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McKinsey & Company has mapped out a couple of conceivable scenarios that would put humanity on a pathway to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations well below 550 parts per million, an oft-cited and somewhat arbitrary target that increases the odds of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius. Whether or not such action would actually guarantee said result is a different matter, but McKinsey suggests it's possible to come in at 480 ppm, which leaves a little room for error.

To see one of the leading global business consultancies putting out such a document (download requires free registration) is encouraging, but conceivable does not mean easy, let alone likely. And to be clear, "Pathways to a Low-Carbon Economy," now in its second draft, is not so much a plan of action as an analysis of the options. McKinsey calls it a "greenhouse gas abatement database." They attempt to quantify relative potential and costs of each approach, focusing on abatement schemes that are likely to ring in under 60 euros per ton of carbon dioxide. The company then round things out with a few scenarios illustrating what it would take to reduce global emissions by 35-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

Reading the report, you get a sense that you are looking at a menu. I'll take an order of new insulation for old buildings as an appetizer, and then move on to wind, nuclear, and plug-in hybrids. How about some rice management for desert? As it happens, McKinsey projects that the insulation and rice will pay for themselves, but there are barriers to even the most logical choices: In many cases, the approaches that are the most cost effective over the long-term also require the most up-front capital, which isn't exactly plentiful at the moment.

Continue reading "McKinsey: options for a low-carbon economy" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on January 30, 2009
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“If someone’s basement floods and they lose their job on the same day, it is certainly an unlucky day. But they would not wait until they found a new job before pumping the basement and fixing the leak.”
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Ditmas channels Joe the Plumber in an open letter to Obama on climate policy (h/t Green Inc.), the day before the EU unveiled its pre-Copenhagen proposal.

"Just days after taking office, US President Barack Obama has appointed a climate envoy and cleared the way for new rules to force automakers to produce cleaner cars.”
UNEP on Obama’s first week, which put a California vehicle emissions law blocked by Bush back up for review.

“It is foolhardy to demonise all biofuels as unsustainable and environmentally damaging when some, which are already on the market, can play an important role, right now, in helping us to tackle climate change.”
Responding to the UK’s new target of using 3.25% biofuel for vehicles in 2009-2010 - a bit more than the 3% a recent government review recommended - Jeremy Woods at the Royal Society defends plant-derived power.

Global renewables agency launched as support falters
The US and UK decline to sign onto the International Renewable Energy Agency. London is thought to be concerned that the new body will undermine the International Energy Agency.

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 30, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of news items from the ocean fertilization front:

The Indo-German LOHAFEX experiment in the Southern Ocean, suspended two weeks ago, can be conducted as planned. Independent reviews sought by the German science ministry concluded that the experiment is in agreement with environmental standards and international law. On Tuesday, the team on board the German Polarstern started dumping its cargo of 20 tonnes of iron sulphate. The ship will stay around the area for around six weeks, giving the scientists’ enough time to observe the growth and decay of an ‘artificial’ algal bloom.

Picture: RV Polarstern (Alfred Wegener Institute)

It’ll be interesting how their observations, in particular concerning the rate and efficiency of carbon export to the deep ocean, will relate with data reported in a Nature paper this week on natural iron fertilization.

The CROZEX study was conducted in 2004 and 2005 near the Crozet archipelago at the northern boundary of the Southern Ocean. Raymond Pollard of the National Oceanography Centre Southampton and his team found that natural iron fertilization, by dust supplied from the Crozet Islands, increases biological production and the amount of organic carbon taken down into the deep ocean.

That’s not particularly surprising. But what’s amazing is this: The amount of carbon sequestered to 200 metres depth, while 18 times greater than that during an artificially induced bloom (like LOHAFEX), was a stunning 77 times smaller than the amount that had previously been determined during a natural bloom in the nearby Kerguelen region. What’s more, carbon flux at 3,000 metres, where carbon dioxide sucked up at the surface would be safely locked away for centuries, was just 3% of that at 100 metres. Check out this week's Nature podcast and the paper here (subscription)

“CROZEX carbon sequestration for a given iron supply (…) falls 15-20 times short of some geo-engineering estimates,” the authors conclude. This, you’ve guessed it, has “significant implications for proposals to mitigate the effects of climate change through purposeful addition of iron the ocean.”

It has indeed. The Nature news story here makes the point that the findings, if they hold up, could actually be the final blow to such proposals. The notion that putting a little iron into the oceans here and there will suck up most of the surplus atmospheric carbon dioxide is pretty much dead, so it seems. Alas, it was just too good to be true.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on January 29, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, GHG emissions, Mitigation, Ocean science, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The argument for using a cap-and-trade system, or a carbon tax for that matter, to control greenhouse gases comes down to marshaling the troops. Everybody needs to play this game, and the surest way to make everybody play is to make winning profitable - and conversely to make losing costly. In other words, make the market work for you instead of against you. It's a noble and likely necessary goal, but it's not necessarily fast, nor perfect.

This served as a starting point for discussions I had with a number of folks at the UN climate meeting in Poland last month who are pushing the idea of using the Montreal Protocol to control hydrochlorofluorocarbons. HFCs are a class of chemicals developed as industry looked for ways to reduce ozone-depleting substances in refrigerants and other applications. They don't eat ozone but, they are potent greenhouse gases. And funny things happen when you plug them into a carbon market; direct regulation might be the way to go.

