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Climate Feedback is a blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming. The blog aims to be an informal forum for debate and commentary on climate science in our journals and others, in the news, and in the world at large.
Everyone's talking about the CRU data hack. Quirin Schiermeier reports on Nature News:
One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.
The full story is here:
Keith Kloor
While many are feeling pessimistic about the prospects for a deal at Copenhagen, Geoffrey Lean at Grist believes the big climate summit still has a pulse. He reports that “environment ministers from 40 key countries—assembled this week for a two-day preparatory meeting in Copenhagen—made good progress towards a political agreement.”
Lean doesn’t deny that the odds for success are still long. But the game is by no means over, he writes:
“It is all very difficult. But there is a chance that, with luck and skill, a climate-saving deal can be reached. And while far from ideal, the hope that a deal is still salvageable is a lot better than the doom that was so widely pronounced at the start of the week.”
Meanwhile, are people suffering from “climate fatigue,” and tuning out the steady drumbeat of alarming news on climate change? Richard Kerr in Science examines the communication challenges [subscription required]. He writes:
“Almost all climate scientists are of one mind about the threat of global warming: It's real, it's dangerous, and the world needs to take action immediately. But they disagree about the best way to convey the urgency of the situation to the public and policymakers.”
At Yale Environment 360, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that one thing not to do is hype the danger incessantly. Pointing to the consistent polling that shows Americans to have soft support for climate change measures, the authors assert:
“The lesson of recent years would appear to be that apocalyptic threats — when their impacts are relatively far off in the future, difficult to imagine or visualize, and emanate from everyday activities, not an external and hostile source — are not easily acknowledged and are unlikely to become priority concerns for most people.”
Olive Heffernan
This week's Nature [subscription required] is the third in a series of special issues celebrating the life of Charles Darwin. It focuses on the dire challenges to Earth's biodiversity — and finds some reason for hope.
Among the numerous biodiversity-related contributions is an opinion piece by Will Turner of Conservation International with Michael Oppenheimer and David S. Wilcove of Princeton University. They argue that natural ecosystems offer some of our greatest tools in mitigating climate change and, as such, must be made a bulwark against climate change, rather than a casualty of it. They write:
REDD is just one of many possible ways to exploit the potential of natural ecosystems to slow climate change and lessen its effects on people. Natural habitats are a hugely valuable tool in the fight against global warming. Use them wisely and they could save many lives and vast sums of money in the decades to come. Abuse them, and much of Earth's biodiversity could be lost, along with the fight against climate change. Urgent action is needed to understand how best to exploit this promise and develop mechanisms that can be woven into the practices of governments, corporations, communities and institutions worldwide.
Turner and co-authors say that natural ecosystems are a clear mitigation option because of their sequestration potential, but also because "the maintenance and restoration of natural habitats are among the cheapest, safest and easiest solutions at our disposal in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and promote adaptation to unavoidable changes". See the full article here.
Daniel Cressey; cross-posted from The Great Beyond
The world’s carbon dioxide ‘sinks’ are not able to keep up with the amount of the greenhouse gas being produced, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience.
Reviewing the recent literature Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia, and colleagues report that between 1959 and 2008 43% of each year’s carbon dioxide emissions have remained in the atmosphere with the rest being absorbed by land and ocean sinks. However in the last 50 years they suggest that the fraction remaining in the atmosphere has increased from about 40% to 45%.
They also found that a 29% rise in carbon emissions between 2000 and 2008 can be attributed to a large extent to burning coal and the growth of the so-called ‘emerging economies’.
“The Earth’s carbon sinks are complex and there are some gaps in our understanding, particularly in our ability to link human-induced CO2 emissions to atmospheric CO2 concentrations on a year-to-year basis,” says Le Quéré (press release). “But, if we can reduce the uncertainty about the carbon sinks, our data could be used to verify the effectiveness of climate mitigations policies.”
