Climate Feedback

In the race to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the Royal Society now plans to back promising new technology with venture capital as well as intellectual clout. The Society announced Thursday it will sink its first-ever investment fund into businesses developing carbon capture and renewable energy, along with water purification and other world-saving innovations (Financial Times).

Continue reading "Royal Society to fund carbon capture and renewables ventures" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 29, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, In the News, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Judging by the press coverage, it would appear that the Bush administration just turned green. A flurry of stories has hit the press after James Connaughton, a senior environmental advisor, suggested the White House would be willing to “enter into an international agreement” on climate change, “if other countries do, too.” That’s according to the New York Times. The BBC focused on three words - “binding international obligations” - uttered by Daniel Price, a national security advisor to President George W. Bush.

Although it remains unclear what, exactly, this means, it is perhaps telling that such statements could grab headlines around the world. The administration seems eager to clarify what it considers misunderstandings about its position on global warming (namely the general perception that it will stop at nothing to quash or at least cripple any international treaty to protect its industry friends). Bush’s critics aren’t going to buy it, of course, but they appear to be more than happy to watch the president try to wiggle out of what has become an increasingly lonesome political corner.

The problem here is that there isn’t much new. In trying to explain the president’s call for “aspirational” climate goals last year, Connaughton used similarly vague language. Under Bush’s plan, countries could institute various voluntary and regulatory measures at the national level. Those commitments would become binding under an international treaty, he said.

So are those the same “binding international obligations” that Connaughton discussed this week? The answer would appear to be no: Most stories suggest that “binding obligations” refers to various proposals to reduce emissions by some percentage by a specific date.

If that were the case, this might be newsworthy. But Connaughton’s suggestion that major developing nations (think China and India) would have to do the same is, if interpreted literally, a tad unrealistic. It also goes against the administration’s entire strategy for global warming, which has up until this point emphasized a decentralized approach based on various national strategies that could be developed by countries according to their specific needs and resources.

Oddly enough, this is one area where the Bush administration’s arguments seemed to (quietly) resonate. Following the principle of “common but differentiated” responsibilities for poor and wealthy nations, many in the climate community had already come to accept the idea that a one-size-fits-all approach simply would not work. If, on the other hand, Connaughton meant to say that major developing nations could sign up for various national policies as opposed to strict emissions targets, the question is then whether the United States would be able to do the same thing. If that were the case, nothing would have changed.

Where does all this leave us? I’m not sure. Connaughton says he is trying to reframe the administration’s position on climate change by emphasizing what it is willing to do, rather than what it is not willing to do. If would be easier to evaluate if the administration would offer some numbers.

Cross posted from Jeff Tollefson on The Great Beyond

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 28, 2008
Categories: Recent contributors, Climate Policy, In the News, Jell Tollefson, Mitigation | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For anyone interested in the consensus on climate change, there’s a very interesting feature by Joseph Romm who blogs over on Climate Progress on Salon today, in which he argues that opinion on the cause of global warming is irrelevant. What is relevant, says Romm, is the overwhelming body of well-tested science and real-word observations.

Romm makes the case that the perpetual use of the word ‘consensus’ by the media, scientific community, and others mistakenly frames climate change as an issue of opinion, rather than one of scientific scrutiny based on data and evidence:

“Science doesn't work by consensus of opinion. Science is in many respects the exact opposite of decision by consensus…One of the most serious results of the overuse of the term "consensus" in the public discussion of global warming is that it creates a simple strategy for doubters to confuse the public, the press and politicians: Simply come up with as long a list as you can of scientists who dispute the theory. After all, such disagreement is prima facie proof that no consensus of opinion exists.

So we end up with the absurd but pointless spectacle of the leading denier in the U.S. Senate, James Inhofe, R-Okla., who recently put out a list of more than 400 names of supposedly "prominent scientists" who supposedly "recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called 'consensus' on man-made global warming."

Opinion polls on the climate consensus crop up from time to time. Coincidentally one such poll came to my attention this week, via email, and is being discussed over on Roger Pielke Sr’s blog.

The posts basically describe the rejection, first by the AGU journal EOS and secondly by Nature Precedings, of a research poll by Pielke Sr, James Annan and Fergus Brown surveying whether there is agreement among climate scientists on the IPCC fourth assessment report.

