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Archive by date: November 2008

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Calling all climate-conscious avatars...

Next Wednesday, Nature is co-hosting a conference with Imperial College London on the Elucian Islands archipelago in Second Life on carbon capture and storage. Details here. Attendance is free – you’ll just have to direct your avatar accordingly….

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Will the US be ready in Copenhagen?

It’s well accepted that the upcoming climate talks in Poznan will not be the time or place for agreeing the architecture of a new deal on climate change. An idea that is less well received, but one that is gaining traction, is that the same could be true of the negotiations in Copenhagen a year from now.

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While the election of Barack Obama as US president brings renewed energy and hope to the UN process, President Bush will be holding court when environment ministers from some 192 nations meet next week in Poznan. And with Harlan Watson in place as the US chief climate negotiator, any serious shifts in the US position will be on hold until January. In addition, some are speculating that even the modest ambitions of the talks — to settle how to finance emissions cuts and aid adaptation in developing countries — are likely to be eclipsed by the world's financial woes.

But of far graver concern are the growing reports that the US won’t be ready to sign a global deal on climate change in Copenhagen either, given the time needed to enact domestic climate legislation.

As far back as October, Elliot Diringer, Director of International Strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, wrote the following in an op-ed for the Transatlantic Climate Policy Group:

Any near-term action may come in the form of energy legislation that, while helping to reduce U.S. emissions, will not achieve the levels of reduction envisioned under a cap-and-trade scenario. Enactment of a comprehensive climate package, including cap-and-trade, is unlikely in 2009. It may come at the earliest in 2010.

The world can ill afford a replay of Kyoto, with Europe demanding more than can be delivered and the United States ultimately walking away. We need realism, not brinksmanship. Instead of a full and final deal in Copenhagen, we must aim for what is in fact feasible, and set expectations now so that it is received as a success. The risks and consequences of failure are otherwise far too great.

Just last week Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, reflected this sentiment, saying that the financial crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a federal cap-and-trade system would likely preclude action in 2009.

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Attn Obama: Earth science agency merger

There’s a line around the block to give advice to Barack Obama, the latest offering being a 400-page environmental policy paper backed by 29 NGOs (hat tip to Climate Progress). Amid the many recommendations, a proposed bureaucratic shake-up of US Earth science has also resurfaced.

The idea is to combine research programs at NOAA and the USGS into a new, streamlined Earth Systems Science Agency, or ESSA. Published as a Policy Forum in Science this past July (subscription required; also see NRCC story and blog), it is now very much dwarfed by buzz about a possible National Energy Council complete with a czar to be crowned. But ESSA hasn’t fallen entirely off the radar of influential democrats - more on this below. And there’s just been an interesting dialogue over at Prometheus on whether the NOAA-USGS merger makes sense.

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Looking forward to Poznan, and beyond

Shortly after finishing up this week’s Nature story (subscription required) on the upcoming climate talks in Poland, I finally secured an interview with US Ambassador Harlan Watson, the United States' chief climate negotiator.

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Lovley’s day for a climate bunfight

Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond

duty_calls.pngThere’s nothing like a good climate change-denial article to get the internet all riled up, and boy has Erika Lovley done some riling.

She’s penned not one but two articles for the right-leaning Politico newspaper, which are being torn to shreds as we speak.

The one generating most ire is the frankly spectacular ‘Scientists urge caution on global warming’. This claims there is “a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation”.

David Roberts on the Gristmill blog calls Lovley’s pieces, “two of the most jaw-droppingly moronic stories I've ever seen”. The version of his story on the Huffington Post website comes with the headline, “Politico Reporter Erika Lovley Embarrasses Politico, Self, Profession of Journalism, Humanity”.

You know this isn't going to end well for her don't you?

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Is it a Pearl Harbor if it has to happen twice?

