Climate Feedback

A group of ambassadors from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) stopped by the IHDP conference yesterday and held a panel discussion on dealing with the leading edge of dangerous climate change. For AOSIS countries that stand to be swallowed by rising seas or devastated by droughts and storms, their continued existence is on the line in this year's climate negotiations. At the UN meeting here in Bonn in March, the group issued a statement saying, "The survival of the small island states should be the benchmark for the success of the Copenhagen agreement." I nabbed AOSIS chair Dessima Williams of Grenada for a quick interview on the island states' agenda.

What kind of agreement is needed for small island states to survive?

Continue reading "IHDP: No time for pessimism, says small islands leader" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week’s Nature has an extended climate special made of original research papers, features, commentaries, editorials, essays and book reviews. Here’s the content at a glance.

An uplifting read the package is not, but this will hardly surprise devoted readers of these pages. What’s it all about then? Well, Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, in their news and views piece, get to the heart of it: “Dangerous climate change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid.”

Some highlights:
Malte Meinshausen and colleagues find that cumulative emissions from 2000 to 2050 of about 1,400 billion tonnes of CO2 yield a 50% probability of exceeding 2 °C warming – the somewhat randomly defined threshold of dangerous climate change - by the end of the twenty-first century Here's an editor's summary of the paper. Just to be clear: Known 2000-2006 emissions were almost 250 billion tonnes.

Myles Allen and colleagues take a slightly different approach to calculating the climate response to anthropogenic emissions. They show that cumulative emissions of one trillion tonnes of carbon (3,670 billion tonnes CO2) over the entire 1750-2050 period yield a 90% probability of warming between 1.3 and 3.9 °C above pre-industrial temperatures, with 2 °C of warming being the best estimate. About half a trillion tonne has been emitted since the onset of industrialization. Here's an editor's summary.

In clear, if we want a reasonably good chance of staying beyond 2°C warming, we cannot afford burning all the oil, gas and coal buried in the ground. We can’t actually afford burning more than half the proven reserves. If we continue burning fossil fuels at current rates we will leave the ‘safety zone’ in less than 20 years. Let’s face it: We have a bad hand – and we can’t bluff the planet.

Continue reading "The wheel of climate fortune" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Science, Climate prediction, GHG emissions, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics, Uncertainty | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

Following the collapse on April 4 of a narrow ice bridge that had connected the Wilkins ice shelf with a small island off the Antarctic Peninsula, the northern ice front of the ice sheet is beginning to disintegrate.

A high-resolution radar image taken on April 20 by the German TerraSAR-X satellite shows large icebergs being released from a rift zone near Latady Island. Scientists expect up to 3,400 square kilometretres of the Wilkins Ice Sheet to break into icebergs before a new stable ice front will form.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 29, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I caught a speedy summary of the climate vulnerability of Nigerian cities that included a glimpse into public perceptions there. Felix Olorunfemi of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research surveyed 300 people door-to-door in the city of Ibadan and found that awareness of climate change was low, that it was seen as a complex and abstract problem, and that knowledge of such environmental problems wasn't correlated with action taken to address them.

What was striking about this 'not our problem' attitude was that it also cropped up in another case study during the same session. Research presented by Johanna Wolf from the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia revealed it among people whose lives may in fact be directly at risk from global warming: elderly English pensioners.

Continue reading "IHDP: From London to Ibadan, 'it's not our problem'" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 29, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Popping up at the IHDP conference are signs of a certain gap in perception of climate change risks - one that economist Frank Ackerman pointed to in a letter to NRCC recently. "Climate change can't be both a fundamental threat to the conditions that support human life, according to scientists, and a mid-sized policy puzzle that can be solved by an adjustment in tax rates, according to economists," Ackerman wrote.

Much of the social and environmental research on offer here falls into the "fundamental threat" camp. But the blasé attitudes of some mainstream economists came up after last night's roundtable on ways forward for social science in the 21st century - and made a bold showing in a plenary talk today.

Continue reading "IHDP: Blasé economics" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 28, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in the hall that once housed the West German Parliament, a glass-covered fish tank of a building on the Rhine, which nowadays has become the Bonn World Conference Centre. For the next four days, the politicians' microphone-studded desks will be lined by experts in the field of 'human dimensions of global change' - given the impressively broad nickname 'human dimensions' among this crowd. About 1,200 participants are here to give 800 talks that make up the Open Meeting of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), a research arm of the UN.

