Climate Feedback

Humans are at fault for warming at both the Earth’s poles: so say unique findings published in Nature Geoscience today.

With stories of dwindling sea ice and collapsing ice shelves already saturating the media, this at first may hardly sound like news. But in fact, researchers had never formally pinned the Arctic’s rapid warming on humans, because limited data were swamped by great natural variability. Down south, where warming on the Antarctic Peninsula contrasts with cooling in some other regions of the continent, the IPCC’s 2007 assessment report concluded: “Anthropogenic influence has been detected in every continent except Antarctica (which has insufficient observational coverage to make an assessment)”.

In the new study, Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia and colleagues found a way to squeeze clear results from those sparse data. Their method was based on state-of-the-art models of the polar climates that either incorporated anthropogenic as well as natural influences on variability, or included natural factors only. (Human influences include greenhouse gases that cause warming and a cooling effect from depletion of stratospheric ozone; natural ones are solar variation and volcanic eruptions.) This type of study, pioneered by Peter Stott and co-authors in 2000, has greatly boosted the IPCC’s confidence that humans are causing climate change globally. The new Gillett et al. study - co-authored by Stott - gave the technique an important tweak, say Andrew Monaghan and David Bromwich in an accompanying News and Views article, by focusing on model results for only those places with observational temperature records:

By this restriction, the group is able to perform an ‘apples with apples’ comparison of model simulations and polar near-surface temperature records during the twentieth century. Their analysis implies that the models can simulate trends better than previous studies had suggested.

In the records since 1900 put together by Gillett et al., the average temperature across monitoring stations has risen at both poles. And the models match these trends only when they factor in all influences, including human hands (producing the line labelled ALL in the above figure).

“We detected the human fingerprint in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions,” says Gillett. The familiar litany of impacts - balding Arctic summer sea ice, ecological and human displacements, sea level rise - are likely down to us too, the authors say. Stott adds that the results make the poles’ future all the bleaker, since “the human component isn’t going to let up anytime soon.”

Continue reading "Human prints on the poles" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 30, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Attribution, Climate Science, Cryosphere | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Last month I wrote that geoengineering proposals had practically made the scientific mainstream, gracing a special issue of one of the Royal Society’s journals. With global emissions steadily rising and policy responses slow to take hold, scientists have begun to call more loudly for research into the last-ditch technological fixes that might - or might not - be able to reset a rapidly changing climate.

The journal’s special issue turns out to have been just a preliminary move for the UK scientific academy. Today the Society announced it is launching a project to review and compare, on paper, the merits of different geoengineering schemes.

Mentioned in the press release are some of the classics: reflecting sunlight with space-based mirrors, pumping cooling aerosols into the atmosphere, and fertilizing the ocean with iron to create carbon-sucking plankton blooms. (Trials of that last one by startup company Climos, who hope to make carbon-credit money off it, are up for consideration by international regulators this week, Reuters reports.) A working group will assess such ideas’ feasibility - “separate the science from the science fiction”, in the words of chair John Shepherd - as well as the huge side effects we could incur by trying to manually turn the thermostat on an incompletely understood planet. A report will be out in mid-2009.

Philip Boyd of New Zealand’s University of Otago demanded an assessment much like this only a few days ago in a Nature Geoscience Commentary (subscription), as The Great Beyond reported. It’s been 15 years, says Boyd, since geoengineering ideas were comprehensively scrutinized and ranked according to their promise (by Keith and Dowlatabadi in Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 1992, if you're wondering). Here is Boyd's example of what he's looking for (more color denotes a higher ranking - this is one for the imaginative graphics file).

Continue reading "Royal Society launches geoengineering review" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 30, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Mitigation, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In Science this week, a commentary (subscription required) from John Sterman, who studies systems thinking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argues that the public may shy off of action against climate change because their basic mental model of the problem is wrong. People don't intuitively understand how changing rates of carbon dioxide emissions affect the overall concentration of the gas in the atmosphere, Sterman says. In fact, they often make mistakes when thinking about how 'inputs' and 'outputs' sum up to form a total 'stock' - "even in simple, familiar contexts such as bank accounts and bathtubs".

