Hurricane Stan leaves 300,000 needing help in Mexico

BY SUSANA HAYWARD

Knight Ridder Newspapers

MEXICO CITY - (KRT) - Rescuers with emergency supplies of food and water can't reach more than 300,000 people in mountainous regions of Mexico's Chiapas state cut off by flooding and mudslides in the aftermath of Hurricane Stan, officials said Friday.  

States of emergency have been declared in at least six Mexican states because of the storm, which previously had devastated huge regions of Central America .  

Flooding caused by the storm has damaged or destroyed most of the bridges linking Chiapas state with Guatemala to the south.

"There're at least 300,000 people in the region who are not receiving any kind of help," said Chiapas Gov. Pablo Salazar Mendiguchia. He said floods and mudslides had affected at least 1 million residents of his state.  

President Vicente Fox flew to Chiapas on Friday, and hundreds of soldiers were pressed into service to rescue people and open shelters in the state.  

The U.S. Embassy was sending $100,000 worth of food, and Salazar said 50 tons of food and other aid have been donated by private businesses.

"It's devastating. Much of the city is gone. There's hardly any food left. People are desperate," said Maripaz Herrera, the manager of the Hotel Kamico in Tapachula, a city of 400,000 on the border with Guatemala.  

"We're running out of everything. This is the worst disaster we've had," she said in a telephone interview.  

Tens of thousands in seven southern Mexican states Friday were forced to flee their homes as heavy rains and flooding swept the region. Television reports showed dozens of cars and homes buried under mounds of mud.  

The state oil company Pemex said it had evacuated 270 workers from its offshore Gulf Coast and Yucatan Peninsula platforms before the storm hit land.  

Fox declared states of emergency for Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Puebla, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Jalisco and Tabasco . The official death toll from the storm stood at 225 in and Central America .  

But officials acknowledge it is expected to rise much higher when rains cease. Weather officials say that likely won't happen until Tuesday.  

Adding danger and fear was a strong earthquake that shook both Guatemala and El Salvador on Friday afternoon. It caused already damaged highways and bridges to collapse in Guatemala and sent thousands of residents in both Central American nations fleeing into the streets.  

There were no immediate reports of injuries from the quake, which had a preliminary magnitude of 5.8. Telephone service also was cut off briefly in some areas of El Salvador.  

The quake follows the eruption of the Lametepec volcano, which erupted Saturday 40 miles south of El Salvador's capital of San Salvador.  

"The impact of this hurricane is overwhelming," Fox said. "It's affecting practically all of southern , and hundremexicods of thousands of families are in dire misery."  

Stan is the most recent storm of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, one of the deadliest in years. The season ends Nov.30. 

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/12847223.htm

Warmest summer in 400 yrs: NASA

NEW YORK: Caught in a "vicious" circle of global warming, the polar ice pack has shrunk by 30 per cent since 1978 and melting is speeding up causing the warmest summer in 400 years, an yet to be released NASA report said.

The new satellite photos show that the ice pack has shrunk by 30 per cent since 1978 and the melting is speeding up causing the warmest summer in 400 years and changing the flora and fauna and culture of the region, ABC television network quoted from a NASA report to be released this weekend.

Scientists said that Artic may be caught in a "vicious cycle" of global warming. As ice melts, there is less white matter to reflect sun's heat back into space. The dark ocean absorbs more of sun's heat and that, in turn, melts more of the ice pack.

Since melting permafrost leaves the ground soft and with far less frozen surface to block the waves, the water carves away at it. Old graves are tumbling into the sea, the report said.

"They keep getting exposed. People don't really want to see their ancestors getting washed into the ocean," ABC quoted a scientist as saying.

The network showed images of whole villages tumbling into the ocean, forcing people as well as animals to relocate from Point Barrow in Alaska on the northern tip of America.

Now scientists are watching the birds get driven out by puffins, warmer weather birds from the sub-Arctic, which kill the chicks and take over the nests.

"Yesterday, it's the Arctic , and now suddenly, it's turning into the sub-Arctic!" said biologist George Divoky.
Typically in the arctic, any ground deeper than about four feet has always been frozen. But the permafrost is now starting to melt.

As the sea ice disappears, many polar bears are starving because they must have sea ice on which to hunt, the report said.

And the culture of local residents, whose life has centred upon hunting on the ice, is changing as well, the network added.

"It's often too dangerous now, due to the thin ice," said Fred Simik, an Inupiat native.

