Climate Feedback

It’s Tuesday in Lindau and a morning session on renewable energy has just finished. The panel, which featured some serious heavyweights, looked at the role of chemistry in developing renewable energies.

Two challenges exist in deploying renewable technologies on a large scale, said the panelists. Namely, these are storage and transport of energy. “ We cannot create energy. We can only transform the energy coming to earth from the sun. So it’s just a question of how we can transform and store this energy”, said Gerhard Ertl, who won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Robert Grubbs of Caltech, the only organic chemist cum-laureate on the panel, said that materials scientists could play a critical role in solving these problems, such as by designing lightweight, large blades for wind turbines.

There is a huge amount of solar energy available and a smaller amount of wind energy available, said theoretical physicist Walter Kohn, who received the 1998 Prize for his contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. Kohn said that the challenge is turning this vast amount of energy into something usable.

But that something will also have to be safe, suggested Kohn, who expressed particular concern about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. “I’m old enough to have witnessed the affect of nuclear bombs, and I’m a young enough that I can still read the newspapers”, he said, referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. “If this became a major source of replacing fossil fuel, the number of power plants needed would create…a huge probability of leading to a catastrophe”, said Kohn, who worries that “there will a tremendous pressure to go for nuclear” none-the-less.

Laureate Harold Kroto agreed that the pressure to use nuclear energy will be “irresistible” and raised the issue of whether scientists need a new Manhattan project to develop new technologies. Kroto argued that blues skies research will be perhaps more valuable than applied research here, because often the accidental leads to new discoveries.

“Do we need some kind of new chemistry”?, asked Kroto. In developing new technologies “we have a responsibility to society that our discoveries should not be misused”, he added. “This is a worry that many of us have”.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 30, 2009
Categories: Energy, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 2009, Olive Heffernan, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature Geoscience’s latest issue highlights the challenges of understanding fluctuating sea level – from 70 million years ago to the future (sea level content free to registered users). A collection of commentaries and research papers look at how sea level has changed in the past and try to project its future evolution. In addition, the issue provides insights into some of the societal impacts of sea level change, and how some countries are planning for the future.

Continue reading "Focussing on sea level" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on June 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Alicia Newton, Climate prediction | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More than 600 delegates arrived yesterday in the quaint German town of Lindau on Lake Constance for this year’s meeting of Nobel Laureates.

Most of the delegates are students who have been selected by a panel to participate in the event, where they will have a unique opportunity to interact with some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet.

I’m here with a team from Nature, and a film crew, who are making a series of short films on this year’s meeting, which is dedicated to chemistry. A sizeable proportion of the programme is on climate change and sustainability (which is just as well given that I left chemistry behind as a second year undergraduate to pursue earth sciences), so one of our films will focus on those issues, specifically on the role of scientists in informing policy.

After arriving on Saturday we had the tough job of selecting the young researchers who will participate in the films this year. For the film on climate change, that meant choosing just 3 finalists out of the several dozen applicants. It slightly felt like being an 'X factor' judge, but luckily we were all in agreement on the final call.

As well as discussing science itself, many of the young researchers see the Lindau meeting as an opportunity to learn about what it takes to be a great scientist and to discuss the broader role of scientists in society.

In the opening ceremony on Sunday afternoon, Kapil Sibal, Indian Minister for Human Resource Development, who has just been admitted to the Honorary Senate of the Lindau Foundation, said that scientists must stay above politics and not be constrained by history. Science and technology are “value neutral”, but “can used for good or bad”, said Sibal. He urged the next generation of scientists to think carefully about the applications of their work and to whether it can be used for the good of society.

Continue reading "Lindau09: Scientists in society" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 29, 2009
Categories: Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 2009, Olive Heffernan, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over 800 science communicators from around the globe are heading to London's Central Hall this week for the World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be there picking up news and issues on the climate beat, and reporting back via Twitter. Follow me @annabarnett.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 29, 2009
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Since 1951, Nobel laureates have been meeting yearly in Lindau on Lake Constance to pass on their gems of wisdom to the next generation. Young scientists eager to learn from the very best in their field are nominated to come to Lindau and meet the laureates whose work they most admire.

The idea for the Lindau meeting was originally conceived - together with two physicians - by Count Lennart Bernadotte of Wisborg, a member of the Swedish royal family, who had a lifelong interest in science. Wisborg saw the meetings as a “window to the world” for the international scientific elite of present and future generations.

