Climate Feedback
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
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
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
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.”
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 " »
In the latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, economists Nicholas Stern and Michael Grubb, along with European Commissioner Janez Potočnik, share their views on whether governments will agree a global climate deal at the UN climate change conference in December in Copenhagen. Check out the interactive video available here or read the transcript.
I took part in a session today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the role of the media in communicating climate change. Organised by Max Boykoff at the University of Oxford, the session brought together a diverse panel of journalists and academics who study media trends.
The backdrop to this session was quite interesting. Throughout the 3-day conference, there was a palpable sense of frustration among the scientific community that the media simply hasn’t done an adequate job in reporting climate change, and that it may be partly to blame for lack of public understanding and for inaction of the part of policymakers. This theme emerged in many of the talks on the first day alone.
There were many highlights from today’s session, but I’ll just mention a few. William Freudenberg of UC Santa Barbara said that climate scientists on the whole are being too optimistic about the prognosis for global warming and called for a new era of media coverage to highlight the conflict within the scientific community between what is ‘consensus’ and the reality of a more serious situation.
Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego, famous for her 2004 Science paper on the scientific consensus, said that the scientists needs to rethink their strategy on communicating climate change and asked whether they should collaborate with PR agencies to get their message across (she wasn’t advocating this, but asked whether this or other strategies could be employed to inform discussions on science more effectively).
James Kanter of the International Herald Tribune spoke of the role of the media as watchdog and pointed to a feature he investigated over five months last year on how electricity companies are making billions in windfall profits from the European ETS. RWE, a major German power company, and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe, received an estimated windfall of roughly €5 billion in the first three years of the system, more than any other company in Europe. The feature, which made the front page of the IHT in December, provoked a response from REW, which acknowledged the profits it had made (although said they wouldn’t be pocketed) and could serve as a warning to other cap-and-trade schemes under consideration.
My talk looked at the issue of whether a topic of socially and scientifically complex as climate change can be communicated effectively on blogs. The answer to this, in my view, is an unequivocal yes, for the following reasons. Back in August, Nature hosted the first international science blogging conference, where it was evident that bloggers are increasingly taking on the role of journalists in breaking news and providing genuine investigative reporting. That’s likely to become an emerging trend in the current economic climate, where traditional media outlets (think CNN) are seeing cutbacks in science reporting. Perhaps more importantly, as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate previously pointed out, blogs can provide context to news and explain the significance of new research in a level of detail that can never by achieved by newspapers, which have a limited number of column inches dedicated to science.
Unlike many bloggers, journalists who blog have access to embargoed information, which means they can cover science stories as soon as they break, reaching a wide audience effectively and rapidly. But blogs can also provide a forum for scientists to engage more directly with society. While some argue that scientists (and indeed science journals such as Nature) should channel all discussion of research through formal routes such as ‘letters to the editor’, this will only ever reach a limited number of well-informed readers.
To communicate science to a wider audience, a faster and more accessible route is necessary.
A sobering presentation by Marshall Burke of Stanford on future agriculture. He and colleagues looked at historical climate and yield data for various crops in various parts of the world and projected the relationship they found into various future climates as found in the IPCC. As the IPCC itself reported, much of the tropics did badly in this analysis, and the worst performer was maize in southern Africa which was down in yield by about 30% by 2030.
More granular data run out to 2050 showed similar or worse trends, and the rest of Africa did pretty badly too. So did other crops in the same countries, such as millet and sorghum, though as Andy Jarvis of Biodiversity International pointed out from the floor, this may be somewhat worst case. You don't just go on growing the same thing as the situation gets worse and worse. As climates change so will the crops farmers grow, which should help a bit.
While the IPCC has already predicted that tropical agriculture will have its productivity hit by any climate change, it said it expected that in temperate zones modest warming might help productivity. In at least one case Burke went into -- maize in the US -- there are studies suggesting things start going wrong much sooner than that, with yield losses of 30% or so by 2030. Modest rises have been seen: sharp downturns are to come. Burke says that an economic model fed with these and other gloomier-than-common yield assumptions suggests that prices are set to rise more steeply than the IPCC has foreseen: a 1ºC rise in temperature looks like a 25% increase in prices, hurting some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers.
As Burke pointed out, we care about these food security issues because we care about people. A World Bank study suggests that the food crisis of 2007-2008 pushed 100m people into poverty. Reduced yields are normally bad for poor farmers, for whom consequent price increases rarely make up for lost production. They are also bad for the urban poor, who just see the price increases. That 25% increase in prices will some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers. And on current trends that's just the beginning.
I had a look this morning at a breakdown of the press registration at this conference by country. Clear winners are Denmark and the UK, with 40 or so people each. Both of those are inflated figures, because some third-country and international organisations are covering the meeting out of Copenhagen and London (Japanese TV stations are listed as UK, for example, as is Al Jazeera English). But still there is a lot of genuine UK interest: national papers and the BBC. And the locals are out in force.
US representation, on the other hand, seems distinctly on the modest side. As far as I can see from the press room and by searching the papers' web sites there's no-one here from national papers (the Paris-based International Herald Tribune is a sort-of-exception) and not much broadcast. Time is listed as a media partner, but I haven't seen Bryan Walsh here. The rest of the world is represented at a pretty low level, but still here -- I was struck by a biggish contingent from Bangladesh.
Does it matter? Hard to say. The conference is hitting headlines, there are a lot of journalists for specialised outlets here, and the press room people say they are very happy with the level of coverage: Stefan Rahmstorf's sea-level talk on Tuesday, which I didn't see but which people here are talking about a lot, is getting a lot of pick up, to judge by Google News. But in the plenaries this morning John Schellnhuber and Nick Stern were reminding the thousand or so people in the room that this is one of the biggest stories in the world, and they were doing so pretty effectively. And part of the point of this meeting, as I understand it, is to take that same sort of approach and use it to set a scientific stage for the COP 15 "son of Kyoto" meeting, which will take place in the same large shed-like structure this December. By that standard, the coverage that I have seen (and I've been busy, to be fair, just talking to people at sessions, and may have missed lots of good stuff) seems a little thin.
It appears that the action on Wednesday afternoon was where I was not: in the session on tipping points. Chris Jones of the Met Office's Hadley Centre presented some studies of the Amazon (abstract in pdf) that have caused a big media stir. The studies suggest that a) there is a threshold level of warming beyond which much of the Amazon forest is committed to die back (probably being replaced by savanna) and b) that for significant parts of the forest that threshold is alarmingly low. Indeed it is quite possibly either unavoidable in the near future or already dwindling in the rear-view mirror. As I understand it from people who saw the presentation, models in which all the warming already in the pipeline (ie with no further emissions) is realised leave the forests pretty much committed to some dieback, and modest further warming seals the deal. I wasn't able to check that with Jones himself, but it seems to fit with what he and his colleagues write:
We present results to show a possible climate threshold beyond which some dieback is committed and this commitment rises dramatically for global temperature rise above 2 degrees C, a threshold often used by policy makers in their definition of dangerous climate change. Any subsequent recovery is on such a long timescale as to make the dieback effectively irreversible on any pragmatic level.
I'll see if I can find Chris Jones, or some Brazilians, or both to talk about this with on Thursday.
Cross-posted from Heliophage
For those not eager to trawl through the aforementioned geoengineering tweetstream here's the most interesting thing I took from the geoengineering session -- a point on which, interestingly, David Keith and Ken Caldeira, who are keen to see and do more research on the topic, are close to agreeing with David Santillo of Greenpeace, who isn't.
