Climate Feedback

The dizzying economic growth in Asia threatens to disappoint expectations that new technologies will provide an easy fix for our climate problem, warn the authors of a commentary article in Nature this week.
Roger Pielke, Tom Wigley and Christopher Green believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Change Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its work, plays “a risky game” when assuming that “spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry out most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions.”

Most of the emissions scenarios that the IPCC considered for its last report include significant ‘built-in’ technological change. In other words, the IPCC assumes that a good deal of climate-friendly innovation will happen spontaneously, in the absence of climate policy measures.

Now, necessity, economic growth and pursuit of profit do generate all kinds of more or less useful new technologies, from atomic bombs to iPods. But assuming that pure market forces will readily come to our aid in matters of climate change might be too optimistic, the commentary authors warn. Worse, they say, the assumption of a lot of spontaneous technological change could be misinterpreted as a license for policymakers not to take aggressive action.

Pielke, Wigley and Green have stirred up a hornets’ nest with their analysis. Some initial reactions to their call to arms are collected in an accompanying news piece. Expert opinions range from “overdue” to “totally misleading”.

So who’s right and who’s wrong, then? Are we dramatically underestimating the challenge of climate change? Or is this just one more twist exercised to unnecessarily dramatize an admittedly serious problem? Or is it all just shadow-boxing in the arcane world of scenario-making?

Economics of climate change are a politicized field. Depending on one’s standpoint (on what market forces can or cannot do, for example), one may find different answers to these questions. Less disputable is the fact that some two billion people in China and India are on the point of adapting to western living standards. Their consumptive power and increasing mobility will add to the global climate and energy problem. Let’s hope that their creativity and engineering skills will also add to its solution.

Quirin Schiermeier

Illustration: B. Mellor

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 31, 2008
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In a Science paper last year (subscription required), Rahmstorf et al. pointed to 2001-2006 measurements of global temperature at the top end of the IPCC's 2001 projections - and global sea level rise well beyond the range predicted in 2001 - as evidence that "the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly to climate change than our current generation of models indicates." Today in a letter to Nature Geoscience (subscription required), Roger Pielke, Jr, questions whether models from that 2001 generation improve on the predictive power of their forbears.

Pielke checks predictions from all four IPCC reports, dating back to 1990, against reality. Each report made a series of 'if-then' statements about the likely results of various emissions scenarios; in hindsight, Pielke can pick out which of these possible greenhouse experiments has actually been running on Earth since 1990 and compare the results to the IPCC's shifting hypotheses.

Whereas the 2001 projections undershot the observed temperatures and sea levels, the 1990 projections overshot them, he concludes. Projections of temperature and sea level fell substantially between the 1990 and 1995 IPCC reports, when aerosols were added to models and carbon-cycle simulations were tweaked. But because they dropped too far, the adjusted post-1995 projections "are not obviously superior in capturing climate evolution", says Pielke.

That's not to say that 2001 models were no better than those a decade older. Including more information has made recent simulations more sophisticated - but so far it hasn't much improved their ability to sketch out future climates, probably because important factors are still missing. Predictions from the two most recent reports do, however, seem to have crept toward the actual climate evolution, and additional rounds of of refinements may help the models to home in further.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 31, 2008
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The Guardian was far from alone in reporting this week that "A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists." On The Great Beyond, Quirin Schiermeier points out that the the most noteworthy thing about this delicately poised hunk of the Wilkins ice shelf may be its media visibility: the loss of a 400-square-kilometre piece of the same shelf earlier this year received no such fanfare.

Still, that visibility is pretty spectacular. Check out this mashup of the Twin Otter plane's flyover footage with the satellite images that tipped off British Antarctic Survey scientists:

"The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 28, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Science, Cryosphere, In the News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Carbon dioxide usually steals the media limelight as chief climate change culprit.

But in a break with tradition, a less-recognized agent of climate change - black carbon - has been the focus of much media attention this week following a review article by V. Ramanathan and Greg Carmichael in Nature Geoscience.

Though many of the news stories have incorrectly reported this as new research, it's actually an overview of what we know about this important agent of global warming - with some interesting insights from the authors on how it could contribute to future warming trends, and what can be done about it.

Black carbon, which is a component of soot, is largely generated from burning biofuels, biomass such as forests and crops, wood and even dung. Back in August, Ramanathan and co-authors had a paper in Nature showing that brown clouds in the atmosphere, which are largely comprised of black carbon and other aerosols, are significant contributors to regional warming over Asia, in some cases having as great an influence as carbon dioxide.

In the Himalayan region, their combined influence on long-term warming may be sufficient to account for the retreat of glaciers, as highlighted in a news feature last year on Nature Reports Climate Change.

