Climate Feedback
Everyone's talking about the CRU data hack. Quirin Schiermeier reports on Nature News:
One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.
The full story is here:
Anjali Nayar, an International Development Research Centre fellow at Nature, recently visited a pioneering project in Madagascar that's aiming to protect one of the country's few remaining forests. About 90% of the species in Madagascar's rainforests are found nowhere else on Earth, but efforts to save the island nation's forests are about more than conserving biodiversity.
It's hoped that projects like this will provide a model for efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. Under a proposal, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), wealthy nations could meet their emissions targets in part by buying carbon credits from developing countries such as Madagascar. REDD is one of the topics up for discussion at the UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen this December. Countries will negotiate whether REDD should be included in the global climate deal that takes over from the Kyoto Protocol.
But as Anjali reports, to be successful these projects must overcome the poverty and political upheaval common to most developing countries. Read Anjali's full report here. Or see a slideshow video version, here.
Hopes that the UN conference in Copenhagen will result in an ambitious climate treaty have faded, with UN climate chief Yvo de Boer now conceding that reaching a legally binding agreement will be impossible this year.
If December’s summit fails to deliver a strong accord, there will be some obvious culprits: the global recession, which has made nations reluctant to commit cash to the problem, and the US Senate, where horn-locking among lawmakers has delayed the passage of domestic legislation.
But even without these bumps in the road, some say the challenge set for negotiators in Copenhagen may simply have been too great from outset. In a feature out today on Nature Reports Climate Change (free access), Mason Inman looks at the UN summit from the perspective of researchers who study cooperation, some of whom argue that trying to get an effective multi-faceted treaty agreed between 192 nations is a waste of time. Many behavioural economists say — and common sense dictates — that a strong agreement would be more easily negotiated between fewer parties.
The legitimacy of this claim is perhaps evidenced by the recent bilateral talks between two of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, China and India, who last week signed a five-year pact to present a united front at international climate negotiations. Now, the US is now seeking to broker similar agreements, and according to some reports, US climate envoy Todd Stern says that such bilateral deals — with Russia and Brazil also — could be the building blocks for an international agreement in December.
From the perspective of political haggling, this makes sense. Cooperation in Copenhagen will only be achieved if those responsible for the majority of emissions can agree on how to apportion responsibility for climate change fairly, as well as on the incentives and deterrents that will ensure compliance, rather than encourage free-riding.
And according to those who study cooperation, it’s all about the carrots and sticks. Writes Inman:
Suppose there’s a country — call it Slackistan — that is emitting loads of carbon dioxide, and doesn’t want to cut back. If Slackistan can somehow convince all the other countries to take action, but do nothing itself, it gets all of the benefits of a cooler climate with none of effort. In game theory lingo, that’s called free riding.An effective global deal on climate change has to, therefore, use carrots or sticks to nudge countries away from the default strategy — that of Slackistan — and towards cooperation. Figuring out how to create these incentives is the key, many game theorists say, to breaking the current stalemate and to keeping a strong agreement running for many decades.
Continue reading "Climate games: small pacts are no big deal" »
Despite the apparent stress that humanity is causing to the Earth system, defining sustainable limits for our own existence has proved to be something of an intractable problem. But what if we could define global sustainability numerically?
In this issue of Nature, a group of renowned earth system and environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre make a first attempt at estimating boundaries for the biophysical processes that determine the Earth’s capacity for self-regulation.
Using existing data, Rockström and colleagues put ‘acceptable’ upper limits on seven environmental parameters: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater use, biodiversity loss, the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and land-use change. Crossing even one of these boundaries, they say, would risk triggering abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. And if one boundary is transgressed, then others are at serious risk of being breached.
For some parameters, such as nitrogen loading and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we may have already stepped out of our safety zone and need to back-pedal quickly. For others, such as ocean acidification, we may still have enough time to avoid catastrophic change if we act wisely.
But do we understand the Earth system well enough to know the real limits to environmental degradation? And if we can define them, even roughly, would doing so would ultimately help or hinder efforts to protect the planet? We posed these questions to seven leading experts, who were invited to respond to the ‘planetary boundaries’ proposal. Each author brings specific expertise to evaluating one aspect of the proposed framework. Their responses can be freely accessed at Nature Reports Climate Change. We’ve weighed in with our own thoughts in an editorial in Nature, and with a podcast. All of Nature’s coverage, plus a full length version of the paper by Rockström and colleagues, can be accessed here.
The commentaries are available individually at the following links:
William H. Schlesinger, President of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York comments on the boundary for global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (html|pdf).
Steve Bass, senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development, UK comments on the boundary for land-use change (html|pdf).
Myles Allen, physicist and climatologist at the University of Oxford, UK comments on the boundary for climate change (html|pdf).
Mario J. Molina, director of the Mario Molina Center for Strategic Studies in Energy and the Environment in Mexico City comments on the boundary for stratospheric ozone depletion (html|pdf).
David Molden, deputy director general for research at the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka comments on the boundary for freshwater availability (html|pdf).
Peter Brewer, ocean chemist and Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California comments on the boundary for ocean acidification (html|pdf).
Cristián Samper, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC comments on the boundary for biodiversity loss (html|pdf).
For the most part, our respondents agree that the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework is a useful and worthwhile endeavour. But they also issue words of caution in choosing upper limits on environmental degradation. Some such as ocean chemist Peter Brewer question whether we know enough to choose the right parameters; on ocean acidification, for example, does an upper bound on aragonite saturation fully represent the potential detriment of loading the ocean with CO2?
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
Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter, launched an institute last week to galvanise large-scale demonstrations of carbon capture and storage (CCS) (or ‘clean coal’) technology [see Nature coverage here; press release].
Australia is ploughing AU$100m (£48m) a year into the Global CCS Institute (GCCSI). That money’s far short of the billions needed to finance commercial-scale projects. Instead, the GCCSI is acting as an oversight operation, smoothing the progress of those schemes which have been proposed. It will track projects and identify gaps in the types of projects that have been agreed on – perhaps even brokering new ones. The institute will also coordinate and pool knowledge gained from small-scale CCS pilots and analyze sticking points which are stopping projects moving forward.
If the GCCSI is to be successful it will have to get companies to share the lessons they learn from their tests – including information on what doesn’t work. “No-one really understands what knowledge needs to be shared at this time,” says GCCSI head Nick Otter, when queried on the difficulties that may pose for intellectual property.
It will also have to work carefully with existing organizations, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s carbon capture programme and the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) - a network run by the US Department of Energy. These focus more on technical analyses of the technology, and on its surrounding policy and regulation. The CSLF – for a long time scorned on account of its American origins – may try to rejuvenate itself in a London meeting in October, now that it is backed by the Obama administration.
Ultimately networks like these are necessary but not sufficient for getting CCS demonstrations off the ground. What’s needed is a massive amount of public spending.
Richard van Noorden
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.”
Economist Nicholas Stern laid out his new vision for and a safer and more prosperous planet today in London.
Speaking at the launch of his new book ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity’, Lord Stern urged world leaders to see the opportunity for a green recovery from the economic downturn. His hope is that the Group of 20 developed and developing economies meeting in London this Thursday will emphasize the need for a transition to bouyant green economy. “It’s the only option. Low economic growth in a world that has poverty and that is aspirational is unacceptable”, said Stern today at the London School of Economics.
A former World Bank economist, Stern is best known for his landmark report on the Economics of Climate Change, which was published at the behest of the UK government in 2006. The 700-page dossier reframed climate change from being an environmental issue to one of concern to industry and investors alike.
Since then, “emissions have grown faster than we had assumed and the buffering capacity of the planet has lessened", said Stern. "But the pace of technological change has been faster than expected and the level of political commitment is now stronger than it was 2-3 years ago”, he added optimistically.
Still, in his new book Stern has scaled down his recommendation for where atmospheric greenhouse gas levels ought to be stabilized. Whereas his 2006 report suggested an upper limit on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of 550 ppm CO2-equivalent, Stern now says we should hold levels below 500ppm CO2-equivalent [or 450 ppm of CO2 alone]. “We will be at 450ppm CO2* within 6 or 7 years anyhow, but it’s possible to hold levels below 500ppm and to then come down from there”, he said.
Asked whether he was advocating the use of geoengineering to reduce atmospheric concentrations from 500ppm, Stern said it will be part of the solution, but suggested that technologies such as biomass or carbon capture and storage could perhaps be used to sequester the gas rather than “throwing dust or mirrors into the sky”. He also critized efforts to allow new coal fired power stations, such as the one at Kingsnorth, Kent, to proceed without such schemes in place to capture the emissions.
Whether stabilizing below 500ppm in the short term will go far enough to avert dangerous climate change is questionable. Some scientists such as James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, now think that we need to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350ppm to avoid a dangerous level of warming.
But While Stern acknowledged today that 'it's quite possible that Hansen's target is a sensible one for the long term", he is adament that “the first thing is to stop atmospheric concentrations from rising and then to assess the risks. We can’t eliminate the risk [of dangerous climate change], but we can bring down those risks”.
Stern called on world leaders meeting later this week to send out a strong signal on the urgent need to agree a global climate deal in December.
A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (Random House) is out on April 2.
Olive Heffernan
Correction added April 1st: This should refer to 450ppm CO2-equivalent
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
A controversial experiment which poured iron into the Southern Ocean has also poured cold water on the idea that such ‘ocean fertilization’ can mitigate against climate change.
The Lohafex project was investigating suggestions that carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere by promoting algal blooms with iron. Despite protests from some groups, researchers aboard the Polarstern research vessel carried out their experiment this month.