One of today's opening keynotes was from Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. After a daunting rundown of climate change threats, Schellnhuber - a physicist in a sea of human-dimensioners - urged social science to take the front seat on the problem. "Speaking as a natural scientist," he said, "I think 90% of research [on global change] will have to be done by the social scientists."

Physicists, he told me at the coffee break, can describe climate threats increasingly vividly and can tell decision-makers that technological solutions are out there. But it's up to social science, he says, to figure out how we bring about massive economic and social transformation on a tight deadline.

Case in point: feeding solar power from the Sahara where it's plentiful to Europe where it's highly in demand, one of Schellnhuber's favorite ideas. "All the technical problems have been solved," he says, "but it cannot be done." We don't have the legal framework, the transboundary agreements, the international will for this mode of energy delivery.

This is where policy experts, economists, and even anthropologists come in. But, he says, "I don't think the social science community has grasped the scope of the challenge." Operating on the basic principle that all groups are different, 95% of social science papers are local case studies, not global-scale work, he says. And indeed, there are an awful lot of case studies among this week's 800 talks. It remains to be seen whether the picture emerging from the conference will be piecemeal or planet-wide.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 27, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The aerosol story just keeps getting more interesting. In addition to ongoing research about the direct impact of various aerosols on climate and temperature (see here and here, for example), there's also the indirect impact on photosynthesis and carbon uptake. A study in this week's Nature explores the latter phenomenon with regard to sulphur dioxide and comes up with some startling results.

The basic gist is that aerosols scatter light, and indirect light is better at penetrating forest canopies and stimulating growth in the understory (to illustrate, imagine the dark shadows cast on the forest floor by trees blocking direct sunlight). The increase in this understory growth is significantly larger than the decrease in canopy growth, because even on a shady day the tallest trees are going to do fairly well.

The implications are substantial. If you assume that pollution regulations around the world will eventually reduce sulphur dioxide emissions to zero in order to clean up the air and save lives, then solar radiation will become more direct and photosynthesis will go down. Which means plants will pull less carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which means that addressing global warming will be even more difficult than expected.

We covered this, along with a study about China's terrestrial carbon sink, in a news story earlier this week. But before you start thinking we've got it all figured out, you might want to take a look at another story by Quirin Shiermeier, which suggests that the air might be dirtier than we thought. That might be good news for the plants, at least.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on April 23, 2009
Categories: Jeff Tollefson | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

China’s forests, shrublands and soils have absorbed a third or so of China’s fossil fuel emissions from 1980 to 2000. Sequestering up to 260 million tonnes of carbon per year, the Chinese land sink is more than twice as large than that of geographic Europe, and comparable in size to that of the United States.

There has been quite some controversy over the total size of the Northern Hemisphere’s terrestrial carbon sink, so this first comprehensive estimate, published in Nature today, is filling a real gap. Given China’s 1.2 billion population and rapidly growing economy, knowledge of how much of its emissions are actually staying in the atmosphere is pretty valuable information. Globally, around 40% of annual emissions stay in the atmosphere; the rest is sequestered by plants, soils and oceans.

The Chinese data come at a time of growing speculation and guesswork over the People's Republic’s future climate and energy policies. Needless to say, the study is of no small relevance with a view to upcoming climate negotiations. The very fact that China’s land carbon sink is large is good news. But the results will also strengthen the Chinese government’s negotiation position at the United Nations climate summit in December in Copenhagen.

Continue reading "EGU: China's carbon sink - it's large" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 22, 2009
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Policy, Earth science, Mitigation, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Aid charity Oxfam is warning that the number of people impacted by climate-related disasters will rise 54% in the next six years, reaching 375 million.

Using data on 6,500 droughts, floods and other disasters dating back to 1980, Oxfam predicts another 133 million people will be in peril by 2015. Dealing with this will require an increase in aid spending from 2006 levels of $14.2 billion to £25 billion a year.

“Any such projection is not an exact science, but what is clear is that substantially more people may be affected by disasters in the very near future, as climate change and environmental mismanagement create a proliferation of droughts, floods and other disasters,” says the new report. “And more people will be vulnerable to them because of their poverty or location.”

In addition to those people directly impacted by disasters, others will be put at risk by climate-related conflicts when climate change exacerbates more traditional security threats, says the ‘Right to Survive’ report. The projections are made by smoothing out the extremes of the historical disaster data and fitting a straight trend-line up to 2015 (graph below).