Time’s Bryan Walsh covers the piece today, tutting over the “tremendous gap” between knowledgeable scientists who favour aggressive steps and confused laypeople who don’t. Walsh wants experts to “better explain in clear English the dynamics of the climate system, and how to affect it”. Matt Nisbet at Framing Science goes a little further: “What’s needed is not simply getting more scientific information out there, but rather new methods for communicating about the problem that are adapted to the background of targeted publics, journalists, and decision-makers.”

But I’m not convinced that the apparent crisis of understanding Sterman points to is really a crucial barrier. Here's the background: research Sterman published last year with co-author Linda Booth Sweeney of Harvard found that even MIT grad students make rudimentary mistakes when asked how to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Nisbet sums up:

In the experiment, MIT students with advanced training in either the sciences or economics were asked to read descriptions from the IPCC summary for policymakers that depicted the long term accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. When asked then to sketch what they estimated to be the emissions path needed to stabilize atmospheric CO2, nearly 2/3 of the elite MIT students erroneously reasoned that greenhouse gas emissions can stabilize even though emissions would continue to exceed the rate of removal from the atmosphere.

The students typically thought that stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions at current levels would likewise stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at current levels. The right answer is that emissions need to be cut drastically - by over 50%, given the numbers in Sterman's example. This is an instance of the more general problem where “people have difficulty relating the flows into and out of a stock to the level of the stock”, says Sterman.

Sterman takes something of a logical leap, though, in connecting this mistake with poll results showing that majorities in the US, Russia, China and India - all important emitters - favor a ‘wait and see’ or ‘go slow’ approach to lowering emissions. (More on recent climate poll results in this post, by the way.) He writes:

For most people, uncertainty about the risks of climate change means costly actions to reduce emissions should be deferred.

But that’s an answer to the question of when to take major measures against the risks foreseen by climate experts. It’s not about what those measures would look like, in terms of emissions trajectories.

Continue reading "The missing climate science message" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 28, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

In July, a feature in Nature Reports Climate Change
first reported concerns that Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), a greenhouse gas at least 12,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, could be substantially more prevalent in the atmosphere than previously estimated.

Now the first actual measurements of the gas, conducted at two clean-air sites in California and Tasmania, confirm that University of California chemist Michael Prather’s initial suspicion was right: The gas, widely used as an etchant in the plasma screen production process, does escape in quite significant amounts to the atmosphere, scientists with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have found.

Over the last 30 years, the atmospheric concentration of NF3 has increased more than 20-fold, they write in a paper in press at Geophysical Research Letters (subscription). The overall amount of the gas in the atmosphere, currently some 5,400 tonnes, is rising by 11% per year.

In light of these new measurements, the idea that the global warming potential of atmospheric NF3 is negligible must surely be revised. The Nature news story here has more details and explains what experts say should be done about the problem.

Quirin Schiermeier

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 27, 2008
Categories: GHG emissions, Quirin Schiermeier | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the world's largest conservation organizations is getting into the business of predicting which species could suffer most from future climate change - even before the damage begins to show.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is known for its annual Red List, which tracks species populations worldwide over time and nominates those most in danger of extinction. But in a chapter of this year's Red List report, it released early work on a new roster: species susceptible to a climate-induced snuffout in the years ahead.

The new project may facilitate what is being dubbed 'pre-emptive conservation'. Emma Marris reports today on Nature Reports Climate Change:

The data [on climate susceptibility] may someday be integrated into the Red List itself, so that researchers who map hotspots of threatened species or otherwise model biodiversity can include future climate-change-related threats, even if species appear to be in the pink of health. Parks can be planned, corridors built, and more aggressive measures, such as so-called 'assisted migration', can be considered before population numbers begin to decline — a pre-emptive strike against extinction.

Continue reading "Pre-empting climate change extinctions" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 23, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Biodiversity and Ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is the global financial crisis good or bad for green issues? The ongoing controversy over the European Union’s ambitious climate and energy package suggests the latter might be the case. But political and economical analysts seem to be increasingly confident that the current crisis might give rise to environmentally healthier policies and investment decisions.

