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:
Keith Kloor
While many are feeling pessimistic about the prospects for a deal at Copenhagen, Geoffrey Lean at Grist believes the big climate summit still has a pulse. He reports that “environment ministers from 40 key countries—assembled this week for a two-day preparatory meeting in Copenhagen—made good progress towards a political agreement.”
Lean doesn’t deny that the odds for success are still long. But the game is by no means over, he writes:
“It is all very difficult. But there is a chance that, with luck and skill, a climate-saving deal can be reached. And while far from ideal, the hope that a deal is still salvageable is a lot better than the doom that was so widely pronounced at the start of the week.”
Meanwhile, are people suffering from “climate fatigue,” and tuning out the steady drumbeat of alarming news on climate change? Richard Kerr in Science examines the communication challenges [subscription required]. He writes:
“Almost all climate scientists are of one mind about the threat of global warming: It's real, it's dangerous, and the world needs to take action immediately. But they disagree about the best way to convey the urgency of the situation to the public and policymakers.”
At Yale Environment 360, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that one thing not to do is hype the danger incessantly. Pointing to the consistent polling that shows Americans to have soft support for climate change measures, the authors assert:
“The lesson of recent years would appear to be that apocalyptic threats — when their impacts are relatively far off in the future, difficult to imagine or visualize, and emanate from everyday activities, not an external and hostile source — are not easily acknowledged and are unlikely to become priority concerns for most people.”
Keith Kloor
The U.S. Congressional climate bill will be tabled until next year, reports The Wall Street Journal. Says Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus:
"It's common understanding that climate-change legislation will not be brought up on the Senate floor and pass the Senate this year."
Just how important is the U.S. climate bill to a climate change agreement in Copenhagen? It’s everything, argues Geoffrey Lean in Grist:
“Never before has such a vital, international treaty depended so crucially on the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. Even previous environmental breakthroughs, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer or the Washington Convention on Endangered Species, were preceded by U.S. legislation. As such, the rest of the world is experiencing for the first time how its vital interests can be affected by American politics, as senators from coal or oil states object to legislation that would curb emissions from fossil fuels.”
In lieu of this, “the Obama Administration is considering endorsing a limited short-term climate pact,” reports Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post. She writes:
“Backing an interim agreement -- which would fall far short of what many European and developing nations envisioned when President Obama took office -- would be an attempt to keep the U.N.-sponsored talks from being viewed a failure, say administration and congressional officials.”
Enough of all this gloomy talk, admonished European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, in a press conference yesterday. As Green Inc. reports, Dimas:
“criticized world leaders who had played down the possibility of a strong outcome at the Copenhagen meeting, suggesting they were too pessimistic.”
Quirin Schiermeier
Rising temperatures cause melting and retreat of large ice sheets, sea ice, and mountain glaciers – that’s pretty much common knowledge by now, as are implications on sea level, ecosystems, water supply and natural hazard risk. But a couple of news stories this week may cause confusion.
That the Greenland ice sheet is losing ice, and that mass loss has further accelerated in recent years, comes as no particular surprise. Using ground observations and satellite gravity measurements, a team led by Michiel van den Broeke from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, estimates that some 1,500 gigatonnes – roughly 1,500 cubic kilometers – have been lost from 2000-2008, equivalent to about 0.46 millimeters of global sea level rise.
Melting rates have accelerated since 2006, with mass loss reaching 273 gigatons of mass per year, equivalent to 0.75 millimeters of sea level rise. Without the moderating effects of increased snowfall, post 1996 mass losses would have been 100% higher, the team writes in a paper in this week’s issue of Science [subscription].
But the cryosphere – those parts of the globe that are permanently or seasonally covered by ice – does have surprises in store. Or so it seems.
Here’s one: Himalayan glaciers (there are tens of thousands of them of) are not – or at least not yet - shrinking as a result of climate change, the world learned this week from an Indian geologist.
“Although shrinking in volume and constantly showing a retreating front, [Himalayan glaciers] have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat,” concludes retired glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, in a report to India's Ministry of Environment and Forests.
“It is premature to make a statement that glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating abnormally because of global warming,” he goes on.
Following the release of the study – based on observations of 25 glaciers – India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh was quick to challenge the“conventional wisdom" about melting ice in the world’s tallest mountains.
Fellow Indian Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was put out: "We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement," he told the Guardian.
The IPCC had warned in its latest report, published in 2007, that Himalayan glaciers "are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."
So what's going on? I asked Lonnie Thompson, a veteran glaciologist and leading paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University. Here’s what he said:
“First and foremost this is not a peer reviewed report and nothing scientific can be claimed based on 25 glaciers out of over 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas and 46,300 in the Himalayas and Tibetan region.”
Continue reading "Greenland ice and Himalayan glaciers: What’s going on?" »
Keith Kloor
Passing climate legislation through the US Senate may be tricky, but that hasn’t scared off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from doing its part. As Stephen Power at the WSJ’s Environmental Capitol notes:
“Congress might be a long way from passing legislation to fight climate change, but the Obama administration appears one step closer to creating its own regime for controlling greenhouse gases.”
Now the President has said he may even attend the UN conference in Copenhagen ---if a deal is at hand. The AP has the scoop:
"If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over the edge, then certainly that's something that I will do."
But if an accord isn’t reached this year, the global climate-change negotiations may be “headed toward the same aimless end” as the notoriously endless ‘Doha round’ of global trade talks, writes Bryan Walsh at Time magazine.
Speaking of something once thought endless, it’s been 20 years since the cold war crumbled in a heap. Now, a certain key historical figure from that time has emerged to implore today’s leaders to “tear down” another kind of wall. In a guest commentary at The Times of London, Mikhail Gorbachev writes:
“Addressing climate change demands a paradigm shift on a scale akin to that required to end the Cold War.”
If there’s going to be such a paradigm shift, it’s safe to say that most environmentalists weren’t betting that the UK would approve a new fleet of “clean coal” and nuclear power stations. As energy secretary Ed Miliband puts it in The Guardian:
"The threat of climate change means we need to make a transition from a system that relies heavily on high-carbon fossil fuels, to a radically different system that includes nuclear, renewable and clean coal power.”
Ready for another puzzler? What’s going on with that Indian government report claiming there is no evidence that global warming has shrunk Himmalayan glaciers? Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, is hopping mad over this, and gives The Guardian an earful, and then some.
"We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement."
Finally, in the feel-good story of the day, Politico reports that two U.S. political combatants know how to set aside their differences at the end of the day and share warm and fuzzy gifts. "We are really very good friends,” Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer tells Politico, referring to Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, who has called global warming 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.' Adds Boxer: “It’s a good working relationship we have. People are very surprised about it.”
Jeff Tollefson; cross-posted from The Great Beyond
International delegates to the Montreal Protocol wrapped up their meeting in Port Ghalib, Egypt, over the weekend without taking formal action to curb hydrofluorocarbons, modern refrigerants that are also poised to become a major contributor to global warming.
Some 41 countries joined in a declaration in support of regulating HFCs as greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol, according to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and the Environmental Investigation Agency. This is in addition to support in North America and Europe as well as Micronesia and Mauritius, which have led the proposal.
Ozone-friendly HFCs represent the culmination of the Montreal Protocol's original mission; regulating them as greenhouse gases would require an amendment expanding the protocol's regulatory umbrella. In Egypt, Montreal delegates called on a technical committee to analyze alternatives to the chemicals in advance of a potential decision next year. For background, see our previous coverage here and here.
Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), has denied claims that it prevents researchers from publishing work on politically-sensitive issues such as climate change, reports Nature News [subscription].
An ecological economist at the agency, Clive Spash, had a paper accepted for publication in the journal New Political Economy earlier this year, only to find out two weeks later that it had been withdrawn by a CSIRO official because it had not yet been through an internal approval process.
In the article, Spash reportedly criticized carbon trading schemes for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, commenting that they are ineffective even if politically popular.
CSIRO staff are prevented from commenting on matters of policy. The agency has a process in place to ensure that staff only communicate on the results of their research, but Spash argues that such a policy presents real difficulties for academics working in socio-economics. As Nature News reports:
“There's a real issue here about people working in the socio-economic area," [Spash] told one reporter. "It's not at all clear to me how these people are supposed to work and do their job while trying to meet these general guidance principles that have been interpreted at present to say that we're not allowed to comment on any government policy at any level of government, anywhere in the world."
Spash apparently submitted the paper before an internal decision was made, having become frustrated with the slowness of the process and with wrangling over specific wording.
A CSIRO employee told Nature News last Friday that the incident stemmed more from management styles and conservative interpretation of the rules, rather than from any political pressure.
