Tag Archives: future

Join the politics of the future! Updated for 2026

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This has been a momentous year! A year in which the Green Party has taken its place at the forefront of UK politics. A year in which young people in particular have embraced our message of hope and real change.

A year in which nearly 300,000 people joined together to help ensure we took our place in the national leadership debates. A year in which we are matching, and often exceeding, the Lib Dems, a party of government, in national polls.

And a year in which we have become the third largest political party in England and Wales! In the space of 12 months we have grown from 13,000 members to 55,000. Our membership has quadrupled!   

And one thing that the green surge means is that more than 90% of you will have the chance to vote Green on the 7th of May. For some that means the first ever chance to vote Green. 

Your vote can change the face of Britain!

In just nine weeks’ time, you will have in your hands something miraculous … the possibility of a peaceful political revolution. Your vote can change the face of Britain. It can end the failed austerity experiment, end the spiteful blaming of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable for the mistakes of the wealthy.

This election can be a turning point in history. The moment where we can deliver a better Britain, a Britain which works for all its people … A Britain which cares. 

Vote for what you believe in, vote for the policies of hope not fear, vote for policies that work for the common good not just the few, and Britain could be a very different country on the 8th of May. It is time for Green Politics – the politics of the future – that delivers:

  • a living wage: jobs that workers can build a life on, with support for those who need it;
  • public services run for the good of all – our railways run not for shareholders but for passengers, our NHS not handed over to profiteers but kept in public hands;
  • social housing, council housing, to meet our housing needs;
  • the means for everyone to live within the limits of our one planet – because it’s the only one we’ve got.


A society fit for people and our communities

No one should be living in fear of being unable to put food on the table. No one should be forced into debt just for trying to get an education.

No one should be worrying about a fracking drill burrowing into the heart of their community.  No one should fear being left destitute by Iain Duncan Smith’s punitive benefit sanctions. 

The politics of the future is not a politics of transaction, that discredited politics which offers selected individuals and groups a bribe of short-term, unsustainable personal advantage.

History tells us that is now the old politics, the tired politics, the failed politics. The Green Party is offering instead a society working for all of us; for the many, not just the few; a society in which those who can contribute do so, and no one in need goes without.

It asks voters to make a choice that will deliver a society fit for themselves, their communities, and their children.

#GreenSurge

That’s why the Green surge is much more than just a hash tag – although a highly successful hash tag it has been – the green surge is much more than just membership numbers. That’s why people are becoming engaged with the Green Party. 

I have seen the Green surge on the ground, around the country, from a village hall in Ilkley, Yorkshire, to an enormous, snaking queue of hundreds at Exeter University, to a Valentine’s Eve Friday night crowd at the London School of Economics. 

And of course we saw it last May with the election of Molly Scott Cato as the first Green member of the European Parliament in the South West – and boy, hasn’t she delivered for her voters! 

The Green surge is the result of your hard work as Greens. It’s thanks to you in this hall, and to all of the Green Party members and supporters up and down the country – to your commitment, your belief, your dedication and your hard work – that we approach the General Election as a central player in UK politics. 

And of course, it isn’t just Green Party. Up and down the country, campaigns demanding a new politics are getting stronger, bigger, more effective. There’s People’s Assemblies, Occupy Democracy, the anti-fracking movement and the fossil fuel divestment campaigns: the tide is growing, the demand for change is louder and clearer.

We’re fighting back

At last, the people are fighting back! Five years ago we made a huge breakthrough with the election of Caroline Lucas as the first Green MP, and she’s given Brighton a spectacularly good local voice and a national impact far beyond any other MP. Caroline has led the debate on issues from railway ownership to statutory Personal and Social Education.

She’s led the debate on parliamentary transparency and she has put her freedom on the line to oppose fracking. Because Caroline shows what voting Green delivers: passion, sensitivity and courage. 

On May 8, just imagine, a strong green group of MPs at Westminster – able to build on and expand Caroline’s work. A group which would never, ever support a Conservative Government. A strong group of Green MPs – in a parliament where they could have a huge say, a huge impact – that is a real opportunity to start to deliver a new kind of politics.

We know that the way things are in Britain is not sustainable. Continuing as we are is not an option. Since 2007, food prices have risen 22% but wages have fallen 7%. Almost seven hundred thousand people are listed as ‘in work’, despite having no guaranteed hours week-to-week.