In this week's Nature, we took a deeper look at that question and whether the Montreal model could be expanded more broadly to deal with the climate problem. The argument is based on precedent: Montreal has effectively done its job by phasing out some 97 percent of ozone eating substances, while simultaneously outperforming the Kyoto Protocol on climate. And according to one scenario analyzed by Dupont's Mack McFarland, phasing down HFCs across the globe could cut emissions by the equivalent of 12.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2050 (compared to roughly 2 billion tonnes by 2012 under Kyoto).

The same thing could be done under Kyoto, to be sure. The question is how fast and at what cost. Montreal has done all of its work through top-down phase-outs, with industrialized nations helping developing countries pay for the costs. It's an interesting supplement to the market-driven model everybody is focusing on at present.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on January 28, 2009
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Cross-posted from Heliophage

A very useful paper (abstract|pdf|discussion space) comes out today in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by Tim Lenton and his student Naomi Vaughan. Tim told me when I was reporting the Andy Ridgwell paper on leaf albedo (Nature story|blog entry) that he'd become pretty interested in evaluating geoengineering schemes, and was setting up a group at the University of East Anglia to assess them. This paper presumably represents the first fruits of that interest, providing a ranking of most of the geoengineering schemes proposed in the literature in terms of the amount of radiative forcing they can provide.

Lenton and Vaughan first divide geoengineering proposals into two sorts: shortwave and longwave. Shortwave schemes seek to reduce the amount of energy that gets into the earth system by reflecting away incoming sunlight. Longwave schemes seek to increase the amount of energy leaving the earth system by making the atmosphere more transparent to outgoing infrared radiation -- that is, by reducing the greenhouse effect. Then they assess the two with some very simple modelling (well, for the longwave there are some wrinkles, but it's all in principle pretty simple). They don't claim that the figures they come up with are the best available in any particular case, just that they are all derived the same way, and so allow fairly straightforward comparisons. By standardising the techniques they also show up a few errors in previous analyses: for example, if you increase the total amount of light reflected back into space by clouds, you reduce the amount reflected by the surface, simply because less light gets there in the first place.

The first and most striking conclusion is that if you want to have a big effect, go shortwave. Sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere (which were the main topic of this piece and these Climate Feedback posts) and mirrors/refractors in space (also in that piece, and in this paper by Roger Angel) both have the potential to provide as much by way of negative forcing as a doubling of CO2 provides by way of positive forcing. Not surprising; if you're not constrained by money or by concerns about environmental side effects, you can put mirrors in the sky and particles in the stratosphere until it's darkness at noon.

When you leave these global technologies behind, the other shortwave interventions rank, unsurprisingly, more or less according to the area they affect. Increasing the brightness of marine stratocumulus clouds, as proposed by John Latham, would affect about 17% of the earth's surface, and the Lenton-Vaughan analysis suggests that the whitening effect would have to be considerably more marked than previous work has assumed; but if that brightening could be achieved then a negative forcing that averages more than 3W/m² should be possible. Covering non-sandy deserts with aluminium and polyethylene (not an idea I had come across before, and a pretty silly one as far as I can see: more here if you want it) makes 2% of the surface a lot brighter, and gets you an average 1.7W/m² of negative forcing, obviously very unevenly spread. Increasing the brightness of the planet's grassland as Robert Hamwey has discussed (pdf) gets you 0.64W/m², and the Ridgwell et al idea of planting brighter crops gets you 0.44W/m² at best, croplands being smaller than grasslands. Lightening everywhere that people actually live (another idea from the Hamwey paper) gets you 0.19W/m²; increasing the area of plankton blooms that seed the creation of clouds in parts of the southern ocean gives you just 0.016W/m² (and that may be an overestimate) and restricting yourself to just creating shinier cities gives you no more than 0.01W/m².

What of the longwave?

Continue reading "Geoengineering by the numbers" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on January 28, 2009
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Carbon dioxide emitted today - and the warming it causes - could stick around for centuries or millennia, reported Mason Inman over on Nature Reports Climate Change not long ago. New research (subscription) published online in Nature Geoscience this week looks at the impacts of CO2 emissions on the global ocean over a timescale even longer and less imaginable.

Because warm water holds less oxygen than cold water, oceans are expected to lose some of the dissolved gas as a consequence of climate change. This is already happening in certain tropical regions. Using a low-complexity model of the Earth system, Gary Shaffer of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues now find that the full effects of ocean warming and deoxygenation could lag thousands of years behind changes in the atmosphere - and that oxygen levels may not fully recover for the next 100,000 years.

Their projections are based on two IPCC emissions scenarios: A2, a high-emissions world, where carbon dioxide emissions climb through this century, and B1, a more moderate scenario, where emissions peak by around 2050. In both cases, Shaffer et al. assume emissions rapidly fall to zero after 2100. The researchers also try two levels of ‘climate sensitivity’ - the amount of global warming expected for a doubling of CO2 concentration.

Have a look at their figure to see just how long CO2 and its effects are found to linger under various combinations of these variables. The worst-case result is that mean ocean oxygen concentration falls to a low of about 68% of pre-industrial levels in the next few millennia, while low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ - which don't support fish or many other marine animals such as crabs and clams - spread nearly six-fold to cover 12.8% of the sea surface area. Their best case is a low that represents 89% of pre-industrial oxygen levels, with dead zones covering 5.2% of the sea surface.