Continue reading "Carbon dioxide - not the only culprit " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 25, 2008
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Nearly a quarter of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere is emitted in the production of internationally traded goods and services. Rather than being another nail in the climate coffin, trade could be used as a powerful tool to mitigate climate change (akin to smart trade lifting nations out of poverty) - that’s what Glen Peters and Edgar Hertwich of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology argue in a Commentary on Nature Reports Climate Change.

But harnessing trade to mitigate climate change would first involve a particularly contentious — and complex — problem; that of apportioning emissions from traded goods to their rightful owners. And if that’s judged by who consumes, rather than produces, the goods…then the developed countries are, as ususal, the main culprits.

Currently, the Kyoto Protocol takes a “hands off” approach to this issue, stating that “Parties … shall strive to implement policies and measures … in such a way as to minimize adverse effects … on international trade.”

And including trade in climate policy isn’t helped by the IPCC’s rather narrow definition of ‘carbon leakage’, a term that refers to those emissions that are merely relocated rather than reduced (such as from exports and imports), say Peters and Hertwich.

Continue reading "Trading Kyoto" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 20, 2008
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This week’s Nature (subscription) is all about a very special fluid – water. Fresh water, to be precise.

Globally, irrigation accounts for most freshwater use (in some countries up to 80%). But in rich countries in particular, electricity production also places an intolerably high burden on freshwater supplies. In a commentary, Mike Hightower and Suzanne A. Pierce lay out strategies, such as using waste water, sea water or brackish groundwater for cooling, for economizing water usage by power generation.

It has become customary to blame climate change for all kinds of things, from violent conflict in Darfur to the unseasonal mosquito which last week plagued me in my bedroom.

The global water crisis is no exception, no matter whether it signifies flood or drought. Let’s for now just take a look at the latter. Is global warming really worsening the problem of water scarcity?

One might think no. Every physicist will tell you that you’ve got to get more precipitation in a warming world. As temperatures increase, so does evaporation of ocean water which generates clouds and rainfall.

However, the extra energy in the atmosphere has the effect of changing the distribution of rainfall over land. The crux is that in a wetter world many places may actually face longer dry spells between heavier rain events.

Existing climate models are too coarse to resolve the processes which lead to rainfall, so where, and how soon, precipitation will change is still rather uncertain. For my feature article, I spoke with scientists about what they think might be the effects of more extreme patterns of rainfall on soil moisture, land degradation and agriculture - and about possible adaptation strategies.

In a second feature, Emma Marris investigates what plant breeders, agronomists and geneticists have to offer when it comes to produce more crop per drop in dry regions. The wide-spread feeling that biotechnology is at best a mixed blessing for the developing world has not gone away, she found.

As so often when it comes to climate change (and not just that), Africa is in the centre of concerns. Imported science and technology can help; but one wonders if western experts and funding agencies are always right in forcing strategies on societies which they don’t really understand, just because these strategies work at home.

For a totally non-scientific, but altogether enlightening, insight into an agricultural sub-Saharan society (long before climate change had appeared on the horizon) it’s worth checking out Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things fall apart.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 20, 2008
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Canadians are set to slap the first price tag on their greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to some very different initiatives in the works.

Reuters reported Friday that the long-awaited Montreal Climate Exchange will open on May 30, buying and selling voluntary emissions reductions in the same fashion as the Chicago Climate Exchange, its US partner.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government had a few days earlier put out the details of its plan for mandatory emissions reductions, which had likewise been in the works for over a year (a good summary is here; registration required). They're proposing to cut absolute emissions 20% from 2006 levels by 2020 (for those scoring at home, 20% down from 2005 levels would be 0% below 1990 levels, compared to the standard-bearing EU's 20% cut from 1990 levels).

But absolute emissions isn't what they'll limit - they're talking about regulating emissions intensity, or the amount of emissions per unit of production, from 2010. That could make it tough to integrate into a global climate deal, since the EU caps absolute emissions and all three US presidential candidates want to do the same. Interestingly, the plan also mandates carbon capture and storage for oil sands, a carbon-intensive economic lynchpin of the country.

Besides the voluntary market, local measures could already be in play when and if these limits come down. British Columbia is leading the way with what is to be the first carbon tax implemented outside of Europe. Although the tax hasn't been looking very popular and faces the same too-much-is-never-enough criticism that the EU climate bill came in for, liberal leader Stephane Dion now says he'd like the national strategy to be a carbon tax - or something. Anything. "We can talk about what the best model for putting a price on carbon across Canada might be –– but the fact is we need to JUST DO IT. That is what this provincial government has done, and that is what a Liberal government will do," Dion said in a speech in Vancouver.