The problem is in some ways pretty obvious: No one knows whether geoengineering can really be made to work. As Keith pointed out, even for the best characterised putative intervention -- a stratospheric aerosol like those produced by volcanoes -- the comparatively cursory research to date has turned up a wealth of complexities that have not yet been addressed by proponents, and more research will turn up even more of them. To Keith and Caldeira, this raises a nightmare scenario: that the world will have in the back of its mind that geoengineering is there as a fallback, will find that it needs a fallback, and will then find out that the fallback is not there in any practical sense. On this basis the sooner it is clear that there is no way out the better: time to do some serious research.
That is similar to Santillo's position, except he doesn't want to do the research needed to find out for sure. I took it from his talk that he wants instead to create a climate of opinion where the nagging hope that geoengineering might save us was firmly shut down more or less a priori, with commitment to emission cuts the sole and reaffirmed goal of all.
In making this argument, he came up with a nice pithy account of what he sees as the 5 drivers for geoengineering research: desperation, aspiration, fascination, delegation, remuneration. The first two he sees as essentially reasonable, the third -- "it is just such fun to play with these ideas!" -- troubling, the fourth -- "O good, someone else can solve the climate I don't have to" -- dangerous and morally defective (my term not his), and the fifth beyond the pale. (Actually in the presentation he didn't call the fifth driver "remuneration" he just called it "money" -- but he told me later he'd thought about listing it as remuneration, and I think it's slicker that way...)
What all these people agree on is that the lopsided way in which geoengineering is discussed, with a level of prominence in the media (and the unpublished musings of researchers, in my experience) and the imagination disproportionate to the actual level of knowledge among experts, needs to be seen as a real problem. Geoengineering is widely enough discussed that the thought it might be there as a last resort is widespread and quite possibly spreading wider, even though it still may be an illusion. Keith laid out the argument for reducing this disproportionality in a more formal way, looking at scenarios comparing the value of "Early Learning" v. late learning. I didn't note down all the details, but Early Learning seemed, by the economic metric he was using, to be a big, big winner.
PS: Those interested in the twittering per se may possibly want to check out this further post at Heliophage
There's a technical session on geoengineering at the meeting today, and I thought I'd try twittering from it. Since this is a personal experiment and may not pan out, I'll be using my personal twitterfeed, http://twitter.com/eaterofsun, not the naturenews feed.
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will head up a new climate and energy research institute at Yale University from this Fall.
The announcement was made by Yale University President Richard C Levin today at the plenary session of the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.
Pachauri will serve at the Yale Institute on a part time basis and will retain his current positions as IPCC chair and director-general of India’s Energy and Resources Institute, TERI.
Further details of the centre are available over on Economic Times.
Olive Heffernan
Over 2000 delegates from 80 nations have gathered this week in Copenhagen to update the global assessment of climate change, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of them.
Over the next few days, the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change will hear from world experts including climatologists, social scientists and economists on how the prognosis for global warming, and its physical and societal impacts, has changed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its last report in 2007. The science in the 2007 report is now effectively 4-5 years out of date, so it’s clearly time for an update, which is why experts are here this week.
The updated assessment will be in the format of a 30-page synthesis document, to be published in June.
It will be peer-reviewed but not IPCC-style; that's because the ultimate aim of the congress is to deliver a hard-hitting message on the urgency of climate change to policymakers and the media ahead of the UN Conference in December, where delegates will again converge on Copenhagen, this time to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
Among the speakers who kicked off proceedings this morning was congress chair and marine scientist Katherine Richardson, who spoke to me ahead of time about why the congress is taking place and what it hopes to deliver. Read the full interview here.
I’ll be speaking in a session on Thursday on communicating climate change (and particularly on the role of blogs) and both I and my estimable colleague, Oliver Morton, will be blogging over the next few days on anything that especially surprises or interests us. For the full programme, see here.
Olive Heffernan
At a conference this week, marine scientist Andrew Lenton of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie presented a new model that sketches out a beautiful causal chain: from the ozone hole over Antarctica, to rising southern winds, to stronger Southern Ocean currents, to more deep-sea stored carbon arriving at the sea surface.
The simulation, which Lenton reported at a meeting of the CARBOOCEAN research consortium in Dourdan, France, is the first coupled carbon-climate model to account for what biogeochemists have recently seen in the Antarctic waters. As I noted last month, observations (Science, subscription required) suggest the Southern Ocean's considerable carbon dioxide sink isn't soaking up as much of the gas as climate modellers expected, perhaps because there's already too much dissolved in surface waters. That means more climate-warming carbon accumulates in the atmosphere.
By bringing in stratospheric ozone damage, which earlier studies had excluded, the model of Lenton and his colleagues manages to reproduce the recent disappointing sink - a step toward resetting future projections.
I reported this story for Nature News this week, and it posed two problems. One, I didn't get to go to France - I heard it all here at my desk. Two, an issue flagged up in my earlier post also dogs Lenton's research. One of the links in the chain - between speedy winds and more powerful Southern Ocean circulation - isn't supported by oceanographic data (Nature Geoscience, subscription required).
The latest round of UN climate talks kicked off in Poznan, Poland yesterday. Jeff Tollefson has a nice round-up over on The Great Beyond of how the first day of the conference went down - unsurprisingly, with world leaders calling for immediate action. [Update: All Poznan-related posts from Jeff T, who will be at the talks next week, can be found here].
As I mentioned here last week, it’s generally accepted that the current negotiations will not address the really crucial issues of a post-Kyoto climate deal, namely how far to reduce emissions and how to do so equitably. So much as for fighting the urge to postpone everything until Copenhagen.
But what can be expected to emerge from Poznan is greater clarity on how various players will position themselves for next year's endgame, a point that I elaborate on in my latest editorial on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Next Wednesday, Nature is co-hosting a conference with Imperial College London on the Elucian Islands archipelago in Second Life on carbon capture and storage. Details here. Attendance is free – you’ll just have to direct your avatar accordingly….
Twenty-five Nobel laureates convened early this month on the island of Lindau, Germany, to meet with 567 talented young physicists from universities and laboratories around the world. After several lectures on Bose-Einstein condensates, high-energy particle physics, and carbon nanotubes, as well as presentations on biophysics from the winners of the 1988 Nobel prize in chemistry, seven laureates got on stage for a panel discussion of climate change and energy challenges.
Though they were all admittedly speaking beyond their fields of expertise, the scientists offered unfiltered political and social advice.
With an uninterrupted 17-million year sediment record of Antarctic’s climatic past now available, scientists are hoping for unique new insights into the continent’s climatic past.
A few initial results of the Antarctic Geological Drilling programme (ANDRILL) were announced last week at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. There is an online news story here.
Antarctica’s ice sheets, so it seems, respond more sensitively to climate fluctuations than has been assumed. During warmer periods, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its floating extension, the western Ross Ice Shelf, have shrunk substantially. Some 3.5 million years ago the ice seems to have disappeared completely for around 200,000 years. There were snow-capped mountains, alpine trees, gushing rivers, quiet lakes – the frozen continent was a place where you would love to go fishing or hiking, were it not for the midges.
The world was warmer then than it is today, but not substantially so. If temperatures continue to rise, glaciers in Antarctic’s warmer western part might begin to retreat again before long. A few million years ago, Antarctic melting probably raised sea levels globally by 10 metres or so. If history repeats itself, we’re headed for trouble.
Quirin Schiermeier
If there was an eye in the sky keeping watch on our greenhouse gas emissions, what carbon crimes would it reveal?
The ability to measure greenhouse gases from space, soon to become a reality, could answer this question.
