Climate Feedback

Economist Nicholas Stern laid out his new vision for and a safer and more prosperous planet today in London.

Speaking at the launch of his new book ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity’, Lord Stern urged world leaders to see the opportunity for a green recovery from the economic downturn. His hope is that the Group of 20 developed and developing economies meeting in London this Thursday will emphasize the need for a transition to bouyant green economy. “It’s the only option. Low economic growth in a world that has poverty and that is aspirational is unacceptable”, said Stern today at the London School of Economics.

A former World Bank economist, Stern is best known for his landmark report on the Economics of Climate Change, which was published at the behest of the UK government in 2006. The 700-page dossier reframed climate change from being an environmental issue to one of concern to industry and investors alike.

Since then, “emissions have grown faster than we had assumed and the buffering capacity of the planet has lessened", said Stern. "But the pace of technological change has been faster than expected and the level of political commitment is now stronger than it was 2-3 years ago”, he added optimistically.

Still, in his new book Stern has scaled down his recommendation for where atmospheric greenhouse gas levels ought to be stabilized. Whereas his 2006 report suggested an upper limit on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of 550 ppm CO2-equivalent, Stern now says we should hold levels below 500ppm CO2-equivalent [or 450 ppm of CO2 alone]. “We will be at 450ppm CO2* within 6 or 7 years anyhow, but it’s possible to hold levels below 500ppm and to then come down from there”, he said.

Asked whether he was advocating the use of geoengineering to reduce atmospheric concentrations from 500ppm, Stern said it will be part of the solution, but suggested that technologies such as biomass or carbon capture and storage could perhaps be used to sequester the gas rather than “throwing dust or mirrors into the sky”. He also critized efforts to allow new coal fired power stations, such as the one at Kingsnorth, Kent, to proceed without such schemes in place to capture the emissions.

Whether stabilizing below 500ppm in the short term will go far enough to avert dangerous climate change is questionable. Some scientists such as James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, now think that we need to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350ppm to avoid a dangerous level of warming.

But While Stern acknowledged today that 'it's quite possible that Hansen's target is a sensible one for the long term", he is adament that “the first thing is to stop atmospheric concentrations from rising and then to assess the risks. We can’t eliminate the risk [of dangerous climate change], but we can bring down those risks”.

Stern called on world leaders meeting later this week to send out a strong signal on the urgent need to agree a global climate deal in December.

A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (Random House) is out on April 2.

Olive Heffernan

Correction added April 1st: This should refer to 450ppm CO2-equivalent

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 30, 2009
Categories: Economics, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from Heliophage

Interest in biochar has been building up in the UK recently. There was a cover story by Fiona Harvey in the FT a month ago with a familiar headline, Jim Lovelock and James Hansen have been extolling its virtues, it's been on the Today Programme (text here on BBC News), there are new technologies being talked up and there's an interesting looking workshop at the newly established UK Biochar Research Centre in Edinburgh on April 1st. And so of course there is also a backlash: last Monday George Monbiot, whose written on such subjects before, delivered a stirring oppositional salvo in the Guardian (and here's the link to the version on his own site, same text but with references -- a good habit more newspaper columnists should take up):

This miracle solution has suckered people who ought to know better, including the earth systems scientist James Lovelock(3), the eminent climate scientist Jim Hansen(4), the author Chris Goodall and the climate campaigner Tim Flannery(5). At the UN climate negotiations beginning in Bonn on Sunday, several national governments will demand that biochar is eligible for carbon credits, providing the financial stimulus required to turn this into a global industry(6). Their proposal boils down to this: we must destroy the biosphere in order to save it.

In his otherwise excellent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, Chris Goodall abandons his usual scepticism and proposes that we turn 200 million hectares of “forests, savannah and croplands” into biochar plantations. Thus we would increase carbon uptake, by grubbing up “wooded areas containing slow-growing trees” (that is, natural forest) and planting “faster-growing species”(7). This is environmentalism?
...

Read the rest of the post -- more Monbiot and responses to his criticism -- at Heliophage -->

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 30, 2009
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Warming of surface waters in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean has been linked to increasing hurricane activity (Nature News, subscription), but climatologists differ on what's driving the temperature rise. Now a study published in Science (subscription) suggests that a large chunk of the warming trend is due neither to anthropogenic climate change nor to a natural cycle in ocean circulation - the two main contenders previously. The new theory: it's dust in the wind.

Not just dust, actually: sulfates spewed by volcanoes seem to be an even bigger player. Both dust and sulfates are light-reflecting aerosol particles, so they cool the ocean by preventing sunbeams from reaching it. Amato Evans of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues used a simple model to estimate the degree to which fluctuating amounts of these aerosols - measured by satellite since 1982 - have affected sea surface temperature in the tropical North Atlantic. They find that their model, driven by changes in aerosols alone, reproduces no less than 69% of the warming trend from 1982-2007.

How can the cooling influence of aerosols account for warming seas? Two big volcanic eruptions, along with fierce African dust storms, cooled the region in the 1980s and early 1990s, paving the way for a big rise in sea temperatures later on as the dust subsided and the volcanoes lay dormant.

