A new report indicates the US West is heating up [ark] almost twice as fast as the rest of the world, causing severe drought [search] conditions, while threatening cities. Gee, who would have thunk ? You mean building metropolises in the desert with little more than the mid-sized Colorado River and diminishing mountain snowpack to provide water is not a good idea? Add to this ostentatious water use for agriculture and temperate gardens, and automobile and air conditioner dependent communities causing further warming (and you guessed it, much of the electricity powered by hydro dams), and all the ingredients are in place for apocalyptic ecological collapse.

Much of Western development on arid and other ecologically sensitive lands was gravely ecologically misinformed. I expect these cities to be depopulated within decades. How soon sanity and ecological knowledge comes to our economic growth, land use and energy policies will determine whether their population and other climate refugees can be absorbed by other areas already exhibiting various ecological stresses. One cannot help wonder just when those ensconced within their air conditioned, bottled water, energy dependent lifestyles will realize they are living in a mirage that threatens their families lives. Fasten your seat belt, society and you are in for the ride of your life as collapsing regional ecosystems [search] and climate refugees [search] become part of life.

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A 160 square mile chunk of Antarctica's Wilkens ice shelf is collapsing [ark | more\ark | more2\ark2 | search] in the continent's fast warming southwest Antarctic Peninsula. "Block after block of ice is just tumbling and crumbling into the ocean.. The shelf is not just cracking off and a piece goes drifting away, but totally shattering." Given the Connecticut sized collapsing shelf is permanent floating ice, in itself this will not lead to sea level rise [search]. But loss of ice shelves does make it easier for land ice to melt and otherwise move into the ocean.

Along with Arctic sea and glacial ice melt, this new alarming example of accelerated ice cap melting [ark] presents dramatic visual evidence illustrating the advanced state of global heating. The time for the discussions of small thinking in response to climate change and global ecological crises is long since past. Simply, light bulbs and Priuses, biofuels and carbon trading, are not going to do it. Only a comprehensive program of social change -- things like ending coal use and ancient forest logging, while reducing human population and consumption -- pursued through intense advocacy, awareness building and profound personal and societal revolution, will save us now.

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The relationship between land use and global warming is gaining prominence within climate change policy-making. Oregon is studying how to reduce vehicle miles and thus emissions by reducing urban sprawl [ark\search]. And the biofuel debate rages as food and forests [search] pay a high price from growing and burning plant materials for energy.

It is relatively easy to see how burning fossil fuels causes climate change. What is more inscrutable and often given short thrift is the extent to which the condition of terrestrial ecosystems is coupled to the atmosphere [search]. Humanity is already using nearly half of both the energy captured by plants and the Earth's surface for agriculture. I am certain that a full-accounting of the matter would show millenia of human caused land cover changes to be the primary component of climate change, water scarcity and the global ecological emergency.

To suggest that energy and food can endlessly be produced by intensifying land use ignores very real limits. There exist minimum levels of land that must be maintained in natural, large and intact habitats to power the global ecosystem and biosphere. And agricultural intensification is limited by soil erosion [search], toxic accumulation, failing acquifers and other factors. There is no large body of unused land out there to feed and fuel more people and energy use, and trying to do so dooms the climate, land and Earth.

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China's over-population driven pollution frenzy [ark] threatens the entire planet. Frankly, the fault extends to the already over-developed world which exported their pollution to benefit from cheap labor. In the process a global despoiler of unprecedented magnitude has been created; which says a lot, give Europe and U.S. history of ecological imperialism [search].

China is an environmental disaster [search]. China is now a fourth desert and water scarce, most forests are gone so it imports illegal timber, it goes through 200 million tons of coal annually causing soaring carbon emissions [ark], and increasingly it brings these problems to the region and World with an insatiable appetite for resources. And China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship; an enemy of not only global ecological sustainability, but equally of freedom and justice.

Destroying the Earth is not a poverty alleviation program. In China we see the end of the world as over-population and demand for cheap consumer crap overwhelms the world's faltering ecosystems. Given the world consumes its products and is faced with a wave of Chinese pollution, China's pollution is everybody's problem. Global ecological collapse starts in China.

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The world's glaciers are melting faster [ark | more\ark] than any time in the past 5,000 years as a result of global heating. Huge population centers, particularly in South Asia and Latin America, depend upon glacial fed water sources [search]. As these glaciers melt we can expect hundreds of millions of people to be threatened with drying water sources, rising seas, failing crops, mass migration and resulting conflict.

Ecosystems [search] matter. To speak of economics, energy policy or other aspect of human endeavour is totally meaningless without them. Natural habitats and their ecosystems [search] provide not only water -- but also soil, pollinators, carbon storage and many other processes -- upon which life depends.

Loss of glaciers as a result of climate change is going to devastate river systems and their attendant watersheds and ecosystems. We have entered a vicious cycle where ecosystems are destroyed for resources, causing climate change, which results in more ecosystem destruction and so forth. To speak of additional resource utilization from dwindling ecosystems -- such as biofuels from trees -- is remarkably disconnected from what ecological science tells us regarding how the Earth System [search] works and threat it faces.

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Ten years have been squandered in terms of addressing climate change. Robert Watson, the former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, notes world leaders have wasted a decade [ark] arguing about whether climate change is occurring when they should have been formulating and implementing urgent, immediate and sufficient policy actions. This glacial pace continues as international negotiations continue to crawl along [ark].

The United States has been the greatest climate obstructionist [search], followed closely in sheer criminal neglect by China and India. Europe's activities have largely been token, with a carbon market generating windfall profits for utilities but showing little immediate potential to actually reduce emissions [ark]. The U.S., China and India's citizens in particular must demand commitments to timely mandatory emission cut targets, or there is exactly zero percent chance the climate crisis will be solved. We have run out of decades to squander.

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