The EU heads of state are still determined to finalise the package before the end of the year, but they expect tough negotiations with a group of reluctant countries led by Poland.

An editorial in this week’s Nature lays out the options and prospects for EU climate policies in light of the financial crisis:

“Striking the required bargains may require more time than the remaining two months under French presidency. But a well-weighed set of rules is far and away preferable to a rushed political compromise that would substantially water down the EU’s ambitious climate plan. (…) Meanwhile, the current economic turbulence cannot be allowed to serve as a pretext for lessening climate protection efforts.”

Meanwhile, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said in a statement that the EU plan “could also be a boon for the economy, generating millions of new jobs at a time when the world is suffering from the financial crisis.”

Any agreement will come too late for the international climate talks next month in Poznan, Poland (of all places). But a strong European commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 % would be a much-needed signal to the UN climate meeting in Copenhagen 2009, where nations hope to conclude on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

Continue reading "From greed to green?" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 23, 2008
Categories: Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, GHG emissions, Opinion, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Flipping through Dire Predictions, the terrific new illustrated summary of the 2007 IPCC report (reviewed here), has me wondering about the best climate graphics out there. Page after page of beautiful, clear charts and illustrations add up to a lot of power, making the whole book a visual standout, but it would be hard to pick out any individual pieces that really pop with imaginative information design. Meanwhile, even after another banner year for climate science in the media, none of the most recent finalists in Science's annual image contest concern themselves with the warming globe.

So last week when I stopped by the conference 'Representing Climate Change: Ecology, Media and the Arts' at Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, I grilled their speaker on graphic design, Louise Moana Kolff, on other examples of great climate science visuals. (Click each image below to see the full-size original.)

Continue reading "In search of the best climate graphics" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 22, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm here in Kailua Kona for the AGU Chapman conference on atmospheric water vapor and its role in climate. Given the high humidity and afternoon rain, the topic seems quite appropriate.

In the keynote lecture, Brian Soden of the University of Miami gave a great introduction to the role of water vapor in climate change. It seems to be a general consensus that there is a positive feedback between water vapor and climate. There has been an increase in water vapor in the atmosphere over the past 15 years, and Soden reported that model simulations show that greenhouse gas emissions are at least in part to blame.

He suggests that increasing atmospheric water vapor will play havoc with atmospheric circulation. Wet regions will get wetter while arid regions will dry even more. In addition, floods and droughts will become more frequent and more extreme.

Continue reading "AGU Chapman conference: water vapor and climate" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 22, 2008
Categories: AGU Chapman Conference on Atmospheric Water, Alicia Newton, Atmospheric Science, Climate Science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond

Cyclones appear to be responsible for a large amount of organic carbon tied up in ocean sediments.

In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, Robert Hilton and colleagues report on the impact of cyclone-induced floods on carbon in the LiWu River in Taiwan. They found that between 77 and 92% of non-fossil carbon eroded from the LiWu catchment area was moved during floods linked to cyclones.

As increased sea surface temperatures from global warming could increase the intensity of cyclones, this could create negative feedback, with bigger cyclones locking up more organic carbon in sediments. Sadly this is not going to stop global warming.

Continue reading "Cyclones’ carbon capturing" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 20, 2008
Categories: Atmospheric Science, Climate Science, Daniel Cressey, Earth science, Hurricanes, Ocean science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a buried time bomb of greenhouse emissions - and it's even less photogenic than melting permafrost. A team of researchers led by Takeshi Ise of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology has been watching peat dry.

Peat - "an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation matter", in Wikipedia's appetizing phrase - forms in bogs and swamps where the acidic, waterlogged, oxygen-poor soil smothers the decomposition process, just as permafrost freezes it out. That makes it a big sink for carbon that would otherwise have joined the atmosphere as the plants composted. But peat's not just a sink, it's a sump - and a snowballing one. The large amount of water peat can hold lowers the oxygen available, which makes more peat accumulate, which sucks up more groundwater and blocks it from draining.

It's this feedback process, as it occurs in the northern bogs of Manitoba, Canada, that Ise et al. succeeded in accurately modeling for the first time in a paper published this week in Nature Geoscience (subscription required). Their bad news is that warming air temperatures reverse the loop: the peat dries and decays, then can't hold as much water and dries and decays some more.