Cross-posted from In the Field

Changes in the annual life cycles of plants and animals are a good footprint of climate change at the middle latitudes. But it is a footprint that is less easy to detecet than melting sea ice or glacier retreat.

Eye-observations by millions of gardeners and nature lovers suggest that plants green and flower earlier in spring, and that leaves begin to colour and fall later in autumn, than they did just a few decades ago. So where will we end then? Will pollen soon be in the air all year round - a nightmare for allergic persons?

Scientists such as Annette Wenzel, an eco-climatologist at the Technical University of Munich, use remote sensing technologies, models, and in-situ observations to study the response of plants to warming temperatures. But the corelation between warming and ‘phenology’ is less clear than one might expect.

One reason, says Wenzel, is that the European phenology network of around 8,000 observation sites is a rather unevenly distributed affair. The vast majority of sites are located in Germany and its neighboring countries, whereas the whole of Scandinavia has just a handful of sites, and Italy not a single one. To make matters worse, the species composition differs from site to site, making it difficult for scientists to define a Euroean-wide ‘green-up’ index.

Even extreme climatic events don’t provide a clear picture. Warm spells have become significantly more frequent in Europe during all seasons, and cold spells less fequent, from 1990 onward than prior to 1990. Wenzel has looked at how recent warm and cold spells affected the flowering of cherry and apple trees, and the sowing and harvest time of winter wheat. Fruit trees and wheat farmers do respond to climate anomalies, she found. But, again, the correlations where not excitingly strong.

Weather-related crop failures are not included at all in the European phenology database. Scientists trying to establish connections between crop failures and climate change rely mostly on anecdotal evidence and media reports.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 21, 2009
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Cross-posted from In the Field

It’s a warm and sunny spring day today in Vienna - can you guess then whether the coming summer will be colder or warmer than usual? Well, if you think that you hardly have more – though certainly not less - than a 50% chance of getting it right you’re, uhm, right. But guess what: Supercomputer-powered seasonal climate forecasts don’t do much better.

Seasonal climate predictions work relatively well only in the tropics. In Europe and North America their predictive skills are still pretty poor, meaning that forecast and observed climatology are often two very different things. And in some regions seasonal forecasts are actually worse than plain guessing.

This means that seasonal climate forecasts don’t yet provide reliable, if any, guidance for farmers, tourism managers, forest fire fighters, or for me and you. The idea that slowly varying boundary conditions, such as sea surface temperature distribution, snow cover and soil moisture, push the climate in a certain direction is well-established. But statistical climatology is one thing, daily wheather is another.

Andreas Weigel of the Swiss Weather Service, a rising star in the seasonal forecast community, made a few suggestions here at the EGU as to how predictive skills could be improved. Using more than one climate model is one promising possibility, statistical post-processing an re-calibrating forecasts is another, he explained in his well-received medal award lecture today

In the same session, Marie Boisserie of Florida Stae University in Tallahassee reported that when she included realistic initial soil moisture conditions to a climate model it greatly improved its predictive skills. Two-month forecasts of summer temperatures and precipitation in the US were more than twice as accurate than without the precipitation-derived soil moisture data.

Problem is that as yet there exists no reliable global observational database of soil moisture.
All eyes are now on the European Space Agency’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, designed to observe soil moisture over the Earth's landmasses and salinity over the oceans, to be launched in June.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 21, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It certainly took a while, but the US Environmental Protection Agency is finally doing the right thing and endorsing the science behind global warming. In doing so, the EPA will also be answering a simple question: Does EPA have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases?

As it happens, the EPA went through this exercise with much less fanfare more than a decade ago, after a Republican lawmaker, worried about the Clinton administration's activism on global warming, popped the question. Under then EPA Administrator Carol Browner (now President Barack Obama's chief climate coordinator), the agency produced an opinion suggesting that indeed, carbon dioxide was a pollutant that could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The story plods along from there all the way to the Supreme Court, which basically said the same thing in 2007. It was a long, tortuous, path, but it illustrates how the judicial branch can in fact be used to get around the executive branch, as originally intended. The Bush administration, faced with a difficult decision that would either deny the science or result in regulations that it didn't want to issue, elected to punt (more coverage here)

We covered some of the ramifications of that process in an online story on 17 April, which is when the EPA issued its proposed "endangerment finding." The Supreme Court basically said EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, assuming that there is good reason to do so. The endangerment finding, as it is currently written, answers that question in the affirmative.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on April 21, 2009
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Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter, launched an institute last week to galvanise large-scale demonstrations of carbon capture and storage (CCS) (or ‘clean coal’) technology [see Nature coverage here; press release].