Currently, it’s virtually impossible to identify the exact source – and destination - of greenhouse gases, a prominent theme at this year’s European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna.
But, according to scientists speaking today at the conference, this is all set to change within the coming year when two major satellites designed to monitor greenhouse gases will be launched into space.
Due to leave Earth on December 15, the first of these is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a US$300 million-or-so innovation of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The Japanese version, known as the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, has an anticipated launch date in January or February 2009.
For a detailed low-down on the satellites and how they will work, see Amanda Haag’s news feature in Nature (subscription) last December. Since then, the scientists have mostly been testing and calibrating the instruments to make sure they work once they’re orbiting the Earth.
Within a year or two, if not sooner, they will enable scientists to identify major sources and sinks or carbon, says Charles Miller, one of the Principal Co-ordinators of the OCO mission. The greenhouse gas measurements taken by the instrument, which will orbit the planet 14.5 times per day, will be three times more precise than any trace gas measurements ever taken from space.
All-in-all, the missions represent an unprecedented effort to collect global climate data from space. While this is fascinating from a scientific perspective, it should also have some interesting political implications by enabling the easy identification of climate culprits.
“If one were to imagine a way to monitor or verify [emissions], then this would be the way to go”, says Miller. For instance, it should quash (or raise, depending on who you’re talking to) fears that nations claiming credits for avoiding deforestation under the Kyoto Protocol will be able to divert the problem elsewhere.
Miller says they often joke that the instrument could detect the greenhouse gas emissions of serious carbon heaveyweights from space. But while the new satellites won’t realistically help reporting on individual carbon crimes, it could act as a ‘big brother’ to keep countries in line with their Kyoto commitments. Personally, I’m curious to know the OCO’s own carbon footprint!
That’s all from me from this year’s European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna. Over and out….
Olive Heffernan
The North Atlantic Ocean may still be an active storehouse for atmospheric carbon dioxide, said scientists at the European Geosciences Union here in Vienna yesterday.
Following evidence published last year showing that both the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic Ocean have weakened as carbon sinks in the past two decades, the new results suggest that the trend has recently reversed in the North Atlantic.
Scientists have feared that the weakening trend could be a long-term impact of global warming and that it could be typical of the ocean as a whole, which absorbs an estimated 25 per cent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions yearly. If the ocean switches from a storehouse to a source of the greenhouse gas, this would jeopardise efforts to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.
Speaking at a press conference at the EGU assembly yesterday, Ute Schuster from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK and Christoph Heinze at the University of Bergen, Norway, presented the results of a yearly analysis of carbon dioxide fluxes across the North Atlantic Ocean.
Previously, Schuster and colleagues showed that carbon uptake by the North Atlantic had halved between the mid-1990s and the early 21st century. But further analysis of the data on a year-by-year basis has shown that the uptake of carbon dioxide in the region has been increasing since 2002 and showed an even greater increase, relative to the early 2000s, in 2005.
The researchers caution that the results are preliminary and are not yet published. The coverage was poor in 2006 and they have not yet finished the analyses for 2007, but they say that the results so far indicate that the trend in weakening of the North Atlantic carbon sink is not linear.
The reasons for this variation are unclear. “I personally think we can’t say with confidence that the trend [in weakening sinks] is attributable to [anthropogenic] climate change”, says Schuster. Surface circulation in the North Atlantic has changed in recent years, she says, but these changes could be due to natural climate variability. Specifically, the North Atlantic Oscillation, a large-scale atmospheric pattern that has important impacts on European climate, could be influencing the rate of carbon dioxide uptake.
Continue reading "EGU: North Atlantic Ocean may regain status as carbon sink" »
In Bangkok last week, the first UN climate meeting since Bali wrapped up after struggling til after midnight Friday - not to hammer out emissions targets or controversial new approaches to climate change mitigation, but just to agree on how long to wait before restarting discussions of such matters.
Planned from the start as a meeting to decide what would be decided at future meetings, it was never expected to yield any big breakthroughs. But the hard slog required even to set the work schedule for the next two years worried NGO observers.
“The talks managed to keep the momentum going … but it’s hard to leave Bangkok confident that the deadline can be met,” said Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies at the Pew Center on Climate Change. Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace Brazil agreed, "If we took all these hours to agree on a workplan, one can only imagine what will happen when the real negotiations take place."
Why so slow? For one thing, the G77 group of developing nations finally dug in their heels against Japan's week-long steady pressure to plan greenhouse gas limits for particular global industrial sectors, in addition to Kyoto-style national targets. Sectoral approaches - heralded recently in Nature Reports Climate Change via this commentary by Glen Peters and Edgar Hertwich and this book review by Gwyn Prins - have the advantage of directly pushing the dirtiest industries to clean up, without leaving less carbon-stringent havens overseas for them to be pushed into. They also distribute mitigation responsibilities to the developing as well as the developed world, something which the US has previously insisted on but which developing countries have warned they cannot afford without more help from the rich North.
An attempt Thursday to summarize the first few days of talks noted emerging views that sectoral approaches could be used to support national targets, though they should not replace them. Made sense to me: sectoral limits could make deep emissions cuts less painful, while national emissions targets maintain a bottom line necessary for keeping the temperature down. But according to ENB, the summary raised a concerned buzz among delegates. That's generally how things were going, though: the day before, ENB had reported that "Some delegates realized that they didn't have a shared vision on a workshop on shared vision."
By Friday, Japan met surprisingly fierce opposition to holding a workshop on sectoral approaches at the next climate conference, to be held in Bonn, Germany, in June. G77 countries, including China, had been pointing to promises from Bali that rich countries would set new national targets and provide mitigation and adaptation funds enabling the South to share the burden of industrial emissions cuts. After wrangling at length, they compromised on a sectoral workshop in August.
The difficulties raise a post-Bali paradox. With the the US back at the table and all eyes on a new deal to dwarf Kyoto, stakes are high. The greater the political will for change, the more there is for each party to gain or lose in the shakeup. We'll see in Bonn whether the cautious rehashing of familiar arguments - typical of first negotiation rounds, as Diringer points out - gives way to actual steps forward.
Anna Barnett
Image: The closing session, just after midnight on Friday; photo courtesy of IISD/Earth Negotiations Bulletin.
AAAS, Boston -
Whether technology can cure the world’s ills has been a hot topic at this year’s AAAS conference.
I joined Alok Jah and James Randerson as a guest commentator on the Guardian’s weekly science podcast yesterday to discuss, among other highlights from the AAAS meeting, whether we can rely on technology as our sole solution to climate change.
We recorded in Toscanini’s ice-cream café in Cambridge, MA, an institution as famous for its clientele (nobel and ignoble laureates and the Dalai Lama), as much as for it’s delectable ice-cream….the wort variety comes highly recommended!
The impetus for our technology discussion was the release of a report at AAAS by a specialist panel convened to predict the great engineering challenges that humanity will face in the 21st century.
A select group of big names and big thinkers, the blue ribbon panel included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, entrepreneur, geneticist and billionaire, Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Ray Kurzweil, futurologist, software engineer and alleged recipient of some 14 honorary doctorates.
Kurzweil sees no end to the possibilities of what technology can achieve this century – from creating artificial intelligence to match the human intellect to reversing the signs of aging. His basis for these assertions is the rate at which technology is advancing – a doubling every two decades. Though this may sound modest, its cumulative effect is worth contemplating – that’s 32 times more technical progress over the next 50 years than there has been in the past half-century!
The views of the panel are positively circumspect in comparison to Kurzweil’s, though are none-the-less fascinating.