"Such expansion would lead to increased frequency and severity of fish and shellfish mortality events, for example off the west coasts of the continents like off Oregon and Chile", says Shaffer. "The future of the ocean as a large food reserve would be more uncertain."

The number of these underwater deserts has reportedly been doubling each decade since the 1960s, fueled not just by warming but by agricultural runoff - which is expected to increase with flooding in some regions (see this 2008 review in Science; subscription). Other studies have suggested that rapid dead zone expansion this century will be driven by high levels of marine carbon. As Shaffer et al's models don't seem to include these effects, their estimates could run low.

Continue reading "The ocean's next 100,000 years" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 27, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Ocean science | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Winners were announced Friday Thursday in a contest organized by the World Bank for short-short films - two to five minutes long - documenting the social dimensions of climate change. The 'Vulnerability Exposed' contest put out an open call last autumn for films to be posted on YouTube, with a special plea for documentation of developing-world impacts.

And the winner for vulnerability exposure is... Bangladesh! The judges' top pick and the runner-up focus on unpredictable floods in the country and its salinization by the rising sea - some of the same issues Mason Inman wrote about in NRCC recently.

The first-prize film, "Flood Children of Holdibari" by Mary Matheson, looks at children working out an adaptation plan for floods on their river-island home.

Second prize went to Rosa Rogers for "Climate Change in Bangladesh: Who Will Pay?", a film on how salinization and other effects are changing agricultural patterns in the southern delta.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 26, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change, Regional climate, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Among the many technologies contending for a role in the future energy mix, thermoelectricity is one area where researchers have hoped that a big breakthrough in technology could reap equally large benefits in improving energy efficiency.

Up until this point thermoelectric technologies, which use materials to draw electricity from heat, haven’t been widely applied to electricity generation owing to their high cost and inefficiency. But changing the materials and their properties could — in theory at least — make a wide range of products more energy-efficient at a lower cost.

Last year the field made some important gains and seemed to be at a high point in terms of both the science and business potential. Early in the year, a MIT spin-off focused on energy efficient thermoelectric products won seed funding from venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Then in July researchers reported in Science [subscription] that adding trace amounts of thallium to lead telluride, a thermoelectric material used to produce electricity onboard deep space probes, could double its performance.

Continue reading "The truth about thermoelectrics " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 26, 2009
Categories: Features, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although the Inuit people of the North American Arctic are generally thought to be vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the wake of record sea ice loss, it can be difficult to quantify all of the risks to their way of life. In a new paper in Climatic Change, a group of researchers led by Gita Laidler of Carleton University assessed the ability of the residents of Igloolik, a coastal community north of the Arctic Circle, to adapt to changing conditions. The team reports that although the hunters have so far adapted to thinning ice and changing seasons, societal changes among the younger generations may leave the community increasingly at risk.

Continue reading "Climate and society in the Arctic" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on January 23, 2009
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The UK will get an intriguing new climate research centre next week, with the launch of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds. In a Q&A for Nature Reports Climate Change, I've interviewed Andrew Gouldson, who will co-direct the centre with Judith Rees under chairman Lord Nicholas Stern - and who envisions a strong focus on regional impacts of climate change.

CCCEP's experts will be closely in touch with policymakers and other local stakeholders, Gouldson says, in a way that "builds both their capacity and ours — ours to do good research, and theirs to use that research to take better decisions on climate change." One of the stakeholders, and a funder of one of the five research streams at the new centre, is the insurance company Munich Re. As I wrote last month, another new project that aims for the cutting edge of policy-relevant research is a hurricane model projection that Greg Holland is now wrapping up at NCAR - also partly insurance industry-funded. Could these academic-public-private three-ways be the way forward? Let us know in the comments.

I thought the most interesting part of the interview was what Gouldson had to say on the new UK Climate Change Act, which imposes a legally binding requirement to cut emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Here's an extract:

AG: At the national level, I think Britain's been very proactive indeed. The government has been quite brave signing up to this medium- to long-term target which is really quite ambitious. But I don't think there's a public understanding, or possibly even a public acceptance, of what a low-carbon economy might look like — one which is 60, 70, 80 per cent decarbonized.

AB: Does that make it less likely that the policy will actually come through with results?

AG: In the next 10 to 15 years, not necessarily, because there are lots of mitigation options that are relatively affordable and technologically viable. I think the question is what happens in the phase after that. Is there a political appetite to do some really quite painful things which would involve some powerful people or parties losing out? I think there's a need now, in the next few years, to build some sort of broad consensus on the need to shift towards a low-carbon economy.

Read the full interview here.

Anna Barnett

Image: Andrew Gouldson, photographed by Stevie Kilgour at the University of Leeds.

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 23, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Economics, Politics, Regional climate, Research, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“Obama’s goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.”
IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri criticizes the new president’s policy at a Worldwatch event before Obama's inauguration.

U.S. carbon emissions during Bush era 20% greater than official estimates.
According to Brian Angliss over on Scholars and Rogues, US emissions are 20% above reported values owing to the failure of official estimates to account for greenhouse gas emissions generated by other nations as a result of the US outsourcing goods and services (h/t Climate Progress).

A dark cloud settles over a once sunny industry.
The solar-energy industry, which until recently had been booming, starts to feel the pinch of recession.