It’s time to end the scourge of zero hours contracts. Almost half the new jobs created since 2010 are for the self-employed, yet nearly 80% of self-employed workers are living in poverty. I applaud the growing number of individuals who contribute to, who volunteer in, who run, food banks.

But individual charity is no substitute for collective justice. This the outcome of the years of Blair, of Brown, of the Cameron / Clegg Coalition and austerity Britain – this is the record of George Osborne’s ‘long term economic plan’.

The Green Party are calling time on the politics of low wages, job insecurity and fearing the food bank. We are calling time on privatisation – the sell-off and the handing over – of public assets into private hands.

We must treasure the natural world – not trash it!

We are calling time on the trashing of our natural world – the world on which everything, depends. Our economy, our lives, our future depend on society, which in turn depends on the Earth and its resources.

That puts a huge weight, a huge responsibility on our shoulders – a responsibility we have to meet in the next few years. We know now the damage we are doing to the Earth, as we didn’t know in the past. We have to be up to the task.

The whole ideology of Thatcher and her successors, be it Blair, Brown or Cameron, has failed. Change has to come. The market is short-sighted and short-term. It is blind. It is senseless. It works for the 1%, it fails the rest of us. All in it together? I don’t think so.

The current model of economics and society has served only those with power and wealth. In austerity Britain, the super rich grabs more than anywhere else in Europe. We must be first and foremost citizens, paying fairly to common funds to look after the poor, the weak, the old and the sick. 

Everybody contributes what they can and everybody benefits from that. This is what the politics of the future will look like, what the Green Party will deliver. The old politics, the failed politics of letting the market rule has to end.

Save our NHS! Save our social care!

There’s nowhere that’s more obvious than in our NHS. The insidious but rapid infiltration of the profit motive into our health service, the dreadful, senseless PFI schemes that have deliver despair and threaten bankruptcy, must be reversed.

The market costs us big time. In 2010 the Health Select Committee reckoned it consumed 9% of total NHS costs – well over £10bn a year. As Caroline has already said – we will repeal the Health and Social Care Act, which is damaging and threatening the health service.

And we will go further – we will replace it with an NHS Reinstatement Bill that removes the market mechanism from our NHS. But of course there is another side to care. Free healthcare is the very cornerstone of our NHS. Whether you are rich or poor you have the right to the best that is available.

That’s something the Green Party will restore – and extend. For that same principle should apply to social care – the support and services that you need to lead a fulfilling life should be available when you need it, free at the point of use. 

We believe that to be a decent, humane, caring society, social care must be free. We believe those who have the most should contribute to help pay for social care. We need a range of new taxes aimed at making Britain a more equal society.

We would introduce a new wealth tax, rigorously clamp down on tax avoidance and evasion and introduce a financial transaction tax – a Robin Hood Tax, and we are not ashamed to say that those on incomes above £100,000 should pay more income tax.

Providing Free Social Care for the Over 65’s means security and freedom from fear, suffering and loneliness for many, and it means 200,000 new jobs and training places. 

We will consult experts, users, and care workers on its exact design – but our manifesto will include this as a core pledge: social care is not a privilege, it is a right! 

Register to vote – now!

We know that the younger generation – many of whom are supporting the Green Party – have it tough. But we acknowledge, we stress, that isn’t the fault of their elders. 

In a Britain of solidarity, in a Britain of community, in a Britain of care, we all need to look out for each other. Of course – and I cannot stress this enough – we can only do this if you, the people of the UK have your say on May the 7th.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of each and every person who can vote registering to do so and making their voice heard. The deadline is April 20th, but please don’t wait – register today. Only then can you deliver the politics of the future, help us deliver for the Common Good.

There are people who want to see business-as-usual politics continue. People who are happy with politicians who learnt nothing from the global economic crash. People who’ve quietly forgotten the scandal of MPs expenses. Who are resigned to the failed austerity experiment, to low wages and to the swift demise of public services.

Those people will probably vote for the parties of yesterday. To counteract them, you need to use your vote. At this election, if we all vote Green, we can change Britain. Together we can create the society we all deserve a society that cares, a society that works for all of us. 

Vote for the party that cares. Vote for the common good. Vote for the politics of the future. Vote Green.   

 

 

Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party of England & Wales.

This speech was delivered to the Green Party’s spring conference on Friday 6th March 2015. See original here.

