Whales and Climate Change: How Are They Linked? - Blue Living Ideas

Whales and Climate Change: How Are They Linked?

Posted on Mar 08, 2010 by Zachary Shahan.

Two issues close to the hearts of many environmentalists (or even the average person now) — addressing climate change and protecting  endangered whales — are now being seen as linked issues.

Whales are huge! Blue whales are the largest creatures on Earth. An elephant, the largest animal that lives on land, could stand on a blue whale’s tongue. Its heart is the size of a small car. A sperm whale has a brain the size of a car and you could swim in its veins.
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The First Nation to Run out of Water? Yemen

Posted on Mar 02, 2010 by Susan Kraemer.

War-torn Yemen is set to be the first country in the world to completely run out of water.

War and strife are caused by shortages, and Yemen has been no exception to that rule. As the nation has succumbed to desertification, war has followed. As the world warms, desertification (in some regions in parts of China, the Middle East, the USA and Australia) will all increasingly create water shortages which by 2050 will affect billions.

For all these regions; that’s in the future. In Yemen, that future is right now.

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Climate Change Alters Gray Whale Migration

Posted on Feb 04, 2010 by Jennifer Lance.

It’s the peak of gray whale southern migration off the central and southern coast of California. Between 20 to 30 whales an hour are being spotted in Monterey, but gray whales are also being spotted up north in Washington state months ahead of their typical migration schedule. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, these Washington gray whales may not actually be migrators but “residents”.
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CalWater Project to Study the Impact of Climate Change on California Water

Posted on Jan 28, 2010 by Scott James.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has called California’s water troubles a “holy water war… north versus south, California versus the feds, rural versus urban….” As divisive as the state’s water issues are, they are just as poorly understood. Population growth, inconsistent weather and the threat of drought are well known factors that make water planning difficult, but California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told the water committee in late 2009 that all of these could be intensified by climate change. The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) have created CalWater, a project that brings together researchers from University of California, the California Department of Natural Resources, the California Air Resource Board, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography among others to examine how climate change could affect water resources in California.
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The Rising Sea: 7 Foot Ocean Rise by 2100

Posted on Jan 21, 2010 by Scott James.

Sea levels are rising, though there is little agreement on how much has happened and how much will come over the next century, there is general consensus that we will need to learn how to adapt to a changing coastline. In their book The Rising Sea, scientists and authors Orrin Pilkey and Rob Young claim that “governments and coastal managers should assume the inevitability of a seven-foot rise in sea level.” According to their reassessment of the 2007 IPCC report in light of the past two years, rising sea levels are not a thing of the future, but something that is very real and is happening right now.
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