Continue reading "Settling of dust warms tropical Atlantic" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 26, 2009
Categories: | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In the latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, economists Nicholas Stern and Michael Grubb, along with European Commissioner Janez Potočnik, share their views on whether governments will agree a global climate deal at the UN climate change conference in December in Copenhagen. Check out the interactive video available here or read the transcript.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 24, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from The Great Beyond

A controversial experiment which poured iron into the Southern Ocean has also poured cold water on the idea that such ‘ocean fertilization’ can mitigate against climate change.

The Lohafex project was investigating suggestions that carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere by promoting algal blooms with iron. Despite protests from some groups, researchers aboard the Polarstern research vessel carried out their experiment this month.

However, the Alfred-Wegener institute, which was backing Lohafex, says “only a modest amount of carbon sank out of the surface layer by the end of the experiment. Hence, the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean to compensate the deficit caused by the LOHAFEX bloom was minor compared to earlier ocean iron fertilization experiments.”

Continue reading "Results cast doubt on potential ‘climate fix’" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 24, 2009
Categories: Daniel Cressey, Features, In the News, Ocean science, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Jane Lubchenco, a marine tidal ecologist at Oregon State University, is on the job this week as the new head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She replaces Vice-Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, who led NOAA until last October, and becomes the first woman to head up the agency, which is a sprawling beast charged with everything from managing US fisheries to running the country's operational earth-monitoring satellite programme.

On her first business day on the job after being sworn in (by the highest-ranking official at the Department of Commerce who was available; she's undoubtedly hoping for Vice-President Joe Biden for the ceremonial swearing-in that comes later), Lubchenco granted me and Eli Kintisch, a reporter for Science, 30 minutes of her time. I've posted up an edited version of that conversation here. What might not come through to the casual reader is just how well-versed Lubchenco is in the world of policy. She's never run a major agency or facility or group before, but she has plenty of experience in communicating with the public and, perhaps more importantly in her new job, with Congress.

As my colleague Rex Dalton reports in a story in the upcoming issue of Nature, she created the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, perhaps the most respected programme in the world to train environmental scientists to communicate with policymakers. I've spoken to Lubchenco casually before on science topics, but in our talk this week it became clear just how practiced she is at dealing with the short attention spans of not just journalists, but also policymakers. She speaks clearly and in practiced sentences, sometimes coming off as stiff but more often as thoughtful. She uses small words, short sentences, and stays on topic throughout her answers. And perhaps most significantly, she knows when to say she doesn't know something.

A science-policy friend of mine says that Lubchenco stands out because she knows more than she thinks she does, whereas the opposite is usually the case with people who ascend to high levels of government. It'll be interesting to see where she takes the agency and how she fares in the dog-eat-dog world of Washington.

Posted by Alex Witze on March 24, 2009
Categories: Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I blogged on new research into shrinking Arctic summer sea ice. But as just reported at Nature News, climate change is not only "making Arctic sea ice disappear — it's also changing the type of ice that forms".

Nicola Jones writes that a patchwork of 'pancake ice' is becoming more common as the Arctic Ocean opens up and grows choppier. Because pancake ice is thinner and patchier than the usual think multi-year sea ice found in the Arctic, more sunlight is now reflected from the sea surface in the region, causing concern that it could accelerate local warming. It could have other knock-on effects on ocean circulation, ice growth and air temperature. More details in the story here.

Anna Barnett

Image: Pancake ice / Glenn Grant, National Science Foundation

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 24, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The team behind a new Antarctic ice-mapping submarine is breathing a sigh of relief at its safe return, Daniel Cressey reports over on Nature News. The Autosub 3 robot submarine was sent out early this year on a 110-kilometre journey under Pine Island Glacier, which juts out into the Admunsen Sea. But, Cressey writes, there was no guarantee that the sub would ever come back:

Its sister craft, Autosub 2, had been lost on a similar mission in 2005. Autosub 3 was being sent on a much more ambitious mapping expedition, in an environment in which escaping to the surface is not an option.

In a Q&A, the mission's technical and scientific leaders tell Cressey what might have happened to the lost sub, and why they risked sending out another. Adrian Jenkins of the British Antarctic Survey explains :

Pine Island Glacier is both thinning and accelerating. It's one of the fastest changing regions in Antarctica at the moment. What we're trying to do is understand what is driving those changes.

This thinning has been measured by radar altimetry. It's strongest on the floating parts of the glacier. The favoured hypothesis is that it is a change that has been driven by the oceans — there is some change in the supply of ocean heat and the floating parts of the glaciers, the ice shelves themselves, are now thinning. Because of the thinning, the glaciers feeding the ice shelves flow faster.

Continue reading "Q&A: Trapped under ice" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 23, 2009
Categories: | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate intervention technology”
Stanford University's Ken Caldeira comments on the news that the research arm of the US defense department has set its sights on geoengineering (h/t Gristmill).

UN accuses the EU of backtracking on Bali agreement
European officials call for developing countries to produce plans for emissions cuts before receiving financial aid; UN climate chief Yvo de Boer says could undermine Copenhagen talks.

UK climate targets not tough enough, say scientists
A report from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says that cutting national emissions 34% by 2020, as advised by the Committee on Climate Change, will not be sufficient to avoid dangerous warming.