 

 

 




391048

Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century Updated for 2026

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The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 




390300

Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century Updated for 2026

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The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 




390300

Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century Updated for 2026

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The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 




390300

Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 




390300

Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 




390300

A tale of two farming conferences: the future is ‘real’ and organic Updated for 2026

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In Oxford this week, two major farming conferences have been under way.

The newer, forward-looking Oxford Real Farming Conference is discussing innovations in technology that are needed for farming to face the challenges of achieving massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, tackling the horrendous problems of diet-related ill health, and restoring beauty, colour, wildlife and human cultivators to our farmed countryside.

Meanwhile, speakers at the much older Oxford Farming Conference seem stuck in a time-warp where for decades almost the only new development in agriculture worth discussing is GM crops, and where an annual attack on organic farming seems to be obligatory.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Liz Truss, did her bit in praise of GM – which is now just “one tool in the toolbox”, having been demoted from the “future for all farming and food” that was heralded in the 1990s.

Under what seem to be strict instructions from David Cameron not to do any more damage, if that were possible, to his “greenest government ever” claim, Liz Truss steered clear of saying anything new about GM, or announcing any action that would bring GM crops in England any closer, or indeed doing anything which you might expect an allegedly pro-GM government to do.

However, now that the Scottish referendum is over, the English Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is happy to forget that agriculture is already devolved to Scotland and Wales, and that both those countries remain staunchly opposed to GM crops.

So Liz Truss talked grandly about GM crops coming to the UK, when she’s actually only able to talk about England – 60% of the UK. Nor did she mention the commitment given by one of her junior ministers at the end of last year, namely that GM crops for England are, at best, “several years away“.

Over to you, Lord Krebs …

It was left to Lord Krebs to mount the seemingly obligatory attack on organic farming and food.

That’s the same Lord Krebs who made himself a figure of fun several years ago, when he was chair of the Food Standards Agency. On taking up his position, he announced, without any scientific evidence, that anyone buying organic food because it had nutritional differences with non-organic were “wasting their money”.

In his own field, which does not include nutrition or farming, Lord Krebs is a very distinguished scientist, so it must have hurt somewhat when, last year, a major meta-analysis was published which looked at 343 individual studies comparing antioxidant levels, heavy metals and pesticides in organic and non-organic food, focusing on salad crops, vegetables, grains and pulses.

An international team of scientists, led by Newcastle University, pooled all the existing research, and showed unequivocally that there are significant differences between organic and non-organic food, with 18 – 69% more beneficial antioxidants and 48% less dangerous cadmium.

We need more and better research in this area, and the researchers said that more studies would be likely to confirm the significance of a number of other positive trends in the differences between organic and non-organic food that they detected.

Yes, the science indicates that organic food is healthier!

That research did not look at the impact on our health of eating organic food – this takes many years and is very costly. To get clear results, scientists need to follow large groups of people who eat organic food, and a similar group who do not, for their whole lives.

As many modern diseases, like cancer and heart disease, tend to mainly emerge much later in life, it would take many decades of expensive monitoring to identify any differences. However, health problems that emerge early in life should be identifiable more quickly.

A Dutch study comparing mothers and children who drank organic milk and used organic dairy products with those that did not, found that those children suffered 36% less eczema than children on a non-organic diet.

More recently, a Norwegian study has linked organic vegetable consumption to a 24% lower incidence of pre-eclampsia, a major cause of illness in mothers and deaths of babies worldwide.

But while it is clear is that the way we farm does affect the quality of our food, the jury is still out on whether eating organic food will lead to people suffering less illness or disease over their lifetime.

Now the problem is ‘climate change’, claims Krebs (wrong again)

Given that Lord Krebs could hardly maintain his “it’s a waste of money” position in the face of this overwhelming scientific evidence, he has changed tack, claiming at Oxford that organic farming is bad for climate change, because it yields less than non-organic.

As is often a problem when scientists step outside their own fields of expertise, Lord Krebs has missed two other recently published meta-analyses, covering organic and non-organic farming, looking at yields and climate change impact.

First, a new meta-analysis published by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley pulled together all existing research comparing organic and non-organic yields (reported on The Ecologist), and concluded that the productivity of organic farming has been substantially underestimated.

Scientists found that globally organic yields are generally around 19% below non-organic, and that could reduce to only 8-9% below with better use of modern organic techniques.

