 1960′s, at the behest of the government, international aid organizations began constructing a system of dikes to create permanent river channels and stop the natural flooding. Islam says it was an attempt to protect farmers who grow rice here.

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul Islam: “Because in our country we always think that the Western countries’ manners are very good and they are very knowledgeable, they know everything. But we are very poor countries, we don’t have vast knowledge, we don’t have good engineers here and therefore we have to invite engineers from outside.”

Grossman: But channelizing the rivers robbed the surrounding land of fresh soil. In a matter of decades, once-productive rice paddies had sunk so low they could no longer be drained into the river, which is necessary to farm rice. So the paddies became stagnant and infertile. People had no food.

Shafiqul Islam and others proposed a radical idea: cut the dikes, and let silty water flow onto the farmland for a few years to replenish the depleted paddies. Water officials rebuffed their suggestion. So in 1997, a band of frustrated farmers defied the government and did just that – breached the embankment.

Shafiqul Islam: “There were many police and government officials present while we cut the channel. But thousands and thousands of people were there to help us, and we did it.”

Grossman: As an estimated 20,000 farmers watched, a team of men hacked a hole in the dike with shovels.

Shafiqul Islam: “A huge amount of water went to the wetland side with silt. After the high tide is in full, the water remains stagnant for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at this time, the silt is deposited in the wetland.”

Grossman: The plan to save the paddies outside the city of Khulna worked. In three years the land had collected four feet of new silt. Rice flourishes here once again. Government officials now agree that selectively opening dikes for a new dose of sediment is a good idea. They’ve done it themselves in other areas.

Ainun Nishat: “This is something which is working. And we are champion of it.”

Grossman: Civil engineer Ainun Nishat, who has advised Shafiqul Islam, says although the purpose of cutting the dike in 1997 was to improve agriculture, his country could use the same method to raise the level of the land and protect it from the slow advance of the sea.

Ainun Nishat: “We are pushing the government to do it more effectively. We find the government not doing it with the proper enthusiasm it should receive.

Grossman: Bangladesh does plan to breach more embankements. And other low-lying regions are also exploring this idea. Earlier this year the state of Louisiana announced that it will try restoring sinking wetlands by redirecting sediment from the Mississippi River. But Sheikh Nural Ala, an official with Bangladesh’s Water Development Board, says this technique alone won’t save his people from rising seas.

Sheikh Nural Ala

Sheikh Nural Ala: “Well, it can help, actually, to some extent but not fully because you know, we can apprehend that it may rise up to 1 meter of water level in the sea. So it is not the permanent solution. We have to search for permanent solution again.”

Grossman: A permanent solution, Ala says, will likely involve a mix of techniques – including selective flooding of some areas, and using accumulated sediment to build higher dikes. And a new study says such measures are urgently needed. The study found that most of the world’s major deltas are sinking… and as the sea rises, flooding in these areas could increase 50% this century – putting tens of millions of people at added risk.

For The World, I’m Daniel Grossman, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Daniel Grossman’s reporting in Bangladesh is part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s climate change initiative. It was supported by the Kendeda Fund, Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation, Barbara Smith Fund, Whole Systems Foundation and Abby Rockefeller & Lee Halprin and 7th Generation Incorporated.

Climate change meeting

The World — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:30:56 +0000

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UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for urgent action on climate change, saying negotiations on reducing emissions were proceeding too slowly. He said failure to reach agreement at December’s climate talks in Copenhagen would be “morally inexcusable”. He was speaking at a UN meeting attended by about 100 world leaders in New York to revitalize the talks.

Attention is likely to focus on Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is expected to unveil new steps to tackle emissions. The summit in Copenhagen is aimed at approving a global climate change treaty. Negotiators are trying to agree on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon emissions. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports

BBC coverage
Summit on Climate Change