However, the Alfred-Wegener institute, which was backing Lohafex, says “only a modest amount of carbon sank out of the surface layer by the end of the experiment. Hence, the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean to compensate the deficit caused by the LOHAFEX bloom was minor compared to earlier ocean iron fertilization experiments.”
Continue reading "Results cast doubt on potential ‘climate fix’" »
Cross-posted from The Great Beyond
New Yorkers beware! A new study published in Nature Geoscience says the north-eastern US coast will be in more trouble from global warming than previously believed.
Looking at the predictions from a whole set of different climate models, researchers Jianjun Yin, Michael Schlesinger and Ronald Stouffer found that changes in ocean circulation will result in higher sea levels in the region, over and above expected global sea level changes. Depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions are low or high, an additional rise of between 15 and 21 cm can be expected by 2100, they say.
“Some parts of lower Manhattan are only 1.5 meters above sea level,” says Yin, a researcher at Florida State University (National Geographic). “Twenty centimetres of extra rise would pose a threat to this region.”
The graphic right shows dynamic sea level rises at coastal cities worldwide in the medium greenhouse-gas emission scenario, due to the knock on effects of changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
“Our results show that the northeast coast of the United States is among the most vulnerable regions to future changes in sea level and ocean circulation, especially when considering its population density and the potential socioeconomic consequences of such changes,” write the researchers. “It should be noted that the impact of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet on the [Atlantic meridional overturning circulation] is not taken into account here.”
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.
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
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
A short while ago, stand-up economist Yoram Bauman reviewed Frank Ackerman’s ‘Can We Afford the Future?: the Economics of a Warming World’, a layman’s guide to one of the most pressing and complex questions of out time, over on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Ackerman objected to the review and I invited him to respond with a letter to the editor. You can find it in the latest issue, but I’ve also copied it here:
To the Editor - Yoram Bauman has written a hostile and dismissive review of my book, Can We Afford the Future?: The Economics of a Warming World (Zed Books, 2009). With my book, he says, "the bumper-sticker culture of cable TV news has finally reached ... the economics of climate change." I allegedly failed to recognize the virtues of mainstream economics and oversimplified the subject "for the masses".Oddly enough, Bauman is best known for performing as a stand-up comedian making fun of mainstream economics. His signature performance offers a flippant 'translation' of ten principles of economics from a leading textbook. How could a stand-up comic dislike bumper stickers and communication with "the masses"? I plead guilty to summarizing a complicated subject in four provocative, non-technical statements suitable for printing on bumper stickers. This was an intentional strategy to combat the 'eyes glazing over' effect that technical economics has on most people, and to lead the reader into substantive discussion of the big issues about the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation.
The loss of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which last week ended up in the ocean rather than in orbit, is a hard blow not only to the team who devoted much of the last decade to getting it off the ground but to scientific – and especially climate - research.
There is quite literally of sense of grief among the climate research community, evident in the story by Jeff Tollefson and Geoff Brumfiel over on Nature News. My colleague Anna Barnett interviewed David Crisp, OCO Principal Investigator, ahead of the launch. His excitement about the mission was palpable as he spoke of how the NASA satellite would measure atmospheric carbon dioxide at a resolution 3 times higher than any previous space measurement of a trace gas.
The Japanese space agency successfully launched their Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) in January and undoubtedly this will provide some of the data that OCO would have collected. But OCO would have provided an unprecedented spatial resolution. Taking half a million carbon dioxide measurements per day, the satellite would have located specific sources of the greenhouse gas, differentiating cities and freeways from adjacent forested areas.
Not only is this a huge loss for exploratory science, the timing of the incident is especially unfortunate. With emissions rising and a global climate deal in the balance, pinpointing the origin and fate of carbon dioxide has never been more urgent — a task that the US$280-million mission would have accomplished skillfully.
So what’s next for NASA? Personally, I think the agency should make every effort towards a rapid re-launch, as I’ve detailed in my latest editorial. Getting an OCO replacement into orbit within the next few years would offer at least a brief period of data verification with GOSAT – one advantage of having two CO2 trackers in space simultaneously – and would have the added advantage of monitoring carbon heavyweights from space during the early stages of a post-2012 global climate deal.
NASA’s long-awaited carbon dioxide detector, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), crashed into the ocean near Antarctica today following a launch failure.
The $280 million mission would have provided much needed information on the origin and fate of carbon dioxide emissions. The instruments aboard the satellite were designed to measure carbon dioxide at a precision higher than any current space-based measurements of a trace gas, and would have helped scientists to identify sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas. Although the project was intended as a science mission, its results would also have been relevant to policymakers.
The loss of OCO marks a huge setback for the climate science community, and especially for the scientists who have worked so hard to get the satellite off the ground. Geoff Brumfiel reports over on Nature News (subscription):
It's a major setback," says Paul Palmer, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who is part of the OCO science team. It will be particularly devastating for the tight-knit group of scientists and engineers who have devoted much of the past decade to the project. "These guys have sweated OCO for seven or eight years," he says.
The data from OCO would also have complemented those being collected by another satellite launched in January. The Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), a project of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, will now have to verify its measurements of methane, water vapour and carbon dioxide against those taken from ground-based stations.
Olive Heffernan
Among the many technologies contending for a role in the future energy mix, thermoelectricity is one area where researchers have hoped that a big breakthrough in technology could reap equally large benefits in improving energy efficiency.
Up until this point thermoelectric technologies, which use materials to draw electricity from heat, haven’t been widely applied to electricity generation owing to their high cost and inefficiency. But changing the materials and their properties could — in theory at least — make a wide range of products more energy-efficient at a lower cost.
Last year the field made some important gains and seemed to be at a high point in terms of both the science and business potential. Early in the year, a MIT spin-off focused on energy efficient thermoelectric products won seed funding from venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Then in July researchers reported in Science [subscription] that adding trace amounts of thallium to lead telluride, a thermoelectric material used to produce electricity onboard deep space probes, could double its performance.
The recent food crisis, which saw crop prices sky rocket in 2007/08, demonstrated the fragile nature of the world’s food system. Coping with the short-term challenges of food price volatility is daunting, but the longer-term challenge of avoiding a perpetual food crisis due to global warming could be far more serious.
Temperatures in crop growing seasons across the world will exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures on record by the end of the century, new research suggests.
View image
Writing in the latest issue of Science, David Battisti at the University of Washington and Rosamond Naylor at Stanford University warn that unprecedented seasonal average temperatures will threaten global food security unless adaptations such as heat and draught tolerant crops, the creation of jobs outside of agriculture for those regions where farming will no longer be viable and appropriate irrigation systems are introduced.
In a new study, they use data from 23 global climate models produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 scientific analysis to show that there is a 90% chance that the tropics, sub-tropics and temperate regions will experience unprecedented seasonal average temperatures by the end of the 21st century.
Their research looks at historical case studies of three regions – France, the Ukraine, and the Sahel in Africa – that have experienced extreme heat waves, to illustrate the size of the impact on food production. For example, France felt some of the greatest impacts of the 2003 heat wave in Western Europe, which saw temperatures rise to 32 -33°C in June to August - nearly 4°C higher than the country’s average historical temperature for those months. Over this period, production of maize fell by 30%, fruit harvests declined by 25% and wheat harvests dropped by 21%.
Continue reading "Adaptation needed to avoid world food crisis" »
A Chinese expedition is expected to start work this week on a new Antarctic base that will faciliate novel research in climate science as well as in other fields, reports Jane Qiu over on Nature News [subscription].
The Kunlun base will be located at Dome Argus, or 'Dome A', some 4,093 metres above sea level. It will be China's third Antarctic research facility and is being built as a legacy of International Polar Year, a major two-year scientific programme that comes to an end in March.
According to radar studies of the region, Dome A sits atop ice over 3,000 metres thick. Scientists hope that extracting ice cores of that depth at this particular site could extend the record of past climate changes back to 1.5 million years. Qiu writes:
A key focus of research is finding sites where ice cores stretching back further in time than any others could be drilled. A core obtained at a site known as Dome C — about 1,000 kilometres from Dome A (see map) — reached 3,200 metres deep and helped to reconstruct past climate going back 800,000 years. Many believe that Dome A promises older ice because it is higher and has less snow, meaning that researchers can get more years of climate records in a given thickness of ice.
Work on the station is expected to be completed by January 28, before temperatures drop tobelow –50 °C. At that stage it will have room for 25 people, with 11 sleeping units. I'm guessing they use that rotational bed-sharing system scientists sometimes use at sea?
Olive Heffernan
Image:P. Huybrechts, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Over the past 24 hours, some 15,000 earth scientists descended on San Francisco for the annual Fall conference of the American Geophysical Union. Delegates were a dead give away at the airport and on the BART yesterday with their large poster tubes in tow. It’s my first AGU and it could be the jet lag, but I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed by the sheer size and number of parallel sessions; at any given time I could be at one of at least four climate-related talks and invariably find myself wondering why the session next door is receiving louder applause.
A number of talks today focused on the need for climate science to become less curiosity driven and more specific to the needs of stakeholders such as local authorities and natural resource managers.
This is a topic that’s been getting a lot of attention recently. Earlier this year, for example, scientists called for a billion dollar investment in climate computing facilities to enable regional scale climate predictions on decadal time scales. At a press conference this morning, scientists including Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona and Jack Fellows of UCAR highlighted the importance of partnerships between universities and decision makers in enabling states and regions to plan for climate change.
The latest UN negotiations on a global climate deal taking place in Poznan, Poland are failing to make fast enough progress to secure a treaty by next December in Copenhagen, according to various media reports.