This year’s event, which runs from this Sunday until Friday July 3rd, is dedicated to chemistry, and will be attended by 23 Nobel Laureates and 580 young researchers from 67 countries.

I’ll be traveling there tomorrow with colleagues and a film crew to meet with some of the best world’s best atmospheric chemists. Attending Lindau this year are Mario Molina, Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen, who jointly received the Nobel Prize in 1995 for their work on stratospheric ozone depletion, which led to the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer.

Also on this year’s programme is a panel discussion with Rajendra Pachauri and Thomas Stocker of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN climate body that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

While at Lindau, we’ll be making a short film about the role of climate scientists in speaking on and advising on policy. When Molina and Rowland first published their results on ozone depletion in a 1974 Nature paper, they were conventionally understated in communicating the wider implications. But when the research failed to grab much attention, they went public on their concerns and called for a worldwide ban on CFCs. Their call was successful and ultimately led to the formation of the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty designed to phase out the use of CFCs.

There is perhaps much to be learned from their experience today. Climate scientists are increasingly being asked to communicate the implications of their research to policy makers, and indeed to make their research more policy relevant. Clearly, the solution to climate change will not nearly be as simple as the phasing out of CFCs. But while some climate scientists (and perhaps one in particular) have not held back in speaking their minds openly on policy, many others have. Perhaps this is out of concern that by becoming advocates they would damage their credibility as independent scientists. But with so much at stake, is that position justifiable? I’ll be exploring this question, among others, next week in Lindau.

You can follow the Lindau meeting here on Climate Feedback, where I'll be blogging daily.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 26, 2009
Categories: Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK's Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government's Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The loss of £4.3 million (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. "The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now."

The Met Office is now in negotiations with other goverment departments in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding.

Read the full story over on Nature News.

Olive Heffernan

Image: UK Met Office

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 26, 2009
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate guru and NASA scientist James Hansen has been arrested after taking part in a protest against mountaintop coal mining.

Hansen, along with actress Daryl Hannah and other protesters, apparently planned to deliberately trespass on the property of mining company Massey Energy in the appropriately named Coal River Valley, West Virginia (press release).

However, a counter protest by miners and coal industry supporters forced them to change their plans. Instead, according to the Charleston Gazette, they sat down in the road outside Massey Energy's Goals Coal preparation plant in Raleigh County and were arrested for obstructing the police and impeding traffic.

Some reports say Hansen and other actually did trespass. Another account alleges a coal supporter assaulted members of the Hansen protest group.

Hansen, of course, has a long history of opposing coal power. He even appeared with Hannah before at a climate change protest, where Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson noted “Hansen says he is willing to get arrested”.

Willing and able, it seems.

More
Photos of the protest and arrests – RAN
A Plea To President Obama: End Mountaintop Coal Mining - Hansen on the Enivronment 360 blog

Cross-posted by Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond

Image: Hansen at a previous protest / Jeff Tollefson

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 24, 2009
Categories: Daniel Cressey, In the News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate Feedback has recently become part of the Guardian Environment Network, a website from the Guardian that brings together the world's best websites focusing on green topics. This means that we’re listed with other noteworthy climate blogs on their site and that some of our content will appear on their site from time to time. Needless to say, we’re very pleased to join GEN.

We’ll be moving to a new blogging platform soon, and will have more updates on the blog then. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for additions to our blogroll, please list them in the comments section or email them to us at climatefeedback@nature.com

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 24, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Judging from even a cursory search of forthcoming titles on Amazon.com, it’s going to be quite a year for books on the politics of climate change. Hardly surprising perhaps, given that anyone with even half an opinion would be wise to air their tuppence worth before December.

One book that’s been receiving considerable attention – and praise – is Anthony Giddens’s aptly named The Politics of Climate Change.

A sociologist at the London School of Economics, Giddens is best known as mastermind of New Labour’s 'third-way' politics of the 1990s, in which he tried to move politics beyond the traditional debates of the left and right. In his latest book, he applies the same ‘third way’ rationale to the problem of climate change. Roger Pielke Jr. has reviewed Giddens’s new book for us over on Nature Reports Climate Change. In brief, his assessment is that as a philosophical treatise, The Politics of Climate Change is excellent and in places even brilliant, but that Giddens fails to translate his brilliant philosophies into concrete policy options.