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Prodded by Andy Revkin at the Times, Joe Romm offers a list of "Pearl Harbors" that might lead to the second-world-war scale of effort against climate change that he (and to an extent I) see as necessary. Here it is:

1) Arctic goes ice free before 2020. I have bets out on this. It would be a big, visible global shock.
2) Rapid warming over next decade, as recent Nature and Science article suggests is quite possible
3) Continued (unexpected) surge in methane
4) A megadrought hitting the SW comparable to what has hit southern Australia.
5) More superstorms, like Katrina
6) A heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003 one.
7) Something unpredicted but clearly linked to climate, like the bark beetle devastation
8) Accelerated mass loss in Greenland and/or Antarctica, perhaps with another huge ice shelf breaking off, but in any case coupled with another measurable rise in the rate of sea level rise,
9) The Fifth Assessment Report (2012-2013) really spelling out what we face with no punches pulled.

What strikes me about this list is that most of it has already happened. Leaving aside the question of whether it was a superstorm, Katrina happened. So did the 2003 canicule. So did the Australian drought and the bark beetle devastation. A decade of rapid warming took place in the 1990s, and so did a surge in methane. "Another huge ice shelf breaking off"? -- clue's in the "another".

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Antarctic currents aren't a-changing

The Southern Ocean’s carbon-sponging capacity has been getting a scientific rethink lately, and a paper in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription required) offers new info on what assistance we can expect from these frigid waters. Unfortunately, the wire report on the paper garbles its bottom line.

According to one long-term prediction, the Earth’s oceans - our greatest natural ally in any war on climate change - will soak up 70 to 80% of the entire industrial era's anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions over the next several centuries . The Southern Ocean accounts for some 15% of that storage. Last year, however, a widely reported study (Science, subscription required) led by the University of East Anglia’s Corinne Le Quéré concluded that the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb the gas was weakening.

The new paper, by Claus Boening of IFM-GEOMAR and colleagues, has garnered a Reuters article that unsurprisingly doesn't go into detail about past studies. But the summary from Reuters wrongly implies an about-face on worries over a weakening ocean sink. The story leads with:

The Southern Ocean has proved more resilient to global warming than previously thought and remains a major store of mankind's planet-warming carbon dioxide, a study has found.

and it later continues:

The analysis shows the Southern Ocean has maintained its ability to soak up excess carbon despite changes to currents and wind speeds.

Actually, though, the Boening et al. paper doesn’t evaluate carbon-soaking ability - current and wind speeds are what it's all about. In contrast, storage capacity is the primary concern of Le Quéré et al. So the direct contradiction between today's story, Southern Ocean changing but still major CO2 sink, and the 2007 Reuters report on Le Quéré et al., Southern Ocean saturated with carbon dioxide, looks like an oversimplification.

I called Boening to clarify. “We don’t have anything to directly challenge that conclusion [of Le Quéré et al.],” he says. “We are just challenging the scenario behind that conclusion, namely changing circulation patterns.”

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The large carbon footprint of climate scientists

Collaboration requires communication, and communication is always better in person, but should climate researchers travel less?

In an article reported on the Nature News website, Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research says the community should reflect more seriously on its jet-setting culture.

Stohl has detailed the carbon emissions of scientists and non-scientists at his institute in a paper recently published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. The emissions are certainly not jaw-dropping, but he raises a couple of interesting points.

For one, why is international collaboration between climate researchers—which usually requires some air travel— so strongly encouraged by funding agencies without an eye cast to how the hopping on planes might be minimised? And to what extent is it for the climate change community to set an example to the rest of science—and to professionals of all stripes?

Yes, most researchers in the field care passionately that their work informs policies that changes people’s behaviour. But only a quarter of attendees at the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry conference in September have sent back questionnaires about the fuel they burnt to get there. Without more completed questionnaires, the organisers are having a tough time calculating the total carbon emissions, and thus how much they are aiming to off-set.

We are all busy, but we should never be too busy to practise what we preach.

Anna Petherick, Research Highlights Editor, Nature

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Glacial climate swings: It’s in the ocean

A paper this week in Nature (subscription) sheds new light on the causes of pronounced greenhouse-gas and climate fluctuations during glacial times.

The last ice-age, which covered the period from around 110,000 to 10,000 years before now, is famed for a series of climate swings known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

Scientists have found evidence in Greenland ice cores for abrupt warming episodes of up to 15 degrees Celsius within few decades, followed by a more gradual cooling. These glacial warm and cold periods swung back and forth between the poles in a kind of thermal seesaw effect, whereby Antarctic temperatures rose when Greenland temperatures dropped, and vice versa.