Reuters reported yesterday that even the eternally buoyant UN climate chief Yvo de Boer believes that it will only be possible to nail "the key political issues" by this deadline. But he still maintains that an overarching treaty must be signed with specific greenhouse gas reduction targets for developed nations, writes Jeff Tollefson on In the Field.
Over on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, says it’s time to press the panic button. He points out that the UN negotiations are acting as though the 2007 IPCC report still reflects the latest science, when in fact we’ve had three years of peer-reviewed research since – and a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change.
His advice for Senator John Kerry, who is reportedly acting as incoming US President Barack Obama’s ‘eyes and ears’ in Poznan:
Suggest on behalf of the US Senate that the IPCC should be reconvened as early as possible in 2009 to undertake an emergency review of all the science that has emerged since 2005. It should be asked to report to the UN by the end of June, giving just enough time to inform the debate about appropriate policy responses before the Copenhagen conference in November.
In the meantime, Obama has met with Al Gore to discuss the state of the climate and has promised to treat climate change as a matter of urgency and national security.
Olive Heffernan
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.
In what could be good news for the Earth’s ability to mitigate warming, scientists have reported that deep convection has resumed in the North Atlantic after more than a decade of little activity.
Also known as overturning, deep convection transports cold water to depths of more than 1000m, bringing carbon dioxide with it and keeping the greenhouse gas out the atmosphere for centuries. It's also partly reponsible for maintaining the global climate system, as we know it - at high latitudes, deep convection forms a mass of cold water that drives the Atlantic oceanic conveyor belt and carries warm water northwards.
In the past decade, however, the process of deep convection has been sluggish, causing some to speculate that warming of surface waters due to climate change is already taking its toll on ocean circulation.
Its recent return has now been independently reported by two groups of scientists; the first team, led by Kjetil Våge of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, publish their data in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience. Igor Yashayaev and John Loder of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, Canada, have a forthcoming paper in Geophysical Research Letters.
Scientists have reported the first direct evidence of a link between flooding underneath the Antarctic ice sheet and the rate at which glaciers are discharged into the sea. The study, which was published online on Nature Geoscience yesterday [subscription], has important implications for understanding how ice released into the ocean from the Greenland and Antarctic land masses could raise sea level.
Led by Leigh Stearns of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, the trio of researchers found that ice on the Byrd Glacier in East Antarctica accelerated just as there was a massive release of water from lakes beneath the ice.
Over the past 20 years, researchers have discovered more than 150 lakes beneath the Antarctic ice pack, the largest of which (Lake Vostok) is equal in size to Lake Ontario in Canada.
And more than a year ago, researchers reported that these subglacial lakes could actually lubricate the flow of ice off the continent and into the ocean, as I reported over on Nature News at the time.
Continue reading "Under-ice floods speed glaciers towards the sea " »
More elderly readers of these pages may remember having heard in their school days back (circa 1970s) that scientists then thought an ice age would be coming soon. I certainly do – even though the alleged ‘global cooling consensus’ in the scientific literature of the time has recently been disproved as a myth.
Now an interesting new paper in Nature [subscription] suggests that a rapid natural transition towards a stable glacial climate, with permanent ice sheets covering large parts of North America and Eurasia, could indeed be ahead.
Thomas Crowley and William Hyde ran a coupled energy-balance/ice-sheet model to test their hypothesis. When forced with long-term variations in daily solar radiation which result from small cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit, the best-fit model run (that is the one which most accurately reproduced ice sheet variations during the last 3 million years) predicted a rapid transition towards a cold climate regime to occur merely some 10,000 to 100,000 years from now.
Models and theory do indeed suggest that at critical points (namely when climate variability is at a maximum) large ice sheets can rapidly develop from very small perturbations in solar forcing.
Continue reading "Glaciation ahead - on a geological time scale " »
Cross posted from the Great Beyond
Let us get one thing clear right at the start: lemmings do not commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs into the sea. However, their populations do undergo massive size fluctuations, leading to mass migrations where the cute critters may go swimming to find new food sources.
At least, they used to undergo massive population explosions. In a paper published this week in Nature a group of researchers analyse the absence of such events since 1994. The culprit, you guessed it, is climate change.
Nils Stenseth and colleagues show that changes in winter weather and snow go hand-in-hand with changes in Lemmus lemmus populations. They further show that when the regular explosion of lemming numbers doesn’t occur predators such as foxes switch their attention to other species, leading to knock-on effects throughout the eco-system.
“A relatively small effect on one particular species is having a broad effect on the system,” Stenseth, a researcher at the University of Oslo, told Reuters.
In a News and Views piece analysing the research, Tim Coulson and Aurelio Malo, of Imperial College London, explain that lemmings like to scurry about in a gap that warm ground melts between it and the snow layer above it. This so-called subnivean space is relatively warm and keeps the rodents safe from things that would like to eat them.
What Stenseth and colleagues found was that climate change seems to have eliminated the subnivean space and, worse, created a sheet of ice over the moss on which lemmings like to nibble.
“The critical reader will complain that the story is based on correlations. Although this is true, it is often the only way to study populations and the consequences of changing climate for ecosystems,” write Coulson and Malo. “The collection of detailed long-term data on the dynamics of free-living populations of animals and plants rarely attracts the same excitement as genomics or particle physics, yet such data are vital in characterizing the consequences of climate change for the natural world on which we depend.”
Following Obama’s landslide victory in the US presidential elections last night, pundits are already speculating on how he will deal with the formidable challenges in his in-tray, not least of which will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the economy into clean-energy mode.
The news that Obama will be the 44th President of the US has been met with jubilation by environmentalists (as reported here and here), who are hopeful that the new administration will come good on promises to protect the planet.
Over on the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog, James Kanter reports that hopes have soared in Europe toward global cooperation on climate change following Obama’s appointment as President-elect. Earlier today, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, welcomed a new start for transatlantic relations on issues including climate change and invited Mr. Obama to address the European Parliament next spring. That would be the first time a U.S. president has spoken at the European Parliament since Ronald Reagan’s address in Strasbourg in 1985, writes Kanter.
Back on the home front, corporate carbon giants are less happy about the potential impacts of an Obama administration. CNNmoney says that companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp are concerned that policies such as windfall profits tax and market intervention will target the fossil fuel industry unfairly. Some southern utility companies, such as Duke Energy Corp have lobbied against a federal renewable portfolio standard, though some encourage state mandates, writes Ian Talley.
Continue reading "Obama victory brings new hope for climate policy, dark days for fossil fuels " »
The third and final debate in the US Presidential elections took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York last night. Moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS news, it took as its theme domestic policy.
As pointed out over on Gristmill, the debate yielded nothing new from either candidate on climate and energy issues, though it did serve to highlight the differences in the candidates’ positions as well those topics where they differ from their party positions.
John McCain set himself aside from the GOP is taking credit for "bringing climate change to the floor of the Senate for the first time", while Barack Obama noted that his support for clean coal technology “doesn't make me popular with environmentalists."
The discussion on climate and energy focused almost exclusively on energy independence, and on the timescale to eliminating foreign oil imports. Here’s the transcript of that part of the debate (taken from CNN politics):
Continue reading "Focus on energy independence in final debate " »
Now that remarkable headway has been made into understanding the physical science of climate change, there’s a feeling among climate experts – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and among funding agencies of the need to shift the focus of climate research from identifying the cause to assessing the impacts, whether hurricanes, oceanic dead zones or forest fires.
A case in point is the new study just launched by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the US to examine how climate change will influence hurricane activity in the coming decades.
In an excellent news feature in Science magazine, Eli Kintisch takes up the issue by looking at how the $1.8 billion available for the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is likely to be reoriented towards climate impacts research under a new administration.
But evaluating climate impacts will require more than a shift in CCSP’s vision. As Kintisch points out, the research budget available to CCSP has declined from $1.9 billion in 1994, whereas climate research advocates estimate approximately $4.5 billion will be needed by 2014 to sustain the needs of both academic and federal climate scientists. The widening gap between escalating costs and narrowing research budgets is placing a strain on basic earth monitoring and means that fewer scientists are tackling increasingly complex issues, such as the impacts of aerosols, writes Kintisch.
For anyone interested in the state of the earth’s climate, the most recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are essential - if not exactly bedtime - reading (I prefer a bit of Proust myself).
Fair enough, the panel’s synthesis report collapsed the three prior encyclopaedic volumes into a summary of what one really needs to know about climate change, its impacts and what we could/ought to do about it, but it’s still not the most accessible synopsis I’ve seen.
Now this problem has been solved with a diminutive and accessible translation in the form of Mike Mann and Lee Kump’s Dire Predictions, reviewed here for us by Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Gulledge, who briefs decision-makers in various sectors on the science and projected impacts of climate change, applauds the fact that he no longer has to consider whether to lug around three books the size of the Los Angeles telephone directory, and can instead use this “lavishly illustrated volume”, which he says is “little more than a centimetre thick and fits neatly in the outer pocket of my backpack”.
With climate change as environmental problem number one, the nuclear industry has proclaimed itself as part of the solution and is starting to enjoy a reputation as a green power provider after decades of bad press.
As a result, political support for nuclear energy is reaching at all time high – the US government is offering the nuclear industry $18.5 billion in loan guarantees and billions more in production tax credits and both US presidential candidates have voiced their support for nuclear power as a means of meeting climate goals. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain is bracing itself for a revival of the nuclear industry now that EDF and British Energy have agreed a deal whereby France will help the UK develop a new generation of nuclear power stations.