Australia is ploughing AU$100m (£48m) a year into the Global CCS Institute (GCCSI). That money’s far short of the billions needed to finance commercial-scale projects. Instead, the GCCSI is acting as an oversight operation, smoothing the progress of those schemes which have been proposed. It will track projects and identify gaps in the types of projects that have been agreed on – perhaps even brokering new ones. The institute will also coordinate and pool knowledge gained from small-scale CCS pilots and analyze sticking points which are stopping projects moving forward.

If the GCCSI is to be successful it will have to get companies to share the lessons they learn from their tests – including information on what doesn’t work. “No-one really understands what knowledge needs to be shared at this time,” says GCCSI head Nick Otter, when queried on the difficulties that may pose for intellectual property.

It will also have to work carefully with existing organizations, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s carbon capture programme and the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) - a network run by the US Department of Energy. These focus more on technical analyses of the technology, and on its surrounding policy and regulation. The CSLF – for a long time scorned on account of its American origins – may try to rejuvenate itself in a London meeting in October, now that it is backed by the Obama administration.

Ultimately networks like these are necessary but not sufficient for getting CCS demonstrations off the ground. What’s needed is a massive amount of public spending.

Richard van Noorden

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 20, 2009
Categories: Features, In the News, Richard Van Noorden, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from In the Field

A record number of 9,000 or so scientist has come to the always charming Austrian capital of Vienna for this year’s general assembly of the European Geosciences Union, the biggest such meeting this side of the Atlantic.

In search of some local colour I went this morning to a session on climate and mountain hydrology. Vienna, just like Munich, Milan, Grenoble and many other cities in vicinity to the Alps, depends on drinking water from mountain streams and reservoirs. The Alps are in fact a water tower for all the surrounding lowlands; and although there is no real water shortage, Alpine regions are highly sensitive to climate change.

Bruno Schädler of the University of Bern in Switzerland explained that a two degree increase in average temperature is equivalent to a 360 metres decrease in altitude. Total glacier area in the Alps is likely to decrease by more than 50% under this pretty realistic scenario. Projections are that more winter precipitation will fall in the form of rain, and less as snow, and that increased evapotransporation will reduce the amount of summer rainfall. All this will change the runoff regimes of Alpine rivers and streams, and hence the availability of water competing purposes including irrigation, hydropower, and tourism. But how, where and when these changes will come, and if they will bring more floods, or more low water, or both, is still extermely difficult to say. Regional climate models, for example, don’t represent complex Alpine topography, hydrology and meteorology, which differ from one valley or catchment area to the next.

Perhaps that explains why there is little, if any, adaptation to climate change happening in the Alps. Indeed, adaptation measures are driven by concrete events and economic requirements – such as lack of snow in a skiing ressort – rather than by climate change predictions. This is the result of ongoing regional case studies in six Alpine regions of Austria, Slovenia, Italy, France and Switzerland. Planning and management tools which consider climate change are almost totally absent, found Andrea Prutsch of Austria’s federal environmental agency, who coordinats the studies. Water-consuming artificial snow making is just one example of frequently happening cases of ‘maladaptation’. By and large, she said, adaptation to climate change in the Alps suffers from a widespread lack of data, monitoring and knowledge.

The science of climate change has come a long way. But this little Alpine saga shows that it has not yet arrived in the centre of society.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 20, 2009
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In a Mexican eco park, of all places, scientists have found compelling evidence that sea-levels can rise – nah, jump – at scary rates during warm climates such as ours.

That the global sea-level can rise by almost half a metre per decade when huge glaciers melt towards the end of an ice age has already been known. But a paper in Nature today (Editor’s summary) suggests that a similar jump has occurred at the close of the sea-level ‘highstand’ during the warm period, the Eemian Interglacial.

The team, led by Paul Blanchon of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Cancun, analyzed the age structure of exceptionally well-exposed coral reefs at Xcaret, a popular theme park on the northeast Yucatán peninsula. Because no earthquakes have occurred in the more recent geological history of the region, the peninsula is an ideal location to study sea-level behaviour.

The team found that at the end of the last interglacial many reefs were flooded and replaced by new reefs on higher ground. Age and layering of the corals indicate that a rapid 2-3 metres jump in sea-level occurred around 121,000 years ago, possibly within less than one century.

Only swift and substantial melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets can explain the extreme rate at which the seal level rose to its highstand some 4-6 metres above today’s sea-level.