Keith Kloor
Prospects for the U.S. congressional climate bill appear grim, writes Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:
“With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.”
David Roberts at Grist offers a similar prognosis for a bill he says that is already “far weaker than what’s needed.” Because of America’s institutional “political dysfunction,” Roberts predicts:
“There’s every chance it will a) get weaker still and b) fail to pass in the end.”
Amidst this backdrop, cap-and-trade, which is the basis for the congressional climate legislation, is getting raked over the coals again. Two attorneys for the U.S Environmental Protection Agency penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which they asserted:
“The House and Senate climate bills are not a first step in the right direction. They would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion-dollar carbon-offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions. Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more.”
Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs in the November/December issue of Scientific American takes a similarly dim view of “the cumbersome cap-and-trade system proposed by the House of Representatives. Too much is at stake, argues Sachs:
“We’ll need to spend trillions of dollars over time to save the planet from climate change. All the more reason not to let lobbyists make a financial game out of this deadly serious effort.”
Did American politicians thus bet on the wrong horse, muses Keith Johnson at the WSJ’s Environmental Capitol? He suggests it might be wise to set aside the conventional wisdom about carbon taxes being “a political dead-end.” Johnson lays out how environmentalists can find common ground with deficit hawks on a climate bill centered on a carbon tax.
Whatever policy instrument eventually gets put in place to reduce carbon emissions, it may still be too late to save the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As The Times of London reports:
“The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.”
Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
Climate negotiators are in Barcelona, Spain, this week for the last bout of negotiating prior to the two-week Copenhagen meeting. In December this year, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will descend on Copenhagen to wrangle over the details of a new global climate deal — a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. See Nature’s Road to Copenhagen special for more coverage.
“The clock has almost ticked down to zero and, as always, time will fly. These last five days are critical on the road to success to Copenhagen. They need to be used wisely.”
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, tells the meeting to make progress (AFP).
“A good deal for the climate is still possible. All that is missing is political will, not least from the US, which under President Obama has fallen far behind the rest of the world, and is threatening to undermine a planet-saving agreement in Copenhagen.”
Damon Moglen, of Greenpeace US, comments after his organisation stormed the town’s Sagrada Familia to unveil banners (AFP).
“I feel it [is] very hard to imagine how the US president can receive the Nobel peace prize on December 10 in Oslo only a few hundred kilometres [from Copenhagen] if he has sent an American delegation to Copenhagen with no offer.”
Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s environment minister, takes aim at America (Guardian).
“Climate change is a ticking time bomb. Global leaders need to act now to stop the needless deaths of millions of children.”
David Mepham, Save the Children’s policy director, says climate change could kill 250,000 children in 2010 and over 400,000 by 2030 (Daily Telegraph).
Keith Kloor
So if Copenhagen doesn’t produce a global warming treaty next month, which now seems likely, what about setting up a global environmental body? The environmental ministers for Italy and Kenya float this idea in a Guardian op-ed. They note that Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France are lobbying to have the idea taken up at Copenhagen:
“In a letter to the UN secretary general [Merkel and Sarkozy] emphasised that we must overhaul environmental governance and use Copenhagen climate talks in December to progress the creation of a world environmental organisation.”
In their op-ed, the two environmental ministers argue:
“History has proven that strong international institutions are the precondition for building any successful international cooperation. The global financial crisis and the collaboration through the G20 and the International Monetary Fund are recent examples.”
Anyone familiar with the bad environmental press Canada has been receiving of late will be surprised to learn that the country has agreed to preserve vast tracts of its Boreal Forest from development, which will helpfully soak up huge amounts of carbon. The action, as the Guardian notes:
“is somewhat of an anomaly for Canada, whose government has been accused of sabotaging the global climate change talks by its development of the Alberta tar sands and its refusal to make deep cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions.”
Three days of hearings on climate legislation in the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works committee concluded on Thursday. The big story to emerge, according to Politico, is a key moderate Democrat’s “serious reservations” about the bill. Recalcitrant Republicans, meanwhile, heard about the national security implications of climate change from retired military brass and former Republican Sen. John Warner, who is a close ally of the military. He cautioned:
"We are talking about energy insecurity, water and food shortages, and climate-driven social instability. We ignore these threats at the peril of our national security and at great risk to those in uniform."
Committee Republicans, for their part, seem more interested in winning additional time to study the bill’s cap-and-trade program.
The African Union takes up the issue of "climate refugees" in a new treaty that addresses the plight of displaced people. According to IRIN, a U.N. news service:
“the inclusion of displacement by natural disasters was informed by the global debate on the need to develop a framework for the rights of ‘climate refugees’ - people uprooted from their homes and crossing international borders - because the changing climate threatened their survival.”
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" »
Keith Kloor
The public battle starts anew on the U.S. congressional climate & energy bill, as senate hearings get underway today. Keith Johnson over at the WSJ’s Environmental Capital believes that three camps will shape the debate:
“Those that believe climate legislation will actually strengthen the economy, those that figure it will have significant but manageable costs, and those that figure it will further burden a recession-challenged economy. Much of the opposition in the Senate—both from Republicans and Democrats—centers on how big the final bill is and who picks up the tab.”
While the proposed legislation is slated to cut greenhouse gases by about 80 percent by 2050, Grist predicts there will be plenty of concessions to coal, nuclear, and natural gas proponents, and even then:
“Reaching a compromise, as the debate over health care reform is already showing, will come down to a key question: How much are the Democrats willing to give away in order to secure one or two votes from the other side of the aisle?”
Despite the tough congressional slog, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he was hopeful the U.S. congress would pass the bill before the upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference in December. At a press conference on Monday, the Secretary General said he would be personally calling Senators to pick up the pace.
Whatever happens in Congress, pressure is mounting for President Obama to bring his prestige and Nobel aura to Copenhagen. That’s not likely to happen, reports The Times. According to this story:
“a source close to the Administration said it was ‘hard to see the benefit’ of his going to Copenhagen if there was no comprehensive deal for him to close or sign. Another expert, who did not want to be named, said he would be ‘really, really shocked’ if Mr Obama went to Copenhagen, adding that European hopes about the power of his Administration to transform the climate change debate in a matter of months bore little relation to reality.”
Despite the increasingly bleak outlook for a comprehensive deal at Copenhagen, people around the world on Saturday expressed their concern about global warming. At over 5,000 events, signs and banners were unfurled that read 350, a symbolic number in reference to 350 parts per million, which many scientists have said should be the limit for carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere. (We’re currently topping out at 387 parts per million.)
Keith Kloor
If all the maneuvering in advance of Copenhagen is beginning to resemble a high-stakes poker game, then the European Union has thrown its cards down on the table this week. As the Guardian reported:
“The EU negotiating position offers to slash greenhouse gas emissions by between 80-95% by 2050 and to deepen cuts from 20 to 30% by 2020 if other world powers sign up for similar action.”
That’s a pretty big if, especially in the case of the United States, since the U.S. official position is that it won’t commit to any targets until its Congress passes a climate change bill that is now in the senate. “Without such a commitment,” the New York Times writes, “other nations are loath to make their own pledges.”
Except the EU, that is. There’s still plenty of deal-making happening on the sidelines, though. For example, the border between China and India may be heating up over competing land claims, but that hasn’t stopped the two countries from inking a deal to cooperate on energy and climate issues ahead of Copenhagen.
As Keith Johnson over at the WSJ's Environmental Capitol notes:
"The battle over the Senate climate bill starts in earnest today, with more details on the Kerry-Boxer bill, fresh economic analysis from the EPA, and a speech by President Obama backing the measure."
Greens are thus wringing their hands over a new Pew Research Center poll that finds:
“There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem – 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.” Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research center, tells AP that the poll's results probably reflect the bleak economic landscape:
“The priority that people give to pollution and environmental concerns and a whole host of other issues is down because of the economy and because of the focus on other things.”
Still, as Grist observes, there is a sliver lining:
"There were two small (and puzzling) bits of consolation in the poll: many respondents support limiting greenhouse-gas emissions, and many want the U.S. to join an international climate-change plan."
That's precisely why people should look at the poll in a larger context, Roger Pielke, Jr., argues, in his analysis of the data:
"One reason to stop focusing on what people think about the science of climate change is that a majority of the public supports action on emissions as well as international cooperation on climate change. The policy challenge is thus to design policies that can be effective given the strong political support that has existed on this topic for some time. The realities are that support is about as strong as it is likely to be, and really hasn't changed much over a decade or longer."
Ironically, the Poll came out a day after 18 scientific organizations sent a letter to the U.S. Congress, reaffirming “the multiple independent lines of evidence” for climate change:
“Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.”