“No proposed or final regulation should be sent to the Office of Federal Register for publication unless and until it has been reviewed and approved by a department or agency head appointed or designated by the President."
On Barack Obama's first day as US president, a memo to federal agencies from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel freezes all of the Bush administration's new and pending 'midnight regulations'.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 23, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A study published in Science today (subscription) uses carbon-14 measurements to figure out where the black carbon drifting in the haze above South Asia is coming from. That’s a prerequisite to cleaning it up - which, as we’ve reported here, could be a major boon to a very vulnerable region. The light-absorbing compound not only causes cancer (among other ill health effects), but reportedly warms some places as much as greenhouse gases do. Because its lifespan in the atmosphere is far shorter than carbon dioxide’s, these impacts could potentially be reduced quickly - if we knew where to clamp down.

Writing in Science, Örjan Gustaffson of Stockholm University and colleagues call black carbon the "dark horse" in the current climate debate, saying “substantial uncertainties exist about its atmospheric longevity, aerosol mixing state, measurement, and sources.” Black carbon is unusually concentrated in the ‘brown cloud’ over South Asia, they note. But estimates vary wildly on how much of this is from fossil fuel burning and how much from smoky fires of wood, dung and other biomass: the ratio ranges from about 1:10 to 10:1, depending on the technique and study area.

Radiocarbon measurements give a more reliable read on this question than other methods, according to Sönke Szidat of the University of Bern, who discusses the new paper in an accompanying Perspective. The principle is simple: fossil fuels are ancient enough that all their carbon-14 has decayed away, whereas freshly gathered biofuels have plenty of the isotope. And while other chemical clues about the brown cloud can change as it wafts around, carbon-14 stays stable.

The carbon-14 levels tell Gustaffson et al. that around half of the black carbon in the cloud, or more, is from biomass. They took samples at ground stations in the Maldives and atop a West Indian mountain, downwind of the rest of South Asia. The 50% figure, Gustaffson says, comes from a method of isolating black carbon that picks up airborne coal dust as well as combusted carbon in soot; in soot-only samples, about two-thirds was from biomass.

Says Szidat:

The study shows that the importance of biomass burning for local and global BC [black carbon] budgets has been underestimated. This was previously pointed out for urban, rural, and remote areas in Europe, but never were the consequences as severe as for the Asian haze.

Continue reading "Biomass, biomass, burning black" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 22, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Atmospheric Science, Regional climate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The research below, which I blogged from the AGU conference in December, is published today in Nature [subscription].

New research presented at the AGU today suggests that the entire Antarctic continent may have warmed significantly over the past 50 years. The study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle and soon to be published in Nature, calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century. [Update: To be more specific here, incomplete records previously suggested that the interior was cooling].

Steig and colleagues combined satellite thermal infra-red collected over 25 years with weather station data for the region. Although the satellite data span a shorter time period and are accurate only for blue sky days i.e. when there is no cloud cover, they provide high spatial coverage of the region, which cannot be obtained from discrete ground measurements. In contrast, the weather station data provide complete temporal resolution over the past half-century.

Using an iterative process to analyse the data, they found warming over the entire Antarctic continent for the period 1957-2006. Restricting their analysis to 1969 to 2000, a period for which other studies have found a net cooling trend, Steig’s study found slight cooling in east Antarctica, but net warming over west Antarctica.

As well as uncovering evidence of warming over a wider region than previous studies have shown, the researchers found that warming occurred throughout all of the year and was greatest in winter and spring. In contrast, cooling over east Antarctica was restricted to autumn.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: Evidence that Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years [updated]" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 21, 2009
Categories: AGU, Cryosphere, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (1)

In the 70s and 80s, scientists from around the world worked to reconstruct Last Glacial Maximum (19,000 to 23,000 years ago) sea surface temperatures across the globe under the auspices of the Climate: Long Range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction (CLIMAP) project. Since then, a number of new proxies and seafloor coring and drilling projects have produced a wealth of additional data. In a new paper online this week in Nature Geoscience (subscription required), the MARGO (Multiproxy Approach for the Reconstruction of the Glacial Ocean surface) team members have updated this reconstruction using all the newly available data.

Continue reading "CLIMAP for the 21st century" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on January 20, 2009
Categories: Alicia Newton, Palaeoclimate, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah, January in London. It’s gray. It’s clammy and damp. As I write, it’s begun to bucket rain unreservedly and, in my view, rather un-Britishly. Where’s the fog?

Heading here from the US last winter, I vaguely expected Dickensian mists to greet me. It was only after expatriation that I learned the old 'pea-soupers' were laden with noxious coal smoke, dispelled by environmental laws after a particularly deadly fog in 1952. Now a new paper in Nature Geoscience (subscription) quantifies similar trends across Europe - and the warming that has resulted.

Averaging visibility data from 342 weather stations across Europe, Robert Vautard at the Atomic Energy Commission in France and colleagues found what they call a “massive decline” - of roughly 50% - in foggy, misty and hazy days when visibility fell below 8 kilometres, 5 kilometres or 2 kilometres. [Update: That decline was over the last 30 years.]

The trend is particularly pronounced in eastern Europe. Tellingly, three available long time series show that visibility in Potsdam, in the former East Germany, didn’t start improving until sulphur dioxide emissions dropped off with the decline of the communist economy - noticeably later than the turnaround in the Netherlands and Switzerland. When Vautard et al. compare their visibility records to an inventory of SO2 emissions, they find that places with greater reductions in the pollutant from 1990-2000 also had greater increases in visibility.