Americans prioritize economy over environment
Gallup poll shows majority preferentially support economic growth for first time in 25 years.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 20, 2009
Categories: In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Arctic has been losing summer sea ice fast. At the end of the melt season in September 2008 the ice extent was barely above its record low of 2007, even after a much cooler summer. Most climate models did not anticipate the pace of this ice disappearance and still can’t replicate it. And as shown in the figure above, the futures projected by models are all over the map.

But researchers are reporting this week that there may be a way around the problems with modelling sea ice. With a new method for using observations to constrain climate projections, they find that the summertime ice is going, going, and set to be gone well before 2100.

The study was published in Nature Geoscience (subscription) by Julien Boé and his colleagues at UCLA. They calculate that the models showing the fastest future ice loss are also the most realistic about the recent past - something you could guess at by looking at the graph above, where the actual ice trend is shown as a black line. So rather than simply averaging across models, their technique teases out the most likely future sea ice evolution using the differences between the models that show the 1979-2007 ice extent most accurately and those that perform less well at reproducing past trends (if you’ve a yen for statistics it’s worth checking out the paper itself - the method is explained in a neat graphic). They project, based on a moderate emissions scenario, that September sea ice will most likely disappear between 2066 and 2085. That is sooner than even the most pessimistic models suggest on their own (see graph again).

Continue reading "Reconciling sea ice models with reality" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 19, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate prediction, Cryosphere | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Two papers in Nature today shed light on the possible future behaviour of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), complete loss of which would produce a worldwide rise in sea level of around 5 metres.

The two teams - one using a high-resolution ice sheet model, the other looking at glacial records contained in seafloor sediment – independently arrive at similar conclusions: The WAIS has intermittently melted during the past five million years or so, and its oscillations follow a 40,000 year cycle in the Earth’s axial tilt. Small variations in tilt – called the obliquity of the ecliptic – result in reduced or increased amounts of sunlight reaching the poles, thus pacing the succession of ice ages and warm periods.

During the warmest interglacial phases the WAIS has in the past episodically collapsed entirely, the studies suggest (Editor's Summary) Global temperatures around 3 degrees Celsius warmer than today seem to have sufficed to initiate the transition from grounded ice to open waters in the Ross Bay, reports the team led by Tim Naish of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, who analysed a sediment core recovered from beneath the Ross ice shelf by the ANDRILL programme. Model simulations suggest the transition from full glacial to intermediate state (such as today’s) to nearly ice-free conditions can proceed rapidly. In the warmest ‘super-interglacials’, such as one around 1.07 million years ago, it took only around thousand years for the WAIS to collapse, report David Pollard and Robert DeConto of Pennsylvania State University in the second study.

Image: Punchstock

Continue reading "Antarctica: Memento melting " »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on March 19, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Palaeoclimate, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

New Yorkers beware! A new study published in Nature Geoscience says the north-eastern US coast will be in more trouble from global warming than previously believed.

Looking at the predictions from a whole set of different climate models, researchers Jianjun Yin, Michael Schlesinger and Ronald Stouffer found that changes in ocean circulation will result in higher sea levels in the region, over and above expected global sea level changes. Depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions are low or high, an additional rise of between 15 and 21 cm can be expected by 2100, they say.

“Some parts of lower Manhattan are only 1.5 meters above sea level,” says Yin, a researcher at Florida State University (National Geographic). “Twenty centimetres of extra rise would pose a threat to this region.”

The graphic right shows dynamic sea level rises at coastal cities worldwide in the medium greenhouse-gas emission scenario, due to the knock on effects of changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

“Our results show that the northeast coast of the United States is among the most vulnerable regions to future changes in sea level and ocean circulation, especially when considering its population density and the potential socioeconomic consequences of such changes,” write the researchers. “It should be noted that the impact of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet on the [Atlantic meridional overturning circulation] is not taken into account here.”

Continue reading "Will warming wash-away Wall Street?" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 17, 2009
Categories: Daniel Cressey, Extreme Events, Features, In the News, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other
The New York Times reports that climate skeptics at the Heartland Institute's conference this week are “showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support".

EPA moves on Obama climate policy
Having set in motion a proposal for a national greenhouse gas emissions reporting system, the EPA plans to declare the gases a danger to human health next month.

"To see the effect of this recession, if it's reducing emissions, I'd say it would take one to two years to see that signal properly in the atmosphere. I don't think we've seen any signal yet.”
An economically-driven emissions slowdown might not show up until 2010, says Paul Fraser of CISRO.

"We always knew the DOE's logic was flawed. Now it turns out their math was wrong too."
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. Investigating what killed the government’s FutureGen carbon capture project, the US House Science committee uncovered a $500 million budget error at the Department of Energy.

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 13, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The clear message to emerge from the 3-day climate congress that wrapped up yesterday here in Copenhagen is that the prognosis on global warming is worse than anticipated by the IPCC in 2007. I reported the full story over on Nature News yesterday (no* subscription required). Here’s an excerpt:

The latest results made for bleak listening at times. Scientists cautioned that some of the impacts of global warming, such as sea level rise and loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, are happening much sooner and more severely than scientists had estimated just two years ago. "What we are seeing now is that some aspects are worse than expected," says Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a plenary speaker at the congress.