It has long been assumed that Dansgaard-Oeschger events were triggered by changes in Atlantic ocean-circulation. The new modelling study by Andreas Schmittner and Eric Galbraith now adds new evidence to the idea. Weakening Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the heat conveyor which carries warm water surface water northwards and cold deep-water back south, is indeed the primary physical mechanism driving glacial climate fluctuations, they conclude. Here’s an editor’s summary.

Schmittner and Galbraith carried out simulations with a coupled model of glacial climate and (simplified) biogeochemical cycles. When they manipulated the Atlantic circulation – artificially ‘switching’ it off and on in their model, that is - the model nicely reproduced the temperature changes typical for Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Remarkably, the model also reproduced reasonably well the ice-core-derived changes in atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse-gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide which accompany such events.

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Bonanza of carbon cases at the EPA

Obama's Environmental Protection Agency may not have a director yet, but it already has its hands full. In the final year of the Bush administration, the EPA has simply procrastinated on greenhouse gas control: the Supreme Court in 2007 ordered the agency to assess the dangerous impacts of emissions under the Clean Air Act, or else justify its lack of action, but the result was a hopelessly conflicted report with a comment period that outlasts the presidential turnover. Now adding pressure to sort this out, pronto, are an EPA decision on coal plants last week and the threat of a new lawsuit over ocean acidification.

On Thursday the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board rejected the permit for Utah’s new Bonanza Coal Power Plant - a ruling that could halt as many as 100 other coal plants on the EPA docket until the agency can decide how to regulate their carbon dioxide output. For details, see the thorough coverage on Wired Science and Climate Progress. AP summarizes:

The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.

The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order limits on carbon dioxide. This is "an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting process," the panel said.

The Sierra Club conservation group filed the Bonanza appeal and argued it on the basis of the Supreme Court ruling. Their victory wasn't absolute, explains Alexis Madrigal on Wired Science:

The Board did not actually side with the Sierra Club's interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but in deciding to send the decision back to the EPA with the instruction to come up with a nationwide plan for regulating greenhouse gases, the Sierra Club effectively stopped new coal plants in their tracks.

"It's going to stop everything while EPA mulls over what to do next," Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder told the AP. "And that will be decided by the next administration."

Meanwhile, the Center for Biological Diversity has appeared to the EPA as the Ghost of Lawsuits Yet to Come. Skipping the Clean Air Act (and other federal laws cited in past cases against carbon, as noted by Dot Earth), the CBD say they will invoke the Clean Water Act in defense of acidifying oceans. The group petitioned last year for an update in the EPA's pH standards, which haven't been revised since 1976 - a problem flagged in a July 2007 Science commentary (subscription required).

Their followup is a notice of intent to sue. A win in court could open yet another door to EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions - something the CBD is going after explicitly in separate, state-level petitions.

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World’s first climate collective intelligence event

The world’s first climate collective intelligence experiment is looking for participants.

The aim is to develop a comprehensive, distilled, visual map of the issues, evidence, arguments and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, that will be available for all to explore and enrich across the web, writes event organiser Dr Simon J. Buckingham Shum over on Nature Network.

The event kicks off in January and will culminate in a conference in April. Now in its pre-launch phase, the organisers are trying to bring together teams of scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers to work with the tool developers on specific aspects of the complex set of issues around climate change.

So, if you are a scientist, industrialist, campaigner, policy maker, tool maker — or someone with other ideas and resources to contribute — and are interested in participating, check out the site here.

Olive Heffernan

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Under-ice floods speed glaciers towards the sea

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Scientists have reported the first direct evidence of a link between flooding underneath the Antarctic ice sheet and the rate at which glaciers are discharged into the sea. The study, which was published online on Nature Geoscience yesterday [subscription], has important implications for understanding how ice released into the ocean from the Greenland and Antarctic land masses could raise sea level.