Quirin Schiermeier
The European Union’s environment ministers have reportedly agreed on a negotiation mandate for Sweden for the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. Sweden currently holds the EU presidency, which rotates every six months. (German).
The EU has previously said it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 % by 2020. At a speech to the European Parliament, Andreas Carlgren, the Swedish environment minister, yesterday reiterated that the EU will agree to 30 % cuts only if other parties make sufficient commitments in Copenhagen.
“We see the 30 per cent target as a lever to convince other parties to join us in being more ambitious. By 2050 emissions should have dropped by at least 80 per cent,” he said.
At today’s talks in Luxembourg, environment ministers of the 27 EU member states also called for the Copenhagen climate talks in December to set targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from ships and airplanes. By 2020, global emissions from aviation should be cut by 10 %, and emissions from shipping by 20 %, compared with 2005 levels, the group said according to news reports.
Meanwhile, at a meeting yesterday of EU finance ministers, Poland and other eastern EU member countries blocked a decision on climate adaptation aid for developing countries. The group is concerned that their national contribution to the planned adaptation fund will overburden their economies.
Andreas Borg, the Swedish finance minister, complained about “a lack of commitment by certain member states”.
The EU’s heads of states will now attempt to resolve the issue at a council meeting next week in Brussels, when the EU’s negotiation position for Copenhagen is to be rubber-stamped.
Has continuing criticism of the controversial Superfreakonomics book taken an ugly turn? Co-author Stephen Dubner believes so and fires back at his NYT blog, asserting that critics have:
“given the impression that we are global-warming deniers of the worst sort, and that our analysis of the issue is ideological and unscientific. Most gravely, we stand accused of misrepresenting the views of one of the most respected climate scientists on the scene, whom we interviewed extensively. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it’s not.”
Roger Pielke Jr., never one to shy away from a battle, believes that Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt have indeed been critized by Joe Romm over at Climate Progress. Dubner's charges have been denied by Romm, who has written multiple, lengthy posts in just the last 24 hours to defend himself. Regardless of who claims the high ground in this episode, Bradford Plumer reminds us over at The New Republic's website that Dubner has yet to "address any of the errors that scientists like William Connolley have pointed out," which Olive Heffernan summarized here:
Meanwhile, Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt has scolded the Superfreakonimics authors for embracing geoengineering, which Schmidt asserted:
“is neither cheap, nor a fix, and the reasons why it is very likely to be a bad idea are ethical and legal, much more than its still-uncertain scientific merits.”
Incidentally, the book is being published today. Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune magazine, who is friendly with one of the co-authors registers his disappoinment in the book over at Bloomberg. The controversial book, Pooley writes:
“turns out to be the same pile of misinformation the skeptic crowd has been peddling for years.”
In recent weeks, the big news on the U.S. business front has been about all the companies, such as Apple, quitting their membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the latter’s hostility to regulatory action on global warming. Now it seems that the climate issue is dividing energy producers as well. The NYT reports:
Getting a climate deal agreed in December will require an ‘uphill battle’ said UK energy and climate change Secretary Ed Miliband in London yesterday, despite incremental progress from the world's largest economies on agreeing the way forward.
Miliband addressed the press following a two-day meeting of the Major Economies Forum, a US-inspired initiative that includes 17 of the world's developing and emerging economies. The meeting aimed to address some of the key obstacles to securing a global treaty and involved six guest nations, including some of the world’s poorest such as Ethiopia.
Although the forum is not part of the formal UN negotiation process, its members collectively account for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so any shift in their positions will significantly affect prospects for reaching an agreement in Copenhagen.
I attended the press conference and reported the story for Nature News [subscription]. It’s interesting, as Andy Revkin points out over on Dot Earth, that the final communiqué from the meeting was seen by some observers as empty rhetoric but by others as containing substantial signs of progress.
Miliband certainly gave the impression that the meeting was successful, saying “there was a sense that substantial progress had been made”. That was reflected to some extent in the press coverage.
But Miliband was scant on the details of what exact progress had been made. He highlighted three areas where agreement had been reached: the need to substantially increase funding for adaptation and mitigation in the developing world (but he didn’t say by how much or by when), how that money will be transferred (this presumably relates to the decision that the UN, rather than the World Bank, will administer the fund) and the need for an international deal to reflect current commitments by both rich and poor nations (an issue that’s important to the US; Stern said there won’t be an agreement without this).
A cursory look at the communiqué suggests that progress by the MEF this week was incremental, and perhaps even insignificant, given the larger issues on the table. The address by US climate change envoy Todd Stern last night suggested that getting a deal that involves the US will be tricky.
I’ve elaborated on this in the full story, but in short, the US is unlikely to sign up to targets if the Waxman-Markey bill hasn’t passed through the Senate by December. And if it has passed, the issue of the legal framework of the treaty will be contentious: many developing nations want a Kyoto-style protocol, whereas the US isn’t keen on such an agreement, instead favouring one that commits both developed and developing nations to mid-term targets for 2020.
Speaking yesterday in London, Stern said that the US is “historically the biggest emitter, but the capacity of the world to get where we need to go [will] be more determined by what happens in China and other major developing nations in the future. It has to involve the major developing economies – that’s the only way it’s going to work”.
Olive Heffernan
Image: PurestockX
A newly launched series of Google Earth tours will map out the projected impacts of climate change worldwide and look at mitigation and adaptation options. Here's a brief intro, narrated in the light Tennessee drawl of Al Gore:
The full length intro is here, with more tours to come. Google is also inviting netizens to talk back about climate change on a new YouTube channel.
While you're playing with climate science layers on Google Earth, you may want to check out our interactive map of polar ice coring sites where researchers have extracted hundreds of millennia of climatic history.
Anna Barnett
After a banner week of international summits, a great leap forward on climate policy has yet to materialize, and some players are expressing a growing frustration.
US President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao both gave big speeches at a UN meeting in New York on Tuesday, but they didn’t make any bold leadership moves.
Jeff Tollefson has a briefing in Nature News on what went down:
Everybody is looking for signs of progress from the two biggest emitters, who together account [for] roughly 40% of emissions, but neither president offered the kind of commitments needed to re-energize the talks. Obama was in the unenviable position of needing to make bold promises before the US Congress has weighed in on the issue. Nonetheless, he declined to acknowledge, let alone address head on, the challenges he is facing on the domestic front.For his part, Hu largely underscored existing policies, promising to expand forests, produce 15% of the country's power using renewable energy and decrease energy intensity per unit of gross domestic product by a "notable margin" between now and 2020. All of these would substantially reduce Chinese emissions compared with baseline forecasts, and China is beginning to win some praise for its energy policies. Nonetheless, cumulative emissions are expected to continue rising, and Hu made no reference to any specific emissions targets or a date by which the country might try to stabilize its emissions.
As Jeff explains, almost everyone agrees with these statements, but they are old hat. And the clock is ticking. Says campaigner Steve Howard, founder of The Climate Group, in a New York Times story on the summit: “It was really great to have the vision, but with just 70 days left to Copenhagen, it is time to put some substance on the table. The two most important countries on this issue are being guarded in their positions.”
Obama’s speech did impress one observer, at least. Fidel Castro praised him as “brave” for acknowledging that the US has been slow to act on climate change.
Following closely was the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which started yesterday evening and continues today. With financial policy expected to take up much of the agenda, hopes aren’t high for a climate breakthrough there either.
Continue reading "Climate summits underwhelming, say leaders" »
This week in Nature you can read the first (subscription) of four articles unpicking the business of biofuels. First up is jatropha – the shrub that promised to give drought-ridden countries boundless oil supplies. The reality has turned out to be somewhat different. After a period of hype and over enthusiasm, investments have dried up, somewhat like the promise of oil from arid land.
Jatropha definitely still has a future, but the plant genetics really need to be better developed and a number of companies are now doing this, including London-based D1oils – a company which hit trouble earlier this year when a deal with oil giant BP fell through.
We also catch up with Pushpito Ghosh, director of India’s Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute. Nature first encountered Ghosh in 2007 when jatropha was still promising the Earth. His project seems to have benefited from a realistic approach from the start. Here we see a photo taken just last week at a CSMCRI plantation in Mahuda, Orissa. Each plant in this kind of harvest gives 1.75–2.25 kg of seeds, which have the oil extracted and the waste turned into briquettes.
The series continues next week with a look at bioalgae as a potential fuel source. After that comes cellulosic bioethanol, followed by the potential for a ‘green gasoline’ to be used as a simple drop-in-fuel replacement.