But as the ‘nuclear renaissance’ comes to fruition, many are starting to question whether nuclear energy is a feasible part of the solution to global warming.
Several studies have queried the low-carbon credentials of the nuclear industry, an issue that Kurt Kleiner explores over on Nature Reports Climate Change. While it's understood that an operating nuclear power plant has near-zero carbon emissions, it's the other steps involved in the provision of nuclear energy that can increase its carbon footprint.
Critics claim that other technologies would reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions more drastically, and more cost effectively, but the nuclear industry and many independent analysts respond that the numbers show otherwise, writes Kleiner.
"The fact is, there's no such thing as a carbon-free lunch for any energy source", says Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace in Washington DC. But "for every dollar you spend on nuclear, you could have saved five or six times as much carbon with efficiency, or wind farms", concludes Benjamin Sovacool, author of a recent study in Energy Policy on the lifetime emissions of nuclear power plants.
And as Oliver Morton pointed out here last week, even if nuclear does the job of reducing emissions from the generating sector, if the rest of the economy keeps growing and burning fossil fuels in cars and heating systems and factories, the overall reduction of emissions will be pitiful.
Continue reading "Nuclear energy: falling out of favour? " »
For some time, the received wisdom has been that a post-Bush administration will herald a new era in which the world can move boldly forward on climate change. But the present political - and financial - climate is calling that wisdom into question, as I've written in my latest editorial, and below.
Whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain wins the White House next month, the elected president will face a daunting list of challenges in making climate change a priority both on the home front and internationally. Yet there are several reasons to believe that reducing greenhouse gases may not be given the high priority it deserves.
Firstly, while both candidates made climate change a signature issue early on in their campaigns, McCain's choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee weakens the Republican message. Having publicly questioned the contribution of human activity to climate change and championed aggressive offshore drilling, Palin is positioning herself to the right of the existing administration on the issue, casting doubts on whether a McCain–Palin administration would carve out a new direction for the Republicans.
Secondly, and arguably of graver concern, is the escalating financial crisis, which is reverberating worldwide and, which teamed with rocketing fuel prices and insecure energy supplies, could push rising emissions far down the political agenda regardless of who is in office.
Indeed, both presidential candidates have already had to pull back from positions held early on in the election. As oil prices soared to over $140 a barrel earlier this year, McCain and Obama were forced to rethink their opposition to offshore oil drilling, though Obama has done so a lot more cautiously than his opponent.
I wrote here yesterday that ‘I don’t think that anyone knows for sure how close we are to reaching tipping points in the climate system’. As it so happens, a pair of articles published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week illustrates this point nicely.
The first is a Perspective by atmospheric scientist V Ramanathan and postdoctoral researcher Yan Feng from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who argue that the Earth is now committed to a 2.4°C rise in temperature above pre-industrial levels.
Anything above a 2°C increase is generally considered to be ‘dangerous’ climate change and would likely trigger several of the Earth’s tipping points, such as the complete loss of Arctic summer sea ice and melting of the Greenland ice sheet. And according to the IPCC, a rise in global temperature by 1-3°C will commit the planet to widespread loss of biodiversity, widespread deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and a major reduction of area and volume of Hindu-Kush-Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for most major river systems of Asia.
The authors argue that for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to remain constant at 2005 levels for the rest of the century, aggressive emissions reductions would be required – yet emissions are rising.
Currently, the warming effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is being masked by the cooling effect of other air pollutants – such as smoke from cooking and agricultural waste burning – that create a dimming effect at the Earth’s surface.
Assuming policies to reduce these air pollutants are successful, the full warming potential of greenhouse gases will soon be realized. So as air pollution measures become effective (and much headway is being made here), the need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions becomes even more urgent, say Ramanathan and Feng.
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
The latest global carbon budget numbers are just out, and they make interesting, if slightly depressing, reading. (Global Carbon Project site – will be updated at midnight)
Most striking is that, despite years of effort, carbon dioxide emissions are increasing at an alarming rate of 3.5% a year– faster than the 2.7% predicted by the IPCC in their worst case scenario, and miles ahead of the 0.9% annual rise in the 1990s. Worst still, current measures have been based on a middle-ground IPCC scenario. Pep Candell from the Global Carbon Budget told me that this was “astonishing”.
For the first time, we have hit 10 billion tonnes of carbon emitted annually.
The other thing to note is that China and India are galumphing their way up the table of biggest carbon dioxide emitters. Ten years ago the top four were: USA, China, Russia, Japan. Today that list reads: China, USA, Russia, India – and I am assured by Candell that next year India will have jumped into third place.
This is a worry – when the Kyoto Protocol was first talked about, the countries of the developing developed world were overwhelmingly the highest emitters of CO2. But in the meantime, whilst decisions were made, details argued out and paperwork signed, the developing world has taken pole position.
China has, since 2002, jumped from being responsible for 14% of the global carbon dioxide emissions, to 21%. At the same time the US has been hovering at around 20%.
Slightly good news is that our natural saviours - the oceans, forests and soil, are still doing a sterling job. In 1959, natural sinks removed just over 50% of the carbon dioxide man emitted. And today, they do the same - gobble up just over half. The efficiency of these natural sinks has dropped by about 5% in the intervening years, which isn't ideal, but means that the overall news is not disastrous.
Response to the news – which will be officially announced tomorrow – from the media is widespread. It’s a ‘reality check’ according to the Daily Green; Zee News runs with the rise of India in the emission charts; while other reports tell it like it is: carbon dioxide emissions still rising.
Katharine Sanderson
When Nature (subscription) looked over the whole portfolio of carbon-free electricity options last month, it left wave power for last. In contrast to mature technologies like hydropower and up-and-coming ones like solar, most ideas for capturing the energy of pounding surf “remain firmly in the testing phase”, they wrote.
One project moving out of that phase involves three ‘wave snakes’ that the company Pelamis has just installed off the coast of Portugal - long, cherry-red tubes that wiggle in the waves and use the motion to drive generators, whose electricity passes onto the Portuguese grid. This video hosted by the Guardian shows how they work (and couples soothing music to the animated undulation - I may save the link for next time I’m up at night worrying about the energy crisis).
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
Criminal damage in the name of climate change is not a criminal offence, according to a shock ruling from a British court.
A jury yesterday acquitted six Greenpeace activists who claimed that the threat of global warming was a ‘lawful excuse’ for the damage they caused while protesting at a coal power plant (see this blog post for background).
Climate change scientist James Hansen had previously backed the six: he released a statement declaring “We will need our Mercedes-driving lawyer friends to tell us if the verdict has greater significance -- but the jurors were common people, not politicians.
“The main point, that the government, the utility, and the fossil fuel industry, were aware of the facts [of climate change] but continued to ignore them are more generally valid worldwide. It raises the question of whether the right people are on trial.”
Eco-warriors’ UK paper of choice The Independent says the verdict “will have shocked ministers and energy companies”. In the Guardian, veteran environment correspondent Jon Videl says it will “embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies”.
Continue reading "Shock climate change verdict acquits Hansen’s heroes " »
Last week NASA climatologist Jim Hansen came to London to testify on behalf of activists who defaced the Kingnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which we recently blogged about here on Climate Feedback. Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen in a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered. You can read the full story over on Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
As residents of New Orleans prepare to return home and breathe a sigh of relief that Hurricane Gustav was less damaging than feared, new research published today in Nature [subscription] suggests that the strongest tropical cyclones will pick up speed in the coming decades.
Weighing in on the long-running and at times very stormy debate over whether and how warmer seas will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes is a team led by climatologist James Elsner of Florida State University.
Using a 25-year archive of satellite data, Elsner and colleagues derive wind speeds for tropical cyclones over the globe. They find that the maximum wind speeds reached by the strongest tropical cyclones increased from 1981-2006 in most ocean basins, with the greatest changes in the North Atlantic and Northern Indian Oceans.
There was no trend in the intensity of cyclones occuring over the South Pacific, however, and the upward trend observed over a couple of ocean regions was not statistically significant. The researchers also found no increase in either the frequency or average intensity of tropical cyclones over the globe.
The approach taken by Elsner and colleagues – looking at whether the most severe cyclones will hit a higher speed limit during their lifetime – is both novel and socially relevant, simply because the most severe storms do the most damage if they make landfall. Once tropical cyclones reach speeds of over 74mph, they are officially classified as hurricanes.
The real bone of contention within the scientific community has been whether hurricanes will become more intense and more frequent as a result of human-induced climate change. Elsner and colleagues steer well clear of linking the trend to global warming though - they can’t attribute cause as their study doesn’t investigate other factors such as cyclone origin and duration, proximity to land, El Niño conditions and solar activity.
Continue reading "As Gustav subsides, new study says strongest cyclones will pick up speed" »
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
The contentious ‘hockey stick’ climate change graph has again been upheld as broadly accurate, doubtless to the rage of climate denialists/sceptics/whatevers.
A team led by Michael Mann of Penn State University has looked at a whole range of proxies for surface temperatures over the last 2,000 years in an attempt to counter criticism of the graph, which showed a long ‘handle’ and a sharp upturn (the blade).
Their findings? As the Christian Science Monitor puts it: “It still looks a lot like the much-battered, but still rink-ready stick of 1998. Today the handle reaches further back and it’s a bit more gnarly. But the blade at the business end tells the same story.”
The previous hockey stick had been accused of relying too much on data from tree rings so this PNAS study may silence some of the critics when it appears later.
This week on Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a news feature on a topic that has been considered something of a conservation taboo: assisted migration – in other words manually relocating species that are under threat of extinction from climate change.
