Climate Feedback

Nature Reports Climate Change rolls out its podcast today, with editor Olive Heffernan interviewing the experts behind our key stories. In this first episode:

- Tim Lenton has more to say about his Commentary on tipping points for dangerous climate change

- IPCC scientists Stefan Rahmstorf, Michael Oppenheimer and Gavin Schmidt opine on where the IPCC should turn now, having released its Fourth Assessment synthesis report last week

- journalist Emma Marris explains how mountain-dwelling species are being killed off by the 'escalator effect'

- speculation on the 'son of Kyoto' to be conceived at next month's UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, from Eliot Morley of Globe International, Nick Mabey of e3g and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

Starting next week, Climate Feedback will have Olive Heffernan blogging from the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, so tune in to find out whether the delegates are standing united against climate change threats or mired in debate over which policies are fair to whom -- or both. And keep an eye out (or an RSS feed subscribed) for next month's podcast, which will feature interviews and discussion direct from the floor of the UN conference.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 29, 2007
Categories: Anna Barnett, Features, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How expensive is climate change, what's the cost of stopping it, and should we pay now or pay later? Scientific American gets a three-sided look at these questions in side-by-side interviews with Nicholas Stern, Bjorn Lomborg and Gary Yohe.

Stern and Yohe push raising the price of carbon emissions via caps and taxes, respectively, as insurance to ward off big future risks, with Lomborg taking the contrarian view that we shouldn't mitigate until renewable energy is cheaper -- and shrugging off the risks. (Lomborg thinks that other problems like HIV/AIDS and malaria need money more immediately, an argument Olive Heffernan took on in NRCC's editorial last month.) Interesting discussions of the values assigned to human lives in the present vs. future (Stern, Lomborg), and to lives threatened by asbestos vs. temperature rise, also ensue.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 29, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s not a good time to be a flying fox. Justin Welbergen, from the University of Cambridge, has just published some new research on them and he thinks climate change means they are all going to die.

The issue for the animals, which are not foxes at all but fruit bats, is that they’re just not that good with heat. This is a bit of a problem if you live in an Australia that is getting slowly hotter. Welbergen and his colleagues found that temperature extremes caused mass die-offs, with females and the young being especially vulnerable. When temperatures reached 42.9°C, thousands of the bats keeled over and flapped no more (paper should appear here today).

Climate change may also be benefiting some types of the bat, by allowing them to expand their range by reducing the number of cold nights, which they can’t tolerate. “If so, this provides an example of how climate change may act like a double-edged sword,” write Welbergen and co, “it can cause a species to expand its distribution in response to a reduction in the number of cold nights, while putting the same species at an increased risk from extreme warm events.

It has been acknowledged before that climate change is causing changes in species distributions. Nature Reports Climate Change had an article on this recently, noting that in Australia some possums have been getting so hot they fell out of their trees.

Stefan Klose, one of the research team, told the Daily Telegraph, “In a very dramatic way we see the outcome of extreme climate events that are predicted to increase as a result of climate change by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. These animals are simply not able to cope with higher temperatures and so they die. They are the seed dispersers for Australia's rainforest so the ecosystem effects could be very considerable.”

According to the Times over 30,000 fruit bats have died since 1994 in heat waves “associated with global warming”. Conservation Magazine thinks monitoring roosts when high temperatures are expected is the way forward. This isn’t going to please fruit growers. According to the North Queensland Register a “‘plague” of flying foxes is tormenting the regions’ farmers. A small piece of good news for the animals: lychee farms in North Queensland have been told to dismantle electric grids used to stop bats eating the tasty fruit (ABC).

Image: courtesy of Justin Welbergen

Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond.

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 28, 2007
Categories: Daniel Cressey | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This year’s edition of the UN Human Development Report makes bleak reading. Unless we deal with climate change, it says, efforts to reduce poverty will stall then reverse, the poorest countries will suffer first and not even the richest countries will escape global warming. Efforts to improve health and education are also threatened (summary PDF, full report PDF).

“Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs,” said Kemal Derviş, administrator of the UN Development Programme (press release PDF).

More droughts, floods and storms are already reinforcing existing inequalities in standards of living, says the report. Climate change must be tackled now. “The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest,” says the UN (report home page).

The annual report also ranks the UN’s members in terms of their development, using life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. Top of the pile this year is Iceland, bottom is Sierra Leone. As Reuters notes, per capita GDP is 45 times higher in the former than in the latter. Without fail this ranking brings a rash of stories where countries celebrate or mourn their position – details and full ranking below the fold.