Katharine Sanderson
Image: CSMCRI
Over on Nature News, Declan Butler has a detailed briefing on the new carbon tax unveiled in France last week:
France is set to become the first major European economy to implement a carbon tax — a levy on activities that emit substantial amounts of carbon dioxide.Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, announced on 10 September that the tax would come into effect at the start of 2010. The tax draws largely on recommendations made on 28 July by an expert panel commissioned by the government, and chaired by the former Socialist prime minister, Michel Rocard.
Nature discussed the tax with Jean Jouzel, a member of the Rocard panel, director of the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute near Versailles, and also the French representative on the executive of the International Panel on Climate Change.
The French carbon tax will be levied at a rate of €17 (US$25) per tonne of CO2 — the current market price. Is that enough to change people's carbon-emitting habits?What's most important is that a carbon tax of some sort is going to be introduced. Starting at €32 per tonne, as our report recommended, would have been more courageous. The economists on the panel considered that €40 was the minimum for the carbon tax to be effective in changing consumer behaviour, so €32 was itself already a compromise. It's true that the plan is to phase in higher carbon prices over time, but Sarkozy failed to give further details. In the longer term, by around 2020, we need to reach a price of €100–€200 per tonne.
Read the full interview here.
Anna Barnett
Oxford economist Dieter Helm co-edits an upcoming book, The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, that he says takes "a colder and harder look at the challenge". In a Q&A on Nature Reports Climate Change this week, Helm gives his take on a long-term strategy for reducing emissions. Here's an excerpt:
Where, in your view, has policy gone wrong?Let's remember what lies behind Copenhagen. The Kyoto Protocol measures countries' production of carbon, not consumption. It's no accident the Europeans like Kyoto. It's a set of measures which, as they de-industrialize and production moves to countries like China, makes them look good. But the carbon consumption record of Europe, once you take those imports back, is pretty awful. That's why Kyoto looks like a success, and yet it hasn't caused even a blip in the emissions path.
Do we also need to re-think climate economics?What we have learnt is that politicians tend to choose the most expensive options first. Faced with climate change, what's our solution? In Europe, it's to devote most of our energies to a rapid build-out of wind power. This is the sort of thing that makes nuclear power look cheap. Climate change is about the massive increase of coal burning internationally, especially the growth of China and India fuelled by coal-based energy — and America too, where the Obama plans are also small relative to the problem.
What exactly will windmills across Europe do to address that overwhelmingly dominant effect? Of course they'll play some role, but it'll probably take a couple of weeks for China to add sufficient new coal power stations to cancel out any renewables effort in Britain. It's time to grow up. It's time to realize that coal is where the core of the problem lies, and to think cleverly about solutions towards that.
Anna Barnett
Cross-posted from Geoff Brumfiel on The Great Beyond
Yesterday the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, delivered its official view on geoengineering. Scientists analyzed a dozen different approaches and weighed their pros and cons. Then, being scientists, they plotted their results in a bizarre phase space that nobody could understand. Many a reporter, myself included, were scratching our heads when co-author Ken Caldeira popped this little gem up onto the screen:
(Note: error bars are purely symbolic. Huh?)
Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it's a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it's not surprising that you saw a range of headlines. The most inaccurate enthusiastic one by far, came from those lovely folks at the Register:
Boffins: Give up on CO2 cuts, only geoengineering can work
The Financial Times landed on the other end of the spectrum:
Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions
And in between came everybody else:
Study says 'geoengineering' to flight climate likely, but risky (USA Today)
Royal Society warns climate engineering 'could cause disaster' (the Times)
World must plan for climate emergency-report (Reuters)
Investment in geo-engineering needed immediately, says Royal Society (the Guardian)
These headlines make the report look like a Kurosawa film, but most of the actual stories are pretty accurate in my opinion. The bottom line is that the Royal Society felt that the only sure way to save the planet is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in the event of a global climate emergency, we should at least know the consequences of geoengineering.
You can read our coverage here.
Update: The Register headline was referring to an article in Physics World that came out the same day.
Update: I've included the updated diagram off the Royal Society website.
Geoff Brumfiel
Today The Guardian is unveiling their new 10:10 campaign, which pledges individuals, businesses and organizations to shrink their carbon footprints 10% in 2010. I'm heading down to Tate Modern to tweet the launch - follow @annabarnett, #1010.
Anna Barnett
As warming starts to shake up marine food webs, ecologists say it may give an unexpected boost to some fisheries - but also make them more precarious.
This is one of the implications of a new experimental study in PloS Biology that takes a panoramic point of view. Rather than tackling complex food webs species by species, the authors look at how warming affects growth and metabolism across the board within the broad groups of organisms at the base of the web.
Mary O’Connor of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and colleagues turned up temperatures in outdoor containers holding phytoplankton, the ocean’s primary producers, and bacteria and zooplankton, the smallest consumers. Warming of two to six degrees drove up the productivity of phytoplankton, as expected. But consumers increased their growth even more. Zooplankton retain only about 10% of the biomass they eat, so total biomass declined as the hungry hordes munched on the phytoplankton.
Zooplankton are fish food. O’Connor tells New Scientist, "The effect could be translated up the food chain" to a gain in fisheries, but “that top-heavy food web structure could be less stable, and crash all together." The group found that the consumer boom was much greater when nutrients were added, so they suggest that food webs in nutrient-poor waters - such as the ocean surface - may be more resilient to climate change.
The study is timely: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center recently announced that world ocean temperatures were the hottest on record last month. The temperatures beat the 20th-century average by nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius. According to AP, meteorologists are attributing the record high to a combination of global warming trends, an El Nino phase just getting started, and other natural variation. Apparently, an unusual and unexplained weather pattern this summer is concentrating warmth over the ocean while land surfaces stay cooler.
And this won’t be a brief blip in sea temperatures:
Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land."This warm water we're seeing doesn't just disappear next year; it'll be around for a long time," said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
Anna Barnett
Image: Mysis zooplankton / Uwe Kils, Creative Commons license
A new reservoir of fossil fuel could be ready to tap much sooner than previously thought. R&Ders have been talking up natural gas extraction from methane hydrates - a solid form of the greenhouse gas, found tucked away beneath the sea floor where low temperature and high pressure keep it stable.
Following an enthusiastic Congressional testimony, Ray Boswell of the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has a commentary in Science on hydrates’ potential as an energy source. But methane hydrates are also making headlines this week as a worrying harbinger of climate change. Some scientists have warned that ocean warming could destabilize hydrates and send methane gas bubbling into the ocean. Now a team led by Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham has spotted over 250 such gas plumes near Svalbard, Norway - echoing a similar observation from a group in Siberia earlier this year.
Much of the released gas dissolves in the water column, but any portion that reaches the air could amplify warming.
By drilling for hydrates, could we wake a sleeping giant? Boswell doesn’t tackle this question head on, but he offers some relevant points.
First off, hydrates in the Arctic - where gas plumes have been seen - are hard to get at. Before they go messing with the permafrost lid that protects the vast northern stores of methane, prospectors will find more enticing targets, says Boswell. Specifically, it’s hydrates found in sandy deposits in the Gulf of Mexico that are raising hopes at NETL.
Hydrate-bearing sands were first spotted off Japan in 1999. By recent estimates the Gulf of Mexico holds 190 trillion cubic meters of natural gas in such sands - over 300 times the amount of gas the US burns annually. An April expedition to probe the Gulf's deposits found promising pockets of highly saturated hydrates. There are technical and economic hurdles to extracting this gas, says Boswell, but many could be overcome with existing technology. That's a big difference from the hydrates known a decade ago, which were dispersed across muddy fields or packed into solid mounds.
Methane from sandy hydrates may also be easier to control. Boswell writes:
These resevoirs are commonly buried many hundreds of meters below the sea floor and enclosed in a matrix of impermeable sediments that help to prevent the escape of released methane. The most prospective gas hydrate deposits are also those that are most effectively buffered from environmental change.In other words, drillers are keen to avoid the escape of methane - they want to get it to customers who’ll burn it.
Speaking of which, does the world need another fossil fuel reservoir? Not if you’re hoping our supplies will run out in time to save the climate. But with the world facing dwindling oil reserves and a sluggish start on renewables, Boswell implies the gas could fill an important gap: “hydrates may offer an important ‘bridging’ fuel that will help ease the transition to the sustainable energy supplies of the future.”
Anna Barnett
Image: Methane actively dissociating from a hydrate mound / National Energy Technology Lab
Rice paddies produce an estimated 20% of the methane released by human activities. But according to data presented at a Beijing climate conference last week, a switch to certain farming practices could erase most of those emissions. Jane Qiu reports on the research over at Nature News.