The implications for our warming planet are clear. As modern temperatures approach those at the height of the Eemian Interglacial, the rate of seal-level rise could soon – perhaps very soon - shift gear, from modest to catastrophic.

The spectacular break-up of the Wilkins Ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula is a reminder that we are getting closer to the point where things could get really nasty.

“Given the dramatic disintegration of ice shelves and discovery of rapid ice loss from both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability at the close of the last interglacial,” the authors conclude.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 16, 2009
Categories: Ocean science, Palaeoclimate, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My collegaue Quirin Schiermeier has a round-up of the UN climate talks in Bonn over on Nature News. The overall assessment? Not much progress, with developed and developing nations coming to loggerheads over the issues of money and targets. Quirin writes:

Developing countries, including South Africa, India and China, told the Bonn meeting that they expect rich nations to commit to a 40% cut by 2020. Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), acknowledged that getting rich nations to agree to 25–40% emissions cuts by 2020 will be "very difficult".

Another point of contention was the money that poorer countries will need for adaptation programmes. The UNFCCC's Least Developed Countries Fund allows rich countries to support such programmes in the poorest nations and thus meet some of that need, but to date it stands at only US$172 million. Overall, development agencies talk of a need for sums at least 100 times greater.

Even the change in the US delegation hasn't brought clarity to these two seemingly perrenial problems. You can read the full story here.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 15, 2009
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Climate change could force birds to migrate hundreds of extra miles, according to new research. The extra distance might even be deadly.

Modelling by Stephen Willis, of Durham University, and his colleagues shows that the breeding ranges of Sylvia warblers will shift consistently north as the Earth warms. Non-breeding ranges showed no consistent directional shift, meaning longer migrations.

“From 2071 to 2100, nine out of the 17 species we looked at are projected to face longer migrations, particularly birds that cross the Sahara desert,” says Willis (press release). “Our findings show that marathon migrations for some birds are set to become even longer journeys. ... The added distance is a considerable threat.”

According to the team’s paper in Journal of Biogeography, trans-Saharan migrants face an average extra flight of 413 km. The researchers write that the challenge facing many species is “unprecedented”.

Continue reading 'Birds face longer migrations due to climate change' on Nature's The Great Beyond blog.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 15, 2009
Categories: Biodiversity and Ecology, Daniel Cressey, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Economist Nicholas Stern released his new book just a couple of weeks ago, in which he updates his assessment of the costs of tackling climate change from his 2006 review for the UK government. In Blueprint for a Safer Planet, Stern frames this as an affordable, effective global deal that could be adopted at the UN negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

Fellow economist Frank Ackerman, who has written extensively on the costs of climate change, and who has critiqued Stern’s 2006 Review, gives his take on the new book over on Nature Reports Climate Change. Here are are some excerpts on the science. Ackerman writes:

Stern’s latest offering updates his arguments from 2006. For a start, the science has grown even more ominous, prompting him to revise his recommendation for the upper limit at which we should aim to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. Now he says they should be held below 500 parts per million (p.p.m.) of CO2-equivalent (roughly 450 p.p.m. of CO2 alone) — compared to 550 p.p.m. CO2-equivalent in the Stern Review — and then reduced further over time if necessary.

Ackerman later questions whether Stern’s analysis understates the severity of the problem and the extent of the action required:

Climatologist James Hansen, among others, has argued that stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at 450 p.p.m. would leave them at a dangerously high level and has called for a safer limit of 350 p.p.m. Stern responds that his global deal, putting us on track to 450 p.p.m., is at the outer limits of what is politically feasible in the near term; achieving Stern’s goals for 2050 would position us to revise global targets downward in the future, if needed.

Overall, Ackerman gives the book the thumbs up, writing:

This book is not fundamentally aimed at advancing knowledge of either science or economics. Rather, it uses what we know about those fields as the basis for a sweeping policy proposal. With the Copenhagen conference fast approaching, the book outlines a vision for a global deal that could be acceptable to all major parties to the negotiations.

His conclusion highlights the striking congruence between parts of the Stern proposals and parts of UK climate policy:

It is not clear which came first: earlier government policies may have shaped Stern’s sense of what is possible; conversely, the Stern Review has served as a basis for revisions of some government positions. Coming from a country that has done less on the issue than Britain to date, I don’t view this as a mark against either Stern or his government. The British Empire was rarely so skilfully and persuasively served by its citizens and scholars.