There’s been a spate of coverage on assisted migration the last year, but as Emma Marris reports, experts are now starting to give serious consideration to how it might work in reality.
Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from August 1 to 3 ahead of this year’s Ecological Society of America was a group of scientists, lawyers, land managers, economists and ethicists, some of whom feel that relocating species would most likely be a disaster. But it looks like even those opposed to the idea are concerned enough to consider it an option.
Ok, so no-one is really suggesting we move polar bears to the Antarctic (I just liked the cartoon)! More likely is shifting the quino checkerspot butterfly several hundred kilometers north.
But with climate change impacting biological systems throughout the globe, the reality is that many species may have to adapt to climate change in situ or say sayonara as part of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction. And for those that could up and leave to a better place if they were not hemmed in by human barriers, giving them a helping hand could make all the difference.
But as Emma details in her news feature, proposals to relocate species are likely to meet some significant barriers - and not just of the physical kind.
Continue reading "It’s conservation – but not as we know it " »
Carbon’s colourful rise to infamy has been something of an underreported story, at least until now. Swamped by innumerable accounts of its current status as public enemy number one, it’s easy to forget that this element has a rather glorious past and present.
Former Time magazine reporter Eric Roston chronicles the story of carbon and its significance in the wider universe in his first book ‘The Age of Carbon’, which Mark Lynas reviews over on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Lynas, who has just recently been awarded the 2008 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, calls Roston’s book “a welcome slew of context for the humdrum daily dose of ‘low-carbon this, high-carbon that’ now peppering the newspapers”.
From its origins as the ash of helium fusion, carbon takes on a starring role in the story of life on Earth, adopting a variety of forms both by itself and in combination with other elements. Roston details its role in the evolution of the most primitive life forms on Earth right through to the appearance of the (as Lynas writes) "hubristically self-named Homo sapiens, then the internal combustion engine and other paraphernalia of the Industrial Revolution, turning up the planetary thermostat in the blink of a geological eye".
As well as giving a chronological account of carbon, Roston also goes off on some rather specific tangents - such a whole discursive chapter on the gingko tree – at times in great detail and at the expense of holding the narrative, says Lynas, who also commends its "wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach".
You can access the full review over here.
In this week’s issue of Nature, we look into an ongoing debate about research priorities within the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the United States’ main climate research facilities in Boulder, Colorado.
Our story follows up on an earlier piece in the New York Times by Andrew Revkin, who initially broke the news that NCAR was laying off the well-respected political scientist Michael Glantz. Revkin also covered the story in his Dot Earth blog.
Such stories frequently peel apart like onions, and this one was no different. Glantz is not alone in his belief that NCAR is turning its back on the social sciences. NCAR management says it respects Glantz work but is in a budgetary bind. University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. questions NCAR’s numbers in his blog.
Meanwhile, other NCAR scientists who have worked in the social science program say they are comfortable with their positions. And some are worried that NCAR is falling behind on its basic sciences and climate modelling. Is this not the foundation for such a scientific institution?
Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is one contestant in a ‘climate war game’ taking place this week in Washington, where four teams representing China, India, Europe and the United States are negotiating a new deal on curbing global greenhouse gas emissions.
As Daniel Cressey reported yesterday on The Great Beyond blog:
"Today the participants woke up in the year 2015, and the outlook on global warming is significantly worse than it was just seven years earlier. ... Droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events are on the rise. Some 250,000 refugees from Bangladesh are camped out on the border of India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon." “It feels a bit like a grown-up version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, but I'm willing to give it a try,” says Tollefson.
If yesterday's roleplay scenario is anything to go by, it seems the EU and US may completely swap stances on climate policy by 2015! For an explanation of just how that might happen, check out Jeff's progress over on Nature's conference blog.
A couple of weeks into the early reporting for a story on the prospects for advanced coal use in China, which I wrote for the latest issue of Nature, I started to get nervous. I had already talked to several Western researchers and observers, but our first major contact in China fell through (for reasons that were never entirely clear) and the dozens of emails I sent out to Chinese scientists and policymakers simply disappeared into a void.
But our thesis seemed sound, and everybody I talked to who had experience in China suggested that things would fall into place once I got on the ground, made a few contacts and then started working the network via cell-phone. In the end, we decided to give it a go.
Jane Qiu, a Nature correspondent stationed in Beijing, was able to set up several interviews in advance, and we had a clean coal conference in Shanghai as a backstop. And earlier reporting eventually paid off in a big way as a few key industry and university contacts came through, just days before I hopped on the plane.
Continue reading "Nature takes a closer look at coal in China" »
Toyako, Japan
The climate vision put forward by G8 leaders here in Toyako, Japan yesterday has recieved widespread criticism for failing to make clear its commitment to cutting greenhouse gases.
Developing nations, led by China and India, rejected the deal outright ahead of today's major economies meeting where they met with G8 nations to discuss targets for greenhouse gases and the respective efforts that would be required of rich and poor nations, as well as emerging economies.
Despite the inclusion of a goal for 50% cuts by 2050 in the G8 declaration, it's not at all clear what this alledged target means. If, as suggested by Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, they are intending to cut emissions by 50% of current levels, then that's not nearly as ambitious as cuts based on a 1990 baseline.
The statement, which seems purposefully vague, also fails to clarify which nations would have to make the deepest cuts in emissions to reach this global target of 50% and whether the target would be legally binding. Responding to the offer, Mexico, Brazil, India, China and South Africa said yesterday that G8 nations should slash their emissions by 80% by 2050 and set firm nearer term targets if they are to agree on a global deal.
As a result, US President Bush's meeting of major economies made no progress beyond their meeting held June in Seoul.
I've reported the full story for Nature News and will provide a link here once it's online. All for now...it's getting really late here...
Olive Heffernan
Toyako, Japan –
At about 4pm today, just over half way into the the latest gathering of the G8 Summit, leaders released a draft communiqué on climate change.
In the run up to the Summit, it looked as though the more immediate problems of oil prices and global food shortages would bump climate change off the G8 agenda. But with climate change having taken centre stage at the talks, the mood has been reasonably hopeful that a statement due for release today would go somewhat beyond the agreement made by the same clique of rich nations last year in Heiligendamm, Germany.
Yet the proposal seems to simultaneously take a step forward and backward, which perhaps would explain the wide variety of media reports, some calling it a success, others highlighting its flaws and others perhaps undecided – see this report from the BBC, which appears to have been republished (Google link reads: G8 agrees tough action on climate, but header reads: G8 aims to halve greenhouse gases).
I’ve reported the full story for Nature, but in brief, the down side is that the document seems to actually take a step back from last year’s declaration by the G8 to ‘seriously consider’ cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% of 1990 levels by 2050. This agreement, which unlike its predecessor includes the US, commits to a vision of halving emissions by 2050, but doesn’t specify a baseline year. When questioned on the baseline year, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda said earlier today that it was 2005, rather than the UN framework year of 1990.
And despite international pressure to set specific, clear nearer-term targets for reducing emissions, the statement merely recognizes ‘aspirational’ mid-term goals, with no mention of dates or the level of cuts needed. Given that seven of the G8 nations agreed to work toward cutting emissions by 25-40% of 1990 levels by 2020 in Bali last December, its seems that they’ve had to make a large concession to appease the US in this forum.
On the plus side, though, the US has agreed to the declaration, which is a small step forward from last year. And the document does recognize the need for mid-term targets, even if it hasn’t been specific on what those should be or what ‘mid-term’ means.
Tomorrow, the statement will be rolled out as the basis of discussions with eight other ‘big polluting’ major economies, who will join the G8 for the major economies meeting. Opinion here is divided on whether the draft communiqué goes far enough to meet their expectations of the big eight.
Olive Heffernan
Image: G8 leaders at working lunch on climate change. Image courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan
Toyako, Japan-
Tomorrow, delegates are expected to finally get down to the real discussions here at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, with climate change scheduled as the topic of a working lunch. Experts here are musing over the various ways in which leaders could move forward on the issue.
Kim Carstensen, Director of the Global Climate Initiative for conservation organisation WWF International, said that they hope that constructive proposals being put forward by developing nations, such as India,will spur concrete engagement from rich nations. Specifically WWF’s position statement echoes recent calls from scientists for at least 80% reductions on 1990 emissions levels by 2050, though in reality Carstensen says he’s be happy if they agreed to at least 50% cuts by mid century.
Also monitoring the talks here is Philip Clapp, Deputy Managing Director at the Pew Environment Group, a non-profit organization in Washington DC. According to Clapp, a new proposal put forward by developing nations, however, is being considered by negotiators. The proposal, expected to be issued as a formal statement here tomorrow afternoon, could be the key to resolving the issue of how to bring developing nations on board a deal with emissions targets while ensuring rich nations take the lead.
In the proposed deal, developing nations including China would be willing to slash emissions by 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 if unindustrialized nations are willing to agree to a clear specific emissions reduction target by 2020. And given that they haven’t said what the 2020 target would be, the idea would likely be acceptable to many of the delegations here – with one exception; the US.
“It would have to be some sort of package”, says Clapp, who remains optimistic that an agreement could be reached. It will be a “difficult agreement”, he says, and is “entirely depends on what President Bush is willing to give. If the President wanted to enumerate he could have an historic agreement. If not, then this is the end of the road for him on climate change”.
But as Clapp acknowledges “Presidents do some unexpected things when faced with the end of their terms”.
Olive Heffernan
Image: US President George Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda meet today at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido
Toyako, Japan-
I finally arrived at the G8 summit this morning after somewhat of an arduous journey. Not that I didn’t think it would be a schlep to Hokkaido from London, but I hadn’t quite bargained on the detour that was in store.