Conservatives, who will be defending their control in the next election, countered with praise for the Montreal market. And while other provinces remain skeptical of the carbon tax, B.C. and Manitoba are considering joining western US states in a new cap-and-trade system - so a regulatory patchwork looks likely. As in the US recently, though, the question is no longer whether the Canadian government should intervene to raise fossil fuel costs, but how.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 19, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, In the News, Mitigation, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Nature Reports Climate Change , Gywn Prins of the LSE has reviewed The Hot Topic by science writer (and once climate change editor at Nature) Gabrielle Walker and former UK chief science advisor Sir David King.

The book has with the odd exception, received mostly favourable - and a few oustanding reviews - namely Chris Mooney's for New Scientist and Dave Reay's in the March 6 issue of Nature.

Indeed, Reay compares it Rachel Carson’s celebrated Silent Spring in its ability to engage millions and commends its even-handed coverage of the ‘climate debate’. Reay writes:

The Hot Topic has an authoritative clarity that scythes through the junk science and brushes aside the brigades of doom-mongers and overly earnest environmentalists.

Over on The Intersection Chris Mooney refers to it as "the best global warming book I've ever read", and has a similar stance to Reay. Of Walker and King, he writes:

Their overview of the science and policy of climate change is a model of clarity, comprehensiveness and, above all, sanity. It truly does find a middle ground in the climate debate.

On the contrary, Prins (who authored a Commentary in Nature last year with Steve Rayner calling for a radical alternative to the Kyoto Protocol) argues that the book is both “troubling” and “relentlessly normative” in that it represents “an unquestioning acceptance of the received wisdom”.

Prins is especially disgruntled with how Walker and King, in his view, polarize perspectives on the way forward on climate policy:

[They] have no scintilla of doubt that the Kyoto Protocol is the road to follow and that anyone who deserts it is wrong and possibly corrupt. So we have as heroes the EU, which doesn't "duck" the problem, and as villains the US, languishing under the rule of "President Bush and his fiercely partisan advisers". They lump all "sceptics" — anyone who disagrees with them — together like the damned in a Hieronymus Bosch painting of heaven and hell.

He then compares The Hot Topic to Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (albeit at the other end of the polemical spectrum) in it’s treatment of uncongenial information, essentially making the point that the authors choose their supporting arguments carefully and disregard the rest.

Continue reading "Review of The Hot Topic: The road well travelled " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 17, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Climate Science, Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year on Climate Feedback, Kevin Vranes wrote about some of the unintended consequences of climate policy – namely how the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism was increasing greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of HCF-23 in developing countries – as well as increasing ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere.

Now, the drive to tackle climate change – and fast - has landed us back in the land of unintended consequences, though for a whole host of other reasons.

A few particularly noteworthy examples have come across my radar in the past couple of weeks.

First up, is the increasing demand from alternative energies on the world’s water supplies, a factor not helped by the complete lack of cohesion between energy, water and climate policy. A prime example, as reported by Brian Hoyle on Nature Reports Climate Change, is the extensive irrigation required for those waving fields of midwest grain that supply the ethanol for biofuels.

“At least 40 gallons [of water] go into every mile travelled by an ethanol-powered vehicle” according to Michael Webber of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas-Austin.

And gas-electric hybrid vehicles fare little better. “We need to move from our old way of thinking — miles per gallon — to gallons of water per mile," says Webber.

Not only do these golden fields of corn pose a threat to water supplies, the massive amounts of fertiliser used in growing them are increasing nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and worsening the existing ‘dead zones’ in the Gulf associated with fish kills. The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , notes that this is in direct conflict with existing policy targets to reduce the oxygen-depleted area in the region.

And on an unrelated topic…the trail of unforeseen outcomes continues overseas…as highlighted last week in The Washington Post, which reported the toxic waste being left behind by solar energy companies in China, posing a severe threat to human health.

As much as climate policy is urgently needed, it seems it would be worth remembering that climate is not the only sustainability issue.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 14, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s been quite a while since the Gulf Stream was last on the Nature cover. This week the old highlight is back.

Now that’s a topic which has caused an awful lot of confusion before. “How global warming will cause the next ice age”, stuff like that. So just to be clear: the Gulf Stream is the mostly wind-driven upper limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which ceaselessly transports warm surface water from the Caribbean to middle and high latitudes on the other side of the Atlantic. Yes, ceaselessly. As long as the Earth keeps rotating there’s really nothing in the world (not even global warming) that could bring it to a halt.

It is common knowledge - and true - that the British Isles and Scandinavia enjoy a much warmer climate than Newfoundland or Labrador thanks to the Gulf Stream. But its climatic influence goes far beyond that, a US-Japanese team report in a paper in Nature this week.

They detected the Gulf Stream’s signature in the entire lower atmosphere - namely in air and cloud temperatures, rain bands, pressure fields and wind convergence - above its meandering cross-Atlantic course, and far inland in Europe.

That the influence of the Gulf Stream might penetrate deeply into the atmosphere has been previously assumed. Firm evidence that this is indeed the case, and vehemently so, comes from the combination of satellite observations, operational weather analysis and atmospheric circulation models which the team utilised for their study.