Continue reading "Can technology stop the world from warming (and my ice-cream from melting)? " »
Correction Appended
AAAS, Boston-
One of the most interesting, and popular, sessions I’ve been to so far at AAAS was the panel discussion on how the media communicates climate change.
Though there wasn’t any news in the talks about news by various well known science communicators, the room was packed to the rafters and the lively discussion spilled over into the next session.
Andy Revkin of the New York Times , who recently started the excellent Dot Earth blog, spoke of the tyrannies of news and the difficulty of getting climate-related news on the front page without a peg like Hurricane Katrina. He also pointed out that the more complex a story is (as is so often the case in climate science), the less space it gets.
Matt Nisbet, who runs the Framing Science blog, talked about how sources of information frame people’s perceptions of the issue, with the example that Gore’s ‘climate crises’ gets referred to more frequently by the media than the IPCC, NOAA or NASA.
David Dickson, director of Scidev Net warned that journalism is at risk of losing its independence and becoming a voice for various NGOs, as they become increasingly strategic at media relations. Some NGOs apparently paid for a large contingent of journalists to attend the UN conference on climate change in Bali, with the explicit understanding that they would cover their stories*.
John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Centre, aired his frustration at various aspects of how climate change is reported by the mainstream media, including references by journalists (other than Revkin) at the NYT to “global warming, [which] is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe”.
Holdren has been trying convince journalists to use ‘global climate disruption’ rather than the misrepresentative ‘global warming’. Good luck to him – it would up the word count, and, as we've heard, there just ain’t no space for that.
Yesterday morning, I took part, with a national environment reporter from a popular broadsheet, in an interview on how journalists communicate climate change. The interviewer was a grad student from MIT who is doing her PhD on the topic. She asked me a lot of questions about sources of information - the issue of NGOs came up again and also the question of where to draw the line with quoting scientists on policy recommendations. The differences between us and a national paper were very interesting - I get way less bumf from NGOs, for a start!
Olive Heffernan
*Dickson has since clarified that the agreement was that journalists would cover the conference rather than the activites of the NGO at the conference.
American Geophysical Union meeting, San Francisco -
Turns out that Jim Hansen, the outspoken NASA climatologist, didn’t attend John Marburger’s talk on Monday night, in which Marburger (who is President Bush’s science advisor), called accusations of censoring US climate scientists ‘ignorant’.
Hansen, who has long gone public with his thoughts about the problems of human-caused global warming, has said in the past that NASA public-affairs people censored his public speeches and media interviews to play down the risks of climate change. On Monday, Marburger charged that such accusations were baseless, saying that he personally had tracked down each claim and found it to be wanting. Marburger didn’t mention Hansen by name, but the subtext was clear to everyone in the audience.
Asked for his response today, Hansen simply pointed to a new book called Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. (I haven’t read it and thus can’t recommend it, but here is a link so you can see at least what it looks like.) According to Hansen, it details a systematic effort to suppress climate scientists such as himself.
Asked if he had ever spoken to Marburger about the issue of censorship, Hansen said simply: “Not about this.”
Hansen isn't just confining his criticisms to US leadership, though. He's got a draft letter in the works to UK prime minister Gordon Brown and the German chancellor Angela Merkel, criticising the planned construction of coal-fired power plants in their countries.
Asked today why he was focusing on these leaders when China is constructing a coal-fired power plant at the rate of nearly one per week, Hansen said he feels that the developed world needs to take responsibility, as it has been the source of the majority of carbon dioxide emissions up until this point.
Cross-posted from Alex Witze on In the Field
American Geophysical Union meeting, San Francisco -
News from the Arctic just continues to get worse. A fair number of presentations here have been dealing with the dire 2007 conditions for sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet.
First up, Greenland. Last summer, more ice melted atop Greenland than ever before measured, adding to a consistent downward trend of some 135 gigatons of ice disappearing per year. Marco Tedesco, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told the meeting that surface temperatures in Greenland were four to six degrees Celsius warmer than usual this summer, which helped accelerate melting, particularly at high latitudes.
The situation is even more precarious for sea ice. A couple of researchers here have been tossing around dates like 2012 or 2014 for estimates of when the Arctic might be completely ice-free in summer. While these sorts of numbers are pretty arm-waving at the moment (numbers like 2040 were previously considered to be aggressive), there’s little reason to think the situation will get better in the next couple of years. Mark Serreze, of the University of Colorado, spent a keynote lecture on Tuesday showing images of Arctic ice shrinking like a snowman left out too long in the sun. In September of this year, sea ice covered just 4.2 million square kilometers - by far the lowest record ever.
And the ice isn’t only shrinking in extent – it’s also thinning. Don Perovich, of a US army cold regions and research laboratory in New Hampshire, reported on a single but extraordinary ice buoy in the Beaufort Sea. In June the buoy measured sea ice at that location as 3.3 metres thick – “really a healthy piece of ice,” as he put it. But by the end of the summer, 70 centimetres had melted off the top – and 2.2 metres (yes, metres) off the bottom.
When you see those dramatic maps of the Arctic ice extent shrinking over time, don’t forget that it’s also thinning – a complicating factor that may just make things worse in summers to come.
Cross-posted from Alex Witze on In the Field
American Geophysical Union meeting, San Francisco -
What a difference a year makes. Last AGU meeting, the evening keynote lecture was by Al Gore. This AGU, Gore was in Oslo, having picked up his Nobel Peace Prize for his climate activism, on the same day President Bush's science advisor John Marburger was giving a lecture here on climate change.
Gore got a standing ovation from the AGU scientists. Marburger got a slew of hostile questions. He probably should have expected this, given the Bush administration's policies on climate change. And lines like "scientists have lost credibility in this debate" didn't help either.
Marburger spoke for about 45 minutes on US climate policy, reinforcing many of the same messages he's put out there before. Bush recognizes the significance of climate change, Marburger argues, and has been saying as much since June 2001. The US is doing plenty to move towards taking action, including hosting a summit of major emitters in September and adopting 'aspirational' goals to improve energy consumption and develop new technologies to deal with it. Too much emphasis is being placed on mitigiation strategies for reducing carbon emissions, instead of adaptation strategies to get people to live differently in a greenhouse world.
Such messages did not go down well with the audience. Questioners pressed Marburger on mandatory emissions caps for US industries (ask Congress, says Marburger); alleged censorship of climate scientists (not a word of truth in it, he argues); and Bush's refusal to move the Kyoto protocol forward (Congress would have stymied it anyway).
Marburger also included a plea for people to read the details of the IPCC technical reports issued this year, not just the policymakers' summaries. Only in the technical reports, he argues, are the details and the complexity that everyone needs to understand in order to make informed decisions about what to do about climate change.
No one's arguing with that. But surely he hadn't forgotten that his very audience was made up of many of those who wrote the IPCC technical reports in the first place -- and they still don't agree with him.
Cross-posted from Alex Witze on In the Field
Bali, Indonesia-
In the disabling humidity of Bali, former US vice president Al Gore last night urged delegates gathered here at the UN conference on climate change to continue efforts towards an international climate change deal, despite attempts by the US delegation to stall progress.
Gore said, to loud applause, that the US was “principally responsible for obstructing progress” at the UN conference, which aims to set out an agenda for how negotiations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol should proceed over the next two years.
Delegates have now reached agreement on a number of key issues for the ‘Bali roadmap’, including reducing deforestation, providing financial assistance for adaptation and transferring technology to developing nations.
But there are fears that the science that has informed the process is now being sidelined.
The main bone of contention is how the most recent findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, will be acknowledged in the final text agreed to in Bali.