Having handed over the logistics completely to our trusted travel agent, I sort of hoped I’d end up in the right place. On taking off from Tokyo, though, I decided to plan my journey from the airport (somewhat late, maybe, I know!) and realised I was headed for a remote outpost nearer to Russia than the location of the G8 Summit. Though still in Hokkaido, Wakkanai is a small fishing port known for spotting harp seals and drying kelp; it’s about as far north as you can go in Japan, some 60km from Russia, and a good eight hours overland from my intended destination.
Luckily for me, an Italian reporter and a Nigerian sherpa had found themselves in the same predicament, and so we shared the long trip back, which was fun, if a bit like something from an Aki Kaurismaki film.
It certainly seems that the organisers of this year’s summit went of their way to host it in a remote location where the customary protests that accompany the event could be kept at a distance. Few protestors reached the resort of Toyako itself, where world leaders arrived yesterday, but more than 1,000 marched in Sapporo (the city I should have flown in to!) over the weekend.
The media are for the most part more than an hour away from the actual event in mountain lodges, and security measures for photo opportunities are super tight. Today has largely been taken up with formalities such as meetings between individual heads of states, photo shoots and fine dining experiences (whilst discussing world food shortages, no doubt).
But talks should get down to details tomorrow…
Olive Heffernan
Image: Train station at Wakkanai, Hokkaido
Next week, here on Climate Feedback, I'll be reporting directly from Hokkaido, Japan's nothernmost island, where leaders from rich nations and emerging economies will be meeting to discuss some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Gathering from July 7-9 will be the Group of Eight (G8) - an exclusive but informal bloc of nations, comprising the world's seven leading economies Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus Russia. This year's summit will extend to an additional eight industrialised nations on the final day to facilitate US President George Bush’s Major Economies Meeting.
Climate Change is expected to top the agenda of both meetings. Pressure is on G8 delegates to go above and beyond the political breakthrough of the 2007 Summit in Heilegendamm, Germany, where leaders agreed to seriously consider slashing emissions by half of 1990 levels by 2050. And George Bush seems keen to leave some sort of a legacy on tackling climate change through this meeting of major economies (or just any sort of a legacy other than Iraq actually).
But are binding emissions a realistic expectation of the G8? Will oil prices and global food shortages bump global warming down the agenda? And what progress on climate change is likely under the current US administration? I've written a preview in this week's Nature on what's being hoped for, and expected, from what should be a very interesting round of talks.
Tune in here from next Monday to follow the events as they take place.
Olive Heffernan
Twenty years ago yesterday, Dr. James Hansen gave a landmark testimony to US Congress in which he told senators that global warming was real, it was happening, and humanity was to blame.
Yesterday, he appeared before Congress, where he told most of official Washington we are now at the point of a “planetary emergency”.
For the low-down of yesterday's speech, and links to the best media coverage, check out Alex Witze's post over on The Great Beyond.
Olive Heffernan
“People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced”, concludes the latest poll on public opinion of global warming by social marketing group Ipsos Mori.
Despite the deluge of media reports in the last year documenting the scientific consensus on climate change and the startling rapidity at which impacts are being seen around the world - most notably perhaps the ever-decreasing Arctic sea ice - 60% of the British Public is uncertain that climate change is caused by humans, and many others believe that scientists are overstating the problem.
Writing in Sunday’s Observer, Juliette Jowit provides the following explanation:
There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.
While it’s reassuring to know that the public questions the status quo, if Jowitt is correct, what’s frustrating is the ability of blatantly misrepresentative arguments to sway public opinion.
The Great Global Warming Swindle resulted in a record 250 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom (including the first ever peer reviewed complaint), but that’s still a fraction of the 2.5 million viewers. Like many of those who saw the Channel 4 documentary, readers of Lawson’s offering on climate change ‘An Appeal to Reason’ are probably unaware it has been scientifically discredited in almost every review, including one on Nature Reports Climate Change by Sir John Houghton, Honorary Scientist at the UK’s Hadley Centre.
As Sir Houghton writes:
Promised as a "rare breath of intellectual rigour" and a "hard headed examination of the realities" of climate change, this offering is neither cool nor rational….and is largely one of misleading messages.
Lawson’s fundamental misunderstanding of basic scientific concepts is first displayed in his interpretation of the temperature records for the first part of this century, with which he attempts to discredit the science of climate change, and the work of many thousands of researchers who’ve dedicated entire careers to the problem. More recently, he repeats this in an amusing attack on the recent Nature paper by NASA’s Cynthia Rosenzweig.
Writing as a guest over on Susan Hills’ blog, Lawson’s piece starts off with a failure to grasp the term 'meta-analysis' – he clearly thinks that this is merely a lumping together of existing data. On the contrary, Rosenzweig and colleagues have used a powerful scientific tool to analyze changes in early 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - no mean feat - and in doing so, have shown that warming is aready having a worldwide impacts.
As Houghton rightly points out, Lawson is in need of climate science 101. But then, it seems, he's not alone - at least on that count.
Olive Heffernan
Whether and how to put a price on carbon has been something of a hot topic this week, primarily due to the proposal of a landmark climate change bill to the US Senate that would "cap and trade" emissions of the greenhouse gas.
Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the climate change bill offered by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, and Warner died today in the Senate after Democrat leaders fell a dozen votes short of the 60 needed to defeat Republican obstruction.
Republicans opposed the global warming bill over fears of the economic costs of pricing the greenhouse gas, though Democrats argued there would be no cost to consumers, who would be aided with tax relief. The debate over "cap and trade" legislation is now expected to be postponed until next year, when there is a new president in the White House.
Both presidential nominees back mandatory greenhouse gas reductions and indicated they supported moving forward on discussing the bill offered to the Senate this week, but whether "cap and trade" is the the best way to price carbon remains contentious.
The issue is taken up this week on Nature Reports Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr who reviews Earth: The Sequel by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn of the Environmental Defense Fund. The basic tenet of the book is that a US carbon market with tradable credits would provide the profit incentive needed to energize potential innovators of low or no-carbon technology – thus meeting the world's escalating demand for green energy. But Pielke Jr argues:
By placing their attention on the need for innovative energy technologies, Krupp and Horn have focused on the one area where advocates for action on greenhouse gas reduction are in strong agreement. They have avoided engaging in the real debate over the policies necessary to decarbonize the growing global economy and, crucially, over whether and how to put a price on carbon dioxide.
You can read the full review here.
Meanwhile, over on Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has written about an alternative, though less popular, pricing approach known as “cap and dividend”. The scheme, being strongly endorsed by NASA climatologist James Hansen, is based on the principle of making the polluter pay without placing the burdening of rising costs on the consumer, the most commonly cited down-side of "cap and trade" (discussed by Pielke Jr in the above review).
Revkin explores two proposals for “cap and dividend”: one by Hansen that involves taxing fuels by their carbon content, and another by investment pioneer Peter Barnes that entails selling a steadily declining number of permits for emitting carbon dioxide. The latter would force polluters to eventually pay the full whack of their carbon consumption, and the revenue would be returned to citizens. You can read the full story here.
Olive Heffernan
Cutting global greenhouse emissions by half of 1990 levels by 2050 will not be sufficient to prevent major damage from climate change, say scientists in a Commentary published today on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Earlier this week, environment ministers from the world’s leading industrialised countries, the Group of Eight, called for a deal to slash global greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by mid-century.
This would still commit the world to substantial harm, even if it is “widely considered to be the most stringent politically achievable target”, says Martin Parry, who co-chaired the impacts assessment group for the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, and others.
By analysing the regional and global impacts that would occur by 2050 and 2100 for various greenhouse gas emissions targets, Parry and co-authors argue that compared with 50 per cent cuts, slashing emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by mid-century would substantially reduce the damage caused; for example, halving the number at risk of water stress and flooding.
They call on world leaders at the forthcoming UN climate change talks in Bonn in June and July's G8 summit in Hokkadio, Japan to boldly declare their commitment to dramatically reducing greenhouse gases.
The current global food crisis should serve as a ‘wake-up call’ to G8 and UN leaders, they say, who suffer from “false optimism’ that “we can find a way to fully avoid all the serious threats of climate change”.
They caution, however, than even with 80% cuts, damages will still be large, which is why world leaders must also step up their commitment on funding adaptation. Current efforts are vastly below par, with a mere US$67 million donated to date of the estimated tens of billions needed for developing-world adaptation alone.
At the same time as world leaders are being urged to consider stricter targets for 2050, others are urging them to seriously consider shorter term targets – for 2020 – a goal believed to be important if emissions are to peak within the next 10 to 20 years.
Olive Heffernan
A new study, published online Sunday by Nature Geoscience, presents solid evidence that temperatures in the Earth's lower atmosphere are increasing in line with temperature changes on the ground.
This issue has been hotly disputed in the past, partly owing to the fact that temperatures measured in the troposhere - the portion of the atmopshere stretching from 12 to 16 kilometeres above the Earth's surface - by satellites and weather balloons in the early 1990s didn't mirror the changes on the ground.
This fact was used as evidence against climate change, despite the fact that it has been long known that there were problems with the original data collection and analysis.
In the search for more accurate measurements, two scientients Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood of Yale University, have now developed a novel approach using wind rather than temperature data. Their research shows that the lower atmosphere has indeed warmed since 1970, as projected by most climate models, and in sync with warming on the ground measured using temperature data.
In a related News and Views article, aslo on Nature Geoscience, Peter Thorn of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the world's premier climate modelling facilities, writes:
This is not simply an interesting academic aside — not knowing where observational problems begin and modelling limitations end undermines our ability to understand and predict global climate change.