Led by Leigh Stearns of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, the trio of researchers found that ice on the Byrd Glacier in East Antarctica accelerated just as there was a massive release of water from lakes beneath the ice.

Over the past 20 years, researchers have discovered more than 150 lakes beneath the Antarctic ice pack, the largest of which (Lake Vostok) is equal in size to Lake Ontario in Canada.

And more than a year ago, researchers reported that these subglacial lakes could actually lubricate the flow of ice off the continent and into the ocean, as I reported over on Nature News at the time.

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Pre-Poznan: China makes the first move

Wangfujing_street,_Beijing.JPGThough experts have pegged China as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter for well over a year, it was only two weeks ago that the government first openly admitted China's emissions have caught up with the US (just barely, they insist).

This acknowledgment came the day after a senior Chinese climate policy official said rich nations should earmark a wopping 1% of their GDP to help the developing world tackle climate change. Swift to follow was an international climate conference in Beijing, run jointly by China's government and the UN, which ambitiously proposed a new international agency to push technology transfer. Jane Qiu reports the meeting’s outcome in Nature this week (subscription required).

In short, it’s not just the rather ghastly Christmas tree in my hairdresser’s window that’s signaling December is around the corner. Next month ushers in the UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, a major stop on the road between Bali and the Son of Kyoto treaty to be hammered out next year in Copenhagen. The formerly reticent China seems to be after a louder voice at the table.

Reuters reports:

"There's growing external pressure on China and also its own problems with energy and the environment, and these factors are coming together to make it more active and focused on climate change," said Goerild Heggelund, an expert on Chinese climate change policy at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway.

President-elect Barack Obama's entry into the White House early next year, vowing greater action on climate change, will also lift expectations of China, said Guan Qingyou, a climate policy researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

"With U.S. policy changes, there will also be more pressure on China to show initiative," he said. "Eyes will be on us."

The 1% of GDP demanded last month, Qiu says, would cash out at US$284 billion - more than twice what the eight largest economies pledged to the climate-challenged developing world at July’s G8 summit. Even if the North agreed to such a sum - or the 0.5% or 0.7% the Chinese have previously suggested - countries heading toward a global recession seem unlikely to improve on their poor records of delivering foreign aid.

Perhaps more UN-friendly is the new plan for stepping up the transfer of technologies that would allow the South to produce clean energy and adapt to unavoidable climate change. Writes Qiu:

Under the framework proposed in brainstorming sessions at the Beijing conference, the new inter-government agency would be an independent body able to make and implement decisions and monitor compliance. It would oversee and verify mitigation targets of developing countries, identify barriers to technology transfer, and propose countermeasures. Developed countries would commit to providing it with a steady stream of income for its primary operating budget, possibly supplemented with money from the private sector and other sources.

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Oil crisis, financial crisis, total crisis

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

world energy outlook cover.bmpThe Paris-based International Energy Agency came out with its annual World Energy Outlook report yesterday. And it makes for gloomy, and expensive, reading (Press release, Calgary Herald, Greentech Media).

The agency bases its findings on a reference scenario that assumes no new government policies are introduced. In this scenario, the IEA says that between now and 2030 world energy demand will grow by 1.6% a year, requiring energy-supply investments of $26.3 trillion (yep TRILLION dollars). “Yet the credit squeeze could delay spending, potentially setting up a supply-crunch that could choke economic recovery,” says the press release.

A week ago, Reuters pre-empted the report, with a story focusing on the slim chance we have to limit warming of the planet to 2 degrees Celsius. “The scale of the challenge ... is immense,” IEA has warned.

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Energy under President Obama

Now that Barack Obama has been elected, Washington DC is involved of its two favourite activities: scrambling for the hard-to-get tickets to the 20 January inauguration, and speculating wildly on who might get positions of power in the new administration.

Nature has some of its own speculation available in a news story in this week’s issue. Even with many competing priorities, energy policy looks likely to be of interest early under President Obama.

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Glaciation ahead - on a geological time scale

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More elderly readers of these pages may remember having heard in their school days back (circa 1970s) that scientists then thought an ice age would be coming soon. I certainly do – even though the alleged ‘global cooling consensus’ in the scientific literature of the time has recently been disproved as a myth.