As Joseph Romm points out on Grist and Climate Progress, that potentially makes the peat loop a link in a bigger, and climatically more important, vicious circle - the one where temperatures raised by human emissions start an uncontrollable release of methane and carbon dioxide from natural stores like peat and permafrost.

Continue reading "Watching peat dry" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 16, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Science, Earth science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The third and final debate in the US Presidential elections took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York last night. Moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS news, it took as its theme domestic policy.

As pointed out over on Gristmill, the debate yielded nothing new from either candidate on climate and energy issues, though it did serve to highlight the differences in the candidates’ positions as well those topics where they differ from their party positions.

John McCain set himself aside from the GOP is taking credit for "bringing climate change to the floor of the Senate for the first time", while Barack Obama noted that his support for clean coal technology “doesn't make me popular with environmentalists."

The discussion on climate and energy focused almost exclusively on energy independence, and on the timescale to eliminating foreign oil imports. Here’s the transcript of that part of the debate (taken from CNN politics):

Continue reading "Focus on energy independence in final debate " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 16, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that remarkable headway has been made into understanding the physical science of climate change, there’s a feeling among climate experts – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and among funding agencies of the need to shift the focus of climate research from identifying the cause to assessing the impacts, whether hurricanes, oceanic dead zones or forest fires.

A case in point is the new study just launched by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the US to examine how climate change will influence hurricane activity in the coming decades.

In an excellent news feature in Science magazine, Eli Kintisch takes up the issue by looking at how the $1.8 billion available for the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is likely to be reoriented towards climate impacts research under a new administration.

But evaluating climate impacts will require more than a shift in CCSP’s vision. As Kintisch points out, the research budget available to CCSP has declined from $1.9 billion in 1994, whereas climate research advocates estimate approximately $4.5 billion will be needed by 2014 to sustain the needs of both academic and federal climate scientists. The widening gap between escalating costs and narrowing research budgets is placing a strain on basic earth monitoring and means that fewer scientists are tackling increasingly complex issues, such as the impacts of aerosols, writes Kintisch.

Continue reading "Impacts research – the next frontier" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 15, 2008
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For anyone interested in the state of the earth’s climate, the most recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are essential - if not exactly bedtime - reading (I prefer a bit of Proust myself).

Fair enough, the panel’s synthesis report collapsed the three prior encyclopaedic volumes into a summary of what one really needs to know about climate change, its impacts and what we could/ought to do about it, but it’s still not the most accessible synopsis I’ve seen.

Now this problem has been solved with a diminutive and accessible translation in the form of Mike Mann and Lee Kump’s Dire Predictions, reviewed here for us by Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

Gulledge, who briefs decision-makers in various sectors on the science and projected impacts of climate change, applauds the fact that he no longer has to consider whether to lug around three books the size of the Los Angeles telephone directory, and can instead use this “lavishly illustrated volume”, which he says is “little more than a centimetre thick and fits neatly in the outer pocket of my backpack”.

Continue reading "Pocket IPCC" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 09, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the long view on the 2008 Arctic sea ice melt, see today’s commentary on Nature Reports Climate Change by two National Snow and Ice Data Center researchers. Mark Serreze and Julienne Stroeve recap the results:

The seasonal minimum for 2008, occurring on 14 September, entered the books as the second-lowest of the satellite era, probably the second-lowest of at least a century, and just behind the standing record set in 2007.

Barely second-lowest still came as a shock, given the cooler weather this year. Said Stroeve in an NISDC press release, “I find it incredible that we came so close to beating the 2007 record — without the especially warm and clear conditions we saw last summer. I hate to think what 2008 might have looked like if weather patterns had set up in a more extreme way. ”

August 2008 saw the fastest melt ever recorded, according to NASA. And ice volume, a bellwether for the future, probably was at its lowest this year - an observation that hasn’t reached the broadsheets (but see Climate Progress and Stoat).

NSIDC scientist Walt Meier explains, “Warm ocean waters helped contribute to ice losses this year, pushing the already thin ice pack over the edge. In fact, preliminary data indicates that 2008 probably represents the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record, partly because less multiyear ice is surviving now, and the remaining ice is so thin.”