You can read the full review here.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 22, 2009
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Long-awaited projections of how climate change will impact the UK have been met with caution by scientists.

The projections, released yesterday in London, offer the most detailed picture yet of how the UK - piece by piece, in sections just 25 km sq - will be affected by various climate impacts.

Their main message is that without substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time by the 2080s. While the risk of flooding will worsen in the North West, the South East will face an anticipated 22% decline in summer rainfall. If emissions continue to rise, London will likely experience a 2-6°C degree rise in temperature and sea-level rise of 36cm.

The UK government hopes the information will enable citizens and local authorities adapt to the changes that lie ahead, but some fear the projections provide misleading information.

That’s because the method used to produce these highly detailed projections of the future is new – and hasn’t yet been through peer-review. Bob Watson, chief scientist with the UK Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is confident it’s just a matter of time before the methodology is used on a broader scale. He expects it “will be taken up by other regions and highlighted by the IPCC in their next report”.

But while the projections were originally slated for release last November, an independent committee was convened at the eleventh hour to check out the methodology.

Oxford climatologist Myles Allen was on the committee, and he’s concerned that the results stretch the science beyond its current capabilities. His main worry is that as recently as 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t think that climate variables could be reliably resolved at spatial scales beyond a couple of 1000kms. And no research published since has challenged that view.

He spoke to me about this for Nature News, where I’ve covered the story in detail. He also spoke of his concerns on yesterday’s Newsnight, which is definitely worth a look.

Continue reading "Cautious response to UK climate projections " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 19, 2009
Categories: Climate prediction, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A never-before-seen megadrought made an appearance this morning at the last day of the AGU Chapman Conference. Paul Aharon of the University of Alabama says his latest observations are the first to suggest that drought affected the southeastern United States from about 13,000 to 11,800 years ago - during the so-called Younger Dryas cool period.

The evidence comes from the De Soto Caverns in Alabama. This cave has already offered up rich history of a non-palaeoclimatological kind: it holds a Native American burial ground and an abandoned moonshine distillery from the 1930s, when good-timing Alabamans used to shoot down the stalactites.

Continue reading "AGU Chapman Conference: Megadrought in Dixieland" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 19, 2009
Categories: AGU Chapman conference on Abrupt Climate Change, Anna Barnett, Palaeoclimate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the AGU Chapman conference today, Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss took the prize for an abrupt climate change picture worth a thousand words. Excavating an Akkadian palace in Tell Leilan, Syria, in 2006 and 2008, Weiss's team found one room with a grain storage vessel smashed on the floor. Lying next to it were a standard litre measure used for rationing grain, and the tablet on which a bureaucrat had been recording the rationing. The artifacts date from about 2190 B.C., when cities and towns of the Akkadian empire in Mesapotamia were being abandoned en masse as the region suffered crushing drought.

"This site is the Pompeii of ancient Mesapotamia," says Weiss. "They walked away."

Weiss reviewed evidence that a rapid change in storm tracks in the North Atlantic - yet to be satisfactorily explained - dried out the Tigris and Euphrates valley 4,200 years ago. And that valley wasn't alone. Around the same time, deflection of the Indian Monsoon hit the Nile with a drought, and Egypt's Old Kingdom went down. The extreme events are also mirrored in North America from New Jersey to the Yukon. In a separate talk today, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson showed a new ice core data* from Huascarán in Peru, the highest tropical mountain, with a huge spike in dust deposition around this time. The dust probably blew off an aridifying West Africa, Thompson says.

Continue reading "AGU Chapman Conference: "They walked away"" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 18, 2009
Categories: AGU Chapman conference on Abrupt Climate Change, Anna Barnett, Extreme Events, Palaeoclimate, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the Earth has alternated between glacial and inter-glacial periods, the steep climatic ups and downs have gone hand in hand with changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But where was the CO2 going to and coming from? Scientists have pointed to the ocean – currently a vast sponge for the greenhouse gas.

But a talk at the AGU Chapman Conference today by palaeoclimatologist Lowell Stott of the University of Southern California suggests a radically different reservoir: pools of liquid carbon dioxide trapped in seafloor hydrothermal vents.

These pools were spotted in the mid 2000s unleashing bubbles of liquid CO2 from the Okinawa trough in the Pacific Ocean (see the video here).