Now an interesting new paper in Nature [subscription] suggests that a rapid natural transition towards a stable glacial climate, with permanent ice sheets covering large parts of North America and Eurasia, could indeed be ahead.

Thomas Crowley and William Hyde ran a coupled energy-balance/ice-sheet model to test their hypothesis. When forced with long-term variations in daily solar radiation which result from small cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit, the best-fit model run (that is the one which most accurately reproduced ice sheet variations during the last 3 million years) predicted a rapid transition towards a cold climate regime to occur merely some 10,000 to 100,000 years from now.

Models and theory do indeed suggest that at critical points (namely when climate variability is at a maximum) large ice sheets can rapidly develop from very small perturbations in solar forcing.

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Energy vs Climate: A surprising confluence of goals

Guest Commentary by Andrew Dessler

There is an emerging view among some experts that recoverable fossil-fuel reserves are far smaller than previously thought. If so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) highest emissions scenarios could be unrealistically high, thus limiting the worst-case climate change during the 21st century. This view of a constrained fossil-fuel supply points to a potential convergence of thinking about policies and actions needed to address the seemingly divergent problems of energy supply and climate change.

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One of the standard techniques for estimating future oil production is the method pioneered by M. King Hubbert. Briefly, Hubbert’s theory involves fitting historical production data to a logistics curve; extrapolation of the curve allows estimation of future production. Hubbert successfully predicted domestic U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s, and his theory predicts that world oil production should be peaking about now, which production figures seems to be confirming. Application of Hubbert’s theory to world-oil production suggests that total future recoverable conventional oil is ~1.2 trillion barrels or 7 Zeta Joules (ZJ). Figure 1 shows oil consumption from emissions scenarios produced by the IPCC, along with this estimate based on Hubbert’s method. All IPCC scenarios assume integrated oil production greater than the Hubbert estimate of recoverable oil.

For coal, the canonical wisdom is that there are hundreds of years of availability. However, several recent analyses have cast doubt on this. A recent NRC report on U.S. coal availability concluded, “… there is probably sufficient coal to meet the nation’s needs for more than 100 years at current rates of consumption. However, it is not possible to confirm the often-quoted assertion that there is a sufficient supply of coal for the next 250 years.” Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech has applied a Hubbert-like analysis to coal production data and concluded that the availability of coal is overstimated. The Energy Watch Group, a German think tank, has performed a detailed country-by-country analysis of coal reserves. Integrating their estimate of future coal production, we get 11 ZJ for world coal production from 2008 to 2100 — about one-ninth of the coal reserves cited by the IPCC (Table 4.2 of the fourth assessment report). As is the case for oil, the IPCC’s scenarios’ projected coal consumption generally exceeds this estimate of available resources.


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Climate change hits loveable lemmings

Cross posted from the Great Beyond

lemming top.jpgLet us get one thing clear right at the start: lemmings do not commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs into the sea. However, their populations do undergo massive size fluctuations, leading to mass migrations where the cute critters may go swimming to find new food sources.

At least, they used to undergo massive population explosions. In a paper published this week in Nature a group of researchers analyse the absence of such events since 1994. The culprit, you guessed it, is climate change.

Nils Stenseth and colleagues show that changes in winter weather and snow go hand-in-hand with changes in Lemmus lemmus populations. They further show that when the regular explosion of lemming numbers doesn’t occur predators such as foxes switch their attention to other species, leading to knock-on effects throughout the eco-system.

“A relatively small effect on one particular species is having a broad effect on the system,” Stenseth, a researcher at the University of Oslo, told Reuters.

lemming angry.jpgIn a News and Views piece analysing the research, Tim Coulson and Aurelio Malo, of Imperial College London, explain that lemmings like to scurry about in a gap that warm ground melts between it and the snow layer above it. This so-called subnivean space is relatively warm and keeps the rodents safe from things that would like to eat them.

What Stenseth and colleagues found was that climate change seems to have eliminated the subnivean space and, worse, created a sheet of ice over the moss on which lemmings like to nibble.