What is also clear from my news story is the growing sense of frustration that the urgency of climate change is failing to permeate. While I imagine the climate community has felt that way for some time, it was palpable at a different level this week, I felt. For one, there seemed to be a lot of finger pointing – at the media for poor reporting, at policy makers and the public for failing to understand, and at scientists for failing to make the implications of their work more policy prescriptive.

I can’t help feeling that’s not going to bring us much closer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the final plenary session of the congress, Danish PM Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that scientists who want a significantly more ambitious global carbon cut target of 80 percent by 2050 must not move the goal posts.

If this sense of frustration can be channelled into very clear communication on what needs to be done and when we need to start, could it increase the chances of an effective deal being reached in Copenhagen?

Olive Heffernan

*Correction: This article is now subscription only

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 13, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The skies over most land areas are not, as previous studies have suggested, becoming cleaner.
Aerosol pollution has in fact increased most everywhere since 1973, a team reports in Science today (Abstract). Only over Europe have skies brightened, they found.

Kaicun Wang of the University of Maryland, and his colleagues, looked at a 35-year record of clear-sky transparency from 3,250 stations around the world. At many stations visibility had notably decreased - the skies have dimmed.

Air pollution is worst In India, China, Africa and South America, where hundreds of millions are breathing air thick with soot and smog. Clean-air technologies are lacking, or have not yet had much effect, in these regions.

Previous studies concluded that the skies are getting cleaner, and that as a result more sunlight is reaching the surface. Atmospheric scientists believe that aerosols and dust have been shielding us from the worst of global warming.

But the overall cooling effect of aerosols has lately been questioned. The connection between different types of aerosol particles, clouds and solar radiation is more complicated than previously thought. Now it appears as if darker skies don’t necessarily mean less warming, and vice versa. My story
over at Nature News has more about these disturbing uncertainties.

Meanwhile, China is trying hard to reduce air pollution in its most populated cities. Strict regulations aimed at curbing pollution from cars have been set up last year in Beijing and Shanghai.

Quirin Schiermeier

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on March 13, 2009
Categories: Categories, Atmospheric Science, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics, Uncertainty | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I took part in a session today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the role of the media in communicating climate change. Organised by Max Boykoff at the University of Oxford, the session brought together a diverse panel of journalists and academics who study media trends.

The backdrop to this session was quite interesting. Throughout the 3-day conference, there was a palpable sense of frustration among the scientific community that the media simply hasn’t done an adequate job in reporting climate change, and that it may be partly to blame for lack of public understanding and for inaction of the part of policymakers. This theme emerged in many of the talks on the first day alone.

There were many highlights from today’s session, but I’ll just mention a few. William Freudenberg of UC Santa Barbara said that climate scientists on the whole are being too optimistic about the prognosis for global warming and called for a new era of media coverage to highlight the conflict within the scientific community between what is ‘consensus’ and the reality of a more serious situation.

Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego, famous for her 2004 Science paper on the scientific consensus, said that the scientists needs to rethink their strategy on communicating climate change and asked whether they should collaborate with PR agencies to get their message across (she wasn’t advocating this, but asked whether this or other strategies could be employed to inform discussions on science more effectively).

James Kanter of the International Herald Tribune spoke of the role of the media as watchdog and pointed to a feature he investigated over five months last year on how electricity companies are making billions in windfall profits from the European ETS. RWE, a major German power company, and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe, received an estimated windfall of roughly €5 billion in the first three years of the system, more than any other company in Europe. The feature, which made the front page of the IHT in December, provoked a response from REW, which acknowledged the profits it had made (although said they wouldn’t be pocketed) and could serve as a warning to other cap-and-trade schemes under consideration.

My talk looked at the issue of whether a topic of socially and scientifically complex as climate change can be communicated effectively on blogs. The answer to this, in my view, is an unequivocal yes, for the following reasons. Back in August, Nature hosted the first international science blogging conference, where it was evident that bloggers are increasingly taking on the role of journalists in breaking news and providing genuine investigative reporting. That’s likely to become an emerging trend in the current economic climate, where traditional media outlets (think CNN) are seeing cutbacks in science reporting. Perhaps more importantly, as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate previously pointed out, blogs can provide context to news and explain the significance of new research in a level of detail that can never by achieved by newspapers, which have a limited number of column inches dedicated to science.

Unlike many bloggers, journalists who blog have access to embargoed information, which means they can cover science stories as soon as they break, reaching a wide audience effectively and rapidly. But blogs can also provide a forum for scientists to engage more directly with society. While some argue that scientists (and indeed science journals such as Nature) should channel all discussion of research through formal routes such as ‘letters to the editor’, this will only ever reach a limited number of well-informed readers.

To communicate science to a wider audience, a faster and more accessible route is necessary.

Continue reading "Copenhagen: Why the media matters " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 13, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A sobering presentation by Marshall Burke of Stanford on future agriculture. He and colleagues looked at historical climate and yield data for various crops in various parts of the world and projected the relationship they found into various future climates as found in the IPCC. As the IPCC itself reported, much of the tropics did badly in this analysis, and the worst performer was maize in southern Africa which was down in yield by about 30% by 2030.