Fog forms around airborne particles, including pollutants, Dave Britton of the UK Met Office explains to the Guardian: "Go back to the 1950s and the big pea-soupers in London came from the amount of crap that people were putting out of their chimneys from coal fires." Since then measures like London's Clean Air Acts have played a role in clearing things up.

But they also may have inadvertently warmed the continent, the authors say. A standing problem in climate science is to account for the 0.5 C average temperature rise in Europe in the last three decades, which models don’t reproduce. Correlations between visibility and temperature suggest that lifting the fog could have contributed 10-20% of daytime temperature rises in Europe overall, and about half in central and eastern Europe.

Continue reading "Fog clears, Europe warms [updated]" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 19, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Science, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We were referring to a Google search that may involve several attempts to find the object being sought and that may last for several minutes.
The Times clarifies their statement that a Google search produces 7 grams of carbon dioxide - after it turned out to be based on a study that made no mention of Google.

It's inconceivable you can hold those two things in your mind at the same time: [that] you're really going flat out for rapid decarbonisation and perfectly reconciled to expansion of aviation.
Jonathan Porritt comments on the UK government’s decision to give the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow. The verdict has caused some to speculate that the government was really just having a laugh when it comitted to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% of 1990 levels last autumn.

One tell-tale symptom of anti-science syndrome is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.
Joe Romm gives his take on the climate skeptic blog ‘Watts Up With That?’, which the public voted as Best Science Blog of 2008, ahead of RealClimate, run by real climate scientists.

Finally, in response to popular demand, we comment on the likelihood of a near-term global temperature record.
NASA's annual summary of temperature trends says 2009 or 2010 will likely be the warmest recorded year, sticking by last year's assertion that an El Niño is on the way.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 16, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from Heliophage

I wrote a little piece for Nature today today about a paper by Andy Ridgwell at Bristol and some of his colleagues on changing the albedo of crops. The gist as published:

Manipulating the waxiness of crops through traditional breeding techniques or genetic modification should raise their albedo by about 20%, from 0.2 to 0.24. On the basis of climate modelling they calculate that the planet would cool by a modest 0.11 ºC. "It's very small on the global average," says Ridgwell. But "what is more important is the summertime effect in specific regions". The mid-latitudes of North America and Eurasia could cool by as much as 1 °C in June, July and August, according to the models. Ridgwell and his colleagues report their results in Current Biology.

The models also show pronounced cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea in the wintertime — which might have a positive effect on sea ice — but a drying out of the soil in some parts of the subtropics. Ridgwell points out that climate models do not predict future precipitation well on a regional basis and treats the latter results more as evidence that there might be effects far from the fields being changed than as a clear indication that there would be damaging consequences.

Making the plants more reflective, if it proved a good idea at all, might well necessitate genetic engineering, which in some places is distrusted. That engineering might be more acceptable in energy crops than it is in food crops. It might make sense, if people are going to engineer energy crops for other purposes, to make them a little lighter too, all other things being equal.

Continue reading "Leaf albedo engineering" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on January 15, 2009
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Like nearly everyone else in America, we at Nature have been thinking about how life might change when the US presidency changes hands next week. From the magazine’s Washington DC offices, just a few blocks from the White House, we’ve been watching the red-white-and-blue bunting go up on buildings along the inaugural parade route. And in this week’s issue, we’ve taken a look at some of the legacies that George W. Bush leaves behind and some of the promises that Barack Obama has been holding forth. (See a related editorial here.)

First up: some advice from experts. In our Commentary section, six leading voices weigh in with their thoughts on how Obama could improve science at various federal agencies. Notably, Christine Todd Whitman – former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency – takes her former boss Bush to task. Among other things she writes: “Although…Bush originally told me that the EPA would be the administration’s representative on the environment, subsequent actions by the vice-president and the CEQ [Council on Environmental Quality] proved otherwise. In fact, towards the end of my tenure at the EPA I was told in no uncertain terms that when the CEQ spoke, it was speaking for the president even if on an issue that the EPA felt needed more work.”

Whitman’s main advice to Obama? Clarify who will speak for the president on environmental matters. This becomes even more important now that Obama has designated Carol Browner as a climate/energy coordinator who, somehow, will have to run the gauntlet of EPA, CEQ, the Department of Energy, and all the myriad other federal agencies that have a piece of climate and energy policy.

Also in the same package, former senator Tim Wirth lays out his argument for why the US must lead the way to a new deal at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. Obama has said he will make climate a priority, but little time remains to hammer out the international agreement that is meant to replace the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which expires in 2012. His administration will have to hit the ground running and come to agreement in the first few months on the broad outlines of the deal it hopes to achieve, Wirth advises. Have your say about Whitman's and Wirth's commentaries here.