“The critical reader will complain that the story is based on correlations. Although this is true, it is often the only way to study populations and the consequences of changing climate for ecosystems,” write Coulson and Malo. “The collection of detailed long-term data on the dynamics of free-living populations of animals and plants rarely attracts the same excitement as genomics or particle physics, yet such data are vital in characterizing the consequences of climate change for the natural world on which we depend.”

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'Midnight regulations' target power plants, and more

yosemite.jpgCranking out 11th-hour regulations has become a tradition among exiting US presidents, and despite early hopes to the contrary it looks like this year will be no different.

Topping the list in terms of energy this year is a pair of industry-friendly regulations that critics say would increase pollution from coal-fired power plants. In this week’s edition of Nature, we take a quick look at these and a few others that are moving through the system as the Bush administration prepares to hand the reigns to Barack Obama in January.

The regulations in question are technical in nature, which means the overall result is not always obvious. One of the rules being proposed would change the way power plant pollution is measured in national parks and wilderness areas. By shifting from an annual emissions calculation to a short-term maximum measured over the course of hours, for instance, power plant managers can increase their energy output and effectively put more emissions into the air over the course of a year.

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Obama victory brings new hope for climate policy, dark days for fossil fuels

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Following Obama’s landslide victory in the US presidential elections last night, pundits are already speculating on how he will deal with the formidable challenges in his in-tray, not least of which will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the economy into clean-energy mode.

The news that Obama will be the 44th President of the US has been met with jubilation by environmentalists (as reported here and here), who are hopeful that the new administration will come good on promises to protect the planet.

Over on the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog, James Kanter reports that hopes have soared in Europe toward global cooperation on climate change following Obama’s appointment as President-elect. Earlier today, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, welcomed a new start for transatlantic relations on issues including climate change and invited Mr. Obama to address the European Parliament next spring. That would be the first time a U.S. president has spoken at the European Parliament since Ronald Reagan’s address in Strasbourg in 1985, writes Kanter.

Back on the home front, corporate carbon giants are less happy about the potential impacts of an Obama administration. CNNmoney says that companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp are concerned that policies such as windfall profits tax and market intervention will target the fossil fuel industry unfairly. Some southern utility companies, such as Duke Energy Corp have lobbied against a federal renewable portfolio standard, though some encourage state mandates, writes Ian Talley.

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AGU Chapman Conference on water vapor - the final report

The AGU Chapman Conference on water vapour and its role in climate has come to a close, and I have headed back to not so sunny London. In addition to getting scientists out of the lab, the meeting afforded great opportunities for normally independent communities to interact. Pupu platters and Longboard Ales led to a very interesting discussion about the meaning of terms such as mean global precipitation and temperature rise. Are statistics such as these preventing scientists from meaningfully communicating results about climate change? This of course comes back to old faithful argument “if the Earth is getting warmer, why did it snow last week?” Definitely something to think about when preparing press releases or giving interviews.

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Hurricanes and sea surface temperature: all relative?

Ike.jpgWith a month to go until its official finish, the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season has seen more damage, as measured in dollars, than any other year except the monster 2005 season. Scientists have yet to agree whether human-induced climate change has caused spiking Atlantic hurricane activity since the early 1990s - and while the season has raged on, researchers have continued to go back and forth on whether worse is in store as the ocean keeps warming. Science this week has the latest salvo in the longtime debate: a Perspective (subscription) by Gabriel Vecchi of NOAA, Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Brian Soden of the University of Miami.

Warming sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Atlantic, thought to fuel hurricanes, are correlated with the recent surge in storm activity. The trend is roughly linear, note Vecchi et al., and extending it along with predicted temperature rises implies that by 2100, a hurricane season like 2005’s might be considered mild.

But that’s only true, they caution, when you look at absolute temperatures. Relative warming - the Atlantic heating up even more than other tropical seas - is equally well-correlated. Citing their recent papers in Nature and Geochemistry, Geophysics and Geosystems, and Knutson et al. in Nature Geoscience, the authors make an argument that relative warming is more likely to be the true cause of increasing activity. And relative warming of the Atlantic sea surface, in contrast to absolute warming, doesn’t keep trending upwards in 21st-century climate predictions.

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