Earlier this year, Xiaoyuan Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues came out with a notably low estimate of global rice-paddy methane emissions. Unlike other surveys, this one took into account the methane-busting practices of draining paddies mid-season and applying rice straw between crops.
Qiu’s story highlights work from a different American-Chinese team - Chris Butenhoff and Aslam Khalil of Portland State University and Xiong Zhenqin of Nanjing Agricultural University. Mid-season paddy draining has been common in China since the 1980s, the group points out, because it increases rice yield and saves water. By looking at the spread of paddy-draining and straw-strewing practices and at experiments that show the effects of such techniques, the researchers estimate that methane emissions from Chinese paddies have fallen nearly 70% from 1980 levels.
The catch? Drained paddies emit more nitrous oxide, another potent greenhouse gas. Still, the net effect is equivalent to taking 270 million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. But outside China, mid-season drainage is not commonly practiced. Low-hanging fruit, anyone?
Anna Barnett
Image: Punchstock
In this year’s series of UN climate talks - the latest of which took place last week in Bonn - one of the issues negotiators are sinking their teeth into is a source of greenhouse gases that has previously been sidestepped. Chopping and burning trees causes an estimated one-fifth of global emissions, and slowing down deforestation could be the cheapest and quickest way to keep a substantial load of gas out of the atmosphere. With this in mind, the Bali meeting in 2007 called for a decision on forests to be made by the time the 2009 talks wrap up in Copenhagen this December.
But deciding to do something about it and agreeing on what needs to be done are two very different matters, as Mark Schrope writes in a feature on Nature Reports Climate Change this week. He explains:
Some of issues raised are rooted in serious ethical and environmental concerns, such as how to protect indigenous people and ensure compliance. But much of what was being mulled over boils down to money: adequately addressing deforestation will require a new flow of billions of dollars from developed to developing nations. Developing countries are scrambling to position themselves to receive as much as possible, while developed nations are doing their best to ensure they get what they want from their investments. The result is a complex debate that is likely to grow more heated as countries move from stating their positions to settling on an agreement that everyone can live with beyond December.
Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
Climate change may need a military response from America, according to a story from the New York times which is getting a lot of pick up in the world media.
While most policy discussions around climate change focus on energy wonks, the Times says that military analysts are increasingly of the view that “climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions”. Food and water shortages or huge floods could push vulnerable regions over the edge into crises that could “demand an American humanitarian relief or military response”, it says.
The Times piece quotes from a recent report prepared by retired Marine general Anthony Zinni for private research company CAN. Zinni says:
We will pay for this [climate change] one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll. There is no way out of this that does not have real costs attached to it. That has to hit home.
Although the Times says the Pentagon is “for the first time” looking seriously at national security and climate change, the idea that global warming could heat up things other than temperatures has been around for a while. Back in July 2008, for example, Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson attended one of the first war games on the subject of global warming. You can read his blog posts from the games in our archive.
Image: frigate USS Doyle in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year / US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Patrick Grieco
“It’s incredibly important. We need a global deal on the climate.”
Bjorn Lomborg, who formerly put climate change last among the world's priorities, makes a U-turn.
“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it.”
A lobbying firm subcontracted by a coal advocacy group to fight the US climate bill was caught creating fake letters to congressmen from real community organizations.
"If you look at the group of developing countries in general, having some come forward and take steps is useful, it stops them from hiding more as a bloc, saying it's not possible."
Diane McFadzien of WWF Singapore on South Korea's new emissions targets.
"Praying should of course continue, because our villages should be spared from natural catastrophes. We should at the same time pray that our glacier does not melt any further, but instead grows.''
Rev. Pascal Venetz, pastor at Ernerwald Chapel in southern Switzerland, is seeking the Pope's permission to adjust a 17th century vow that asks God to protect local villages from an advancing alpine glacier.
"We're slogging ahead...I'm not going to kid anybody; I don't think it's easy. But I do think that we will get there."
After two days of high-level talks in Washington, US climate envoy Todd Stern predicts an American-Chinese climate agreement will be forged before Copenhagen.
Jellyfish study raises "bizarre ancillary questions" for climate modellers
If swimming jellyfish significantly affect ocean mixing, as a new study suggests, "the modelling community is going to have to pay attention", comments MIT's Carl Wunsch.
"To claim that global temperatures have cooled since 1998 and therefore that man-made climate change isn't happening is a bit like saying spring has gone away when you have a mild week after a scorching Easter."
Bob Henson of NCAR says this perennial skeptics' argument is refuted in a forthcoming paper by US Navy and NASA scientists (Geophysical Research Letters subscription required).
"If employees are on the road 20 percent less, and office buildings are only powered four days a week, the energy savings ... would be enormous."
John Langmaid is organizing the Connecticut Law Review's upcoming symposium on the benefits of taking Friday off. The state of Utah has estimated it could save 12,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year by putting its employees on the 4-day, 40-hour workweek.
In the latest salvo of the scientific debate over future sea level rise, a new report counters claims that rapidly swelling seas will soak estimates published by the UN climate planel in 2007.
A major “it’s worse than we thought” story out of March’s Copenhagen Climate Congress, for example, was that sea level could climb more than a metre by 2100 - seemingly far worse than the rise of up to 59 centimetres indicated in the 2007 report from the Intergivernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was in fact something of a straw-man comparison, since the IPCC total explicitly excluded the impacts of accelerated glacier melt, and the new studies were attempting to add these impacts in.
But the latest study suggests that even considering glacier effects, the 2100 rise is likely to be well under a metre. A trio of researchers - Mark Siddall of Columbia University in New York, Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern (current co-chair of IPCC Working Group I) and Peter Clark of Oregon State University - used a new method that looks to the past to inform this future projection.
"Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience.”
Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh says the developed world has needlessly raised the alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers.
Scientists find that not only is climate change shrinking sheep, it is making them lighter in colour.
Headlines such as 'Bye bye black sheep' draw attention to the increasing frequency of light-coated sheep in the Outer Hebrides.
"It would be a tiny step financially to keep this factory open, but it would be a huge statement about the government's commitment to the green economy."
Worker at wind turbine factory due to close this month accuses the UK of having incongruent policies.
"This is a dangerous thing, and I think people in Congress must understand this. Please don't use this weapon."
IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri warns that trade tariffs in the US Waxman-Markey climate bill could dissuade developing countries from signing up to a new global deal.
There’s an update over at Nature News on efforts to get a regulatory handle on carbon dioxide emissions from the shipping industry. I noted last month, when the International Maritime Organization was taking criticism for not moving faster on the issue, that an IMO official had said a July meeting might come up with ideas.
No such luck. The meeting wrapped up last week, and though progress was made on regulating pollutants that harm air quality, the issue of climate went unresolved. Although ships emit a variety of greenhouse gases, CO2 is the main culprit, outweighing other sources by almost ten-thousand-fold.
The accusation in June was that the IMO should have taken control of ships’ carbon footprints - a duty assigned to them by the Kyoto protocol - well before the Copenhagen conference. Coming to the IMO’s defense, an industry representative says they’ll find it easier to do it after December:
"The fact that the IMO cannot come to such agreement this year doesn't mean in any way that it's somehow hopeless," says Bryan Wood-Thomas, vice-president for environmental policy at the World Shipping Council, a trade group that represents about 90% of the cargo-container shipping industry. "Quite to the contrary, I think it will arrive at an agreement in the next year and a half," he says — once countries assess whether the results of the Copenhagen meeting change the context of the IMO's climate negotiations.
But if the IMO doesn't make this switch from crawl to sprint, the European Commission has said it will impose regulations on its own. The full article has more details.
Anna Barnett
Image: Flickr user "helmuts", Creative Commons license
Shrug-worthy, disappointing, too slow, reactionary, lacking ambition, could-do-better: the scientist’s attitude to most UK politicians’ policy statements on reducing carbon emissions.
Today’s “low-carbon transition plan” looks different – although we could have done with it a lot earlier.
In a collection of four strategy documents which together proclaim themselves “the most systematic response to climate change of any major developed country”, the UK government plots out exactly how it plans to meet its legally binding targets for cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband says that by 2020 he wants 40% of electricity to come from low-carbon sources: over 30% from renewables – overwhelmingly wind power, but also biomass, and tidal energy – and the rest from nuclear and carbon capture and storage. Heat and transport will also see vastly-boosted renewables contributions. By 2020, there will be 3,000 offshore wind turbines across the country and every home will have a smart meter. Every government department has been given its own carbon budget to follow. Thousands of ‘green jobs’ (undefined) will be created.
The ambition on paper is praiseworthy. It leaves only sizeable doubts about whether the government can match deeds to fine-sounding words – and whether they can persuade households and firms that they must pay increased costs on energy bills.