Most delegations believe that the text should refer to the need for developed nations to reduce emissions by 25-40% on 1990 levels by 2020. But the US says that to do so would be ‘prejudge the outcome’ of the process. Japan and Canada agree with the US and Australia agreed with this stance earlier in the week, though it’s position is a little less certain at the moment.
The EU is standing strong behind the need to include specific numbers on future emissions reductions, arguing that it would be pointless to agree on a roadmap without a destination. “It is crucial for us that we must have an idea where we are heading to – it’s not only to science to show us the destination, but the destination must be consistent with the science”, said Portuguese secretary of state for the environment, Humberto Rosa yesterday in Bali.
European commissioner Stavros Dimas warned US under secretary of state Paula Dobiansky in a meeting yesterday morning that unless a substantive agreement was reached in Bali, there would be little point in the EU attending the Major Economies Meeting to be hosted by the US in February in Hawaii. Rosa and Dimas said this was not a threat, but an acknowledgment of the fact that the Major Economies Meeting is designed to feed into the UN process.
In his address last night, Gore advised negotiators to move beyond their anger and frustration at the US and to recognize that a new US administration, which will take over from Bush in little over a year, will likely embrace more climate-friendly policies.
"Do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save a large, open, blank space in your document and put a footnote by it [that says] this document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway."
But this morning, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo De Boer, said that option would be unfeasible.
“It would be impossible to advance here without the US, as this is a consensus”, said De Boer. “It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to craft a climate change regime without one of the major economies and the major emitter”.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
Olive is about to fill you in on the content of Al Gore's speech tonight, so, refreshingly honest as it was, and as much as I and many others enjoyed this:
“I am not bound by diplomatic niceties. My own country is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali…but not the only one that can take steps to ensure we move forward”
I won't duplicate. In fact, it was an unscheduled side event that I found rather entertaining – and possibly more enlightening with respect to the ongoing negotiations. With difficulty, I’d found a seat from which to watch Gore’s speech, but several latecomers weren’t so fortunate, which led to a little altercation in the row in front of me.
Several conference attendees had taken seats for themselves and reserved some for colleagues who were hot-footing it to the plenary hall, when another from a different delegation (have a guess - it's not the most obvious - answers on a postcard, 25-40% off your next, er, ten years of emissions for the first correct answer*) swooped in and took a place smack bang in the middle. A good-natured squabble ensued, but with both parties getting gradually more annoyed, and ending with a schoolroom-worthy outcome: the single man refusing to budge, and everyone else talking about his rudeness behind his back, but so he could hear every word.
If what was going on behind the doors of the closed negotiations was anything like this, then no wonder many are finding the inch-by-inch progress frustrating, and no wonder Yvo de Boer opened the press conference this morning with the words: “I am very concerned about the pace of things.”
*subject to there being no actual numbers in the competition smallprint, as we feel this prejudges the outcome
Kerri Smith
Bali, Indonesia-
As anticipated, deforestation has emerged as something of a thorny issue at the UN conference on climate change, currently nearing a close in Bali.
It was announced yesterday that measures to avoid further destruction of tropical forests, such as the Amazon, will be included in the agreement to come out of the talks at the end of this week. The Bali agreement is expected to act as a guideline for negotiations on an international climate change deal up until the end of 2009.
Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole Research Centre, US said today in Bali that the Amazon rainforest is expected to see a 55% dieback by 2030 through deforestation, logging and drought. Rainforests in other nations, such as Indonesia are facing similar pressures. So, any effort to avoid deforestation, which accounts for an estimated 20-25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is to be commended. But the solution being put forward to in Bali , known as REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is being met with opposition on many sides.
Under the proposed scheme for ‘avoided deforestation’, carbon sequestered by forests in developing countries that are not being cut can be traded on the carbon market, where developed countries can buy the credits and ‘offset’ them against their own emissions targets.
A draft text on deforestation is ready to go forward for discussion by the high level ministers, who arrived at the Bali conference today, said executive secretary of the UN conference on climate change, Yvo De Boer.
Countries such as Indonesia and numerous conservation NGOs are celebrating inclusion of the scheme. And given that emissions from deforestation were omitted from the Kyoto Protocol, it is the first such international effort of its kind.
But much remains to be agreed upon. The issue of whether such a scheme should include forest conservation is a remaining “bone of contention”. As reported in the Hindustan Times, the Indian delegation wanted to add 'conservation' to 'avoided deforestation' , owing to the fact that India is one of the few developing countries where the forest cover is going up, not down. “We should not be penalised for that” said secretary of the ministry of environment and forests, Meena Gupta
Continue reading "Deforestation a ‘thorny’ issue at the Bali talks " »
Bali, Indonesia -
There was a chance today for journalists to hear from Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UNFCCC, at a lunchtime press conference usually given by the (often batik-shirted) Yvo de Boer. This conference has so far been a useful purified daily dose of what’s been going on behind closed doors in the Bali meetings.
But today’s was a bit of a disappointment. Although the beginning of Ban Ki-moon’s speech was suitably rousing – “Today we are at a crossroads – one path leading towards a comprehensive new climate agreement and the other towards a betrayal of our planet and our children” - from this point on it felt as if (to bleed the analogy dry) he got a bit lost.
The questions he faced were fairly predictable – but the answers frustrating and woolly. When asked about his view on emissions targets for particular countries, he replied: “There are differences of opinion between developed and developing countries, and even among these groups”.
In contrast, I got the distinct impression that was no difference of opinion among many of the journalists in attendance. Many thought it was all a bit watered-down. That view was epitomised by one question asked of him at the end: if all countries have already agreed to formal negotiations, and the purpose of this meeting isn’t to go any further and define targets and talk numbers, have we achieved what we wanted? Shall we all just go home?
“We need to expedite our process of negotiation”, he said halfway through – but I couldn’t help feeling that if the high-level negotiations going on this week are proceeding at the same swimming-through-treacle pace as this press conference, he would have a hard time expediting anything.
Kerri Smith
Bali, Indonesia-
As celebrations got underway to mark the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, disputes over whether its successor will be a bigger, better deal intensified at the UN climate-change conference in Bali, Indonesia.
I've reported the full story over on Nature News,
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
Whether we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change will ultimately be determined by whether we are willing to finance it.
Finding an effective means for financial assistance and investments to flow from north to south could be a make or break issue at the UN conference on climate change here in Bali, where delegates from almost 190 nations have convened to agree a ‘roadmap’ for an international climate agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
NGOs and delegates from the world’s poorest nations, some of which are already beginning to experience the harsh affects of a warming climate, are calling on developed countries to boost funding to help them adapt, and to transfer technology that will help them green their economies.
Under the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Adaptation fund’, a paltry $163m has been pledged by rich donor countries to developing nations, and just $67m of this has actually been delivered. Yet the sum actually needed to finance adaptation and capacity building in the south is in the region of several tens of billions of dollars, according the World Bank (and reported by the Associated Press). Oxfam says that the very poorest nations also need an up front payment of $1-2bn immediately to address urgent adaptation needs.
The fund, which will finance projects such a building sea walls and irrigating crops, is currently derived from a 2 percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the scheme that allows industrialized nations to pay for carbon credits produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world and credit then against their own emissions targets. But it now looks as though the UN will have to expand its funding for adaptation, potentially through a direct tax on emissions.
The transfer of clean technologies to developing nations is another goal of the Kyoto Protocol that has clearly not been met. In part, this is owing to lack of funding from the public sector and a lack of interest from the private sector, says Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change.