Read the review in full here.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 09, 2009
Categories: Economics, Olive Heffernan, Reviews, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

“We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table. We might get desperate enough to want to use it.”
US science advisor John Holdren comments on the possibility of using geoengineering to tackle climate change.

George Will’s colleagues get tired of his disinformation.
Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan contradict columnist George Will in a news story (and everyone notices).

“It’s a matter of survival for us, also. So we are among the most vulnerable countries, economically.”
Whereas many countries are concerned about the threat of climate change, Saudi Arabia concerns itself with the threat of climate change policy.

“It's like being lost in the desert, miles from anywhere and eating your own legs to sustain yourself during your search for help.”
Ed Gillespie comments on Tesco’s ‘flights for lights’ initiative on the Guardian’s Ethical living blog.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 09, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year, I reported on efforts to merge climate modelling with weather forecasting to create probabilistic climate predictions, with the ultimate aim of providing information that could aid adaptation.

Given enough money to build a world climate research facility with hundreds of petaflops of computing power, scientists could study simulations at the kilometre scale, and answer some of the big questions in climate science, such as how and when regions will be affected, concluded the World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction last May.

Now, a group of scientists led by Suraje Dessai of the University of Exeter and the Tyndall Centre, UK argue that better climate predictions will not necessarily aid adaptation, and that waiting for better predictability in order to act on climate change would be a ‘significantly flawed’ approach.

Writing in the latest issue of EOS, a newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, Dessai and co-authors say that, in any case, the ability to predict future climate is limited by inherent uncertainty that will always leave ‘some level of irreducible ignorance in our understanding’. Furthermore, our ability to predict other factors that are likely to influence the outcome of adaptation efforts, such as population growth or changes in technology, is even more limited than our ability to predict the climate.

But this lack of predictability should not be seen as an excuse to postpone strategies for adaptation, they argue. After all, many organizations such as water authorities only need to know the range of possible representations of future climate to better understand their vulnerabilities. The authors call on decision makers to examine their adaptation strategies over a wide range of potential future scenarios of climate and other economic, political and cultural factors. Society will benefit more, they say, from knowing the vulnerability of climate-influenced decisions in the face of large uncertainty than from any foreseeable increase in the accuracy and precision of climate predictions.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 08, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A letter in the latest issue of Science [subscription] from a group of esteemed scientists and communicators calls for a concerted effort to close the information gap between scientific understanding of climate change and society’s ability to use the available knowledge. Having an accessible climate language, they say, would help stakeholders to better understand climate risks, as well as trade-offs and response options.

The authors – Tom Bowman, Edward Maibach, Michael Mann, Susi Moser and Richard Somerville – call for a convergence in the terminology used for two critical climate concepts. Scientists and science editors should strive for commonality, referring to the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that would result in a given amount of warming as “carbon dioxide equivalents”, rather than as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide alone (in terms of the resultant warming, 500 parts per million of CO2-equivalent is the same as 450 ppm of CO2 alone). Similarly, global temperatures should always be compared with a common pre-industrial baseline, rather than with any other point in time, say the authors.

Having a ‘common climate language’ for policy negotiators would seem like a worthy extension of this proposition. For a start, it could prevent documents, such as the communiqué from the 2008 G8 summit, appearing substantial when in reality leaders had failed to agree the baseline year from which to make the proposed reductions in greenhouse gases.

Does anyone know of plans to have an agreed climate change lexicon in place ahead of the Copenhagen talks?

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 08, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Arctic sea ice continues to shrink, according to the latest satellite data. And in a scenario all too familiar to people of a certain age, the ice that is left has been replaced by a younger, thinner version of itself.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, the maximum extent of Arctic sea ice last winter was the fifth lowest on record. All sixth lowest maximums have occurred in the last six years (press release).

This year’s maximum was 15.16 million square kilometres, which is smaller than the 1979-2000 average by an area roughly the size of Texas (or France). Younger, thinner ice which melts every year is now 70% of Arctic sea ice, says the NSIDC, meaning melting is easier. In the 1980s and 90s this type of ice was between 40 and 50% of the total.

Read the rest of this post at Nature's The Great Beyond blog.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 07, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Cryosphere, Daniel Cressey, Regional climate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The narrow strip of ice which connected the Wilkins ice shelf with a small island off the southwestern Antarctic Peninsula has finally collapsed, threatening to speed up the disintegration of the 11,000 square kilometres-large shelf.