More granular data run out to 2050 showed similar or worse trends, and the rest of Africa did pretty badly too. So did other crops in the same countries, such as millet and sorghum, though as Andy Jarvis of Biodiversity International pointed out from the floor, this may be somewhat worst case. You don't just go on growing the same thing as the situation gets worse and worse. As climates change so will the crops farmers grow, which should help a bit.

While the IPCC has already predicted that tropical agriculture will have its productivity hit by any climate change, it said it expected that in temperate zones modest warming might help productivity. In at least one case Burke went into -- maize in the US -- there are studies suggesting things start going wrong much sooner than that, with yield losses of 30% or so by 2030. Modest rises have been seen: sharp downturns are to come. Burke says that an economic model fed with these and other gloomier-than-common yield assumptions suggests that prices are set to rise more steeply than the IPCC has foreseen: a 1ºC rise in temperature looks like a 25% increase in prices, hurting some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers.

As Burke pointed out, we care about these food security issues because we care about people. A World Bank study suggests that the food crisis of 2007-2008 pushed 100m people into poverty. Reduced yields are normally bad for poor farmers, for whom consequent price increases rarely make up for lost production. They are also bad for the urban poor, who just see the price increases. That 25% increase in prices will some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers. And on current trends that's just the beginning.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a look this morning at a breakdown of the press registration at this conference by country. Clear winners are Denmark and the UK, with 40 or so people each. Both of those are inflated figures, because some third-country and international organisations are covering the meeting out of Copenhagen and London (Japanese TV stations are listed as UK, for example, as is Al Jazeera English). But still there is a lot of genuine UK interest: national papers and the BBC. And the locals are out in force.

US representation, on the other hand, seems distinctly on the modest side. As far as I can see from the press room and by searching the papers' web sites there's no-one here from national papers (the Paris-based International Herald Tribune is a sort-of-exception) and not much broadcast. Time is listed as a media partner, but I haven't seen Bryan Walsh here. The rest of the world is represented at a pretty low level, but still here -- I was struck by a biggish contingent from Bangladesh.

Does it matter? Hard to say. The conference is hitting headlines, there are a lot of journalists for specialised outlets here, and the press room people say they are very happy with the level of coverage: Stefan Rahmstorf's sea-level talk on Tuesday, which I didn't see but which people here are talking about a lot, is getting a lot of pick up, to judge by Google News. But in the plenaries this morning John Schellnhuber and Nick Stern were reminding the thousand or so people in the room that this is one of the biggest stories in the world, and they were doing so pretty effectively. And part of the point of this meeting, as I understand it, is to take that same sort of approach and use it to set a scientific stage for the COP 15 "son of Kyoto" meeting, which will take place in the same large shed-like structure this December. By that standard, the coverage that I have seen (and I've been busy, to be fair, just talking to people at sessions, and may have missed lots of good stuff) seems a little thin.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It appears that the action on Wednesday afternoon was where I was not: in the session on tipping points. Chris Jones of the Met Office's Hadley Centre presented some studies of the Amazon (abstract in pdf) that have caused a big media stir. The studies suggest that a) there is a threshold level of warming beyond which much of the Amazon forest is committed to die back (probably being replaced by savanna) and b) that for significant parts of the forest that threshold is alarmingly low. Indeed it is quite possibly either unavoidable in the near future or already dwindling in the rear-view mirror. As I understand it from people who saw the presentation, models in which all the warming already in the pipeline (ie with no further emissions) is realised leave the forests pretty much committed to some dieback, and modest further warming seals the deal. I wasn't able to check that with Jones himself, but it seems to fit with what he and his colleagues write:

We present results to show a possible climate threshold beyond which some dieback is committed and this commitment rises dramatically for global temperature rise above 2 degrees C, a threshold often used by policy makers in their definition of dangerous climate change. Any subsequent recovery is on such a long timescale as to make the dieback effectively irreversible on any pragmatic level.

I'll see if I can find Chris Jones, or some Brazilians, or both to talk about this with on Thursday.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

For those not eager to trawl through the aforementioned geoengineering tweetstream here's the most interesting thing I took from the geoengineering session -- a point on which, interestingly, David Keith and Ken Caldeira, who are keen to see and do more research on the topic, are close to agreeing with David Santillo of Greenpeace, who isn't.

The problem is in some ways pretty obvious: No one knows whether geoengineering can really be made to work. As Keith pointed out, even for the best characterised putative intervention -- a stratospheric aerosol like those produced by volcanoes -- the comparatively cursory research to date has turned up a wealth of complexities that have not yet been addressed by proponents, and more research will turn up even more of them. To Keith and Caldeira, this raises a nightmare scenario: that the world will have in the back of its mind that geoengineering is there as a fallback, will find that it needs a fallback, and will then find out that the fallback is not there in any practical sense. On this basis the sooner it is clear that there is no way out the better: time to do some serious research.

That is similar to Santillo's position, except he doesn't want to do the research needed to find out for sure. I took it from his talk that he wants instead to create a climate of opinion where the nagging hope that geoengineering might save us was firmly shut down more or less a priori, with commitment to emission cuts the sole and reaffirmed goal of all.