For further reading on the topic, check out the post over on Real Climate last week discussing the same issue, and highlighting some upcoming papers in the Journal of Climate.
Olive Heffernan
Hurricanes may become rarer in the Atlantic throughout the 21st century if the world continues to warm, suggests a new study. The research is the latest to address the question of how – and whether - global warming will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
Globally, the number of major hurricanes has shot up by 75% since 1970. And although rising ocean temperatures are generally accepted as the key culprit – hurricanes can only form where sea surface temperatures exceed 26ºC - the link to global warming has remained a contentious issue.
In the new study, published online yesterday in Nature Geoscience [subscription], Thomas Knutson of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and colleagues showed, using a regional climate model of the Atlantic basin, that the trend in increased hurricane activity in the Atlantic over the past 25 years will not continue into the future, though hurricanes in the area may become more intense and associated with heavier rainfall.
Though they use a different model, the results generally concur with the recent paper by hurricane specialist Kerry Emanuel, which shows that hurricanes are likely to decrease in frequency but increase in intensity in certain locations as temperatures rise.
I’ve written the full story here for Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
Image: NASA / Univ. Wisconsin-Madison
Nearly 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - from the timing of plant flowering to the rate of ice melting - are being influenced by human-induced global warming, according to the first study to formally link trends in biological and physical systems to rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the analysis, published in this week's Nature, brings together data from numerous different studies stretching back to 1970 to gain a big picture view of how climate change is impacting the planet.
Although the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that human-induced climate warming is "likely" to have had a discernible effect on physical and biological systems, attributing such changes in natural systems to specific causes in notoriously difficult, as highlighted in the related News and Views article by Francis Zweirs and Gabriele Hegerl, both IPCC panelists.
Rosenzweig and collaborators made this link first by mapping changes in global average suface temperature between 1970 and 2004. They then looked at whether changes in natural phenomena in each region were consistent with warming or inconsistent with warming e.g. earlier blooming of flowers would be expected in a warmer climate.
In more than 90% of cases where there was a trend, it was consistent with the predicted effects of a warming world. As Emma Marris points out in an online news story, the bulk of the data come from Europe and several hundred more come from elsewhere in the world, but Africa, Australia and Latin America are poorly represented.
Olive Heffernan
Image credit: David Inouye
The Earth’s greenhouse history of the last 800,000 years is an open book now, thanks to years of detective work by two large international teams of climate scientists.
Nature has two papers this week, here and here, about the levels of atmospheric concentration of the two main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and methane – as derived from air entrapped in the EPICA Dome C ice core from Antarctica. Here is an editor's summary.
The first and foremost results: The present day concentration of both gases is higher than has ever been the case in the past 800,000 years. Also, the ups and downs in carbon dioxide and methane curves follows the succession of cold glacial climates and relatively warm periods (such as ours) in between. An 800,000 year temperature record had been reconstructed previously from Antarctic ice cores.
Together, the results provide powerful evidence for a strong link between greenhouse gases and climate. During most of the Earth’s history greenhouse gas concentrations have fluctuated in the absence of humans burning coal and other fossil fuels. But the unprecedented rise of greenhouse gases in the modern atmosphere, to concentrations which threaten to unhinge vital components of the Earth’s climate system, is clearly the result of human activity.
In the past, greenhouse gas concentrations have varied owing to subtle feedbacks between orbital changes and oceanic and terrestrial carbon cylcles. Carbon dioxide concentrations depend on oceanic uptake, whereas methane is linked with the size and distribution of wetlands releasing the gas.
Like all good science, the new data will raise many new questions. One is why the amplitude of the 100,000-year oscillation in methane and carbon dioxide concentrations (which correlates with the 100,000 year temperature cycle) has changes so markedly around 450,000 years ago. Warm periods in the more recent history of the Earth seem to have been warmer than the interglacials prior to 450,000 years ago. Carbon dioxide and methane concentrations mirror this trend, which might hint to the existence of a longer-term cycle not visible in the existing record.
Another question is how greenhouse gas concentrations measured in Antarctic ice cores relate to episodes of rapid warming and cooling in Greenland and the northern hemisphere. It seems that more that 70 such temperature jumps, perhaps as a result of changes in ocean circulation, have occured over the last 800,000 years.
“These new benchmark data for greenhouse-gas variability pose questions as to what a much longer record might show,” writes Ed Brook in a news and views article. The search for the best drilling site which could produce such a record is beginning.
Quirin Schiermeier
While most Londoners spent last week maximising their time spent basking in the glorious sunshine that so rarely comes our way, I spent it largely indoors - at a place that predicts these sorts of unusual occurrences, otherwise known as the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading.
The World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction held there last week was itself something of a rare event – a union of the weather and climate communities, who met to discuss whether – and how – they can eventually provide climate predictions that are as useful, and as useable, as weather forecasts.
The four-day summit culminated in a call for a massive investment, around a billion dollars, to fund a new global research facility or facilities with computer and research resources that would ‘revolutionize’ climate modelling capabilities, bringing into view the holy grail of ‘seamless’ weather-to-climate prediction.
We’ve covered the summit in some detail in this week’s Nature [subscription], in my news story and an editorial by Oliver Morton.
In short, the idea is that an injection of cash on this scale could bring about a quantum leap in climate simulations by funding climate computers far beyond those in use today. Currently, computers used for modelling the climate are in the 10-teraflop range, which means that they operate at inconceivably high speeds and run models that divide the globe into 100 kilometre cells to roughly project how global climate is likely to change in the long-term.
Though these models have had a key role in warning us of the gradual warming of our planet, they’ve fared pretty poorly when it comes to gauging the likelihood of extreme localised events, such as flooding or more frequent hurricanes. But scientists at the conference said that if they had access to supercomputers – with speeds in the range of hundreds of petaflops (basically 10,000 times more processing power) - they could resolve climate globally on the scale of kilometres, potentially creating models good enough to inform nations of the specific regional challenges they can expect in adapting to climate change.
Continue reading "A revolution - for climate model evolution " »
The current issue of Nature has a feature about the state of the Greenland ice sheet (See also the related editorial dealing with the state of polar research funding).
I got started on this story at the American Geophysical Union meeting last December, in which session after session presented new data about the extent of summer melt in Greenland. Information from the GRACE satellites shows that the overall mass balance of the ice sheet is dropping steadily, and although surface melt varies quite a bit from summer to summer, two of the last three years have seen record levels of melt.
“2007 was a shocking year,” Scott Luthcke, who works with GRACE at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told me later.
One record melt season does not spell the end of Greenland, of course, and journalists must always be wary about sounding too alarmist based on short-term records. But overall, the outlook for Greenland is simply not good: Changes in speeds of the island’s outlet glaciers show that, no matter whether they are advancing or retreating, they are far faster at changing their behavior than anyone had thought before.
As the article was going to press, we learned that another pair of key Greenland papers would appear the next day online in Science. Such is the peril of scheduling features far in advance while knowing your competitor journal has interesting papers under review.
The basic point of the two new papers -- that vast quantities of meltwater can form and then drain away atop the ice sheet each summer – made it into my feature anyway. But if you want more details, check out the original papers at the Science Express website. One paper, with lead author Sarah Das of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, reports on a 4-kilometre-long melt lake that vanished into the ice sheet within the space of two hours. The other, with lead author Ian Joughin of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, describes seasonal speed-up in ice flow along Greenland’s western flank – though not so much in the outlet glaciers. Together, the papers confirm how meltwater likely helps lubricate the slippage of the ice sheet towards the ocean.
If you’re still looking for more things Greenland, check out the recent posting on RealClimate that again suggests the details of how Greenland melts are more complicated than we thought.
And if you just need a fix of gorgeous Greenland pictures, click on over to the Extreme Ice Survey project of photographer James Balog and others. We used only one of Balog’s iceberg images in my Nature feature, but his time-lapse work of melting glaciers is stunning.
Alexandra Witze
Image credit: NASA/GSFC VISUALISATION STUDIO; SOURCE: S. LUTHCKE
On Nature Reports Climate Change , Gywn Prins of the LSE has reviewed The Hot Topic by science writer (and once climate change editor at Nature) Gabrielle Walker and former UK chief science advisor Sir David King.
The book has with the odd exception, received mostly favourable - and a few oustanding reviews - namely Chris Mooney's for New Scientist and Dave Reay's in the March 6 issue of Nature.
Indeed, Reay compares it Rachel Carson’s celebrated Silent Spring in its ability to engage millions and commends its even-handed coverage of the ‘climate debate’. Reay writes:
The Hot Topic has an authoritative clarity that scythes through the junk science and brushes aside the brigades of doom-mongers and overly earnest environmentalists.
Over on The Intersection Chris Mooney refers to it as "the best global warming book I've ever read", and has a similar stance to Reay. Of Walker and King, he writes:
Their overview of the science and policy of climate change is a model of clarity, comprehensiveness and, above all, sanity. It truly does find a middle ground in the climate debate.
On the contrary, Prins (who authored a Commentary in Nature last year with Steve Rayner calling for a radical alternative to the Kyoto Protocol) argues that the book is both “troubling” and “relentlessly normative” in that it represents “an unquestioning acceptance of the received wisdom”.
Prins is especially disgruntled with how Walker and King, in his view, polarize perspectives on the way forward on climate policy:
[They] have no scintilla of doubt that the Kyoto Protocol is the road to follow and that anyone who deserts it is wrong and possibly corrupt. So we have as heroes the EU, which doesn't "duck" the problem, and as villains the US, languishing under the rule of "President Bush and his fiercely partisan advisers". They lump all "sceptics" — anyone who disagrees with them — together like the damned in a Hieronymus Bosch painting of heaven and hell.