Scientists had expected the break up. A partial collapse of the ice sheet last year had already thinned and twisted the natural ice bridge which connected the Wilkins ice shelf with Charcot Island, providing stability. On 1 April scientists monitoring satellite images of the region first noticed that rifts had occurred in the Manhattan-sized strip of ice. On 4 April it broke into pieces.

Satellite image: Terra SAR-X ScanSAR, 5 April 2009 © DLR, 2009
(Charcot Island is to the left. The island at the bottom right is Latady Island. Behind the broken ice bridge are icebergs from the June/July 2008 break up)

The collapse could accelerate erosion of the Wilkins ice sheet, which is located in one of the most rapidly warming regions of Antarctica. Its demise threatens to speed up the flow of continental glaciers to the coast, with implications for global sea level rise.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 07, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Leaders of the world’s 20 richest nations “missed an opportunity” to kick start the green economy in their efforts to arrest the global financial downturn at a summit in London yesterday.

Science and green leaders expressed “disappointment” at the G20 summit’s failure to include a commitment to spend a proportion of the agreed $1.1 trillion financial injection to resuscitate the global economy on a low carbon stimulus package.

The meeting’s final agreed statement on actions to take forward leaves mention of climate change and low carbon technologies to the final paragraphs. It says, “We agreed to make the best possible use of investment funded by fiscal stimulus programmes towards the goal of building a resilient, sustainable and green recovery. We will make the transition towards clean, innovative and resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure.”

The statement adds that world leaders “reaffirm” commitments to address climate change and to reach a deal at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

Responding to the outcome, Martin Parry, past co-chair of the IPCC’s working group II on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, told Nature, “The statement on climate change looks like an afterthought and appears to restate commitments that have already been made.”

David King, chief scientific advisor to the UK government from 2000 – 2007 and a vocal campaigner on the need to tackle climate change, told Nature that world leaders had “missed an opportunity” to integrate the recovery of the world economy with the future sustainability of the global financial system.

Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, an independent research organisation based in London, UK, told Nature, “There was very little recognition of the real crunch issues of climate and natural resources. It could be really damaging to restart the global economy on the same line as we left it.”

World leaders agreed to a further G20 meeting later this year, to review progress made on goals set at the London summit. Read the full story on Nature News [subscription].

Natasha Gilbert

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 03, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Economics, G20 London Summit, 2009, Natasha Gilbert, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"If wind energy were the one practical and affordable answer to global warming then I would grit my teeth at the loss of the countryside and accept it. But I know that windfarms are no answer to global warming in northern Europe."
James Lovelock's retort to UK environment minister Ed Miliband’s claim that it should be "socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area - like not wearing your seatbelt".

"We are in a dilemma. We want to support Obama - we know he has political difficulties. But we want him to know he has to do more."
A European delegate to the UN climate negotiations in Bonn this week.

"The creation of Arctic forces reflects a normal desire to protect our territory."
Polar scientist Artur Chilingarov on Russian plans for new military units patrolling the country's northenmost reaches - where thawing is sparking disputes over rights to resources.

"Any delay in fighting global warming would be detrimental to our economic stability - costing us billions of dollars and dampening the state's most important economic sectors."
Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, sums up a new report on projected climate change impacts in the state.

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 03, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

This week’s UN hosted climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, are well underway. According to New Scientist this climate summit is “more important than the G20”.

So what’s going on in Bonn?

This meeting is the first of five sessions leading up to what the UN says will be an “ambitious and effective international climate change deal” to be finalised in Copenhagen in December (pdf). The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has already started its ‘countdown to Copenhagen’ timer.

However, as Reuters pointed out on Wednesday, delegates from 175 nations even managed to argue about what they were arguing about. The question is whether they should come up with a ‘treaty’, a ‘protocol’ an ‘agreement’, a ‘deal’, or a ‘decision’ to succeed the Kyoto protocol.

The first two would imply something legally binding, says the news wire, while the last would be non-binding. “It certainly has big legal implications,” Yvo de Boer, head of the UNFCCC, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Whatever the eventual wording is, developing nations think the more developed world should be trying harder. “We believe that by 2020 the [developed nations] should reduce their emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels,” says Chinese delegate Xu Huaqing (Reuters).

Current US plans are much less ambitious than this, points out the BBC, being merely to limit emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

“It is not the point in time in 2020 that matters - it is a long-term trajectory against which the science measures cumulative emissions,” says Jonathan Pershing, head of the US delegation. “The president has also announced his intent to pursue an 80% reduction by 2050.”