Continue reading "Climate change ‘will undermine poverty progress’" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 28, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Policy, Daniel Cressey | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Those bored of playing with Google Earth may be interested in NASA’s new toy – a stunningly detailed map of Antarctica. Claiming to be ten times more detailed than previously available equivalents, the map was painstakingly constructed by the stitching together of 1,100 hand-selected photos from Landsat satellites (NASA press release).

The map was produced in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey. It’s already attracting media attention (BBC, Bloomberg, ABC, Herald Sun, Wired).

“This innovation, compared to what we had available most recently, is like watching the most spectacular high-definition TV in living colour versus watching the picture on a small black-and-white television,” says Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Goddard (NSF press release).

Those who sifted through all the photos and put them together are hoping that the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica will be rather more than a fun distraction for desk workers avoiding work.

“...LIMA is also a fundamental tool for scientists,” says Scott Borg, director of NSF's division of Antarctic sciences. “It will be used in every discipline from biology to geology to glaciology, both to answer scientific questions and plan fieldwork in the vast unexplored tracts of Antarctica. For educators, students, and the general public, LIMA will bring to life the Antarctic continent like nothing before it.”

The images will apparently eventually make their way to Google Earth, but why wait for that – the map is online now.

Images: top – mosaic of Antarctic shots, bottom – diagram of photos used in LIMA / all courtesy of NASA

Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond.

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 28, 2007
Categories: Climate Science, Daniel Cressey | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today Nature News reports on new evidence that retreat of sea ice in the Hudson Bay is starving polar bears to death by shortening their hunting season.

The cubs and the oldest bears, specifically, are more likely to die in years with early ice breakup. Polar bears hunt seal pups in the early spring, and if the ice breaks early the youngest and oldest bears can't catch enough pups to last them through the summer.

The US Geological Survey already warned recently that at least two-thirds of polar bears could die from ice melt in the next 50 years, as Oliver Morton discussed in this post. But the direct evidence that ice breakup is killing young and old bears is the first available. Starving polar bear cubs will probably get a high profile in appeals to put the polar bear on the US Endangered Species List next year.

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 23, 2007
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The appearance of a massive swarm of jellyfish, and their subsequent decimation of an Irish salmon farm, are this week being blamed on global warming.

Stock worth £1million were suffocated in their cages by the swarm, which is estimated to have covered 25 square kilometres of sea and been up to 10 metres thick. The fish farm's director said “It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about, it, absolutely nothing.” says Northern Salmon Company managing director, John Russell (Telegraph). The full story is on The Great Beyond.

This isn't the first time climate change has been linked to jellyfish outbreaks. Last summer, the same jellyfish (Pelagia notiluca) was spotted in unusually high concentrations in the Mediterranean, again prompting speculation about impacts of sea temperature rise (New Scientist). Reuters reported that a volunteer campaign had removed eight tons of jellyfish from the Spanish coastline. Both reports mention temperature and decline in predators as causes.

A recent study linked increasing populations of jellyfish in the North Sea to climate change and predicted that more jellyfish would appear over the next 100 years.

If the two events are truly linked the UK's salmon industry may have to be added to the list of climate change victims.

Image via Wikipedia

Daniel Cressey and Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 23, 2007
Categories: Anna Barnett, Daniel Cressey, In the News, Ocean science | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Leaders of 16 Asian countries, including top polluters China and Japan, committed to “stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the long run”, says Reuters. The ‘pact’, struck at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Singapore, does not set caps on emissions or otherwise quantify what efforts might be made to reduce the impacts of climate change (though it does promise they will “work to achieve an EAS-wide aspirational goal of increasing cumulative forest cover in the region by at least 15 million hectares of all types of forests by 2020”); and leaders emphasized that economic growth remains a priority for them.

"Climate change has to be addressed -- but they cannot leave people in absolute poverty," Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Reuters. "This is a declaration of intent, not a negotiated treaty of what we are going to do to restrict ourselves.”

The declaration is posted on the ASEAN website.

At the same meeting, Japan pledged to provide US$2 billion over the next five years in aid of fighting environmental problems in East Asia (Japan Times).

Behind-the-scene details can be found in the AFX report on Forbes’ website, which adds that the countries are in favour of nuclear power, and has some interesting notes on how a goal for reducing energy intensity by a set value was dropped after apparent objections from India.

Cross-posted from Nicola Jones on The Great Beyond.

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 23, 2007
Categories: Climate Policy, In the News, Nicola Jones | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The political debate over climate change is ratcheting up in the two notable holdouts to the Kyoto protocol – Australia and the United States. The current issue of Nature takes a look at upcoming national elections in both countries, and what role climate change is playing in each.