Continue reading "Has Arctic summer sea ice tipped?" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 09, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Science, Cryosphere | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Parliament’s environment committee yesterday voted largely in favour of the ambitious European climate action plan (subscription) proposed in January.

The decision, although preliminary, allows the European Union (EU) to go into the upcoming next round of international climate negotiations with a common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across Europe by at least 20 % by 2020. The European commission, Council and Parliament must yet formally agree on details of the plan, but substantial changes are now considered unlikely.

Power plants in Europe will no longer receive free allowances for their greenhouse-gas emissions.TRAVELPIX/GETTY

Most hotly contested were the amendments to the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) which the European commission had proposed in January to strengthen the effectiveness of the scheme.

Introduced in 2005, the ETS is as yet the only mandatory emissions trading system in the world. Until now, power stations and other large European industries have benefitted from generous supply of free permits to release carbon dioxide. Much of the commission’s proposed reform was aimed to end the over-allocation of emission allowances.

The compromise now agreed upon in parliament doesn’t pull the teeth out of the original plan. As of 2013, power stations will not receive free emission allowances anymore. Instead, they will have to obtain 100% of allowances at auction.

Other energy-intensive industries, such as steel and cement facilities which, unlike the power sector, have to compete with suppliers outside the EU, will in a first phase merely have to obtain 15% (rather than 20 % as the commission had initially proposed) of emission allowances at auction. But the allocation of free allowances to manufacturing industries is to be gradually phased out by 2020.

The environment committee did make some concessions to industry, though. The threshold for facilities – currently around 10,000 - which participate in the ETS is to be raised from 10,000 to 25,000 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Continue reading "EU Parliament backs climate plan" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 08, 2008
Categories: Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Energy, GHG emissions, In the News, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“In the 1970s, all the scientists were saying an ice age was coming.” This seems to be a popular sentiment echoed in blogs and novels aimed at challenging the consensus views regarding future climate change. It was even a key theme in Michael Crichton’s State of Fear , when a character suggests that scientists only jumped on the global warming bandwagon in a bid to secure funding.

But a new article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society challenges the idea of a 'global cooling ' consensus. Thomas Peterson of NOAA teamed with William Connolley of the British Antarctic survey and science reporter John Fleck to create a survey of peer-reviewed climate literature from the 1970s. Looking at every paper that dealt with climate change projections or an aspect of climate forcing from 1965 to 1979, they were able to assess the ‘trends’ in the literature. They found that only 7 of the 71 total papers surveyed predicted global cooling. The vast majority (44) actually predicted that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide could lead to global warming.

Continue reading "The great global cooling myth" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on October 07, 2008
Categories: Alicia Newton, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Communicating Climate Change, GHG emissions | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Tomorrow’s been dubbed Super Tuesday for EU climate policy, with the EU Parliament set to vote on proposals that follow up the climate change legislation proposed at the start of the year.

But what was once touted as a cutting-edge vision has turned into a tough sell. By the end of last week, Polish leaders announced they’d added a sixth country, Greece, to the coalition they’ve been building against parts of the plan - creating a large enough minority to block a decision.

Their beef is with auctioning of emissions permits under a revamped European carbon-trading system, scheduled to start in 2013. The financial turmoil that’s muddied the political path in the US is also having an effect here, sharpening countries’ concerns about their high-emissions industries - whose lobbyists have protested all along that the cost of buying permits will push them out of Europe. “This crisis changes priorities,” said German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier last week. “One cannot rule out that interest in protecting the climate will change.”

So various cushions are on offer. Companies may be allowed to buy half their permits from carbon-offset projects in the developing world, which makes them cheaper; and there’s a leaked list of industries that could get their emissions rights spooned out for free, though such get-out clauses weren’t supposed to be inked until after the UN attempts a global climate change deal in Copenhagen in December 2009.

These solutions don’t work for Poland. Its problem is reportedly not manufacturers that have to compete with Chinese and Indian counterparts, but its electricity industry, overwhelmingly based on Polish coal. As The Economist explains thoroughly and sympathetically, making coal too expensive - which is the whole point of the policy - will push Poland toward natural gas supplied by the increasingly scary Russia.