Also in this week’s issue of Nature is a report from Jeff Tollefson on the $800-billion-plus economic stimulus package that Obama and Congressional leaders have been hammering out. As Jeff reports, scientists are practically rubbing their hands with glee in anticipation of scoring billions of extra dollars in research and other funding. The House Appropriations Committee today released the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009, and indeed it looks as if scientists have scored extra funding. On the energy front, it proposes $32 billion to “transform the nation’s energy transmission, distribution and production systems by allowing for a smarter and better grid and focusing investment in renewable technology”. This includes $11 billion for research and development into a smart electricity grid; $8 billion in loans for the renewable energy industry; $2 billion for competitive grants to universities, companies and national laboratories for research into energy efficiency and renewable energy; $2.4 billion for demonstration projects for carbon capture and sequestration; $2 billion in incentives for advanced vehicle battery research; and a host of other tax credits and incentives in the energy arena. The proposal also includes $3 billion extra for the National Science Foundation; $400 million to NASA for climate change research; $600 million to NOAA for satellite development including climate sensors; and $200 million to modernize facilities at the US Geological Survey.

What remains unclear is whether a one-time injection of money, as the stimulus package is designed to be, is actually good for long-term research. Some thoughtful commentators have noted that it's much more preferable to have increased funds built into the bottom line of the agencies' year-by-year budgets. What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Posted by Alex Witze on January 15, 2009
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Monday was George W. Bush's last press conference as president, and the administration seized the day to release new security directives on US interests in the Arctic - where disappearing sea ice has the five bordering countries on edge about who will get their hands on assets set to be freed up.

Reuters reports that the new US policy contradicts Russian claims to seabed rich in oil and gas. Canadian press like the National Post are focused on the Northwest Passage: the US has asserted its right to sail the newly navigable waterway, which the White House calls an international strait but Canada says it owns.

The directives even look toward opportunities for terrorism in a warmer Arctic, says a press release reprinted at Dot Earth (alongside links and details on the new docs). The release is clear about the new reality up north:

Fourteen years have passed since the last review of federal Arctic policy. Our understanding of climate change in the Arctic has caused all Arctic nations to reassess their policies in the Arctic. In addition, with the increase in summer melting of Arctic sea ice, human activity is increasing. This raises new questions about the potential expansion of fisheries, pollution, energy exploration and development, and the nature of sustainable economic development in the region.

"When it comes to energy, the notion isn't a race to the Arctic to put our flags down," a National Security Council spokesman told Reuters - in a seeming jibe at Russia's flag-planting expedition at the underwater North Pole. "Our approach is going to be dealing with our fellow Arctic nations in finding ways to access and develop, when it comes to energy specifically, that takes into account conservation and the environment."

Continue reading "US stakes claims in melting Arctic" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 15, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

James Hansen isn’t shy about speaking up, and now the American Meteorological Society is rewarding him for it.

Hansen, a NASA climate scientist known best for his outspoken criticism of the Bush administration, received the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal yesterday, the highest award given by the AMS. The society commended him for his contributions to climate modeling but also his “clear communication” to the public.

“The debate about global change is often emotional and controversial, and Jim has had the courage to stand up and say what others did not want to hear,” said Franco Einaudi, director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland (NASA press release). “He has acquired a credibility that very few scientists have.”

Continue reading "Outspoken climate scientist gets props" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 15, 2009
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As a vast, flat delta, Bangladesh is perhaps the country most clearly associated with the threat of rising seas – without protective barriers along the coast, even a moderate increase in sea level could cause flooding deep inland. Estimates suggest that even a one-metre rise could swallow 15 to 20 per cent of the land area, where some 20 million people reside.

But while sea level rise may pose the greatest challenge for Bangladesh, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is likely to be felt at ‘ground zero for climate change’ in numerous different ways – among them dwindling water supplies, saltwater damage to crops, loss of biodiversity and fiercer storms tearing through the region.

Over on Nature Reports Climate Change, a feature by Mason Inman looks at the changes that are already being witnessed on the ground in Bangladesh and how the region is preparing for the changes yet to come. Mason travelled to Bangladesh in November to report this feature with support from a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism.

In areas such as Bhola, where people have lost land to the ocean, many are looking to the Netherlands for inspiration – and calling for strengthening of existing embankments as well the construction of new, taller and stronger sea walls.

Continue reading "Bangladesh’s battle with climate change " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 15, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More than two years have passed since Nick Stern’s report on the economics of climate change was published, yet the question of how to weigh the costs against the benefits of acting on climate change – and whether such an approach in even ethical – is still being hotly debated.

Stern's adherents, on the one hand, support the stance of the former World Bank economist who argues that taking strong, early action on climate change outweighs the costs of doing nothing, or of delaying action. On the other hand, some of Stern’s detractors – most notably ‘skeptical environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg - argue that although climate change is happening, major reductions in carbon emissions are simply not worth the money. (Others argues that Stern was right for the wrong reasons, but I won't go into that here).

The latest to weigh on the issue is Frank Ackerman, a research economist at Tufts University in Massachusetts, whose new book Can We Afford the Future?: the Economics of a Warming World is reviewed by Yoram Bauman over on Nature Reports Climate Change. Bauman teaches at the University of Washington, but he is perhaps better known for adding levity to such impenetrable topics as climate economics with his stand-up comedy routines.

Bauman picks out some highlights of Ackerman's analysis, namely his policy prescription for massive government-funded clean-energy R&D and his coverage of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman's work on improbable, but not impossible, catastrophic climate change.

Ultimately though Bauman concludes that Ackerman is the perfect odd couple match for Lomborg.

