olelog

Early June 2009 desert locust swarms moved across northern Somalia. Can this country, that already has fallen into parts (see map further below), survive more plagues in continuation of civil war, famine, soil erosion, human health problems due to use of contaminated water, overgrazing and further desertification?

Food security in eastern and western regions of the self-declared republic of Somaliland (see map further below) is under threat following an invasion of desert locusts, which have destroyed an estimated 3,000 ha of farmland.

Somalia is geographically divided into the northern desert and the southern coastal plains and plateaus. Somalia became independent in 1960. Somalia is one of the poorest, most violent, least stable countries anywhere on Earth. It suffers from severe drought and its people face hunger and violence on a daily basis. It has been tormented by crude civil war most of the time since 1986. Only 1.64% of Somalia’s 637,657 km² is arable land with permanent crops on 0.04% of Somalia. Most of the country receives less than 500 mm of rain annually, and a large area encompassing the northeast and much of northern Somalia receives as little as 50 to 150 mm/yr (deserts are usually defined as areas with an average annual precipitation of less than 250 mm/yr). One of the country’s biggest problem is the heavy loss of livestock suffered by the pastoralist/nomadic communities in the worst drought in 30 years.

Somali has a 3,025 km long coastline. In 2005 ca. 700 foreign fishing trawlers were illegally active in Somalian waters. For years other countries have dumped nuclear and toxic waste off the coast of Somalia. After the tsunami in 2005 some of this waste washed ashore with disastrous results for the coastal population like skin diseases and mouth bleedings.

So what can you do in Somalia for a living. Crops gone, livestock gone, fish gone, and no social security. One solution is taking aid helpers as hostages to get ransom money. There is however bigger money in piracy. And the pirates are local heroes. They are the revengers of those foreigners that destroyed the fishing industry and they provide money. Eyl (in Puntland, another more or less independent region, see map below) is the location of most of Somalia's casualties from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. It has about 3 million inhabitants and has become something like the capital of the Somalian pirates. As the so-called pirate capital it is where the high seas hijackers often steer their captured vessels. Special restaurants in the town cater for the captive crews. With their expensive tastes in fancy houses, cars and women, the pirates have brought boom times to the local economy.

Puntland is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis following poor rains that have created severe water and food shortages. Puntland has experienced a third consecutive seasonal rainfall failure. Most of the population relies on livestock, but poor rainfall has left them struggling to make ends meet. In some places 30 to 40 percent of the livestock has died, and what little livestock is left is so weak it cannot even be sold, and much less used for milk and meat.

Seen the humanitarian situation it does not come as a surprise that many people try to flee from the country. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) the number of those who crossed to Yemen in 2008 was 50,000, of whom more than 1,000 people died during the journey. Apart from piracy there is therefore also money to earn from smuggling fugitives out of the country. Smugglers are reportedly charging each migrant US$100 for the trip to Yemen, but sometimes the smugglers do not even take them anywhere near Yemen. They take them on their boat, wander around the Somali coast for a night and dump them near a Somali town telling them it is Yemen.

• http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=84700

This post is mainly based on my earlier posts on the humanitarian situation in Somalia and Puntland. I thought it might fit in the “Carnival of the Arid”, showing what may happen in an arid area, when human conflicts worsen a situation already harsh due to climate and not least climate change. Without improving the humanitarian situation for all Somalis, the current problems will not be solved. This is an extremely difficult task for the international community.

• http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2009/04/23/somalia-is-burning-and-we-have-no-water
• http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2009/05/08/puntland-drought

PS of 3 July 2009:
Somewhere in the middle of the Greenland Sea I have succeded in connecting to the Internet. The temperatures here are a bit lower than in Somalia, and I am looking at gulls! So if you want to read more about dry areas go to the "Carnival of the Arid" now up at: http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/carnival_of_the_arid_5/
In the meantime I'll have a closer look at the sea and the Arctic.



Support local economy
- and sustainable transport !