Pielke Sr. writes:

“It is clear that the AGU EOS and Nature Precedings Editors are using their positions to suppress evidence that there is more diversity of views on climate, and the human role in altering climate, than is represented in the narrowly focused 2007 IPCC report”.

There’s a further post and comment stream over on Brown’s blog.

I’m not privy to the inside information on why their paper was rejected from both EOS and Nature Precedings, but it seems to me that there are (at least) two point to be made here:

Continue reading "Climate consensus: is opinion even relevant? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 27, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

This Thursday, take-no-prisoners environmental writer George Monbiot of The Guardian steps up to the podium at Second Nature, Nature's archipelago in the virtual world of Second Life, to give a talk on climate change.

In his 2006 book Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning, Monbiot argued for 90% emissions cuts by 2030 to stop dangerous climate change. With the UK and other governments struggling toward a consensus that 80% cuts must be made by 2050, we'll see how he feels about the planet's current prospects.

Monbiot speaks at 17:00 GDT (12:00 EDT). Second Life avatars can attend here.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 19, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston -

Whether technology can cure the world’s ills has been a hot topic at this year’s AAAS conference.

I joined Alok Jah and James Randerson as a guest commentator on the Guardian’s weekly science podcast yesterday to discuss, among other highlights from the AAAS meeting, whether we can rely on technology as our sole solution to climate change.

We recorded in Toscanini’s ice-cream café in Cambridge, MA, an institution as famous for its clientele (nobel and ignoble laureates and the Dalai Lama), as much as for it’s delectable ice-cream….the wort variety comes highly recommended!

The impetus for our technology discussion was the release of a report at AAAS by a specialist panel convened to predict the great engineering challenges that humanity will face in the 21st century.

A select group of big names and big thinkers, the blue ribbon panel included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, entrepreneur, geneticist and billionaire, Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Ray Kurzweil, futurologist, software engineer and alleged recipient of some 14 honorary doctorates.

Kurzweil sees no end to the possibilities of what technology can achieve this century – from creating artificial intelligence to match the human intellect to reversing the signs of aging. His basis for these assertions is the rate at which technology is advancing – a doubling every two decades. Though this may sound modest, its cumulative effect is worth contemplating – that’s 32 times more technical progress over the next 50 years than there has been in the past half-century!

The views of the panel are positively circumspect in comparison to Kurzweil’s, though are none-the-less fascinating.

Continue reading "Can technology stop the world from warming (and my ice-cream from melting)? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 18, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Conferences and Meetings, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston –

I went along to the COMPASS ‘marine mixer’ (picture an alcohol-laced gyre awash with journalists and marine science/policy types) last night. In the 7th year now, it has become quite the who’s who of marine science.

At one point, I was chatting to Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, who is moderating a panel here at AAAS today on the effects of climate change on the ocean.

Lubchenco and colleagues have a brief communication in this week’s Science, reporting the expansion of a low-oxygen or ‘dead’ zone off the US west coast, which they believe is partly attributable to climate change.

While scanning video footage off the seabed off the Washington and Oregon coast, Lubchenco and her fellow marine ecologists came across a mass of dead marine organisms. After some investigation, they found this was due to the expansion of a dead zone both toward the coastline and throughout 80% of the water column.

The region, known as the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, is one the world’s four eastern boundary current systems, which are some of the most productive areas in the ocean and produce 20% of the world’s fisheries.

The number of such ‘dead zones’ throughout the world’s oceans has increased dramatically in recent decades. Most, however, such as the well-known Gulf of Mexico dead zone, are caused by excessive nutrient run-off from land increasing the nitrogen content of the water, and sucking out the oxygen.

Under normal conditions, the region off the US west coast is characterised by the upwelling of nutrients from deep waters, driven by strong winds. Plentiful nutrients provide the nutrition necessary for an algal bloom, which forms the basis of a rich food web.

But too much nutrition…and it all goes horribly wrong.

Continue reading "AAAS: Marine mixing, dead zones and climate change " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 17, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Correction Appended

AAAS, Boston-

One of the most interesting, and popular, sessions I’ve been to so far at AAAS was the panel discussion on how the media communicates climate change.

