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The European Commission's draft blueprint for tackling climate change, announced January 23rd, is praised in today's Nature editorial for hitting "the sweet spot" between politically pragmatic but shortsighted proposals and implausably idealistic ones. Other groups - idealists and pragmatists alike - have reacted differently.
The American Geophysical Union released a revised statement on climate change on Thursday. The new statement is a bit bolder, strongly linking human activities to global warming and including a call for collaboration with industry and government.
While the previous AGU statement, released in 2003, said human activities contribute to climate change, the new statement decrees a clear causal connection:
The cause of disruptive climate change, unlike ozone depletion, is tied to energy use and runs through modern society.
At a press conference on Thursday, Michael Prather, who chaired the committee that drafted the new statement, said “two major advances,” 21st century data and advanced modeling, have solidified the science in the past 5 years. The new statement is the first in a line of three AGU statements on climate change to call for a reduction of greenhouse gases.
Of particular concern, the statement now says, is the potential of hitting a global temperature rise greater than 2 degrees C above 19th century levels, a threshold the union says would trigger the decline of biodiversity and agricultural productivity and the eventual loss of the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea levels by several meters. To prevent this 2 degree Celsius rise, the AGU says net CO2 emissions much be reduced by more than 50 percent in this century.
Rachel Courtland, Nature Washington bureau
Europe and the US could be headed for a trade war over climate change.
In a speech yesterday José Barroso, president of the European Commission, said he would be ready to force companies outside the EU to buy carbon allowances to ensure that companies inside were not disadvantaged by Europe’s tougher emissions targets (speech).
While this apparently went down well with the audience (of European businessmen) it hasn’t gone down so well with America.
Reuters highlights that US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said that an earlier version of the EU plans seemed to be an excuse to close the European market and amounted to something like protectionism. More worryingly, the notes for speech delivered by Schwab last week contains the statement, “The unilateral imposition of restrictions can lead to retaliation, and dramatically impact economic growth and markets worldwide – while accomplishing nothing or worse when it comes to advancing environmental objectives.”
The US approach has also been backed by the UK, most recently by energy minister Malcolm Wicks saying today the government was “against any measures which might look like trade barriers” and warning that some in Europe “could use this as a kind of secret weapon, as it were, to bring about protectionism” (listen to Wicks on BBC or read his comments on Reuters). Barroso also appears to be picking a fight with his own trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson. Mandelson is on record as saying the restrictions are not the way forward (BBC)*.
Currently on Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a review by Michael Oppenheimer of Mark Bowen’s lastest book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth About Global Warming.
As suggested by the title, the book documents the White House-led censorship of James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who bravely spoke out about the dangers and urgency of global warming long before many of his fellow climate scientists. Oppenheimer writes:
In doing so, Hansen staked a claim to unfettered speech far beyond the usual scientist's model of announcing research findings. If there was ever a pure test of the rights of government scientists, this was it.
As well as narrating “the step-by-step attempts of a low-ranking NASA press staffer and right-wing ideologue, along with other officials, to censor Hansen”, the book delves into the story of Hansen as research scientist who made important discoveries on the greenhouse effect and documents his personal journey as an individual.
While commending the book overall, Oppenheimer criticizes Bowen’s unyielding reverence for Hansen:
Bowen provides a fascinating tour of Hansen's scientific mind and mental voyage over 30 years, including the basis for his prescient assertions about the future course of warming. But here the story swerves off course into a morass of condescension and inaccuracy. Rather than providing a slice of science history, Bowen feeds the reader hagiography, as if he feels the need to enhance Hansen's stature — a completely unnecessary exercise — by reducing that of other scientists.
Historian Will Durant ... is said to have cautioned: "Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
This warning, re-broadcast in an essay by eminent public scientist Frank Press, wraps up an excellent special supplement on Earth science in this week's Nature. In honor of the International Year of Planet Earth, the supplement features more than a dozen in-depth commentaries on current topics in geoscience, almost all looking warily toward past, present and future climate change (with or without notice).
As an overview of several leading-edge climate science issues, it's well worth a look - and the thoughtful opening article on historical drivers of geoscientific progress is also not to be missed. Act now, because the entire supplement is currently free to access.