Continue reading "Ackerman: Odd-couple match for Lomborg? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 15, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Economics, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Stimulating algal growth by adding iron to nutrient-poor ocean regions is one of several geo-engineering methods that could possibly mitigate greenhouse warming. But given widespread worries about possibly harmful side-effects on marine life, large-scale ocean ‘fertilization’ is currently not considered advisable.

Predictably, environmental groups have therefore jumped on an iron fertilization experiment which an international team of oceanographers is set to conduct over the next two months in the Southern Ocean near the island of South Georgia. Critics claim that LOHAFEX violates the moratorium on ocean fertilization activities which the United Nations had agreed upon last year. The Nature news story here has more details.

The somewhat ambivalent wording of the legally binding UN Convention on Biological Diversity adds to the controversy. ‘Small-scale’ scientific experiments in ‘coastal waters’ are exempted from the moratorium, it reads. But ‘small-scale’ is a relative term, and where exactly coastal waters give way to the open ocean remains also undefined.

Picture: The Polarstern (Alfred Wegener Institute)

The team on board the German ‘Polarstern’, who plan to spread 20 tonnes of iron sulphate over less than 20 by 20 kilometres-large patch of ocean surface in the Scotia Sea, hope that the study will provide new insight into how ocean ecosystems respond to fertilization – the very data, hence, that are needed to assess whether or not larger-scale future activities might be justified. But opponents counter that such doing already qualifies as an activity banned by UN law. Pressure groups have launched a signature campaign aimed at stopping the Polarstern crew, which will reach its destination by the end of the week, from dumping its load.

A number of companies, such as the now defunct Planktos Inc., had in the past hoped to commercialize ocean fertilization for the carbon credit market. Scientists and institutes participating in LOHAFEX stress that the experiment has no commercial background whatsoever.

UPDATE:
The Indo-German ocean fertilization experiment, LOHAFEX, has been suspended. The German science ministry, in response to environmental concerns, has asked the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven that an additional independent assessment be conducted before the planned activities can commence.

Meanwhile, the Polarstern, scheduled to reach the planned study region in the Scotia Sea by the end of the week, will continue its journey as planned. On arrival, the 48 scientists on board will start doing preparatory work, but the team will have to await permission from the ministry before they can dump any nutrients into the ocean. AWI has today commissioned two undisclosed institutions to carry out the required extra assessment. It hopes the reports will be delivered within ten days.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on January 14, 2009
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Business, Carbon markets, In the News, Mitigation, Ocean science, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Research, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The loss of ice from Greenland ranks as one of the most troubling, and poorly understood, aspects of climate change. Melting of the colossal ice sheet, which is already undoubtedly underway, has the capacity to raise global sea levels by an astounding 7 meters.

Not only is Greenland losing mass from direct surface melting, its outlet glaciers (those that terminate in the sea) are spewing large icebergs directly into the ocean at an increasingly alarming speed as they retreat. Many have worried that these changes are a sign of what’s in store. But a new study published this week in Nature Geoscience [subscription] suggests that the recent rapid retreat of many of Greenland’s outlet glaciers will be short-lived.

A team led by Andreas Vieli at Durham University, UK, used a computer model to reconstruct the recent behaviour of the Helheim Glacier, one of Greenland’s largest outlet glaciers. Helheim retreated some 7 kilometers between 2002 and 2005, during which time it discharged considerable volumes of ice into the ocean.

View image

Vieli’s team looked at whether the recent changes observed in the Helheim Glacier could be explained by one of two hypotheses; the first was that increased surface meltwater reaching the base of the glacier was speeding its slide toward the sea. The second potential explanation was that changing conditions in the area where the glacier meets the sea would trigger a domino effect on the glacier itself, leading to even faster ice flow and thinning upstream.

Their model showed that only the second hypothesis could explain past changes in the Helheim Glacier. Though they only analysed changes in this one outlet glacier, the authors say it is representative of many outlet glaciers south of 70°N that have recently thinned and rapidly released ice to the ocean.

Continue reading "Rapid retreat of Greenland's outlet glaciers may be temporary " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 13, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Extreme Events, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Whose opening lines are these: "The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable ... but that can - and must - be altered.”

Sound like another renewables naysayer upholding the fossil-fuel status quo? That's what the International Energy Agency is being accused of in a report picked up by the Guardian on Friday and endorsed by Grist today.

The IEA is slammed by an international group of legislators and scientists called Energy Watch, best known previously for their oil-has-peaked stance. The group’s new report, on wind-power prospects, is one of a handful it has to its name. In the wind report, the Guardian’s David Adam writes,

The experts … say the International Energy Agency (IEA) publishes misleading data on renewables, and that it has consistently underestimated the amount of electricity generated by wind power in its advice to governments. They say the IEA shows "ignorance and contempt" towards wind energy, while promoting oil, coal and nuclear as "irreplaceable" technologies.

Continue reading "IEA responds to attacks" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 12, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Energy, In the News, Mitigation, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Planting trees seems like a cheap and easy way to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while improving land and soil stocks that have been degraded over the decades. The international community recognized as much when it included reforestation in the Kyoto Protocol more than a decade ago.

Since that time, however, very little has been done, in part because translating botany and ecology into economic terms isn't easy. And once you get the translation right, you've still got to establish the regulations and institutions - both government and economic - to make it happen.

In this week's edition of Nature, Paroma Basu takes a look at how that process has unfolded in India, a country that has enormous potential to take advantage of this particular mechanism to address global warming. The story focuses on one of India's first forestry-based projects under the Clean Development Mechanism, painting a picture of a complicated and bureaucratic process that is bound to frustrate and deter the very people it seeks to serve.