We got started on this special package of features knowing we wanted to flag the 24 November elections in Australia. Political experts differ, but most polls and other observations suggest that climate is a more defining factor now than at other times when Liberal prime minister John Howard has been up for re-election. In our piece, Sydney-based journalist Stephen Pincock reports on the climate moves the Howard government has been making, and whether that will be enough for him to come from behind in opinion polls that have him trailing his Labor opponent Kevin Rudd. Keep tabs on the latest with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s election site.

Once we got going on the Australian situation, we couldn’t help but start wondering about the US presidential election. It’s still nearly a year away, but the rhetoric about energy policy is flying fast and furious. Every leading candidate, for both the Democratic and Republican nominations, has a serious-sounding platform about how to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. The question, of course, is who will actually be elected and what will he (or she) actually do? Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson has spun a hypothetical piece about what the new president might be able to accomplish in leading the US in climate policy. (For a more science-fiction take on this scenario, check out Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel Sixty Days and Counting, in which a newly-elected president tries to save the world from a global-warming-triggered meltdown.)

And finally, we had been looking for other ways to tackle the complex suite of climate-related bills now moving slowly through the US Congress. We collected together a group of experts from science, industry, policy, and environmentalism to talk shop about what we might expect in terms of mandatory emissions cuts, and when. It was a lively discussion in the conference room of Nature’s Washington offices, fueled by coffee and a large number of sugary pastries from the bakery downstairs. Which, when you come to think about it, is never a bad way to go about solving the world’s problems.

Alexandra Witze, chief of correspondents for America, Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 16, 2007
Categories: Alex Witze, In the News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

World experts have gathered in Valencia to produce a synthesis of all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports released to date (Nature – subscription required). Thus, there is a rash of climate change news.

The Valencia meeting’s report will, according to AFP, “serve as a guide for policymakers for years to come”. Now traditional arguments between Europe, the US and other participants over the exact wordings are already underway (AP).

Even OPEC is getting in on the action. The group of oil producing nations said this week it would assist in cutting or capturing carbon emissions (Reuters). Some reports even say it is mulling over the creation of a $3 billion fund invest in emission capture technology (Times).

In Australia the former head of the country’s Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization’s atmospheric research unit warned before the meeting that current policy is based on science that is already out of date (ABC). “If you think climate change is on the agenda, just wait another couple of years,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Cross posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 16, 2007
Categories: Climate Policy, Climate Science, Daniel Cressey, Features, In the News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s an interesting post on the BBC’s ‘The Editors’ blog today on how the BBC, as a media organisation, should deal with communicating climate change and, in particular, how it should represent “climate sceptics”.

The publicly funded corporation came under fire in September when it cancelled plans to air a Comic-relief style show aimed at raising public awareness of global warming amid concerns that it would breach the corporation's guidelines on impartiality.

The blog post by Steve Herrmann briefly describes the efforts of Richard Black, the BBC’s online environment correspondent, to better understand what “climate sceptics” think and the arguments they use to try to debunk anthropogenic global warming.

It includes a more detailed piece written by Black and Roger Harrabin, BBC News’ environmental analyst, for their in-house magazine Ariel, outlining their views on what the BBC must do to “get it right on climate”.

Black and Harrabin write:

Given the weight of opinion building up around the IPCC it makes sense for us to focus our coverage on the consensus that climate change is happening, is serious, but is manageable if tackled urgently.

We do not need consistently to ‘balance’ the reports of the IPCC. When we broadcast outlying views we should make sure we do not over represent them and we should keep a rough balance of views from either side of the IPCC. If we do not, we will distort the issue and risk misleading or confusing our audience.

We must also be more savvy about the way we treat outlying views – and we should make it clear to our audience when an interviewee holds a minority position.

They also say that vociferous views expressed on blogs etc need to be interpreted with caution...it's worth a read.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 15, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Olive Heffernan

In this week’s Nature, Jeff Tollefson reports on the claims that a White House science advisor edited a congressional testimony by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the public health impacts of climate change.

First reported last week by the Associated Press, the story has since been picked up by Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post, in The Boston Globe and in The Wall Street Journal (which takes a different line, reporting that the CDC director says that the testimony wasn’t diluted).

Although White House spokesperson Dana Perino initially denied claims that Julie Gerberding’s testimony had been watered down, it eventually became clear that it had been chopped from 12 to six pages.

Bush’s chief science advisor, John Marburger, said the edits were made in order to align the testimony with the findings of the reports released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But concerned scientists and Democrats believe that the White House was suppressing science at odds with its policy positions.

According to Eilperin “White House officials eliminated several successive pages of Gerberding’s testimony” including a statement that the “CDC considers climate change a serious public concern”.

Tollefson reports in Nature that the missing material "focused on a range of potential public- health impacts related to climate change. These included the effects of heat waves, air pollution, extreme weather and infectious diseases.”

Read the whole story in Nature here.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 01, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)