In making this argument, he came up with a nice pithy account of what he sees as the 5 drivers for geoengineering research: desperation, aspiration, fascination, delegation, remuneration. The first two he sees as essentially reasonable, the third -- "it is just such fun to play with these ideas!" -- troubling, the fourth -- "O good, someone else can solve the climate I don't have to" -- dangerous and morally defective (my term not his), and the fifth beyond the pale. (Actually in the presentation he didn't call the fifth driver "remuneration" he just called it "money" -- but he told me later he'd thought about listing it as remuneration, and I think it's slicker that way...)

What all these people agree on is that the lopsided way in which geoengineering is discussed, with a level of prominence in the media (and the unpublished musings of researchers, in my experience) and the imagination disproportionate to the actual level of knowledge among experts, needs to be seen as a real problem. Geoengineering is widely enough discussed that the thought it might be there as a last resort is widespread and quite possibly spreading wider, even though it still may be an illusion. Keith laid out the argument for reducing this disproportionality in a more formal way, looking at scenarios comparing the value of "Early Learning" v. late learning. I didn't note down all the details, but Early Learning seemed, by the economic metric he was using, to be a big, big winner.

PS: Those interested in the twittering per se may possibly want to check out this further post at Heliophage

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 11, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a technical session on geoengineering at the meeting today, and I thought I'd try twittering from it. Since this is a personal experiment and may not pan out, I'll be using my personal twitterfeed, http://twitter.com/eaterofsun, not the naturenews feed.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 11, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

New research provides strong evidence that acidification is affecting marine organisms, leaving traces even in the remote reaches of the deep sea. Lab-based studies have previously shown that increasingly acid waters impair the shell-building of marine organisms such as corals and some plankton. Now, measurements direct from the ocean floor show that the shells of one species of planktonic foraminifera - calcium carbonate-encrusted creatures about the size of a grain of sand - have thinned by one-third since the pre-industrial era. The study's authors suggest that anthropogenic ocean acidification is to blame - and that the thinning shells may be reducing a major global carbon sink.

A team led by Andrew Moy and William Howard of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Tasmania used shells found in seabed sediment in the Southern Ocean near Tasmania to follow the fortunes of the forams. Marine sediment cores, valued for their records of past climate, also contain some naturally captured carbon dioxide: while living near the sea surface, the foraminifera encase themselves in minerals made from carbon that originated in the atmosphere, and upon their deaths they sink to the ocean bottom, where that carbon gets buried away.

Comparing shells skimmed from the top of the sediment since 1997 with pre-industrial-era shells of nearly the same size interred in sediment cores below, the researchers find that the recent shells are 30-35% lighter. Looking back 50,000 years using an even deeper core, they can also see shell weight loss tracking the release of carbon dioxide during the warming at the end of the last ice age. The results were published in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription).

Continue reading "Thinning shells in the Southern Ocean" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 10, 2009
Categories: | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will head up a new climate and energy research institute at Yale University from this Fall.

The announcement was made by Yale University President Richard C Levin today at the plenary session of the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

Pachauri will serve at the Yale Institute on a part time basis and will retain his current positions as IPCC chair and director-general of India’s Energy and Resources Institute, TERI.

Further details of the centre are available over on Economic Times.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over 2000 delegates from 80 nations have gathered this week in Copenhagen to update the global assessment of climate change, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of them.

Over the next few days, the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change will hear from world experts including climatologists, social scientists and economists on how the prognosis for global warming, and its physical and societal impacts, has changed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its last report in 2007. The science in the 2007 report is now effectively 4-5 years out of date, so it’s clearly time for an update, which is why experts are here this week.

The updated assessment will be in the format of a 30-page synthesis document, to be published in June.
It will be peer-reviewed but not IPCC-style; that's because the ultimate aim of the congress is to deliver a hard-hitting message on the urgency of climate change to policymakers and the media ahead of the UN Conference in December, where delegates will again converge on Copenhagen, this time to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Among the speakers who kicked off proceedings this morning was congress chair and marine scientist Katherine Richardson, who spoke to me ahead of time about why the congress is taking place and what it hopes to deliver. Read the full interview here.

I’ll be speaking in a session on Thursday on communicating climate change (and particularly on the role of blogs) and both I and my estimable colleague, Oliver Morton, will be blogging over the next few days on anything that especially surprises or interests us. For the full programme, see here.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Like Olive, I'm at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen. My first impression is that it's like a scaled up version of the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change meeting that took place in Exeter in 2004: a venue for up-to-date (ie more recent than the most recent IPCC) science to be presented in a polciy relevant atmosphere. And by odd coincidence the first paper I heard presented was on a topic that in my mind is quite strongly linked to that Exeter meeting.

Jonathan Bamber of Bristol University was talking about the stability of the Greenland ice sheet at a session on tipping points. There was a widely cited Brief Communication in Nature that came out just after the Exeter meeting and was discussed there which suggested that if global temperatures rose above 3 degrees the ice sheet was effectively doomed. Bamber and his colleagues have looked at the issue again, treating the point at which the surface mass balance goes negative as the defintive oops-we-lost-Greenland point. Surface mass balance is snowfall minus the run offs. Even with a positive surface mass balance it's possible for the ice sheet to shrink, because ice is lost through the calving of icebergs as well as runoff; once the surface mass balance goes negative, though, shrinkage is taken to be certain and to feed on itself.