While human made emissions of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) and other greenhouse gasses cause global warming, pollution particles including industrial aerosols such as sulphates, nitrates found in smoke from burning agricultural waste and black carbon (soot) from diesel engines and other forms of combustion have a cooling effect. Aerosol particles scatter and reflect the Sun's rays - an effect that "masks" global warming. To which extent such particles or aerosols cool down the climate, remains however so far an unanswered question. Aerosols, are today one of the main reasons for the uncertainty about how humans affect the global climate.

The direct aerosol effect includes both scattering and absorption of solar light and evaluating its magnitude is complicated by the fact that some atmospheric aerosols are predominately scattering whereas others are mainly absorbing. Global models of the emission of these aerosols suggest the cooling effect they have cancels out approximately 10% of the global warming caused by greenhouse gases. But satellite methods that detect the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere suggest a cooling effect that cancels out about 20%. Some estimates even show that aerosols have masked as much as 50 percent of the warming from CO₂.

In a report published online in Science Express Gunnar Myhre concludes that the cooling effect is closer to 10%.

According to Dr. Myhre the impact of aerosols on the climate would eventually become insignificant, compared to greenhouse gases. Aerosols have a very short lifetime and the greenhouse gases have a very long lifetime - more than 100 years for carbon dioxide. In the future it's really the greenhouse gases that are the big issue for warming. They will dominate more and more.

Reference:
Consistency Between Satellite-Derived and Modeled Estimates of the Direct Aerosol Effect
by Gunnar Myhre
Published Online June 18, 2009
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1174461

• http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1174461
• http://www.cicero.uio.no/webnews/index_e.aspx?id=11142
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8108100.stm
• http://www.physorg.com/news164613355.html

PS - Dansk henvisning:
• http://ing.dk/artikel/99693-luftforurening-goer-jorden-ti-procent-koldere?utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nyheder

In my post on Environmental Risks Posed by Oil Activities Offshore Greenland I wrote that polynyas were one of the most important physical features of the biological environment off the coast of northeast Greenland. They are described in “A preliminary strategic environmental impact assessment of hydrocarbon activities in the KANUMAS East area”.

But first a few words about polynyas: Polynia (in the US spelled polynya) is a loan-word from Russian полынья which means uncovered or a natural ice hole, and was adopted in the 19th century by polar explorers to describe navigable portions of the sea. It is a semipermanent area of open water in sea ice. Polynias are generally believed to be of two types. Coastal polynias characteristically lie just beyond landfast ice (also known as fast ice), i.e. ice that is anchored to the coast and stays in place throughout the winter. They are thought to be caused chiefly by persistent local offshore winds, such as the foehn, or katabatic (downward-driving), winds typically found off the coasts of Greenland and Antarctica. The zone of open sea may be 50-100 km wide. Open-ocean polynias, the larger and longer-lasting of the two types, form within the ice cover and are believed to be caused by the upwelling of deep warmer water. This type is best exemplified by the vast Weddell Polynia in the antarctic Weddell Sea. The Weddell polynia was an enormous area of open ocean that reappeared in the Weddell Sea during 3 consecutive winters (1974-1976). At its largest it measured about 350 by 1000 km. The Weddell polynia reappeared in approximately the same position each year above a sea-bed topographic high, known as the Maud Rise.

In open-ocean polynyas heat is lost from the sea-surface mainly by conduction/convection. Water cooled at the surface sinks and is replaced by warmer subsurface water which in turn is cooled and sinks, forming deep convection cells. After the Weddell polynya had formed, the temperature of deep water changed dramatically, decreasing by 0.8°C all the way down to a depth of 2500 m.

Coastal polynias have been referred to as ‘sea-ice factories’. They ‘manufacture’ ice on an enormous scale, perhaps producing much of the ice in the adjacent ocean. It has been calculated that the heat flux to the atmosphere from a coastal polynia is more than 300 Wm-2, enough to supply a ten centimetre thick layer of ice to the adjacent sea each day. The Storfjorden polynya at Svalbard is a coastal polynia, and in fact the heat flux here was indeed estimated to be about 300 Wm-2 - and the wind during the super-cooling event to be about 8 m/sec.