The solution, says De Boer, will require the creation of investment potential through mechanisms such as the carbon market that can send a clear price signal to private investors, who are expected to fund 86% of future clean energy technology projects in the south. It will also require “intelligent financial engineering, to make public and private money go where it has never gone before” akin to “embarking on a star trek expedition”, says De Boer.
A group of finance ministers is now trashing out the details in side meetings at the Bali talks. By the end of the conference, it should be clear whether the worlds’ richest nations are willing to cough up their portion of the much needed cash.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
A group of scientists from the estimable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change yesterday presented ministers of more than 180 nations in Bali with the overwhemling evidence on climate change. I caught up with IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri after the event to get his take on the state of play in Bali…and beyond.
Since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with former US vice-president Al Gore for their work on climate change, the IPCC has become something of a household name and Pachauri, or ‘Patchy’ as he is known to friends, has come as close to celebrity as is possible in science. With the recognition comes constant requests ...not least for interviews from pushy journalists, I imagine.
We meet in the lobby of the palatial Aston Bali Resort and Spa, where during our brief meeting, he is stopped and congratulated by vitually every passer by. He humbly reminds his admirers that the winning work was that of the many hundreds of scientists who make up the UN body on climate change.
I query if he ever tires of the praise, but he admits that he’s a sucker for it…and says it’s unlikely to last longer than a few weeks anyhow. If anything, he seems to take from it a renewed vigour for communicating the urgency of global warming, a task at which he is certainly adept.
The IPCC has been assessing the status of climate change for nearly 20 years and this November issued a synthesis report, the result of almost two years work that acts as a primer on the scientific understanding of climate change.
The synthesis is not merely a summary of the three latest reports released by the panel in the first half of 2007, which each give a detailed discourse on the science, impacts and options for dealing with climate change, respectively. In addition, the neat 23-page document clearly sets out the consequences of various courses of action. The IPCC presentation at the plenary session here in Bali brought that work formally into the UN negotiating process.
Notable at this round of UN talks on climate change, the 13th conference of its type, no-one is questioning the science. A few lonely looking sceptics can be seen outside handing out flyers and openly admitting ‘We’re the least popular people here”.
Pachauri believes that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has convinced people of the magnitude of the issue. “It brings home that climate change is an issue that affects the future of humanity and a dimension that people haven’t really thought about previously – if we don’t deal with this in time, it could become an issue of peace and national security”, he says.
Bali, Indonesia-
The chances of the world’s major emitters agreeing to mandatory emissions reductions are becoming an increasingly unlikely outcome of the UN talks on climate change here in Bali.
“Nothing has been ruled out yet”, said Yvo de Boer, secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) today in Bali, but he described the possibility of binding emissions cuts for developing nations such as China and India as “crawling towards the edge of the table”.
China has been receiving praise for its proactive role on addressing climate change and its willingness to enter into talks on a post-Kyoto agreement, but De Boer said that India has not been at the forefront of the discussions this week in Bali.
Both India and China have introduced strategies to mitigate climate change this year in a notable departure from historic concerns that to do so would threaten economic growth. Rajenda Pachuari, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that neither China nor India has had sufficient time to act on climate change since introducing their respective strategies and expects that they will demonstrate more significant efforts in the coming months.
In the meantime, NGOs are hoping that the passage of two climate relevant bills through the US House of Representatives this week will put increasing pressure on the Bush administration to sign up to binding emissions targets.
First up is the Energy Bill, which is the only piece of legislation in over 30 years to require a rise in vehicle fuel efficiency. Designed to improve energy security while reducing emissions for transport, the bill would raise fuel economy by 40% by 2020. Second is the Liebermann-Warner Climate Security Act, which would cut emissions from the power and industrial sectors by 70% by 2050 relative to 2005 levels.
The passing of these bills sends a clear signal to the world that the political centre of gravity in the US has shifted on global warming, but all signs indicate that domestic policy is unlikely to sway the stance of the US on the international front.
Both bills have yet to pass through the Senate and White House, and President Bush has already threatened to veto them. But according to Angela Anderson of the National Environmental Trust in the US, this would be rather ironic given that these are exactly the kind of measures that other major emitters have enacted into their own legislation - the very nations that the US is currently engaging with a serious of talks parallel to the UN process.
Yesterday, Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said that neither the passing of these acts to limit US domestic emissions nor the move by Australia to ratify Kyoto would change their stance in Bali. "We're not changing our position," he said.
Given that the US is the only nation that appears to be cutting its fossil fuel emissions, while those signed up to Kyoto have failed to meet their targets, some say that binding cuts may not be the way to go after all.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
For the first time this week at the UN conference on climate change, scientists today sounded their views on the specifics they believe the road from Bali should lead to if we are to avoid catastrophically changing the climate.
Signed by more than 200 of the world’s most eminent climatologists, the ‘Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists’ issues a stark warning to negotiators that unless they take immediate, bold action on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, many millions will be at high risk of some of the most sinister effects of global warming including extreme sea level rise and increased drought and heatwaves.
“This declaration makes a clear and unambiguous statement about what our emissions targets have to be. To achieve these targets, we need action now, this week, here in Bali, said Matthew England, climate modeller at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Specifically, the document states that atmospheric GHG concentrations need to be stabilised long-term at 450 ppm CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) or lower to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Formally announced at a press briefing in Bali this morning, the declaration calls on governments to reduce emissions “by at least 50% below 1990 levels by the year 2050”.
Though the science is taken from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the signatories comprise the most prominent IPCC authors, the policy-prescriptive statement is distinct from the UN process which assesses the current understanding of climate change. “This is simply outside the charge of the IPCC process”, said Richard Somerville, meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
Not all of those invited signed. England, one of the coordinators of the declaration, reckons they had at least a 70% success rate with getting authors on board. According to Andrew Pitman, a climate scientist also at the University of New South Wales, Australia, some authors didn’t sign because they felt the emissions cuts called for were simply not tough enough.
The declaration advises stabilising at 450ppm CO2e, yet this would only give us a 50% chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, explained Pitman. To increase that chance to 75%, we would need to bring atmospheric GHG levels down to 400ppm CO2e. With emissions steadily increasing, the urgency of the situation is brought home by the fact that we are now at GHG levels close to those at which the scientists recommend we stabilise.
Developed nations party to the Kyoto Protocol agreed in Vienna in August that emissions should be cut by 25-40% by 2020, based on 1990 levels. England confirmed that the target announced today is in line with this figure.
But the scientists won’t go as far as to say when the targets should be implemented or how nations should go about reducing their emissions. “We don’t have recommendations for how the negotiations should proceed”, said Somerville. He added that there is no magic bullet and that all approaches to reducing emissions will need to be considered.
As for whether their recommendations are likely to be taken on board, it’s probably too early to say. Diana Liverman, climate policy expert at Oxford University, UK and signatory of the statement, said that she hasn’t seen any evidence of the talks derailing yet and that a consideration of stricter targets than those under Kyoto may come next week.
On being asked for his response to the consensus document, US Senior Climate Negotiator Harlan Watson said that he wasn’t aware of it. He added that the US administration wholly approved of the IPCC, but that they wouldn’t endorse any specific scenarios from the latest report.
The IPCC will present their synthesis report at the plenary tomorrow morning – watch this space….
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
The road to building a Bali roadmap was looking increasingly rocky today, as the vastly differing expectations of what will emerge from the two weeks meeting of the 13th conference of parties (COP) to the UNFCCC became increasingly apparent.
One of the biggest bones of contention, of course, is whether the roadmap will include an agreement on the need for binding emissions targets from 2012, which signals the end of the second period of commitment of the Kyoto Protocol.