It has always been the case that for some crops, like beans, peas, tomatoes, lentils and oats, organic and non-organic yields are the same, while grass-reared beef and lamb will be as or more productive on organic farms.

The study’s author, Professor Claire Kremen said: “This paper sets the record straight on the comparison between organic and conventional agriculture.”

Organic farming sequesters more soil carbon

On an even more positive note, a global meta-analysis looking at farming’s ability to restore carbon in soils came to the conclusion that organic farming stores 3.50 Mg Carbon per hectare more than in nonorganic systems.

The research found an estimated maximum technical mitigation potential from soil carbon sequestration by switching to organic agriculture of 0.37 Gt Carbon sequestered per year globally, thus offsetting up to 3% of all current GHG emissions worldwide, or 25% of total current global agricultural emissions.

The climate summit in Paris at the end of this year is going to focus everyone’s mind on to the appalling threat that climate change poses.

Most attention in climate discussions focuses on emissions from industries like power generation (coal and natural gas versus renewables) and transport (petrol and diesel cars versus public transport and electric cars).

Food and farming, which account for as much greenhouse gas emissions as either of those sectors, is largely ignored – but that cannot continue. Indeed this year Parliament’s official Climate Change Committee will be looking in more detail at greenhouse gas emissions from farming.

The story here is an exciting one – globally, soils contain massive amounts of carbon, the release of which adds to the threat of climate change. However, as research shows, globally soils also offer an amazing opportunity to store more carbon.

The things that farmers need to do to achieve this, which include growing more grass in their rotations, returning crop residues and animal manure to farmland, particularly as compost, and growing green cover-crops through the winter, are all things that organic systems encourage or require.

That is why organic farming sequesters far more carbon in soils than non-organic farming.

Farming must get real!

This was on the agenda at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, where a session on a new report, the Square Meal report, focused on the vital importance of fighting food poverty and diet related ill-health, and the multiple benefits of agro-ecological farming systems – like organic.

These are proven to deliver better animal welfare, more wildlife on farms, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower levels of pollution from pesticides and fertiliser run-off, and healthier diets.

This broad, inclusive vision for the future of food, farming and the countryside has been supported by ten major public interest groups, but this sort of discussion seems to be off the agenda for the old Oxford farming establishment.

Indeed the question of what this hugely taxpayer-subsidised industry might do in the public interest, rather than the interests of farm businesses, landowners and multi-national food businesses, is off the old Oxford agenda.

It is time the farming industry got real.

 

 

Peter Melchett is an organic farmer, and Policy Director of the Soil Association.

Photo: Sandy Lane Farm.

 




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Fracking’s future is in doubt as oil price plummets, bonds crash Updated for 2026

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There’s no doubt that US-based fracking – the process through which oil and gas deposits are blasted from shale deposits deep underground – has caused a revolution in worldwide energy supplies.

Yet now the alarm bells are ringing about the financial health of the fracking industry, with talk of a mighty monetary bubble bursting – leading to turmoil on the international markets similar to that in 2008.

In many ways, it’s a straightforward case of supply and demand. Due to the US fracking boom, world oil supply has increased.

But with global economic growth now slowing – the drop in growth in China is particularly significant – there’s a lack of demand and a glut in supplies, leading to a fall in price of nearly 50% over the last six months.

US oil is flooding the market

Fracking has become a victim of its own success. The industry in the US has grown very fast. In 2008, US oil production was running at five million barrels a day.

Thanks to fracking, that figure has nearly doubled, with talk of US energy self-sufficiency and the country becoming the world’s biggest oil producer – ‘the new Saudi Arabia’ – in the near future.

The giant Bakken oil and gas field in North Dakota – a landscape punctured by thousands of fracking sites, with gas flares visible from space – was producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day in 2007. Production is now running at more than one million barrels a day.

Fuelled by talk of the financial rewards to be gained from fracking, investors have piled into the business. The US fracking industry now accounts for about 20% of the world’s total crude oil investment.

But analysts say this whole investment edifice could come crashing down.

Extreme oil is expensive oil

Fracking is an expensive business. Depending on site structure, companies need prices of between $60 and $100 per barrel of oil to break even. As prices drop to around $55 per barrel, investments in the sector look ever more vulnerable.

Analysts say that while bigger fracking companies might be able to sustain losses in the short term, the outlook appears bleak for the thousands of smaller, less well-financed companies who rushed into the industry, tempted by big returns.