Very likely the Gulf Stream’s direct local effects on the atmosphere are tele-connected, via planetary atmospheric waves, with weather conditions in far-away regions. How frequent and pronounced these remote responses might be is not at all clear. But it seems at least as if Gulf Stream-driven atmospheric dynamics over the North Atlantic have a marked influence on hemisphere-wide climatology.

This, you’ve guessed it, adds another piece to the climate change puzzle. Come what may, the Gulf Stream will not ‘run dry’. But its strength does vary, and a possible weakening of the Atlantic overturning circulation, to which it belongs, is unlikely to leave the Gulf Stream unaffected.

A new ice age will not come over Europe because of that, but storm tracks and rainfall patterns could be affected in rather unpredictable ways.

Quirin Schiermeier

You can vote or comment on the importance of the new Gulf Stream paper in the Journal Club of Nature Reports Climate Change.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 12, 2008
Categories: Extreme Events, Features, Journal Club, Ocean science, Quirin Schiermeier | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Investors are backing a geoengineering startup based on the idea of fertilizing the ocean with iron to grow CO2-sequestering phytoplankton, despite recent research that underlines doubts about whether the scheme can work.

The startup, Climos, announced Wednesday that it had received US$3.5 million in venture capital, which it will spend on an environmental impact assessment, scientific workshops to discuss ocean iron fertilization, and international permits for a demo project - all to pave the way for selling carbon offsets from the fertilization technique. It's been less than a month since a rival company called Planktos had to drop a similar business plan for lack of funding, which it blamed on "a highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders". I'm guessing Planktos had in mind the activists who opposed such plans at an international policy meeting last year, though a group of ocean and climate scientists also called fertilization offset sales "premature" in a Science commentary (subscription required) soon before Planktos flopped. Climos must be betting its new millions that its proposed assessment, demo project and workshops will put some scientific weight on its side.

But the list of questions is long. The unknown ecological consequences of stimulating phytoplankton blooms first springs to mind, but another unknown is whether CO2 taken up by the plankton would actually end up stored in the deep sea, as hoped. In a press conference at the AGU Ocean Sciences meeting the day after the Climos announcement, researchers Peter Statham, Stephane Blain and Ian Salter described the results of studies on phytoplankton blooms fed naturally by iron that leaches from islands in the Southern Ocean. Their news may be bad for the offsets business.

If carbon is to stay stored underwater for decades or centuries, phytoplankton that have absorbed it must, upon death, sink at least 300* metres below the sea surface, the speakers said - but they had found that this probably happens to only about 5% of natural iron-happy blooms. They added, however, that differences between artificial iron fertilization and natural leaching may affect the results in ways that have yet to be analyzed: "present geo-engineering approaches will not mimic natural extended release from islands, the iron will not be [the] same form, and the overall impact on eco-systems is unknown."

*corrected figure
Image credit: NASA

Anna Barnett

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2008
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One of the most significant aspects of the UN climate meeting in Bali was an agreement to bring emissions from deforestation into the loop. It only makes sense, given that deforestation is estimated to cause as much as 20 percent of the global greenhouse emissions. There’s still debate about the exact figure, of course, but the point is that it’s an awfully large number to ignore.

We first covered the issue last fall, when environmental advocates and rainforest nations (as they are calling themselves these days) started gearing up for the meeting. With an eye toward Bonn, where the next deforestation discussions will take place in June, I decided to revisit the issue and figure out where we’re at. This week’s Nature features the first story in a two-part special report that runs this and next week.

As a reporter you often have a pretty good feeling for where a story might lead you - the trick is being prepared to be wrong. This was one of those cases where I was caught a little bit by surprise. I expected I would be writing about early-stage discussions on how to build a market that rewards countries for reducing emissions, but I ended up writing about whether this is, or should be, the route the world intends to take.

I thought this debate was pretty much resolved before Bali, or at least in Bali, but people started hammering on the issue the minute I picked up the phone. As it turns out, the European Commission had even issued a policy proposal last month that would close the door to deforestation credits in the European trading scheme, instead putting money in a pot for traditional government programmes.

One thing led to another and pretty soon I wound up back in Kyoto, where the debate between US negotiators, who were pushing the market-based approach, and their European counterparts began more than a decade earlier. The idea still has a strong foothold in the United States, and is being pushed by a diverse and powerful set of interests ranging from utilities to environmental groups. But the divide is still fairly wide and deep on this issue, so we’ll have to see where it goes from here.

I don’t want to give too much away regarding the piece that comes out next week, but I’ll give you a couple of hints: It centers on the world’s largest tropical forest, and I had the opportunity to practice my Portuguese while reporting it out.

Jeff Tollefson

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 07, 2008
Categories: Deforestation, Features | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)