Anna Barnett
The Royal Society today released a report on the future of biofuels, which have recently been the subject of intense debate, as Kurt Kleiner reported in Nature Reports Climate Change last month. New UK rules to begin this April require transport fuel suppliers to include a small percentage of 'renewable fuel' in their fuel sales, working up to 5% by 2010. But according to the Royal Society report, this policy intiative (called the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation or RTFO) is not guaranteed to meet its climate-preserving goals. When it comes to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, the report points out, there are biofuels and biofuels. That is, while some plant fuel sources promise as much as 80% greenhouse gas savings over fossil fuels, it's also possible to keep trashing the planet by using unsustainable methods to produce and supply renewable fuels. Unless the UK sets emissions targets per se in its fuel policy, warns the report, the new UK rules and the EU Biofuels Directive that they reflect "will do more for economic development and energy security than combating climate change".
Climate change is being blamed for problems at the annual ice festival in Harbin, China. Huge intricate sculptures are disappearing before the thousands of tourists that flock to the festival get to see them.
“"The average temperature of winter in Harbin is 5 degrees Celsius higher than historical records,” says Yin Xuemian, a senior meteorologist at the Heilongjiang Observatory (Reuters). “In December 2002, ice lanterns in Harbin melted right after they were sculpted. [In 2006] Lots of money and energy were spent on redoing the sculptures. As the temperature rises, the period of ice and snow activities have shortened dramatically.”
AFP says this year’s festival has been a big success. Participants are concerned though, one told China Daily, “We’re all worried that the things will just collapse.” The festival is supposed to run until February. “We're worried it won't last that long this year,” Sun Lei, an official involved in the festival, told the BBC.
A rise of 5 C is pretty large. Estimates are generally far lower although these tend to be averaged over large areas. See Late-Twentieth-Century Climatology and Trends of Surface Humidity and Temperature in China.
Alternatively, you can geek out with the raw data from NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, which allows you to make maps of the trends. There’s even monitoring data from Harbin itself, although this isn’t totally up to date.
Image: Getty
Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
Did you resolve to use less energy for your home appliances in 2008? In a study released yesterday, a lab within the the US Department of Energy found that lots of Americans (or at least lots of Pacific Northwesterners) want to do the same - and given more information, tools, and sophisticated market incentives, they'll actually do it. To the tune of 15% less peak power use and 10% lower household electric bills.
Continue reading "Technology lessens Americans' power hunger " »
Cross-posted from The Great Beyond
It's Arctic ice time again. A paper in Nature on Arctic warming is getting some interesting and possibly somewhat misleading media pick-up. In their paper Rune Graversen and colleagues at Stockholm University use statistical analyses to try and understand what processes are important in the recent warming of the Arctic. One of their findings is that a substantial part of the warming is seen at altitude, rather that at the surface -- "A remarkable result," Graversen told National Geographic News. "I think nobody expected that."
As that report and others (AFP, New Scientist) point out, the surprise is that this work diminishes the role of the "ice-albedo feedback" in recent Arctic warming. In theory less ice means more sunshine is absorbed, rather than reflected back into space, which means more warming, which means less ice, and so on and so on -- a positive feedback that could be a powerful amplifier of climate change. But that effect would be felt most nearer the surface, not at altitude (The fact that some of the amplified warming takes place in the dark lends further weight to the argument).
Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the road that will lead from Bali to Copenhagen in December 2009, where the world is set to agree a new global climate deal, and the euphoria of seeing the US yielding under global pressure has begun to fade, the question is emerging of whether Bali actually accomplished what it set out to achieve.
So, was Bali a success? I give my take on Bali on the latest Climate Podcast from Nature, which covers highlights from the two weeks of talks as well as a round-up on what was agreed at the eleventh hour.
On ClimateBiz, James Murray takes the pragmatic view that it’s too early to tell:
There are still plenty of reasons to be confident that a solid successor to Kyoto will be agreed in 2009, but at the same time any Chinese leader commenting in 200 years time on whether the Bali conference was a success or not may sadly be doing so from a coastal resort in the Himalayas.
Murray rightly points out that whether you judge Bali as a success depends on whether you had realistic expectations to begin with:
The fact is Bali has achieved everything it was ever going to achieve. This was always going to be a meeting about future meetings and the environmentalists and European politicians who worked themselves up into a frenzy of excitement over the prospect of getting emission targets agreed were always going to be left disappointed.
Over on Open Democracy, which features a diversity of informed views on the outcome of the Bali conference, Oliver Tickell of the Kyoto 2 initiative gives a far bleaker take on Bali:
And is the world saved? Far from it. It is going to hell in a handcart….If this is success, well, give me failure! At least failure would give us a chance to start again and devise an effective framework that really could cut greenhouse-gas emission effectively, while delivering the goods on adaptation, forests, soils, peatlands, farming and the decisive shift we need to a low carbon global economy.
For the latest comment, analysis, news and features, go to Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature’s online resource dedicated to in-depth coverage of climate science and the implications for policy, the economy and society.