The fracking industry’s troubles have been added to by the actions of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which, despite the oversupply on the world market, has refused to lower production.

The theory is that OPEC, led by powerful oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, is playing the long game – seeking to drive the fracking industry from boom to bust, stabilise prices well above their present level, and regain its place as the world’s pre-eminent source of oil.

There are now fears that many fracking operations may default on an estimated $200 billion of borrowings, raised mainly through bonds issued on Wall Street and in the City of London.

In turn, this could lead to a collapse in global financial markets similar to the 2008 crash.

Is fracking a busted flush?

There are also questions about just how big existing shale oil and gas reserves are, and how long they will last. A recent report by the Post Carbon Institute, a not-for-profit think tank based in the US, says reserves are likely to peak and fall off rapidly, far sooner than the industry’s backers predict.

The cost of drilling is also going up as deposits become more inaccessible.

Besides ongoing questions about the impact of fracking on the environment – in terms of carbon emissions and pollution of water sources – another challenge facing the industry is the growth and rapidly falling costs of renewable energy.

Fracking operations could also be curtailed by more stringent regulations designed to counter fossil fuel emissions and combat climate change.

Its backers have hyped fracking as the future of energy – not just in the US, but around the world. Now the outlook for the industry is far from certain.

 

 

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network, where this article was first published.

 




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Europe on the brink – green future or industrial wasteland? Updated for 2026

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In the UK’s debate over its future membership of the EU, the broad ‘progressive’ spectrum of voters has long been in the pro-EU camp.

That’s not because ‘we’ like everything about the EU. It’s because the EU has offered unmistakable benefits for people and the environment – from the Working Time Directive, limiting the hours employees may be forced to work, to the Habitats & Species Directive, protecting our most precious wildlife, and the Air Quality Directive, which is forcing cuts in atmospheric pollution that are already preventing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.

There is no doubt that a reluctant UK – once the proverbial ‘dirty man of Europe’ – has been forced to be infinitely cleaner and greener than it would ever have been on its own. The same goes for many other countries. The benefits have been enormous and unmistakeable.

The Dark is Rising

But there is another side to the EU, built as it was on the disreputable foundations of the Coal and Steel Community and the Euratom Treaty. This is a Europe of vested corporate interests, of over-powerful business lobbies, of jealously guarded privilege, secrecy and dodgy back-room political deals, of weak-wristed regulators unwilling or unable to clamp down on corporate abuses.

And today, it is all too clear which aspect of the EU dominates in the Junckers Commission. In the name of “focusing on what truly matters for citizens – jobs, growth and investment” the Commission is reining in desperately needed regulation to give citizens a clean and safe environment.

Proposed laws to reduce the air pollution that’s still killing some 400,000 people a year are to be scrapped – if Junckers and his troglodytic henchman Timmermans get their way in the College of Commissioners next Tuesday.

Under the name of ‘better regulation’ the whole ‘circular economy’ package to reduce waste to landfill and increase recycling would get bunged into the Commission’s capacious paper-shredder.

There have also been powerful calls to make the Habitats and Birds Directives more adaptable to local needs for example to allow Malta to carry on massacring migrating birds. You can be sure that the adaptation would only go one way – to weaken the laws, not to strengthen them.

Nuclear resurgence

The EU has also shown itself to be far too adaptable for its own good in its interpretation of it’s all important ‘state aid’ rules when it comes to nuclear power.

In October the Commission mysteriously approved a support package worth as much as £35 billion for the UK’s proposed Hinkley C nuclear power station – deeming, against a mountain of evidence, that it somehow maintained a ‘level playing field’ in the UK’s power market, even as it decimated the country’s renewable industries.

And now, following the UK’s inability to raise construction finance in spite of astonishingly generous power prices for nuclear power and a £10 billion construction finance guarantee, the Commission has approved three planned UK nuclear power stations (Hinkley Point C, Wylfa, and Moorside) to appear on its 2015 ‘infrastructure plan’ – putting them in line for as much as €46 billion in loan finance led by the European Investment Bank.

In fact the EU support is meant to be strictly reserved for projects that are economically viable and deliverable in the short term – which is clearly the very opposite of the case as regards the UK’s nuclear projects, which may require as much as £100 billion in subsidies and will not be deliverable for well over a decade.