At the opening plenary talk on Monday, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary said that “A marriage contract is not something to discuss on a first date”, eluding to the fact that the willingness of nations to co-operate must first be established here before they get down to the nitty gritty of asking parties to act on their promises.
But many feel this is a COP-out. Today, Matthias Duwe of Climate Action Network, a worldwide association of some 400 NGOs, retorted to De Boer’s comment, saying “These parties have been dating for over 15 years now, so we’re not exactly on a first date here”.
Duwe is one of many who believe that a process without an end date and without specific substance will be insufficient for the enormity of the task at hand.
But others feel that pushing for targets now will rock the boat…and possibly capsize it.
Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth International basically agrees with De Boer. She believes that there needs to be more evidence of good will from industrialised nations before we can reach that point. “To put the targets on the table right now would be going in the wrong direction”, said Raman.
There’s also the argument that you need to have the right tools for the job, lest we (again!) agree to targets we fail to meet.
De Boer compared setting targets first to being asked to swim across the Atlantic without knowing whether you’d have a team, be allowed breaks, use rescue equipment etc. Basically, you’d hardly sign up for the task without knowing the details beforehand.
This approach, however, would be a flip on the order in which the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, which set targets first and then looked at how to achieve them. And that’s bound to ruffle feathers.
Among all the political wrangling and finger pointing, there has been some light hearted relief takes on the Bali talks, such as the giant thermometer erected by Greenpeace outside the conference venue and the Fossil of the Day Awards announced each evening by the Climate Action Network. The prize is in recognition of the efforts of countries that block progress at the conference.
Yet again, Saudi Arabia won first prize today for complaining that the protocol has an unfair focus on CO2 (and then called for prioritisation of CCS, which is concentrated on CO2). And secondly, for saying that article A "should not attach an economic element to the noble cause of fighting climate change"--when for years, they have been trying to undermine the fight against climate change specifically by campaigning by alleging adverse economic effects!
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
The second day of the UN conference on climate change has seen some diverse opinions emerge on what the immediate priorities should be for a 'Bali roadmap'.
Environmentalists claimed today that a group of obstructionist nations, including Saudi Arabia, Canada, the US and Japan, was forming against binding emissions targets.
Steven Guilbeault of Environmental NGO Equiterre cited Canada’s “abandonment of it’s targets under the Kyoto Protocol” and Japan’s statement today that it is time to move away from a Kyoto approach to addressing climate change as reasons for their inclusion.
“Canada and Japan are saying nothing about legally binding emission reductions after 2012," said Guilbeault.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Yvo De Boer said that although Saudi Arabia had expressed concern about whether the time is right to enter formal negotiations, no other nation has openly backed this stance in Bali. Though that’s not to say that others don’t agree.
Describing the mood today in Bali as “mixed”, however, De Boer said that there was a clear divergence of opinion between industrialised and developing nations on where the focus should now lie. Whereas developed nations are honing in on the long term goals for addressing climate change, many developing nations are concerned that this will diverge attention from the need to address immediate priorities, such as establishing a sufficient fund for adapting to climate change and transferring technologies from developed countries, objectives which have not been realised under the Kyoto Protocol.
A open ‘special group’ was established today to address these issues and others that will shape the Bali roadmap, including whether the negotiations up until 2009 will include targets and measurable objectives, or will comprise a looser period of informal dialogue that could faciltate buy-in from major emitters such as the US, China and India.
One thing is clear: as of yet, there is no consensus on what shape the roadmap will take; for now the son of Kyoto is still gestating.
For direct live webcasts of the conference, visit the UNFCCC website.
Olive Heffernan
Starting today, Second Nature -- the Second Life space for all things Nature -- hosts a series of climate change talks to coincide with the UN conference in Bali. Avatars can attend with a carbon-clean conscience.
Continue reading "Second Life climate talks on Second Nature - no air travel required" »
If you're looking for some background on the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Nature News has a nice roundup (subscription required). They've put together their coverage of the IPCC reports released over the past year, plus related stories stretching back to 1990 and some recent commentaries. Any news stories they report from the meeting will go up on the same page. The Nature Reports Climate Change archive also has lots on the IPCC and the Bali conference.
Bali, Indonesia-
The long-awaited United Nations Conference on Climate Change kicked off this morning on the idyllic island of Bali, where some 10,000 delegates from 187 nations will spend the next two weeks discussing how to reach an international agreement on climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
International governments are now feeling the pressure for urgent action on climate change as the world watches in hope of a Bali breakthrough. At the opening address of the conference, Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s environment minister and newly appointed president of the thirteenth session of the conference of parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP13) said “We now have a better understanding of the complexity of the climate problem. What we need is political will. I hope that Bali can deliver the breakthrough the world is waiting for”.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, described the mood as “very upbeat and encouraging”. He highlighted Pakistan’s statement on behalf of the G77 member states and China indicating their willingness to engage in international dialogue on climate change.
Up until now, failure of two of the world’s largest industrialised nations, the US and Australia, to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been seen by many as a major obstacle to its success. And buy-in from both nations is believed to be crucial to agreeing a workable ‘son of Kyoto’.
One day into the talks…and half of that goal has already been achieved. Newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who defeated conservative leader John Howard nine days ago, today pledged to ratify Kyoto just hours after being sworn in. Rudd also announced his intention to attend the talks in Bali next week.
De Boer described the response from delegates to the news as “an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant decision on the part of the Australian government” . He said that “the long applause reflected people’s appreciation for Australia to engage even more strongly internationally on climate change”.
But achieving the other half is likely to prove much more difficult. The shift in Australia’s stance will undoubtedly leave the US feeling out in the cold in Bali, but not enough to pressurise the Bush administration to change its stance on ratifying Kyoto.
Responding to the announcement, Harlan Watson, US Senior Climate Negotiator and Special Representative, said today in Bali that it was “up to each individual nation how to move forward” and that the US “respected the decisions of other nations and likewise expected them to respect their decision”.
Watson wouldn’t comment on what the US may be willing to agree to, but said that that it “wants a regime that is both environmentally friendly and economically viable” and that any agreement must “include all major emitters and developed and developing nations”.
Judging from various statements made at the plenary session this morning, it seems that many expect the Bali conference to lead to a very general rather than detailed roadmap on how to proceed on climate change over the next two years. While this may be the only way to get the US on board, it hardly seems like the urgent international response that it being called for. While the EU is very strongly in favour of binding international commitments that can be monitored, President Bush has made it clear that he favours a voluntary approach to cutting greenhouse gases.
But some believe that whatever the US says in Bali will be largely irrelevant, given the forthcoming presidential elections next November.
More delegates are expected to arrive in Bali next week, when any agreements will be finalised, including former US vice –president and Nobel laureate Al Gore and Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the meantime, I’ll be keeping you updated with daily posts direct from the talks in Bali here on Climate Feedback.
Olive Heffernan
Olive Heffernan
I've been asked to chair a debate on climate change in Malta in November. The debate, taking place at the Pacem in Maribus XXXII conference on 5-8 November, is being hosted by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology and is aimed at engaging your marine professionals in climate issues.
So, the debate will be looking at some of the issues surrounding climate change of particular relevance to this community, such as the respective role of engineers and scientists in mitigating and adapating to climate change, the role of the shipping industry in contributing to and in mitigating climate change, and the role of individual action versus government leaders in effecting change.
I'd welcome any comments and suggestions and of course if you're interested in joining us or know of others who would be, check out the programme at the link above or register for the debate.
Olive Heffernan
HSBC announced the results of their international survey on public attitudes to climate change in London this morning.