Bamber says he and his colleagues looked at the future of the ice sheet in a warming world using two different types of mass balance model: a positive-degree-day model, which counts days over freezing, as was used in the earlier work, and a more complex energy balance model. Their positive-degree-day model showed the mass balance going negative with four degrees of warming locally, which because warming in the arctic is amplified beyond the global mean fits with the earlier figure of 3 degrees warming worldwide. The energy balance model, though, doesn't see the mass balance go negative until there's 8 degrees of warming. Bamber's clear that there's a lot of uncertainty in that -- but it fits with the palaeoclimate finding that in the previous interglacial period, when temperatures were higher than they are now, significant chunks of the Greenland ice sheet remained un-melted.

On the face of it that's a bit of a reprieve: it would seem to suggest that there's more time to act before the world gets committed to a big, big sea level rise than had been thought. But there are lots of caveats. Ice dynamics or some other factor could mean that there's a point of no return before the point at which the mass balance goes negative. And though this model may be better than the previous one (and there may well be people who would doubt that) that doesn't make it definitive. You can look at the best science around -- but there's always going to be doubt as to whether its good enough.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 10, 2009
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A short while ago, stand-up economist Yoram Bauman reviewed Frank Ackerman’s ‘Can We Afford the Future?: the Economics of a Warming World’, a layman’s guide to one of the most pressing and complex questions of out time, over on Nature Reports Climate Change.

Ackerman objected to the review and I invited him to respond with a letter to the editor. You can find it in the latest issue, but I’ve also copied it here:

To the Editor - Yoram Bauman has written a hostile and dismissive review of my book, Can We Afford the Future?: The Economics of a Warming World (Zed Books, 2009). With my book, he says, "the bumper-sticker culture of cable TV news has finally reached ... the economics of climate change." I allegedly failed to recognize the virtues of mainstream economics and oversimplified the subject "for the masses".

Oddly enough, Bauman is best known for performing as a stand-up comedian making fun of mainstream economics. His signature performance offers a flippant 'translation' of ten principles of economics from a leading textbook. How could a stand-up comic dislike bumper stickers and communication with "the masses"? I plead guilty to summarizing a complicated subject in four provocative, non-technical statements suitable for printing on bumper stickers. This was an intentional strategy to combat the 'eyes glazing over' effect that technical economics has on most people, and to lead the reader into substantive discussion of the big issues about the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation.

Continue reading "Ackerman’s response to Bauman" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Economics, Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Katharine Sanderson

Aerosols were thought to fertilise the oceans, providing phytoplankton with lots of yummy nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorous and iron.

But research published yesterday in PNAS offers a reminder that atmospheric and biogeochemical systems are never that simple. It seems that certain aerosols, those rich in copper, can be toxic to some species of phytoplankton. Read the Nature News story here. The paper, by UCSC marine scientist Adina Paytan and colleagues, is online here.

Continue reading "Phytoplankton choked by dust" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 10, 2009
Categories: | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"I don’t want to bring home a dead-on-arrival agreement. We tried that. It didn’t do the world a lot of good."
US climate envoy Todd Stern dismisses stringent 2020 emissions targets proposed by the EU, saying he will push for a Copenhagen agreement that the US Senate can ratify.

"Because tropical forest lizards aren't very heat tolerant and they live in environments that are already warm, any further warming could push them over the edge."
The narrow temperature range of tropical forests has left lizards who live there poorly prepared for climate change, says ecologist Raymond Huey.

Even hybrid vehicles emit carbon dioxide when blown up.
FOX's drama '24' is going green and carbon-offsetting its explosions.

"Thankfully it was sort of, I think, organic and non-toxic."
On his way to a low-carbon energy summit, UK business minister Peter Mandelson was doused with green custard by a woman protesting the Heathrow third runway plan.

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 06, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Earth’s large forests take up substantially more atmospheric carbon dioxide through photosynthesis than they release back to the atmosphere through respiration. Thus acting as a carbon ‘sink’, they (and the oceans) are our closest natural allies in the fight against climate change.

But many forests are at threat - not only from logging and clearing, but from climate change itself.

Take drought. How will mature tropical rain forests respond to dryer conditions, which some climate models suggest might be ahead in the not-so-distant future?

The 2005 drought in the Amazon basin gave scientists an opportunity to find out. What they saw is not particularly heartening: Prolonged dryness has apparently turned some affected areas of the Amazon from a carbon sink to a carbon source, a team led by Oliver Phillips of Leeds University in Britain reports in Science today (Abstract here).

Patches subjected to a 100-milimetre decrease in rainfall released on average 5.3 tonnes of carbon per hectare – around 9 times the amount undisturbed tropical forests take up, on average, per year. Basin-wide, between 1.2-1.6 billion tonnes of carbon were released during the 2005 drought, the team estimates.

Over at Nature News, I’ve put together a little briefing on what we know and what we don’t know about the tropical carbon sink.