Though there wasn’t any news in the talks about news by various well known science communicators, the room was packed to the rafters and the lively discussion spilled over into the next session.

Andy Revkin of the New York Times , who recently started the excellent Dot Earth blog, spoke of the tyrannies of news and the difficulty of getting climate-related news on the front page without a peg like Hurricane Katrina. He also pointed out that the more complex a story is (as is so often the case in climate science), the less space it gets.

Matt Nisbet, who runs the Framing Science blog, talked about how sources of information frame people’s perceptions of the issue, with the example that Gore’s ‘climate crises’ gets referred to more frequently by the media than the IPCC, NOAA or NASA.

David Dickson, director of Scidev Net warned that journalism is at risk of losing its independence and becoming a voice for various NGOs, as they become increasingly strategic at media relations. Some NGOs apparently paid for a large contingent of journalists to attend the UN conference on climate change in Bali, with the explicit understanding that they would cover their stories*.

John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Centre, aired his frustration at various aspects of how climate change is reported by the mainstream media, including references by journalists (other than Revkin) at the NYT to “global warming, [which] is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe”.

Holdren has been trying convince journalists to use ‘global climate disruption’ rather than the misrepresentative ‘global warming’. Good luck to him – it would up the word count, and, as we've heard, there just ain’t no space for that.

Yesterday morning, I took part, with a national environment reporter from a popular broadsheet, in an interview on how journalists communicate climate change. The interviewer was a grad student from MIT who is doing her PhD on the topic. She asked me a lot of questions about sources of information - the issue of NGOs came up again and also the question of where to draw the line with quoting scientists on policy recommendations. The differences between us and a national paper were very interesting - I get way less bumf from NGOs, for a start!

Olive Heffernan

*Dickson has since clarified that the agreement was that journalists would cover the conference rather than the activites of the NGO at the conference.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 17, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston –

A host of unwelcome visitors could invade the Antarctic seafloor within the next ten to fifteen years, as ocean temperatures rise with global warming, said researchers today at the AAAS meeting here in Boston.

The scientists expect King crabs to be the first invaders, with sharks to follow.

The communities under threat from these invasions are extremely unique and highly diverse, with weird and wonderful inhabitants such as ribbon worms, sea spiders, and the aptly-named brittle stars, which break apart at the slightest touch, but can fortuitously regrow their limbs.

For hundreds of millions of years, these ancient communities have enjoyed a relatively safe haven in Antarctic waters, which are free of modern predators with crushing mouthparts such as crabs and sharks.

But a rise in sea temperature of a few degrees could change this, said marine biologist Richard Aronson of Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

At very low temperatures and high pressures, the concentration of magnesium in crab’s blood becomes toxic. As sea temperatures increase, crabs will be able to extend their range into areas that they are no longer off limits due to this physiological obstacle.

Similarly, sharks have a chemical called triethylamine oxide (TMAO), which is needed to counterbalance the build up of urea generated by their continuous movement. But TMAO is needed in greater doses at lower temperatures and so there appears to be a thermal cut off point of how much they produce.

The Antarctic has previously marked that cut off point, but the researchers highlighted that this is one of the fastest warming regions of the planet. It’s currently warming at a rate of approximately 1 degree Celsius each 25 years.

Cheryl Wilga, associate professor of physiology at the University of Rhode Island, described the Antarctica biodiversity as a “smorgasbord” for invading predators.

“There will be winners and losers”, said Aronson, who predicts that brittlestars will be “hammered” by the invasion, but that brachiopods, commonly known as lampshells, will probably hold up fairly well.

For further information, see the news coverage on Discovery News , National Geographic and the Telegraph.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 15, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m at the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in Boston, which runs from Feb 14-18 and will be following the climate and energy streams over the next few days, so check here daily for the highlights.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 15, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Our latest Climate Podcast is out today, with interviews exploring this month's hot climate stories. In episode three, we find out:

-How the US government tried to silence climate scientist James Hansen

-What’s behind the recent backlash against biofuels

-How the Antarctic is losing ice at an unprecedented rate

-And author Gabrielle Walker tells us why we're nearing the last chance saloon on an international climate change deal

You can tune in here, and suscribe to the podcast RSS feed to stay on top of future episodes.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 14, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A novel approach to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere based on the Earth's natural weathering process, which Olive Heffernan reported on in November, is getting more attention.