“Eventually the Government must move from analysis paralysis to doing and building," says Stuart Haszeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh. “All the right plans are there, but it’s hard to believe that this is actually going to happen.”
"My garage won't hold them. They've got to go someplace."
After scrapping plans for a gigantic 2,700-turbine wind farm because of technical problems, Texas entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens will put the 687 turbines he's already bought on four smaller sites.
"It's a perfect commentary on the potential problems of this approach. Plus, it's a sasquatch paper."
Jeff Lozier of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has projected climate-induced range shifts for Bigfoot to make the point that ecological models are only as good as the data that go into them.
"We'll be in until Christmas, so I'm not worried about it."
US Senator Barbara Boxer remains confident that climate legislation will pass through the Senate this year, despite the decision to delay it until Fall.
Cross-posted from Jeff Tollefson on The Great Beyond
An international crew of academics this week boldly declared that the world is headed down the wrong track in trying to put a lid on global greenhouse gas emissions. But with global leaders pressing the issue in Italy this week, it's not clear that anybody is listening.
The team includes Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who made a splash with their 2007 indictment of the Kyoto Protocol, dubbed The Wrong Trousers (Nature also published a summary of the article). Their latest paper, which includes additional authors, including Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado in Boulder, maintains a hard line and advocates policies that directly promote energy efficiency and decarbonization in place of a messy global carbon market that might or might not do the work it is intended to do. The researchers see a model in Japan, long a leader on energy efficiency thanks in part to a dearth of domestic resources.
Although the BBC posted a story and the New York Times' Andrew Revkin included a blurb in his blog, the paper hasn't garnered much traction. To be sure, Japan has lessons to teach the world, and carbon markets are unlikely to solve all of the world's problems. But like it or not, given the amount of time and political capital that has been invested in the current negotiations, there's little appetite for radical new ideas.
This perspective was nicely summed up in the BBC's coverage by Tom Burke of Imperial College. He acknowledged that many of the authors' criticisms are valid but suggested that "nothing could be more harmful" than the solution they propose, which is to reverse course.
So far, however, that doesn't appear to be a danger. On Wednesday, G8 leaders backed the establishment of a global carbon market as part of a commitment to curb their emissions by some 80 percent by 2050. They also signed on to a goal, long held by the European Union, to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The question facing the Major Economies Forum, to be convened Thursday by US president Barack Obama, is whether major developing countries such as China and India will agree to the 2-degree goal and commit themselves to halving global emissions by 2050 in order to make it happen.
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
Climate guru and NASA scientist James Hansen has been arrested after taking part in a protest against mountaintop coal mining.
Hansen, along with actress Daryl Hannah and other protesters, apparently planned to deliberately trespass on the property of mining company Massey Energy in the appropriately named Coal River Valley, West Virginia (press release).
However, a counter protest by miners and coal industry supporters forced them to change their plans. Instead, according to the Charleston Gazette, they sat down in the road outside Massey Energy's Goals Coal preparation plant in Raleigh County and were arrested for obstructing the police and impeding traffic.
Some reports say Hansen and other actually did trespass. Another account alleges a coal supporter assaulted members of the Hansen protest group.
Hansen, of course, has a long history of opposing coal power. He even appeared with Hannah before at a climate change protest, where Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson noted “Hansen says he is willing to get arrested”.
Willing and able, it seems.
More
Photos of the protest and arrests – RAN
A Plea To President Obama: End Mountaintop Coal Mining - Hansen on the Enivronment 360 blog
Cross-posted by Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
Image: Hansen at a previous protest / Jeff Tollefson
Long-awaited projections of how climate change will impact the UK have been met with caution by scientists.
The projections, released yesterday in London, offer the most detailed picture yet of how the UK - piece by piece, in sections just 25 km sq - will be affected by various climate impacts.
Their main message is that without substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time by the 2080s. While the risk of flooding will worsen in the North West, the South East will face an anticipated 22% decline in summer rainfall. If emissions continue to rise, London will likely experience a 2-6°C degree rise in temperature and sea-level rise of 36cm.
The UK government hopes the information will enable citizens and local authorities adapt to the changes that lie ahead, but some fear the projections provide misleading information.
That’s because the method used to produce these highly detailed projections of the future is new – and hasn’t yet been through peer-review. Bob Watson, chief scientist with the UK Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is confident it’s just a matter of time before the methodology is used on a broader scale. He expects it “will be taken up by other regions and highlighted by the IPCC in their next report”.
But while the projections were originally slated for release last November, an independent committee was convened at the eleventh hour to check out the methodology.
Oxford climatologist Myles Allen was on the committee, and he’s concerned that the results stretch the science beyond its current capabilities. His main worry is that as recently as 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t think that climate variables could be reliably resolved at spatial scales beyond a couple of 1000kms. And no research published since has challenged that view.
He spoke to me about this for Nature News, where I’ve covered the story in detail. He also spoke of his concerns on yesterday’s Newsnight, which is definitely worth a look.
Continue reading "Cautious response to UK climate projections " »
Climate change and other environmental problems worldwide are driving migrants from their homelands - but not necessarily onto European and North American shores, as is commonly assumed. The first worldwide survey of climate refugees suggests that most of the displaced won’t make it further than nearby villages or neighbouring countries. The new findings went into a report released yesterday at UN climate negotiations in Bonn - I've covered them in a news feature here.
"There's been a bit of political rhetoric saying we're going to have waves of migrants at our doorsteps, rushing into Europe and North America," says Koko Warner of UN University, the report's lead author. Concerns about these huddled masses came up in a Commentary Warner co-authored in Nature Reports Climate Change last year.
In April, she and a team of collaborators from across Europe wrapped up two years of research, which involved interviewing migrants on five continents for the European Commission’s EACH-FOR programme. "What we found is that the people whose livelihoods are most sensitive to the environment also tend to be the ones who may not have the means to move very far," Warner says.
Instead, says the report, they could be stuck in destinations that are “as precarious as the places they left behind.”
Although billions of dollars have been set aside for climate change projects to benefit developing countries, they have "not taken off in Africa in any significant way", says Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and also the least likely to be able to afford the costs of adapting to it.
Out of the 1643 “clean development” projects registered with the UNFCCC, only 30 (less than 2 percent) are within Africa. In comparison, 72 percent of projects are in Asia and the Pacific and 26 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 80 percent of the projects in Africa are in Northern Africa and South Africa. The needs of African nations are often side-stepped in international negotiations because their voices are drowned out by the developing nation powerhouses: China, India and Brazil.
The only way African nations can get their voice heard is by working together. But that’s not easy. Africa is politically, economically, environmentally and culturally very diverse. The biggest division is probably South Africa, which is basically a developed nation in a developing continent. But the Arab countries in northern Africa also tend to align themselves with the Middle East; Oil-rich countries, such as Nigeria and Angola, are part of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and share their interests; and Sub-Saharan Africa is further divided into English-, French- and Portuguese-language regions.
To improve Africa’s climate game-plan, more than 300 negotiators, ministers, experts and organizations related to Africa converged in Nairobi last week at the third African Ministerial Conference on the Environment. On 29 May, ministers announced they had forged a “shared vision,” asking industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and for more financial and technical support to help Africa cope with climate change. Beyond that, the 'Nairobi Declaration' contains few specifics.
And it's unclear whether the vague political statement will give Africa a stronger voice this week in Bonn, or during the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December this year. "It was difficult to agree on how much to ask for," says Sputnik Ratau, a spokesman for Buyelwa Sonjica, South Africa's minister of water and the environment, who chaired the ministerial meetings. "Different countries have different needs."
"Saying Africa is vulnerable and needs a lot of money is easy," adds Saleemul Huq, who works with developing-country negotiators through the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. "But coming up with more nuanced negotiating texts is not that easy."
A longer version of this story is available to subscribers on Nature News.
Anjali Nayar is an intern reporter on Nature News.
Image: Punchstock/Digital Vision
Commercial ships steaming through international waters are pumping out increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that are out of the reach of the Kyoto Protocol and national regulatory schemes. A new report from the UK parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee warns it could take years to bring these emissions under control.
The UN’s International Maritime Organisation - tasked under Kyoto with figuring out how to regulate emissions from shipping - has failed to move fast enough, says the report. An IMO meeting on the issue held in October 2008 did not get as far as formulating a proposal that could be part of the negotiating text for a new global climate deal, now under discussion in Bonn.