Quirin Schiermeier

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on March 06, 2009
Categories: Biodiversity and Ecology, Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Science, Deforestation, Mitigation, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One noteworthy observation at December’s AGU conference – the latest and largest ever gathering of earth and space scientists – was the attention being given to a threat conceivably worse than carbon dioxide. In numerous talks, during poster sessions and over coffee, scientists were discussing methane – a greenhouse gas with a warming potential 25 times that of CO2.

Researchers have long speculated that climate change will unleash vast stores of the gas from where it lies frozen beneath the sea floor and locked up in the Arctic, triggering rapid warming.

Until recently, however, there has been little cause for concern. But that could all be changing, reports Amanda Leigh Mascarelli in a feature online today (no subscription required). Several observations made in 2007 to 2008 and reported at the AGU suggest that we could be in danger of waking a sleeping giant.

For one, a group of researchers working in the shallow waters of the Siberian Shelf noticed that their methane measurements were usually high compared with previous observations made in the same location. Added to that, they saw large rings of gas — sometimes as wide as 30 centimetres in diameter — trapped in ice, as well as plumes bubbling to the ocean surface over hundreds of square kilometres.

Then a separate group of scientists reported that global atmospheric concentrations of methane had spiked in the same year, following almost a decade of stability. While scientists can’t say whether either of these observations are anomalies or part of a long-term trend, they are certainly paying closer attention to the problem than ever before. “If there’s a ticking bomb in the room, you’d like to know the possibility of it going off,” says geochemist James White of the University of Colorado. “The fact that it’s there at all is unnerving.”

Mascarelli’s feature gives the low-down on the latest science – from the role of methane in past warming events to projections of what might occur in the future – and looks at what experts are doing to avert the problem. Some intriguing approaches abound, from parts of re-wilding Siberia with large animals that literally stomp the permafrost to keep it intact to using natural methane leaks as a power source for remote villages.

But if understanding the methane problem sounds like all work and no play, think again. Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, whose work is featured by Mascarelli, has produced some amazing videos while studying methane bubbling up from lake bottoms in the Arctic. Here her team drills through lake ice, then lights the escaping methane.

Anna Barnett and Olive Heffernan

Image: The average atmospheric concentration of methane shot up suddenly in 2007, having remained stable for a decade. Data shown are from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, courtesy of Matt Rigby.

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 05, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, GHG emissions, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Uncle Sam wants your observations of flowering and fruiting American plants. A new national ‘citizen science’ program is starting up in the US that asks volunteers to send in data on the seasonal cycles, or phenology, of local plants - information that researchers can use to track shifts caused by climate change and other factors. Animal-lovers can start contributing data next year. Running the effort is the USA-National Phenology Network, a consortium of universities, nonprofits, and government agencies - notably the US Geological Survey, who cover the new program on their latest podcast.

Says the press release:

Among other uses, data collected by USA-NPN will help resource managers predict wildfires and pollen production, detect and control invasive species, monitor droughts, and assess the vulnerability of various plant and animal species to climate change.

Continue reading "Wanted: Citizen climate scientists (shared Nobel Prize not guaranteed)" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biodiversity and Ecology, Climate Science | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The loss of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which last week ended up in the ocean rather than in orbit, is a hard blow not only to the team who devoted much of the last decade to getting it off the ground but to scientific – and especially climate - research.

There is quite literally of sense of grief among the climate research community, evident in the story by Jeff Tollefson and Geoff Brumfiel over on Nature News. My colleague Anna Barnett interviewed David Crisp, OCO Principal Investigator, ahead of the launch. His excitement about the mission was palpable as he spoke of how the NASA satellite would measure atmospheric carbon dioxide at a resolution 3 times higher than any previous space measurement of a trace gas.

The Japanese space agency successfully launched their Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) in January and undoubtedly this will provide some of the data that OCO would have collected. But OCO would have provided an unprecedented spatial resolution. Taking half a million carbon dioxide measurements per day, the satellite would have located specific sources of the greenhouse gas, differentiating cities and freeways from adjacent forested areas.

Not only is this a huge loss for exploratory science, the timing of the incident is especially unfortunate. With emissions rising and a global climate deal in the balance, pinpointing the origin and fate of carbon dioxide has never been more urgent — a task that the US$280-million mission would have accomplished skillfully.

So what’s next for NASA? Personally, I think the agency should make every effort towards a rapid re-launch, as I’ve detailed in my latest editorial. Getting an OCO replacement into orbit within the next few years would offer at least a brief period of data verification with GOSAT – one advantage of having two CO2 trackers in space simultaneously – and would have the added advantage of monitoring carbon heavyweights from space during the early stages of a post-2012 global climate deal.

Continue reading "NASA’s next challenge " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 03, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Climate Science, Features, GHG emissions, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

Jim Hansen, the earth scientist known for his outspokenness about global warming, is marching today as part of a climate protest against burning coal. The focus of all the attention is the Capitol Power Plant, a coal-burning monstrosity just blocks from the US Capitol building that is one of the biggest sources of emissions in the District of Columbia. Hundreds of protestors have reportedly turned out, even in the snow that coats Washington several inches deep and snarled commutes this morning.
Over at Nature's Twitter feed, reporter Jeff Tollefson notes that Hansen says he is willing to get arrested. Check out the action live as Jeff reports it.

Image (sans Darryl Hannah): Jeff Tollefson

Posted by Alex Witze on March 02, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)