Polynyas are predictable in time and are of a high ecological significance. The most significant polynyas of the kanumas assessment areas are the North East Water (NEW) off Kronprins Christian Land, the waters off Wollaston Forland and the mouth of the Scoresby Sound. There are also some much smaller polynyas along the coast.

On the east coast the most important polynia is the North Water between the Qaanaaq area and Ellesmere Island in Canada. Polynyas become free of ice very early in spring (April) and also have ice-free parts throughout the winter, and particularly the North Water is an important winter habitat for marine
mammals. Smaller polynyas are found at several sites along the Greenland coast.

Map of the North Water Polynya from the Canadian Ministry of Environment:
Some polynyas, such as the North Water, occur at the same time and place each year. Because animals can adapt their life strategies to this regularity, such recurring polynyas are of special ecological significance. More information about polynyas is found here, in particular the North Water Polynia.


• http://www2.fsg.ulaval.ca/giroq/now//what.htm
• http://www.dmu.dk/Udgivelser/Faglige+rapporter/700-749/Abstracts/FR_719_GB.htm
• http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2009/03/10/coldest-water-a-misleading-sub-heading
• http://www.mb.ec.gc.ca/nature/whp/nwa/coburg/df07s09.en.html

The National Environmental Research Institute of Denmark has released two reports on “a preliminary strategic environmental impact assessment of hydrocarbon activities” in the areas respectively west and east of northern Greenland. The background is that the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum of the Greenland Home Rule wishes to open the Kanumas areas for invitations for tender for oil exploration and exploitation. The Kanumas areas include two large areas: Northwest and Northeast Greenland, north of 72°N. In response to these areas opening up for exploration and exploitation a program was initiated in 2007 to provide knowledge necessary to assess potential consequences of oil activities through a Strategic Environmental Assessment.

Kanumas is an acronym for the Kalaallit Nunaat Marine Seismic (KANUMAS) project. “Kalaallit Nunaat” is Greenlandish for "Land of the Greenlanders", i.e. greenland (also known as Kalaallisut).

The two reports are of more than 200 pages each and cover a wealth of information - too much for me to mention in one post. Fortunately the full reports in pdf can be downloaded via the links below.

The physical environment of the study area is briefly described with focus on oceanography and ice conditions. Sea ice and icebergs are present throughout the year, with the lowest concentrations in August and September. One of the most important physical features of the biological environment is the polynyas (ice-free or almost ice-free areas surrounded by sea ice). (I described polynyas here).

The environmentally most severe accident would be a large oil spill. This has the potential to impact the marine ecosystem on all levels. The recent oil and gas assessment by the Arctic Council working groups (AMAP 2007) concluded that the main issue of environmental concern for the marine Arctic environment is a large oil spill, which particularly in ice-covered waters represents a threat at the population and even species level. Furthermore, will the lack of adequate response methods in ice-covered waters and the remoteness and lack of infrastructure in most of the assessment area add to the severity of an oil spill. Accidental oil spills may occur either during drilling (blowouts) or from accidents when storing or transporting oil. Large oil spills are rare events today due to ever-improving technical solutions and Health, Safety & Environment Policies. However, the risk cannot be eliminated and in an area with the presence of sea ice and icebergs, the possibility of an accident will be elevated.

I may come back to some of the points in the two reports later. For now I will just show you a figure from the reports showing the ocean currents around Greenland. This figure is from report 719 covering the eastern part of the Kanumas (shown in yellow). A similar figure for the western part is found in report 720. Please notice the Greenland Sea Gyre south of Svalbard/Spitsbergen. I wrote more about gyres here and here.



• http://www.dmu.dk/Udgivelser/Faglige+rapporter/700-749/Abstracts/FR_719_GB.htm
• http://www.dmu.dk/Udgivelser/Faglige+rapporter/700-749/Abstracts/FR_720_GB.htm