Not that it’s a simple problem to solve. To deal with gases released on international routes, either various countries must divide responsibility, or else the gases have to go into a separate “international” basket that’s regulated on its own somehow. Both are thorny approaches. Nevertheless, says the committee:
There can be no excuse for the lack of progress within the International Maritime Organisation since the Kyoto protocol was signed. That the IMO has yet to reach agreement even over the type of emissions control regime to take forward, let alone decide any details, suggests it is not fit for purpose in this vital area.
Scientists have long debated how the global climate might be affected by thawing of the Arctic's permanently frozen soils, known as permafrost. As permafrost melts, bacteria break down the organic matter in the soil, releasing greenhouse gases. But at the same time, plants flourish with access to warmer, deeper soils, taking in carbon dioxide. The overall affect on the climate was assumed to be the balance between the gassing and greening.
A new study in this week’s Nature [subscription], suggests that initially, after 15 years of thaw, plants grow faster and take in more carbon than is released by the melting tundra, making the ecosystem an overall carbon sink. But after a few decades, the balance shifts and the ecosystem becomes a source of carbon.
"The plants are growing faster, but after a few decades the rate of carbon loss from the soils is so high the plants can't keep up," says Edward Schuur from the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led the research. When Schuur extrapolated the findings to the entire Arctic region, they suggested a release of around a billion tonnes of carbon every year — of the same order of magnitude as emissions from current deforestation of the tropics. Burning of fossil fuels releases about 8.5 billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
It's estimated that permafrost soils store about twice as much carbon than is currently present in the atmosphere, so the stores of carbon in permafrost are unlikely to run out any time soon. "It's a slow-motion time bomb," says Schuur.
Read the full story over on Nature News.
Anjali Nayar is an intern reporter with Nature News.
Republicans and Democrats have been wrangling this week over proposed legislation to tackle climate change. In the course of this spat it emerged that the former were considering frustrating the latter by forcing the entire 900 page bill and its 400 amendments to be read aloud.
Faced with this perceived ‘delaying tactic’ Democrat Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, did what any self respecting person in his position would do … he hired someone who can read really, really fast.
Via TPM, here is a video of what happened next:
Continue reading 'Climate change: the need for speed (reading) ' on Nature's The Great Beyond blog
"There is significantly more risk [from inaction] than we previously estimated... There's no way the world can or should take these risks."
Ronald Prinn of MIT, co-author of a new modelling study showing that the climatic consequences of business as usual could be twice as bad as expected.
“They’re hoping that if you ask for 1 per cent, you may get a small fraction of a per cent.”
China's demand that industrialized countries cut emissions 40% by 2020 is not being taken seriously by anonymous policy wonks.
“Right now we’re probably seeing like 10 to 15 résumés a month. But back during Wall Street bonus time, we were seeing two to three times that.”
Evan Ard of the carbon brokerage Evolution Markets says Wall Street professionals have been scampering to join the few US carbon trading firms - especially after the year's bonus season, when traders can make tracks with their fat checks.
"I'm sure that they've gone into a less-than-functional building, but... surely in the whole of central London they could have sourced an up-to-date office block that they could be proud of?"
Greg Clark, shadow climate change secretary of the UK Tory party, on the new Department for Energy and Climate Change receiving the lowest possible score for energy efficiency.
A survey out this week categorizes Americans according to their attitudes towards climate change - and the two most skeptical camps seem to be shrinking while worry becomes the mainstream view.
The authors, Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale and George Mason University's Edward Maibach and Andrew Light, report that “Global Warming’s Six Americas” now break down as follows:
Continue reading "US climate poll: the difference a year makes" »
Climate change represents the biggest health threat of the twenty-first century, according to a new report published 16 May in The Lancet. Olive Heffernan talks to lead investigator Anthony Costello, director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London.
How did this study come about?
Just over a year ago, The Lancet challenged us to do this study. Back then, climate change was not one of my top priorities. I would have said that dealing with malnutrition and HIV and having a better health service were more important issues in health. But I’ve changed my perspective now, partly because I’m beginning to notice the effect that rising temperatures are having in certain parts of the globe.
What climate-related health issues can we expect this century?
In a very broad sense, there will be changing patterns of infection. Insect-borne diseases like dengue fever, tick-borne encephalitis and malaria will spread. We’re already seeing blue tongue virus in livestock moving up from southern Europe, for example. But I don’t think that infectious disease will be the major health effect of climate change, unless new viruses emerge, which is a great unknown.
Heat is a silent killer. Certainly as average temperatures rise we’re going to get many more heat waves and people outside of their coping range. When you get above a certain temperature level, the question is how well can people adapt.
But the biggest health effect that will emerge in the next 20 years will be related to food and water security. There could be quite serious shortages and large rises in food prices, which will penalize the poorest. Currently malnutrition is quite a significant factor in about 60 per cent of childhood deaths. This can result in low birth weight and predisposition to infectious diseases, such as measles, tuberculosis and pneumonia.
What can health professionals do?
Firstly, we have to add the voice of the health community to the argument to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We must campaign urgently on emissions and reforestation. Climate change is going to affect the health of our children and grandchildren, and getting that message across does focus minds. Secondly, we need a framework for tackling this problem.
What exactly would that framework involve?
We need more information. I was shocked to find that there are no health impact assessments on the impacts of climate change in Africa. Not one. The World Health Organization has the tools to do this, but there are very few resources. So we need to start by having country-level health impact assessments for climate change. There’s a deficit of data on climate impacts in Africa, but the situation isn’t much better in Asia. Beyond that, we need to get down to localities. It’s quite important to do participatory work with communities on their risks, and we’re interested in launching an initiative to get people to collect their own data.
Climate-change envoy Morley sacked over £16,000 mortgage
Sacked UK MP Elliot Morley is under pressure to resign as the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, following allegations that he claimed £16,000 of taxpayers' money for a mortgage that no longer existed.
“This man spent all his long ministerial career defending the environment, and lost his job by trying too hard to save it.”
Independent reporter Michael McCarthy comes to Morley’s defense.
“In a competition for resources it cannot be ruled out that military force could be used to resolve emerging problems that would destroy the balance of forces near the borders of Russia and her allies.”
A strategy document steps up Russia’s rhetoric on disputes over the thawing Arctic.
"It's a legislative Susan Boyle. Everyone underestimated it until it started to sing."
Ed Markey, chair of the US House subcommittee on climate change, compares the draft cap-and-trade bill to a contestant on Britain's Got Talent.
“China's controversial railway to the remote and restless mountainous region of Tibet could be threatened by global warming.”
Reuters reports that melting permafrost could undermine the tracks into Tibet.
"The pika is the fire alarm."
Environmental attorney Greg Loarie argues that this temperature-sensitive, adorable mammal should be protected as an endangered species because of the threat posed by warming.
"China used to think the developed world is not serious. But now they know the US is on the pitch and ready to engage with them. It has made a real difference to what China is saying."
Ed Miliband, back from a meeting with senior officials in Beijing.
"When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”
Robert M. Perkowitz, founder of the environmental marketing firm ecoAmerica, says the term “our deteriorating atmosphere” would resonate better.
“[Will] global warming … make the hairy, meat-eating wolf spiders of northeastern Greenland bigger[?]”
National Geographic gets the creepy-crawly angle on climate change.
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
Climate change could force birds to migrate hundreds of extra miles, according to new research. The extra distance might even be deadly.
Modelling by Stephen Willis, of Durham University, and his colleagues shows that the breeding ranges of Sylvia warblers will shift consistently north as the Earth warms. Non-breeding ranges showed no consistent directional shift, meaning longer migrations.
“From 2071 to 2100, nine out of the 17 species we looked at are projected to face longer migrations, particularly birds that cross the Sahara desert,” says Willis (press release). “Our findings show that marathon migrations for some birds are set to become even longer journeys. ... The added distance is a considerable threat.”
According to the team’s paper in Journal of Biogeography, trans-Saharan migrants face an average extra flight of 413 km. The researchers write that the challenge facing many species is “unprecedented”.
“We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table. We might get desperate enough to want to use it.”
US science advisor John Holdren comments on the possibility of using geoengineering to tackle climate change.
George Will’s colleagues get tired of his disinformation.
Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan contradict columnist George Will in a news story (and everyone notices).
“It’s a matter of survival for us, also. So we are among the most vulnerable countries, economically.”
Whereas many countries are concerned about the threat of climate change, Saudi Arabia concerns itself with the threat of climate change policy.
“It's like being lost in the desert, miles from anywhere and eating your own legs to sustain yourself during your search for help.”
Ed Gillespie comments on Tesco’s ‘flights for lights’ initiative on the Guardian’s Ethical living blog.
"If wind energy were the one practical and affordable answer to global warming then I would grit my teeth at the loss of the countryside and accept it. But I know that windfarms are no answer to global warming in northern Europe."