Keith Kloor
After world leaders announced over the weekend that no legally binding global warming treaty would be reached at the upcoming Copenhagen summit, the post mortems have started coming in fast and furious. Christian Schwägerl in Der Spiegel writes:
“The U.S. is quite happy to see itself as the leader of the Western world. But when it comes to climate change, America has once again failed miserably -- for the umpteenth time.”
Foreign Policy Magazine asks “Who killed Copenhagen?” and names President Obama as the top culprit, citing his lackluster leadership on climate change since taking office last year. Prominent environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben levels the same charge over at Mother Jones magazine:
“For a year now it’s been clear that the president is not particularly focused on applying the political pressure that would have been necessary to reach any kind of pact, much less one that approaches what the science demands. Despite the deadline of the Copenhagen conference, Obama placed energy second on his priority list, guaranteeing that health care would occupy most of the year. He talked very little about climate, tending instead to talk about green jobs and energy security, and in the process left the door open for climate deniers to have a field day.”
But John Broder of the NYT says Obama is “hobbled” by the U.S. Congress, which is moving glacially on climate change legislation. As Broder writes:
“Without a firm commitment from the United States — for decades the world’s leading emitter of climate-altering gases — other nations have been reluctant to deliver firmer pledges of their own.”
Never mind all that for now, argues Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who, according to the Guardian, told world leaders that “we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible.” The new endgame, he said:
“The Copenhagen agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion.”
Given the heady built-up over the past year, maybe a delay isn’t such a bad thing, argues David Roberts in Grist:
“If the world’s nations had headed into Copenhagen expecting a legally binding treaty complete with targets and timetables, the result would have been disappointment, acrimony, and worst of all, wasted time. By taking some of the pressure off Copenhagen, the two-steps agreement has avoided disaster and maintained momentum. It’s also given the Obama administration time to engage in more climate diplomacy.”On that last point, the United States and China just released a joint statement on a number of issues, including climate change. The two sides believe that,
“while striving for final legal agreement, an agreed outcome at Copenhagen should, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries. The outcome should also substantially scale up financial assistance to developing countries, promote technology development, dissemination and transfer, pay particular attention to the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable to adapt to climate change, promote steps to preserve and enhance forests, and provide for full transparency with respect to the implementation of mitigation measures and provision of financial, technology and capacity building support.”
Meanwhile, at the World Summit on Food Security in Rome, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the Rome and Copenhagen summits "must craft a single global vision to produce real results for people in real need". As the BBC reports, the Secretary General called for a more co-ordinated approach to the issues, saying:
[there] "can be no food security without climate security".
Olive Heffernan
I've just returned from a two-day visit to the UK Met Office, where scientists are gathered this week to present and discuss the results of a five-year research initiative known as Ensembles. An EU-funded project led by the Met Office Hadley Centre, Ensembles brought together 66 research international institutes with the express aim of developing climate models and projections and applying the newly developed tools to studying climate impacts on agriculture, health and other sectors.
One of the most exciting outcomes from Ensembles is the development of a climate mitigation scenario and its analysis by a variety of state-of-the-art climate models, many of which include carbon cycle feedbacks. As I explain over on Nature News, this is a radically different approach from the gold-standard climate projections, which are run by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nation's climate body.
Up until now, the IPCC has run models for a range of 'what if' scenarios that make various assumptions about the future, such as the level of emissions, technological and economic development. None of these scenarios account for the impact of policy on climate change.
The Ensembles scenario, known as E1, works the other way around. It assumes that atmospheric levels of CO2 equivalents cannot rise above 450 parts per million if we are to avoid 'dangerous' climate change of more than 2 ºC and then looks at the mitigation that policy-makers would need to pursue to achieve that.
Most of the models suggest that emissions will need to be near zero by 2100 in order to stabilize atmopsheric concentrations at 450 ppm. But the Hadley Centre model, HadCM3, suggests that we'll need to start actively removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere - by artifical or natural means - by 2050, if we are to keep temperatures within a 'safe' level.
Although E1 won't be be used by the IPCC in its next report (AR5), due out in 2013, E1 is the forerunner of a very similar scenario that will feature prominently in AR5.
The full story is here [subscription].