The CO2 pools form when one oceanic plate buckles under another and carbonates in the sediment break down under the intense heat. Perforations around underwater volcanic vents can allow CO2 droplets to escape and bubble up to the surface, but where the seawater is cold enough it effectively freezes the CO2 into a solid, or hydrate, form that acts as a lid. NOAA has a further explanation and diagram.

Stott points out that the carbon isotope signatures in some mid-latitude ocean sediment don’t tally with the conventional view of carbon entering the ocean system via photosynthesizing algae. The chemistry of the sea-vent carbon is a much better match, he argues. What's more, unpublished work by Stott and colleagues shows that past changes in deep sea temperatures around the vents would have been sufficient to destabilize hydrate caps and thus modulate the vents' release of CO2 in time with the rising and falling atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Continue reading "AGU Chapman: Could seafloor vents control atmospheric CO2?" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 17, 2009
Categories: AGU Chapman conference on Abrupt Climate Change, Anna Barnett, Ocean science, Palaeoclimate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the United Nations' global warming talks wound down last week, the tone among those who track such things seemed to alternate between optimism and pessimism, frustration and pragmatic resignation.

Not much got done, but nobody really expected anything important to happen. The negotiating text ballooned as parties sought to insert and clarify countless disagreements and positions, but that's the way it always works. Nobody gave an inch on their negotiating positions, but what kind of self-respecting negotiator would reveal the bottom line at this stage in the game?

As is often the case, the biggest deals are likely to be struck at the last minute. Many of the decisions that need to be made involve money and other commitments that only the top dogs can make, and neither the money masters nor the top dogs are in the room with the environmental ministries at this stage. In the case of the United States and China, as we discuss in our story this week, even the top climate officials elected to forgo Bonn in favor of bilateral talks in Beijing.

All of which makes assessing progress quite difficult. Indeed, UN Climate Chief Yvo de Boer held one closing press conference, but reports labeled him alternately confident and doubtful regarding the prospects for striking a deal in Copenhagen come December.

As it happens, both stories say roughly the same thing: de Boer is confident that some kind of agreement will be reached, but doubtful that parties will be able to simply wash their hands, head home and forget about the process afterward. This is pretty much conventional wisdom at this point, particularly in the United States, where the Obama administration is working to put together a domestic policy in order to clarify what it might be able to commit to internationally.

Most observers still believe it's highly unlikely that the United States will be in a position to fully commit itself to a deal in December, but then again, most observers also expected climate legislation to quietly slide off the congressional agenda this year. The opposite has happened: The House of Representatives could vote on climate regulations in the next couple of weeks, and now some are suggesting that the Senate could begin to move a bill next month.

To be clear, getting a bill to the president's desk before Copenhagen would still require Herculean effort, but it increasingly appears that Democrats and the administration intend to try. And if they succeed, the conventional wisdom regarding prospects in Copenhagen might need a few revisions.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 17, 2009
Categories: Jeff Tollefson | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

A gargantuan plan of supplying European consumers with electricity generated in the Saharan desert could see the light of day earlier than even the most optimistic solar energy aficionados had expected.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a group of 20 large German companies, led by the reinsurance giant Munich Re, and also including Siemens, Deutsche Bank and RWE, is determined to go ahead with an €400 billion project known as Desertec. If fully realized, the envisaged network of huge solar thermal power plants across North Africa could provide up to 15 % of Europe’s overall electricity needs by mid-century.

Next month already, the group plans to create a consortium that is to look in more detail into the technical and financial feasibility of the envisaged project. Developing concrete plans could take two to three years, Torsten Jeworek, a Munich Re board member, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Continue reading "Europe looks to draw power from the Sahara" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on June 17, 2009
Categories: Categories, Business, Energy, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's theme at the AGU Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change is that big baddie of climatic tipping points, the shutdown (and rebooting) of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Could this massive system go down again? Tom Delworth of NOAA took on that question and offered up some interesting new modelling evidence.

When running strong, AMOC carries heat from the Southern Hemisphere northward. It's thought that some of the past coolings under scrutiny here stem from slowing or stopping of this conveyor belt. AMOC's future change in response to greenhouse gas increases was recently considered in an assessment report on abrupt change by the US Climate Change Science Program, which Delworth helped author.