Continue reading "What’s going Bonn?" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 03, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Daniel Cressey, Features, GHG emissions, In the News, Mitigation, UN climate talks, Bonn, April 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If we're going to bury carbon dioxide underground to reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, then we need to know it won't shoot out again in a couple of generations time.

Experience from naturally formed underground reservoirs of CO2 shows it's quite possible to keep the gas trapped in bubbles underneath impermeable 'cap' rocks. A study in Nature [subscription] has now sampled a bewildering number of isotopes in nine reservoirs to fill in some more details on exactly where CO2 goes in these sedimentary systems after millions of years.

It turns out, say researchers from Edinburgh and Manchester, in the UK, that much of the CO2 ends up dissolved in water. Only a very small amount - at most, 18 per cent in some areas - gets transformed into minerals such as calcium carbonate.

That doesn't surprise any experts in the field - the limited amount of free calcium cations in these conditions would tend to limit mineralisation. If you read the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's 2007 report on carbon capture, however, you might have thought the potential for mineralisation was somewhat greater.

Although it appears CO2 won't get tied up in minerals much, dissolving it in water is still a good way to trap the gas (which otherwise remains as a buoyant, supercritical fluid phase). In fact, some researchers are actively investigating mixing CO2 ­with water as it's injected, in order to encourage dissolution. The solution created like this is denser than water and should sink downwards.

The slight worry is that injecting a lot of gas into water creates acidic carbonic acid, which could etch out holes in the surrounding rock. And a surge of CO2 might push otherwise stable water into an unexpected flow.

What the paper reinforces is that we really need to know where water might flow in order to decide the long-term fate of carbon dioxide trapped underground. While geologists might be fully aware of this point, will the companies preparing to dump CO2 from their powerplants into the nearest hole also be aware? Only time will tell.

Richard Van Noorden

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 02, 2009
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When Kevin Rudd was elected prime minister of Australia in 2007, hopes were high that climate action might soon follow. And Rudd indeed ratified the Kyoto Protocol his first day in office, which his predecessor John Howard had not done. (See this earlier Nature story for context about the role of climate in that election.)

Things are looking a lot different these days. Australia's nascent stab at creating cap-and-trade legislation to create regulate* greenhouse gases -- introduced as a white paper last December and then as draft legislation last month -- is running into political trouble, as Roberta Kwok reports in this week's issue of Nature. Perhaps not surprisingly, the problem stems in part from struggles among parties; Rudd's Labor party does not have a majority in the Senate and only a slim majority in the House of Representatives, so he needs either opposition Liberals or the Greens on board to make the legislation reality. And that's a long way from happening; the Liberals cite the costs of such restrictions in the economic downturn, while the Greens think its target of 5 to 15% reductions doesn't go far enough.

On the other side of the world, the United States is just starting to embark on its own version of the same political game. On Tuesday, Congressmen Henry Waxman (Democrat, California) and Ed Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts) introduced their first draft of extensive climate and energy legislation -- including an outline of a cap-and-trade system. You can read the bill in all its gloriously gorey detail here.

Alex Witze

*Corrected 2 April 2009.

Posted by Alex Witze on April 01, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest contribution by Bill Hewitt

Yesterday saw the launch of a new climate research center in New York City. The Columbia Climate Center is the offspring of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, itself the brainchild of its founder and director, the influential and prolific economist, Jeffrey Sachs. The CCC has defined an ambitious mission for itself: to integrate the work of various world-class centers and institutes at Columbia, to develop strategies for mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change, and to communicate the science and best policy thinking to the public and decision makers. The affiliates of the CCC include such leaders in climate science as NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), led by Jim Hansen, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO).

Jeffrey Sachs is something of a force of nature. He led the task force that recommended the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and is now President of Millennium Promise. He is ubiquitous in the op-ed pages of publications like the FT and at blogs like the HuffPo. His latest book, among several, is Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

Speaking at the launch yesterday, Sachs said that climate change activists “wouldn’t know what we were doing without the brilliant and painstaking work of scientists.” He noted, for example, the “foresight and prescience” of Wally Broecker, one of the pioneers of climate science and a mainstay at LDEO for nearly 50 years. (Broecker spoke later, recounting six decades of climate research.) Sachs said that scientists have been “not only correct, but correct in their worries” and that, at this point, the “uncertainties of science are only of the depth of the risk” we are facing.

Continue reading "New climate centre launches at Columbia " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 01, 2009
Categories: Bill Hewitt, Conferences and Meetings, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)