Continue reading "Super Tuesday for the EU" »

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

With climate change as environmental problem number one, the nuclear industry has proclaimed itself as part of the solution and is starting to enjoy a reputation as a green power provider after decades of bad press.

As a result, political support for nuclear energy is reaching at all time high – the US government is offering the nuclear industry $18.5 billion in loan guarantees and billions more in production tax credits and both US presidential candidates have voiced their support for nuclear power as a means of meeting climate goals. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain is bracing itself for a revival of the nuclear industry now that EDF and British Energy have agreed a deal whereby France will help the UK develop a new generation of nuclear power stations.

But as the ‘nuclear renaissance’ comes to fruition, many are starting to question whether nuclear energy is a feasible part of the solution to global warming.

Several studies have queried the low-carbon credentials of the nuclear industry, an issue that Kurt Kleiner explores over on Nature Reports Climate Change. While it's understood that an operating nuclear power plant has near-zero carbon emissions, it's the other steps involved in the provision of nuclear energy that can increase its carbon footprint.

Critics claim that other technologies would reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions more drastically, and more cost effectively, but the nuclear industry and many independent analysts respond that the numbers show otherwise, writes Kleiner.

"The fact is, there's no such thing as a carbon-free lunch for any energy source", says Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace in Washington DC. But "for every dollar you spend on nuclear, you could have saved five or six times as much carbon with efficiency, or wind farms", concludes Benjamin Sovacool, author of a recent study in Energy Policy on the lifetime emissions of nuclear power plants.

And as Oliver Morton pointed out here last week, even if nuclear does the job of reducing emissions from the generating sector, if the rest of the economy keeps growing and burning fossil fuels in cars and heating systems and factories, the overall reduction of emissions will be pitiful.

Continue reading "Nuclear energy: falling out of favour? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 03, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

For some time, the received wisdom has been that a post-Bush administration will herald a new era in which the world can move boldly forward on climate change. But the present political - and financial - climate is calling that wisdom into question, as I've written in my latest editorial, and below.

Whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain wins the White House next month, the elected president will face a daunting list of challenges in making climate change a priority both on the home front and internationally. Yet there are several reasons to believe that reducing greenhouse gases may not be given the high priority it deserves.

Firstly, while both candidates made climate change a signature issue early on in their campaigns, McCain's choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee weakens the Republican message. Having publicly questioned the contribution of human activity to climate change and championed aggressive offshore drilling, Palin is positioning herself to the right of the existing administration on the issue, casting doubts on whether a McCain–Palin administration would carve out a new direction for the Republicans.

Secondly, and arguably of graver concern, is the escalating financial crisis, which is reverberating worldwide and, which teamed with rocketing fuel prices and insecure energy supplies, could push rising emissions far down the political agenda regardless of who is in office.

Indeed, both presidential candidates have already had to pull back from positions held early on in the election. As oil prices soared to over $140 a barrel earlier this year, McCain and Obama were forced to rethink their opposition to offshore oil drilling, though Obama has done so a lot more cautiously than his opponent.

Continue reading "A challenging political climate" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 03, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent Summer Olympics in Beijing has drawn international attention to China’s efforts to improve air quality and reduce pollution, both during the Olympics and in the long term. According to Chinese officials, they have made tremendous strides in raising air quality levels since 1998, reporting ever increasing numbers of 'Blue Sky Days’.

However, a new study by Steven Q. Andrews of Princeton University in Environmental Research Letters suggests this may have more to do with reporting than actual increases in air quality. Andrews reanalyzed air quality data and found that much of the improvement reported for Beijing can be attributed to changes in the locations of monitoring stations and revisions to the air quality standards, rather than changes in the level of pollutants. Using the 1996 air quality standards and the original monitoring stations, Andrews finds 55 fewer ‘Blue Sky Days’ in 2007 than the official reports.

Continue reading "Clouding the Blue Skies" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on October 02, 2008
Categories: Alicia Newton, GHG emissions, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)