Some of this might be unavoidable - early movers in any new program end up clearing brush. But similar complaints have arisen throughout the CDM, leading to calls for a streamlined process that will accommodate the kind of demand many hope to see in a thriving global carbon market. Climate negotiators spent considerable time discussing ways to do just that at the UN climate conference in Poland last month.

The trick, however, is ensuring that the system does what it is supposed to do, which is reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even in its current form, the CDM has plenty of critics who question the veracity - and cost - of many projects.

All of which means the United Nations must both streamline and build confidence in the system. It's a tall but necessary order if the CDM is to become a major mechanism for transferring climate funds to the developing world.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on January 10, 2009
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The recent food crisis, which saw crop prices sky rocket in 2007/08, demonstrated the fragile nature of the world’s food system. Coping with the short-term challenges of food price volatility is daunting, but the longer-term challenge of avoiding a perpetual food crisis due to global warming could be far more serious.

Temperatures in crop growing seasons across the world will exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures on record by the end of the century, new research suggests.

View image

Writing in the latest issue of Science, David Battisti at the University of Washington and Rosamond Naylor at Stanford University warn that unprecedented seasonal average temperatures will threaten global food security unless adaptations such as heat and draught tolerant crops, the creation of jobs outside of agriculture for those regions where farming will no longer be viable and appropriate irrigation systems are introduced.

In a new study, they use data from 23 global climate models produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 scientific analysis to show that there is a 90% chance that the tropics, sub-tropics and temperate regions will experience unprecedented seasonal average temperatures by the end of the 21st century.

Their research looks at historical case studies of three regions – France, the Ukraine, and the Sahel in Africa – that have experienced extreme heat waves, to illustrate the size of the impact on food production. For example, France felt some of the greatest impacts of the 2003 heat wave in Western Europe, which saw temperatures rise to 32 -33°C in June to August - nearly 4°C higher than the country’s average historical temperature for those months. Over this period, production of maize fell by 30%, fruit harvests declined by 25% and wheat harvests dropped by 21%.

Continue reading "Adaptation needed to avoid world food crisis" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 08, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Features, Journal Club, Natasha Gilbert, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

With a new year comes a new version of the Bible. Well not exactly new, but fairly recent. This past summer, Harper Bibles published an eco-friendly version of the Bible known as The Green Bible . In addition to being printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink, The Green Bible highlights all the passages that encourage people to care for the Earth in, of course, green ink. While the verses themselves are not new (the text comes from the New Standard Revised Bible), the focus on the Earth is. And this version also includes an introduction from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as well as essays by prominent theologians and information on how to get involved.

Continue reading "The Greening of Christianity" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on January 08, 2009
Categories: Alicia Newton, Communicating Climate Change, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A Chinese expedition is expected to start work this week on a new Antarctic base that will faciliate novel research in climate science as well as in other fields, reports Jane Qiu over on Nature News [subscription].

The Kunlun base will be located at Dome Argus, or 'Dome A', some 4,093 metres above sea level. It will be China's third Antarctic research facility and is being built as a legacy of International Polar Year, a major two-year scientific programme that comes to an end in March.

According to radar studies of the region, Dome A sits atop ice over 3,000 metres thick. Scientists hope that extracting ice cores of that depth at this particular site could extend the record of past climate changes back to 1.5 million years. Qiu writes:

A key focus of research is finding sites where ice cores stretching back further in time than any others could be drilled. A core obtained at a site known as Dome C — about 1,000 kilometres from Dome A (see map) — reached 3,200 metres deep and helped to reconstruct past climate going back 800,000 years. Many believe that Dome A promises older ice because it is higher and has less snow, meaning that researchers can get more years of climate records in a given thickness of ice.

Work on the station is expected to be completed by January 28, before temperatures drop tobelow –50 °C. At that stage it will have room for 25 people, with 11 sleeping units. I'm guessing they use that rotational bed-sharing system scientists sometimes use at sea?

Olive Heffernan

Image:P. Huybrechts, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 07, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Palaeoclimate, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With serious talk about geoengineering options now on a serious roll (“Not so sotto voce any more” is how RealClimate put it back in August) 80 climate researchers have been polled by the Independent about whether we should prepare techno-fixes such as ocean fertilization or aerosol clouds as an emergency lever on the Earth system.

The paper reports today that 54% - i.e. 43 of them - think we should draw up such plans. Here's the actual poll question - not reprinted by the Independent, but reproduced by a recipient (via the geoengineering Google Group):

Do you agree that we now need a “Plan B” whereby a geoengineering strategy – research, development and possible implementation – is drawn up in parallel to a treaty to reduce carbon emissions (subject to international agreements and a scientific assessment of risk)?

35% disagreed and 11% were undecided.

This survey of scientists is hardly a scientific survey, as climatologist Myles Allen of Oxford points out in a Tyndall Centre newslist post. But it does give some kind of temperature reading - especially in the scientists’ direct comments, which the Independent has published for about half the respondents (listed roughly in order of famousness).

There’s a lot more nuance in those comments than ‘Plan B or not plan B?’ But the overall temperature? Lukewarm.

Continue reading "Geoengineering: Plan B or not plan B?" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 02, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Technology | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)