The survey found a gulf between public opinion on climate change in developed and developing nations, with people in developing economies showing greater concern, commitment and optimism in solving global warming compared with respondents in developed countries. The results challenge the myth of committed developed world countries leading on climate change with reluctant developing nations trailing behind, said Jon Williams, Head of Group Sustainable Development at HSBC, speaking at the event.
Conducted in 9 countries (UK, France, Germany, USA, Mexico, Brazil, China, Hong Kong and India) during April 2007, the internet survey asked 1000 participants in each nation to rank their level of agreement on four statements on a 1-7 scale (with 1 representing strong disagreement and 7 representing strong agreement) as follows:
“Climate change and how we respond to it are among the biggest issues I worry about today”.
“The people and organisations who should be doing something about climate change are doing what is needed”.
“I am personally making a significant effort to help reduce climate change through how I live my life today”.
“I believe we can stop climate change”.
Europeans, it seems, are a bunch of ‘sceptical pessimists’, with the lowest scores overall. While we are reasonably concerned about climate change, we have little confidence, optimism or commitment in solving it. Only 6% of UK respondents agreed with the statement “I believe we can stop climate change” compared with 18% in the US and 45% in India.
UK respondents also showed a surprising lack of belief that they are making a significant effort to reduce their personal carbon footprint, in contrast to 44% of those interviewed in China, 47% in both Brazil and India and 23% in the US. And why would we? It seems, according to the survey, we’re not really that concerned about climate change, being far more freaked out by terrorism. On levels of concern, UK citizens (22%) and Germans (26%) scored lowest.
In contrast, Mexico, Brazil and India make up the ‘committed concerned’, with approx 60% worried about climate change. Almost half are certain they are making the necessary changes to avert a climate catastrophe. Some of the findings are somewhat less surprising – US citizens are ‘sceptical optimists’ – more confident and optimistic than their cynical European counterparts that we will solve the global warming problem. China and Hong Kong, the ‘committed confident’, show the greatest belief that the people and organisations responsible are already doing what they should be doing to tackle the problem.
Continue reading "Developing nations lead on concern for combating climate change, shows survey " »
Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Kevin Trenberth
Given that human induced climate change is with us, a looming challenge is to predict just what the climate will be. To date, there are no such predictions although the projections given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often treated as such. The distinction is important. A paper presented at the International Forecasting Symposium in New York City in late June 2007 by J. Scott Armstrong and K. C. Green is highly critical of IPCC procedures and "forecasts" for not being based on "evidence based" procedures as outlined in an earlier 2001 book of his. It is true that IPCC does not refer to Armstrong's work as it has dubious relevance.
In fact IPCC does not do forecasts, as explained in my earlier post. The IPCC instead proffers "what if" projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. Armstrong has evidently read only chapter 8 of the IPCC Working Group I report and has therefore overlooked the fact that the other chapters address many of the things he is critical of.
In particular there is clear evidence (“warming is unequivocal”) that climate is changing in ways consistent with the climate forcings. Also, the projections are for all aspects of climate, not just global mean temperature. It has been said that “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. The Armstrong forecast of no change is not useful when the system is already changing in ways consistent with human influences on the composition of the atmosphere. Nonetheless, improvements in forecasting procedures are always welcome.
Bob Carter, a climate change doubter in Australia, has written a distortion of all this in the Courier Mail, issuing various attack against the science of climate change. Andrew Ash has written a rebuttal of these comments.
Another key point is that unlike forecasts based on past experience, weather forecasts are based on numerical weather prediction models and rigorous procedures, not empirical methods, although the latter are used to provide added value (e.g., based on known biases in the model). My own presentation at the same conference provides a description of weather and climate prediction.
Continue reading "Global Warming and Forecasts of Climate Change " »
Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf on Paty Romero Lankao
For the first time in human history, in this year half of the world's population lives in urban regions. This proportion is expected to go up to more than 60 percent by 2030. In an effort to understand the urban vulnerabilities to climate change, and to highlight innovative solutions to increase cities resilience, the Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD), of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, is sponsoring a week-long discussion (July 8-13) on “Building for climate change resilience” within of month-long series of themed conferences aimed at promoting solid innovations for the many environmental and societal challenges facing urban world.
More to follow after the event next week....
Olive Heffernan
The latest news from the G8 Summit meetings in Heiligendamm, Germany is that leaders of G8 nations have agreed to a ‘compromise deal’ to tackle climate change. According to the BBC, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that
'nations have agreed that CO2 emissions must first be stopped and then followed by substantial reductions.’
Although Merkel pushed for a mandatory 50% slash in carbon emissions by mid century, no specific emissions reductions targets have been agreed. Leaders have purportedly said they will negotiate the successor to the Kyoto Protocol within a UN framework. If true, this in itself would be an achievement, as the US recently announced its refusal to participate in global post-2012 negotiations scheduled for the end of the year. Without a consensus on mandatory global emissions reductions, however, today’s compromise deal may be worth little. The need for effective emissions caps is simply the first of numerous contentious issues to be hammered out in determining a global post-Kyoto pact, as reported by Amanda Leigh Haag on Nature Reports: Climate Change, launched today.
Launching in the midst of the G8 climate talks, the site has kicked off with a strong focus on climate policy, emissions reductions, carbon storage and offsetting, as well as covering climate science in research highlights, news and views and in the Journal Club. In our main feature, Amanda takes an in-depth looks at how the Kyoto Protocol has fared thus far – its major triumphs and downfalls. Perhaps the most prominent disappointments have been the failure of some nations to meet what seemed to be modest emissions reduction targets at the outset, and the backtracking of the US on their commitments in 2001. As well as bringing the US back on board, key issues beyond 2012 will include persuading countries such China, India and Brazil to take bold steps to reduce emissions in the next phase, assisting developing nations to adapt to climate change, and avoiding further deforestation, to name but a few.
While some believe that a global extension of the European Trading Scheme is what is needed for mandatory and aggressive reduction of emissions, others are not convinced. In a Commentary, also published today on Nature Reports: Climate Change, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, argues against ‘an unwieldy global emissions permit system that would be virtually impossible to negotiate and even harder to police’. Yet, despite the considerable global efforts needed to reduce emissions, avoiding dangerous climate change is both practically and economically achievable, says Sachs, if we use a targeted approach aimed at specific sectors.
(Posted by Olive on behalf of Heike)
The week before last, I was one of an army of geoscientists travelling to Vienna from Europe and the world for the General Assembly of the European Geophysical Union (EGU). And of course, we are all aware of climate change. There was a talk on “The carbon footprint of academic travelling – assessing the sustainability of different ways of travelling to the EGU Assembly”. Too late, since most of us had already come by plane.
There also was a debate with the title “The carbon footprint of EGU is bigger than necessary”. I didn’t go. I suspect the potentially interesting question in this debate — “What is necessary?” — was not addressed.
Is the EGU assembly itself necessary? Of course it is nice to meet colleagues in person. Yes, when people chat over a glass of wine at the poster session, chances are that new science emerges that would not have come into the world without that poster session (or without that wine). And for me personally, talking to people informally about the launch of my new Journal, Nature Geoscience, is very helpful.
In the end, do 4,200 oral presentations and 6,700 posters justify 8,000 participants’ travel emissions? The bottomline of EGU sounds reasonable. But necessary? No. Necessary it is not.
Heike Langenberg
Chief Editor, Nature Geoscience
For the latest comment, analysis, news and features, go to Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature’s online resource dedicated to in-depth coverage of climate science and the implications for policy, the economy and society.
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