Indeed, the infrastructure plan spells out the problems they face in clear terms, with strong “barriers” to investment. “High construction cost, long payback period is making debt raising difficult”, the document reveals.

The same applies to Poland’s struggling coal industry – also in line for €8 billion of ‘infrastructure’ funds to build new lignite coal mines, new power stations and extend the lifetimes of old coal plants that would otherwise have to be shut down.

Sacrificing democracy on the altar of ‘free trade’

At the same time the Commission is galloping into deeply unpopular trade and investment deals with the USA and Canada known as TTIP and CETA. Negotiations have been taking place in secret, excluding not just civil society but even MEPs and legislators in national member state Parliaments.

Most vexatious are the ‘investor dispute settlement’ procedures that would allow investors to sue national government for losses incurred due to regulatory changes affecting their anticipated profits.

As such, governments could be liable for losses caused by tightening pollution laws, raising the minimum wage, applying tighter limits on the release of environmental toxins, reversing the privatisation of public services, or a host of other actions. The damages would be awarded in secret courts composed of corporate lawyers.

TTIP / CETA would also involve ‘mutual recognition’ of standards between the EU and the USA and Canada, forcing EU consumers to accept North American GMO crops and meat and dairy produce from animals treated with yield-increasing growth hormones, currently banned from EU markets.

Astonishingly, the Commission even refused to accept an offical petition signed by over 1 million EU citizens known as a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) – on the manifestly false grounds that ECIs can only support the Commission’s proposals, and not oppose them.

How much longer can the EU count on our support?

It increasingly appears that the European Commission has decided, in the name of ‘jobs’, ‘investment’, ‘trade’ and ‘prosperity’ to abandon all the core values that once made the EU attractive to liberal and green minded voters, and abandon itself wholesale to the corporate lobbyists that stalk its corridors and enjoy privileged access to its officials.

And when it comes to a referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership,will surely leave progressive voters bereft of any positive enthusiasm to stay in.

Of course, it may be that the UK on its own would pursue even worse social and environmental policies, and that our own clay-footed politicians would be even more ready to sacrifice our rights, liberties and democratic traditions to corporate interests.

But that is to miss the point. To win a close-run election, the most important thing is not to so much win over opponents to your cause, but to get your own vote out on the day.

To get progressives to deliver their pro-EU votes – surely a necessary counterbalance to the now mainstream anti-EU right – we must be offered a positive vision of the Europe we want, and that our children have a right to enjoy.

And that means a green Europe, leading the world in renewable energy technologies, delivering social and environmental benefits to its citizens, founded on a bedrock of social justice, and rebalancing power away from profit-driven corporations, and to the people.

 


Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 




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Telling Stories of the Future Updated for 2026

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Schumacher College in Dartington, near Totnes, Devon – a leading centre in “education as if the Earth matters” – is celebrating its 25th anniversary later this year with a new short course called ‘Soul, Spirit and Story’.

Drawing on spiritual traditions and indigenous wisdom from around the world, and contemporary understanding of the nature of mind and consciousness, the course will explore the interface between our inner landscape and the outer world.

Rachel Fleming, who is convening the programme, said: “Many people are now calling for a global shift in consciousness – a new story for humankind – if we are to hope for a future that is just and sustainable for all. We hope that our ‘Soul, Spirit and Story’ programme will make a significant contribution in answer to this call. We will provide a space to explore some of the big questions of our time – why are we here, how can we live according to our values and beliefs and how we make a meaningful contribution in life – and we will bring together people from all over the world, from different backgrounds and beliefs, to talk, teach, inspire, remember and co-create the stories of the future”.

Course tutors include Iain McGilchrist, Anita Moorjani, Bruce Lipton, Scilla Elworthy, Anne Baring, Jules Cashford, Matthew Fox, Adam Bucko, Charles Eisenstein, Colin Campbell and Satish Kumar, Editor-in-Chief of Resurgence & Ecologist and a co-founder of the college.

The programme will be based in Dartington Hall’s Elmhirst Centre, the home of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst pioneers of the ‘Dartington experiment’. It is the latest initiative to fall within Dartington’s new strategy for Resilient and Healthy Communities and will continue the rich legacy of radical education, transformation and regeneration that was envisioned here in the 1920s.

Visit the Schumacher College website for more information or to book a place on the Elmhirst Programme – Soul, Spirit and Story.