He then compares The Hot Topic to Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (albeit at the other end of the polemical spectrum) in it’s treatment of uncongenial information, essentially making the point that the authors choose their supporting arguments carefully and disregard the rest.
Continue reading "Review of The Hot Topic: The road well travelled " »
It’s been quite a while since the Gulf Stream was last on the Nature cover. This week the old highlight is back.
Now that’s a topic which has caused an awful lot of confusion before. “How global warming will cause the next ice age”, stuff like that. So just to be clear: the Gulf Stream is the mostly wind-driven upper limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which ceaselessly transports warm surface water from the Caribbean to middle and high latitudes on the other side of the Atlantic. Yes, ceaselessly. As long as the Earth keeps rotating there’s really nothing in the world (not even global warming) that could bring it to a halt.
It is common knowledge - and true - that the British Isles and Scandinavia enjoy a much warmer climate than Newfoundland or Labrador thanks to the Gulf Stream. But its climatic influence goes far beyond that, a US-Japanese team report in a paper in Nature this week.
They detected the Gulf Stream’s signature in the entire lower atmosphere - namely in air and cloud temperatures, rain bands, pressure fields and wind convergence - above its meandering cross-Atlantic course, and far inland in Europe.
That the influence of the Gulf Stream might penetrate deeply into the atmosphere has been previously assumed. Firm evidence that this is indeed the case, and vehemently so, comes from the combination of satellite observations, operational weather analysis and atmospheric circulation models which the team utilised for their study.
Very likely the Gulf Stream’s direct local effects on the atmosphere are tele-connected, via planetary atmospheric waves, with weather conditions in far-away regions. How frequent and pronounced these remote responses might be is not at all clear. But it seems at least as if Gulf Stream-driven atmospheric dynamics over the North Atlantic have a marked influence on hemisphere-wide climatology.
This, you’ve guessed it, adds another piece to the climate change puzzle. Come what may, the Gulf Stream will not ‘run dry’. But its strength does vary, and a possible weakening of the Atlantic overturning circulation, to which it belongs, is unlikely to leave the Gulf Stream unaffected.
A new ice age will not come over Europe because of that, but storm tracks and rainfall patterns could be affected in rather unpredictable ways.
Quirin Schiermeier
You can vote or comment on the importance of the new Gulf Stream paper in the Journal Club of Nature Reports Climate Change.
One of the most significant aspects of the UN climate meeting in Bali was an agreement to bring emissions from deforestation into the loop. It only makes sense, given that deforestation is estimated to cause as much as 20 percent of the global greenhouse emissions. There’s still debate about the exact figure, of course, but the point is that it’s an awfully large number to ignore.
We first covered the issue last fall, when environmental advocates and rainforest nations (as they are calling themselves these days) started gearing up for the meeting. With an eye toward Bonn, where the next deforestation discussions will take place in June, I decided to revisit the issue and figure out where we’re at. This week’s Nature features the first story in a two-part special report that runs this and next week.
As a reporter you often have a pretty good feeling for where a story might lead you - the trick is being prepared to be wrong. This was one of those cases where I was caught a little bit by surprise. I expected I would be writing about early-stage discussions on how to build a market that rewards countries for reducing emissions, but I ended up writing about whether this is, or should be, the route the world intends to take.
I thought this debate was pretty much resolved before Bali, or at least in Bali, but people started hammering on the issue the minute I picked up the phone. As it turns out, the European Commission had even issued a policy proposal last month that would close the door to deforestation credits in the European trading scheme, instead putting money in a pot for traditional government programmes.
One thing led to another and pretty soon I wound up back in Kyoto, where the debate between US negotiators, who were pushing the market-based approach, and their European counterparts began more than a decade earlier. The idea still has a strong foothold in the United States, and is being pushed by a diverse and powerful set of interests ranging from utilities to environmental groups. But the divide is still fairly wide and deep on this issue, so we’ll have to see where it goes from here.
I don’t want to give too much away regarding the piece that comes out next week, but I’ll give you a couple of hints: It centers on the world’s largest tropical forest, and I had the opportunity to practice my Portuguese while reporting it out.
Jeff Tollefson
For anyone interested in the consensus on climate change, there’s a very interesting feature by Joseph Romm who blogs over on Climate Progress on Salon today, in which he argues that opinion on the cause of global warming is irrelevant. What is relevant, says Romm, is the overwhelming body of well-tested science and real-word observations.
Romm makes the case that the perpetual use of the word ‘consensus’ by the media, scientific community, and others mistakenly frames climate change as an issue of opinion, rather than one of scientific scrutiny based on data and evidence:
“Science doesn't work by consensus of opinion. Science is in many respects the exact opposite of decision by consensus…One of the most serious results of the overuse of the term "consensus" in the public discussion of global warming is that it creates a simple strategy for doubters to confuse the public, the press and politicians: Simply come up with as long a list as you can of scientists who dispute the theory. After all, such disagreement is prima facie proof that no consensus of opinion exists.So we end up with the absurd but pointless spectacle of the leading denier in the U.S. Senate, James Inhofe, R-Okla., who recently put out a list of more than 400 names of supposedly "prominent scientists" who supposedly "recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called 'consensus' on man-made global warming."
Opinion polls on the climate consensus crop up from time to time. Coincidentally one such poll came to my attention this week, via email, and is being discussed over on Roger Pielke Sr’s blog.
The posts basically describe the rejection, first by the AGU journal EOS and secondly by Nature Precedings, of a research poll by Pielke Sr, James Annan and Fergus Brown surveying whether there is agreement among climate scientists on the IPCC fourth assessment report.
Pielke Sr. writes:
“It is clear that the AGU EOS and Nature Precedings Editors are using their positions to suppress evidence that there is more diversity of views on climate, and the human role in altering climate, than is represented in the narrowly focused 2007 IPCC report”.
There’s a further post and comment stream over on Brown’s blog.
I’m not privy to the inside information on why their paper was rejected from both EOS and Nature Precedings, but it seems to me that there are (at least) two point to be made here:
Continue reading "Climate consensus: is opinion even relevant? " »
Europe and the US could be headed for a trade war over climate change.
In a speech yesterday José Barroso, president of the European Commission, said he would be ready to force companies outside the EU to buy carbon allowances to ensure that companies inside were not disadvantaged by Europe’s tougher emissions targets (speech).
While this apparently went down well with the audience (of European businessmen) it hasn’t gone down so well with America.
Reuters highlights that US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said that an earlier version of the EU plans seemed to be an excuse to close the European market and amounted to something like protectionism. More worryingly, the notes for speech delivered by Schwab last week contains the statement, “The unilateral imposition of restrictions can lead to retaliation, and dramatically impact economic growth and markets worldwide – while accomplishing nothing or worse when it comes to advancing environmental objectives.”
The US approach has also been backed by the UK, most recently by energy minister Malcolm Wicks saying today the government was “against any measures which might look like trade barriers” and warning that some in Europe “could use this as a kind of secret weapon, as it were, to bring about protectionism” (listen to Wicks on BBC or read his comments on Reuters). Barroso also appears to be picking a fight with his own trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson. Mandelson is on record as saying the restrictions are not the way forward (BBC)*.
Nature Reports Climate Change rolls out its podcast today, with editor Olive Heffernan interviewing the experts behind our key stories. In this first episode:
- Tim Lenton has more to say about his Commentary on tipping points for dangerous climate change
- IPCC scientists Stefan Rahmstorf, Michael Oppenheimer and Gavin Schmidt opine on where the IPCC should turn now, having released its Fourth Assessment synthesis report last week
- journalist Emma Marris explains how mountain-dwelling species are being killed off by the 'escalator effect'
- speculation on the 'son of Kyoto' to be conceived at next month's UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, from Eliot Morley of Globe International, Nick Mabey of e3g and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Starting next week, Climate Feedback will have Olive Heffernan blogging from the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, so tune in to find out whether the delegates are standing united against climate change threats or mired in debate over which policies are fair to whom -- or both. And keep an eye out (or an RSS feed subscribed) for next month's podcast, which will feature interviews and discussion direct from the floor of the UN conference.
Anna Barnett
World experts have gathered in Valencia to produce a synthesis of all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports released to date (Nature – subscription required). Thus, there is a rash of climate change news.
The Valencia meeting’s report will, according to AFP, “serve as a guide for policymakers for years to come”. Now traditional arguments between Europe, the US and other participants over the exact wordings are already underway (AP).
Even OPEC is getting in on the action. The group of oil producing nations said this week it would assist in cutting or capturing carbon emissions (Reuters). Some reports even say it is mulling over the creation of a $3 billion fund invest in emission capture technology (Times).
In Australia the former head of the country’s Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization’s atmospheric research unit warned before the meeting that current policy is based on science that is already out of date (ABC). “If you think climate change is on the agenda, just wait another couple of years,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Cross posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
Olive Heffernan
This week on Nature Reports Climate Change, Amanda Leigh Haag looks at how climate change is increasingly becoming an issue of national security, raising the alarm on issues of border control and immigration policy globally.
The feature details how regions likely to bear the brunt of climate impacts are already beginning to look to neighbouring states for potential resettlement deals, while less vulnerable nations are considering the likely spillover of large-scale migration from areas impacted by severe drought or flooding.
This raises some interesting issues, such as whether adaptation should focus on protecting the rights of people to live in their home, rather than offering relocation programmes, and whether these scenarios are inevitable without drastic measures to prevent further warming….but more on that shortly.
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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