John Shepherd discusses the technique, developed by graduate student Kurt Zen House and colleagues, in a Journal Club column in Nature today, concluding:

The scheme House et al. outline looks promising if it were operated using a solar or geothermal electricity source near a supply of basic rocks. A mid-ocean volcanic island would be good. And the environmental consequences of the scheme's discharges should be less severe than those of the ocean acidification that humans are already causing.

A simple geoengineering solution to soak up carbon dioxide without catastrophic side effects should raise interest, and it has. But Shepherd says that what geoengineering ideas need now, and haven't got, is seed funding for pilot projects. "None of the research councils has so far felt that it's their patch," says Shepherd, but "DEFRA are beginning to take an interest, and both the Tyndall Centre and the Royal Society are now contemplating meetings or studies on geoengineering, so maybe things will hot up a bit sometime soon."

Anna Barnett

Photo: Getty

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 14, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Following on from Jeff's post on Supercallifragalistic Tuesday, Chris Mooney has a post on his blog and a column elsewhere on the differences between McCain on one side and Obama/Clinton on the other on matters climatic.

Writing before Romney dropped out of the race but after it was fairly clear he had little reason to stay in, Chris's point is that while it's true that all three of the people who might be the next President support real action on climate change, which is an undeniably good thing, they don't all support quite the same sort of action. Specifically, while the Deomocrats are talking about cap and trade measures that would lead to 80% reductions in emissions by 2050,

There are many reasons to think [McCain would] settle for a policy that is more lenient and compromise-oriented. Notably, McCain worked closely with Senator Joseph Lieberman on climate legislation in the past, and the current bipartisan Lieberman-Warner bill sets a lower target for emission reductions – a 70 percent reduction in capped emissions by 2050 (and not all emissions would be capped).

Continue reading "And then there were three" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on February 08, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The primary election results from “Super Tuesday” are still trickling in, but one thing is clear: all of the leading presidential candidates in the United States endorse mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. Given the past seven years of obfuscation and, many claim, outright obstruction from the administration of President George W. Bush, this will come as a relief to scientists and many policymakers in the US and abroad.

The news comes from the right side of the political spectrum. While leading Democrats have formulated official and strong positions on global warming, the Republican field until now has been a bit of a mixed bag – in part because little attention has been focused on the issue. But with voters in 21 states weighing in, the GOP candidate with the strongest and clearest position on global warming, John McCain (pictured), came out with a commanding lead. (NY Times).

The Arizona senator bucked Republican leaders on the issue long ago, and is currently sponsoring legislation that would create a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 60% below 1990 levels by 2050.

On the Democratic side, the battle between New York senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois senator Barack Obama will continue in the coming weeks – and perhaps months. Both, however, have endorsed cap-and-trade programs to cut emissions 80% below 1990 levels by mid-century.

Cross-posted from Jeff Tollefson on The Great Beyond

Image: John McCain 2008 / www.JohnMcCain.com

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 06, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, In the News, Jell Tollefson | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In what was billed as the largest teach-in ever, over 1,500 universities, colleges, schools, and community organizations across the US held seminars and events on climate change yesterday.

Organized by student volunteers and driven by a project called Focus the Nation, professors of science, economics, engineering and anthropology - among other disciplines - spoke on panels and brought their classes to the discussions. Meanwhile, students staged information fairs and awareness-raising stunts: in Missouri, they stacked up 20 tons of coal to create a 3D graphic of campus energy use, and in Vermont, the fictional protagonist of a one-woman show promoted a boycott on sex as an effective focusing strategy (Focus the Nation, Christian Science Monitor).

I talked to a few of the scientists involved about how the events went at their universities. Ecologist Tom Sherry of Tulane University in New Orleans was brimming with excitement about the sessions there, which were attended by a total of about 750 students and faculty and included a Q&A that carried on for a lively two hours.

Continue reading ""Largest teach-in ever" focuses US on climate change" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 01, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change, In the News | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)