Another cause for worry for the scientists were that as the permafrost melts and this vast arctic tundra dries up, decaying plants in the soil are releasing increased amounts of carbon, a greenhouse gas that only adds to the warming and melting.

"Humans are putting about 6 or 7 billion metric tons of carbon in the atmosphere every year," ABC quoted biologist Walter Oechel, director of the Global Change Research Institute at San Diego State University as saying.

"And we're standing on 200 billion tons here," he added, pointing to the tundra.

http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=46722

Heatwave makes plants warm planet

By Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website

A new study shows that during the 2003 heatwave, European plants produced more carbon dioxide than they absorbed from the atmosphere.

They produced nearly a tenth as much as fossil fuel burning globally. The study shows that ecosystems which currently absorb CO2 from the atmosphere may in future produce it, adding to the greenhouse effect.

The 2003 European summer was abnormally hot; but other studies show that these temperatures could become commonplace.

In some parts of Europe , 2003 saw temperatures soaring six degrees Celsius above normal; hot enough that estimates of the deaths which it caused run into the tens of thousands.

It was also significantly drier than usual; and these two factors appear to have had a major impact on plant growth.

Up the tower

"The data we used mainly comes from a set of 18 flux towers which are set up across Europe," said Andrew Friend from the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE) in Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris, whose team published their study in the scientific journal Nature.

The towers, managed through a project called CarboEurope, measure the flow of carbon dioxide, water and energy between the atmosphere and the ground; most are set up in forests.

"About half of the mass of a plant is carbon; so by measuring the flow of CO2 into the plants, we can see how well they're doing," Dr Friend told the BBC News website.

The result coming from the 18 sites was that during 2003, plants took up less CO2 from the air and grew more slowly - a finding corroborated by satellite measurements of the area under leaf.So much for natural ecosystems; but what about farmland?

Here, the researchers drew on data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which showed a fall in European crop yields during the 2003 summer.

Putting all the data together, the headline figure is that overall, European lands were 20% less productive than during an average year.

"We expect that many crops will be affected by high temperatures, especially during critical phases of development such as flowering," said Professor Julia Slingo from the Natural Environment Research Council's Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling in the UK, who recently organised a Royal Society seminar on food crops in a changing climate.

"This study found that crops reaching maturity in August were particularly badly affected; some of the fall-off could be related to water stress, but could also have been related to high temperatures during flowering," she told the BBC News website.

"The heatwave also led to higher levels of ozone at ground level, and that can have damaging effects on plants."

Saint becomes sinner

The really surprising finding came with the calculation that during the heatwave, European plants and their ecosystems were putting more carbon dioxide into the air than they were absorbing.

"In the past we expected that climate change would benefit European ecosystems because growth tends to be limited by the short growing season," said Andrew Friend, "but this analysis hadn't taken into account the possibility of extreme events.

"The conclusion of our study is that this extreme event meant a loss of carbon across Europe - a loss which undoes many years of net uptake."

Plants can absorb and emit carbon dioxide and oxygen; the process of respiration takes oxygen in and releases CO2, whereas in photosynthesis, the reverse happens.

Other parts of the ecosystem such as soil bacteria can also contribute to the overall flow of these gases to and from the atmosphere.

During an average year, the net effect is that European plants absorb around 125 million tonnes of carbon (MtC). But in 2003, according to this analysis, they released 500 MtC to the atmosphere.

By comparison, global emissions from burning fossil fuels amounts to about 7,000 MtC; by giving rather than taking, European plants were adding about 10% to the global total.

"This shows that short-term climatic events such as the 2003 heatwave occurring over regional areas like Europe can have major effects on the climate globally," commented Julia Slingo.

The heat to come

The wider context for all this is a study published last year suggesting that summers as hot and dry as that of 2003 will become commonplace as the global climate changes.

"We concluded that on a middle-of-the-road scenario for emissions - assuming we don't do very much to combat climate change - temperature heatwaves as high as the one in 2003 would be occurring every other year by middle of this century," said Dr Myles Allen of Oxford University.

"By the end of the century, 2003 would be a cool year."

Plants could of course adapt to the changing climate, meaning that the switch from net absorption of CO2 to net production might not happen.

But, said Andrew Friend, this finding may be a sign of things to come. "In the tropics, where it's already warm, higher temperatures are predicted to increase the flux of carbon from plants to the atmosphere," he said.

"We have generally assumed that in northern systems, we would see increased carbon uptake; but that might not be the case."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4269066.stm