While some state-of-the-art models suggest the circulation could slow this century - a 25-30% decrease is the report's best estimate - not a single one forecasts another shutdown in that time. That led the US panel to evaluate AMOC shutdown as "very unlikely", in the parlance of the IPCC - meaning a less than 10% probability. The lack of support from models meant they couldn't set the likelihood any higher, says Delworth - but on the other hand, the possibility of flawed simulations kept them from setting it lower, at "extremely unlikely". But Delworth's new work validates the model results.

Continue reading "AGU Chapman: Meridional madness" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 16, 2009
Categories: AGU Chapman conference on Abrupt Climate Change, Anna Barnett, Climate prediction, Extreme Events, Palaeoclimate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The American astronomer Jack Eddy, famed for his studies on the connections between solar activity and terrestrial climate, died last Wednesday in Tucson, Arizona.

Born John Allen Eddy in 1931 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, Eddy was in 1949 appointed to the US Naval Academy where he crawled out on the roof one night to look at the stars. After graduation, he served for four years in the Korean War. In 1957 he became the first student in the astro-geophysics graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After a period of teaching he joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). When laid off from NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory in 1973 he was hired by NASA.

In a famous study published in 1976 in Science, Eddy demonstrated a link between unusually low solar activity and the coldest period of the so-called little ice age.

Continue reading 'Sunspot veteran dies at 78' on Nature's The Great Beyond blog

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 15, 2009
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A scant 21,000 years ago, Columbus, Ohio, was blanketed by the Laurentide ice sheet. Today it is home to the Byrd Polar Research Centre at Ohio State University, where this morning I sat in a glacially air-conditioned lecture hall watching an animation of that sheet flickering rapidly back and forth across Columbus and the rest of the northern parts of the continent. Such strobe-light climate change from the Earth's past is the focus of the AGU Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change, being held here this week.

Though it's a fairly small gathering of 150 experts, it doesn't have the annual reunion feeling of some meetings; many of the people here seem never to have met before. We've got palaeoscientists of various persuasions: they reconstruct climatic history via models, ice, sediment, or - as geochemist Henry Pollack described his work on borehole temperature records to me over hors d'oerves - by "taking the Earth's temperature through its rectum". (Jokes about giant thermometers ensued.)

The common thread is figuring out what caused abrupt changes in the past - and what that implies about the prospects for their return. Says Richard Alley, a Penn State glaciologist and IPCC author, "The IPCC reports are the most optimistic thing we can put forward, because the projections are smooth. If you look at any palaeo record, there are bumps. This meeting is all about the bumps."

One innovative study on show today applied the models behind those smooth future projections to the bumpy past record. Bette Otto-Bliesner of NCAR says her group's research is the first to feed palaeo data into an IPCC-style coupled global climate model and run it continuously for several thousand years during the last deglaciation - rather than just taking snapshots in time, as was done previously. Having given the model instructions about what the greenhouse gas levels, sea ice extent, and meltwater flows should be, they found that it beautifully reproduced the bumpy North Atlantic temperature record.

Continue reading "AGU Chapman: It's all about the bumps" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 15, 2009
Categories: AGU Chapman conference on Abrupt Climate Change, Anna Barnett, Climate prediction, Palaeoclimate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate change and other environmental problems worldwide are driving migrants from their homelands - but not necessarily onto European and North American shores, as is commonly assumed. The first worldwide survey of climate refugees suggests that most of the displaced won’t make it further than nearby villages or neighbouring countries. The new findings went into a report released yesterday at UN climate negotiations in Bonn - I've covered them in a news feature here.

"There's been a bit of political rhetoric saying we're going to have waves of migrants at our doorsteps, rushing into Europe and North America," says Koko Warner of UN University, the report's lead author. Concerns about these huddled masses came up in a Commentary Warner co-authored in Nature Reports Climate Change last year.

In April, she and a team of collaborators from across Europe wrapped up two years of research, which involved interviewing migrants on five continents for the European Commission’s EACH-FOR programme. "What we found is that the people whose livelihoods are most sensitive to the environment also tend to be the ones who may not have the means to move very far," Warner says.

Instead, says the report, they could be stuck in destinations that are “as precarious as the places they left behind.”

Continue reading "Report disperses migration myth" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 11, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Formerly a taboo topic among conservationists, ‘assisted migration’ or ‘managed relocation’ – literally moving sensitive species to new habitats in order to save them - has recently started to come in for serious consideration. A paper out in PNAS this week offers a quick and innovative way to evaluate candidate species with new visual tools.

Some of the paper’s authors, including Stephen Schneider of Stanford, California and Jessica Hellman of Notre Dame, Indiana were part of a meeting last year on how to make such decisions, which we covered in a news feature at Nature Reports Climate Change.

The authors analyze the possibilities for three candidate species:

Image courtesy of PNAS.

Continue reading "Visualizing the assisted migration argument" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 10, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Biodiversity and Ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

International organizations are calling for fisheries to be included in a new global deal on climate change.

Earlier this week, a consortium of 16 organizations including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank and the WorldFish Center issued a policy brief to delegates meeting in Bonn from June 1-12 for the latest round of UN climate talks.

Their key message was outlined in a Commentary by two of the authors of the brief published May 28 on Nature Reports Climate Change. Nick Dulvy, Canadian Research Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and Eddie Allison, director of the WorldFish Center in Penang, Malaysia, argue that climate impacts represent a serious threat to those who depend on fisheries and aquaculture resources both for protein and as a source of income.

While agriculture and freshwater resources have featured prominently in climate policy discussions, the future of fisheries resources has been largely ignored, write Dulvy and Allison. Yet, one third of the world's 6 billion people rely on fish and other aquatic products for at least one-fifth of their annual protein intake, and more than 36 million people worldwide are employed in the fisheries and aquaculture sector.

And with little ability to diversify to other modes of employment or to adapt to change, those in the developing world will be hardest hit as fish migration routes and spawning and feeding grounds change from those that fishers have learnt to harvest. Fishing communities will also suffer indirectly as extreme events such as floods and hurricanes become more frequent.

Continue reading "A place at the table? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 04, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, UN climate talks, Bonn, June 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Although billions of dollars have been set aside for climate change projects to benefit developing countries, they have "not taken off in Africa in any significant way", says Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and also the least likely to be able to afford the costs of adapting to it.

Out of the 1643 “clean development” projects registered with the UNFCCC, only 30 (less than 2 percent) are within Africa. In comparison, 72 percent of projects are in Asia and the Pacific and 26 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 80 percent of the projects in Africa are in Northern Africa and South Africa. The needs of African nations are often side-stepped in international negotiations because their voices are drowned out by the developing nation powerhouses: China, India and Brazil.

The only way African nations can get their voice heard is by working together. But that’s not easy. Africa is politically, economically, environmentally and culturally very diverse. The biggest division is probably South Africa, which is basically a developed nation in a developing continent. But the Arab countries in northern Africa also tend to align themselves with the Middle East; Oil-rich countries, such as Nigeria and Angola, are part of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and share their interests; and Sub-Saharan Africa is further divided into English-, French- and Portuguese-language regions.

To improve Africa’s climate game-plan, more than 300 negotiators, ministers, experts and organizations related to Africa converged in Nairobi last week at the third African Ministerial Conference on the Environment. On 29 May, ministers announced they had forged a “shared vision,” asking industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and for more financial and technical support to help Africa cope with climate change. Beyond that, the 'Nairobi Declaration' contains few specifics.

And it's unclear whether the vague political statement will give Africa a stronger voice this week in Bonn, or during the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December this year. "It was difficult to agree on how much to ask for," says Sputnik Ratau, a spokesman for Buyelwa Sonjica, South Africa's minister of water and the environment, who chaired the ministerial meetings. "Different countries have different needs."

"Saying Africa is vulnerable and needs a lot of money is easy," adds Saleemul Huq, who works with developing-country negotiators through the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. "But coming up with more nuanced negotiating texts is not that easy."

A longer version of this story is available to subscribers on Nature News.

Anjali Nayar is an intern reporter on Nature News.

Image: Punchstock/Digital Vision

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 04, 2009
Categories: Anjali Nayar, Climate Policy, In the News, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest round of UN talks on climate change kicked off Monday in Bonn, where delegates will spend the next two weeks pouring over a draft negotiating text that contains various proposals for a new global climate deal.

The 53-page document has been “basically welcomed as a good starting point for the negotiations”, and delegates are thus far infused with cautious optimism that the process could pick up speed now the US is playing a proactive role under Obama’s leadership.

But on one of the key issues – how much industrialized nations should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the short-term – nations remain at an impasse. To agree a global deal in Copenhagen in December, it must be clear what reductions industrialised nations are aiming for by 2020, says UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, who is leading the negotiations.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), developed countries would need to slash their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 to constrain global warming to 2ºC. If temperatures rise more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, dangerous climate impacts are highly probable.

Speaking in London last week, leading scientists – including 20 Nobel prize winners – reiterated that message, adding that to get on the right pathway, global greenhouse gas emissions must also peak by 2015 at the latest.

With the exception of Japan, whose position is expected in the coming weeks, almost all industrialized nations have now roughly stated where they stand on reducing their emissions by 2020. Germany has pledged reductions of 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and the European Union as a whole will decrease its emissions by 30% of 1990 levels by 2020 if other nations agree to binding targets.

But the current level of US commitment falls far short of the near-term targets needed by developed nations. Under proposed legislation, the US will decrease its emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, which is equivalent to bringing them back down to 1990 levels by 2020. In the meantime, emerging economies such as India and China are calling for all rich countries to sign up to the same level of commitment as Germany.

Speaking at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureates Symposium in London last week, US energy secretary and Nobel laureate Steven Chu implied that the US may, however, go further in its commitment to tackle climate change in Copenhagen. “I hope we can deliver more than we've promised," said Chu. "I have always liked to over-deliver on promises."

Whether emerging economies – especially China, now the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – should also take on targets is another bone of contention. I asked Chu in London last week about the need for China to commit to specific targets. He said that "to declare Copenhagen a failure if countries don't sign to binding targets is not helpful at all. The success of Copenhagen will be determined by what countries do after."

But according to Alistair Doyle reporting for Reuters, Washington clearly wants to see a greater effort overall from China. In a defensive response, China’s climate ambassador has said that rich nations should focus on keeping pledges to curb greenhouse gases rather than place new demands on the poor.

Collectively, the proposals currently on the table for emissions reductions just don’t amount to the required reductions, as Peter Spotts of the Christian Science Monitor points out. With just six weeks of full time negotiations left, something needs to give if an effective global deal based on targets is to be agreed in Copenhagen.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 03, 2009
Categories: Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN climate talks, Bonn, June 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Commercial ships steaming through international waters are pumping out increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that are out of the reach of the Kyoto Protocol and national regulatory schemes. A new report from the UK parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee warns it could take years to bring these emissions under control.

The UN’s International Maritime Organisation - tasked under Kyoto with figuring out how to regulate emissions from shipping - has failed to move fast enough, says the report. An IMO meeting on the issue held in October 2008 did not get as far as formulating a proposal that could be part of the negotiating text for a new global climate deal, now under discussion in Bonn.

Not that it’s a simple problem to solve. To deal with gases released on international routes, either various countries must divide responsibility, or else the gases have to go into a separate “international” basket that’s regulated on its own somehow. Both are thorny approaches. Nevertheless, says the committee:

There can be no excuse for the lack of progress within the International Maritime Organisation since the Kyoto protocol was signed. That the IMO has yet to reach agreement even over the type of emissions control regime to take forward, let alone decide any details, suggests it is not fit for purpose in this vital area.

Continue reading "Shipping emissions up in the air" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 02, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, Climate Policy, In the News, Mitigation, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Nature's The Great Beyond blog.

The Global Humanitarian Forum certainly attracted some publicity last week when it published a report suggesting that global warming kills 315,000 people each year and seriously harms another 300,000. Total price tag: $125 billion annually.

Such numbers are as appealing to journalists as they are to those who put them out, precisely because they are easy to understand and explain. They should also raise alarms, and for the very same reasons. It's not that anybody really doubts that global warming is impacting ecosystems and communities and thus affecting lives, but these are complex issues that resist quick attempts at quantification.

The New York Times published a quick story about the report while raising some basic questions about the estimations. The story quotes Roger Pielke Jr., who has been researching these issues for years, calling the report a "methodological embarrassment" that simply glosses over socioeconomic factors (like people moving into hurricane-prone coasts). For an in-depth discussion, check Pielke's blog.

Although the GHF didn't shy away from using the eye-catching estimates, the authors do explain their calculations in the report. Among other things, they cite data from Munich Re estimating that 40 percent of the increase in weather-related disasters from 1980 to present is due to climate change. As it happens, Pielke says Munich Re itself has come to the opposite conclusion when it comes to assessing the data and assigning blame.

Pielke's message appears to be getting out there. Reuters followed up its initial story with a second, more thematic piece raising various questions about this kind of research.

Jeff Tollefson

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 02, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Jeff Tollefson | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)