James Lovelock's retort to UK environment minister Ed Miliband’s claim that it should be "socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area - like not wearing your seatbelt".
"We are in a dilemma. We want to support Obama - we know he has political difficulties. But we want him to know he has to do more."
A European delegate to the UN climate negotiations in Bonn this week.
"The creation of Arctic forces reflects a normal desire to protect our territory."
Polar scientist Artur Chilingarov on Russian plans for new military units patrolling the country's northenmost reaches - where thawing is sparking disputes over rights to resources.
"Any delay in fighting global warming would be detrimental to our economic stability - costing us billions of dollars and dampening the state's most important economic sectors."
Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, sums up a new report on projected climate change impacts in the state.
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’" »
Last week I blogged on new research into shrinking Arctic summer sea ice. But as just reported at Nature News, climate change is not only "making Arctic sea ice disappear — it's also changing the type of ice that forms".
Nicola Jones writes that a patchwork of 'pancake ice' is becoming more common as the Arctic Ocean opens up and grows choppier. Because pancake ice is thinner and patchier than the usual think multi-year sea ice found in the Arctic, more sunlight is now reflected from the sea surface in the region, causing concern that it could accelerate local warming. It could have other knock-on effects on ocean circulation, ice growth and air temperature. More details in the story here.
Anna Barnett
Image: Pancake ice / Glenn Grant, National Science Foundation
"The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate intervention technology”
Stanford University's Ken Caldeira comments on the news that the research arm of the US defense department has set its sights on geoengineering (h/t Gristmill).
UN accuses the EU of backtracking on Bali agreement
European officials call for developing countries to produce plans for emissions cuts before receiving financial aid; UN climate chief Yvo de Boer says could undermine Copenhagen talks.
UK climate targets not tough enough, say scientists
A report from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says that cutting national emissions 34% by 2020, as advised by the Committee on Climate Change, will not be sufficient to avoid dangerous warming.
Americans prioritize economy over environment
Gallup poll shows majority preferentially support economic growth for first time in 25 years.
Olive Heffernan
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.”
Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other
The New York Times reports that climate skeptics at the Heartland Institute's conference this week are “showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support".
EPA moves on Obama climate policy
Having set in motion a proposal for a national greenhouse gas emissions reporting system, the EPA plans to declare the gases a danger to human health next month.
"To see the effect of this recession, if it's reducing emissions, I'd say it would take one to two years to see that signal properly in the atmosphere. I don't think we've seen any signal yet.”
An economically-driven emissions slowdown might not show up until 2010, says Paul Fraser of CISRO.
"We always knew the DOE's logic was flawed. Now it turns out their math was wrong too."
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. Investigating what killed the government’s FutureGen carbon capture project, the US House Science committee uncovered a $500 million budget error at the Department of Energy.
The clear message to emerge from the 3-day climate congress that wrapped up yesterday here in Copenhagen is that the prognosis on global warming is worse than anticipated by the IPCC in 2007. I reported the full story over on Nature News yesterday (no* subscription required). Here’s an excerpt:
The latest results made for bleak listening at times. Scientists cautioned that some of the impacts of global warming, such as sea level rise and loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, are happening much sooner and more severely than scientists had estimated just two years ago. "What we are seeing now is that some aspects are worse than expected," says Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a plenary speaker at the congress.
What is also clear from my news story is the growing sense of frustration that the urgency of climate change is failing to permeate. While I imagine the climate community has felt that way for some time, it was palpable at a different level this week, I felt. For one, there seemed to be a lot of finger pointing – at the media for poor reporting, at policy makers and the public for failing to understand, and at scientists for failing to make the implications of their work more policy prescriptive.
I can’t help feeling that’s not going to bring us much closer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the final plenary session of the congress, Danish PM Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that scientists who want a significantly more ambitious global carbon cut target of 80 percent by 2050 must not move the goal posts.
If this sense of frustration can be channelled into very clear communication on what needs to be done and when we need to start, could it increase the chances of an effective deal being reached in Copenhagen?
Olive Heffernan
*Correction: This article is now subscription only
I took part in a session today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the role of the media in communicating climate change. Organised by Max Boykoff at the University of Oxford, the session brought together a diverse panel of journalists and academics who study media trends.
The backdrop to this session was quite interesting. Throughout the 3-day conference, there was a palpable sense of frustration among the scientific community that the media simply hasn’t done an adequate job in reporting climate change, and that it may be partly to blame for lack of public understanding and for inaction of the part of policymakers. This theme emerged in many of the talks on the first day alone.
There were many highlights from today’s session, but I’ll just mention a few. William Freudenberg of UC Santa Barbara said that climate scientists on the whole are being too optimistic about the prognosis for global warming and called for a new era of media coverage to highlight the conflict within the scientific community between what is ‘consensus’ and the reality of a more serious situation.
Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego, famous for her 2004 Science paper on the scientific consensus, said that the scientists needs to rethink their strategy on communicating climate change and asked whether they should collaborate with PR agencies to get their message across (she wasn’t advocating this, but asked whether this or other strategies could be employed to inform discussions on science more effectively).
James Kanter of the International Herald Tribune spoke of the role of the media as watchdog and pointed to a feature he investigated over five months last year on how electricity companies are making billions in windfall profits from the European ETS. RWE, a major German power company, and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe, received an estimated windfall of roughly €5 billion in the first three years of the system, more than any other company in Europe. The feature, which made the front page of the IHT in December, provoked a response from REW, which acknowledged the profits it had made (although said they wouldn’t be pocketed) and could serve as a warning to other cap-and-trade schemes under consideration.
My talk looked at the issue of whether a topic of socially and scientifically complex as climate change can be communicated effectively on blogs. The answer to this, in my view, is an unequivocal yes, for the following reasons. Back in August, Nature hosted the first international science blogging conference, where it was evident that bloggers are increasingly taking on the role of journalists in breaking news and providing genuine investigative reporting. That’s likely to become an emerging trend in the current economic climate, where traditional media outlets (think CNN) are seeing cutbacks in science reporting. Perhaps more importantly, as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate previously pointed out, blogs can provide context to news and explain the significance of new research in a level of detail that can never by achieved by newspapers, which have a limited number of column inches dedicated to science.
Unlike many bloggers, journalists who blog have access to embargoed information, which means they can cover science stories as soon as they break, reaching a wide audience effectively and rapidly. But blogs can also provide a forum for scientists to engage more directly with society. While some argue that scientists (and indeed science journals such as Nature) should channel all discussion of research through formal routes such as ‘letters to the editor’, this will only ever reach a limited number of well-informed readers.
To communicate science to a wider audience, a faster and more accessible route is necessary.
A sobering presentation by Marshall Burke of Stanford on future agriculture. He and colleagues looked at historical climate and yield data for various crops in various parts of the world and projected the relationship they found into various future climates as found in the IPCC. As the IPCC itself reported, much of the tropics did badly in this analysis, and the worst performer was maize in southern Africa which was down in yield by about 30% by 2030.
More granular data run out to 2050 showed similar or worse trends, and the rest of Africa did pretty badly too. So did other crops in the same countries, such as millet and sorghum, though as Andy Jarvis of Biodiversity International pointed out from the floor, this may be somewhat worst case. You don't just go on growing the same thing as the situation gets worse and worse. As climates change so will the crops farmers grow, which should help a bit.
While the IPCC has already predicted that tropical agriculture will have its productivity hit by any climate change, it said it expected that in temperate zones modest warming might help productivity. In at least one case Burke went into -- maize in the US -- there are studies suggesting things start going wrong much sooner than that, with yield losses of 30% or so by 2030. Modest rises have been seen: sharp downturns are to come. Burke says that an economic model fed with these and other gloomier-than-common yield assumptions suggests that prices are set to rise more steeply than the IPCC has foreseen: a 1ºC rise in temperature looks like a 25% increase in prices, hurting some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers.
As Burke pointed out, we care about these food security issues because we care about people. A World Bank study suggests that the food crisis of 2007-2008 pushed 100m people into poverty. Reduced yields are normally bad for poor farmers, for whom consequent price increases rarely make up for lost production. They are also bad for the urban poor, who just see the price increases. That 25% increase in prices will some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers. And on current trends that's just the beginning.
I had a look this morning at a breakdown of the press registration at this conference by country. Clear winners are Denmark and the UK, with 40 or so people each. Both of those are inflated figures, because some third-country and international organisations are covering the meeting out of Copenhagen and London (Japanese TV stations are listed as UK, for example, as is Al Jazeera English). But still there is a lot of genuine UK interest: national papers and the BBC. And the locals are out in force.
US representation, on the other hand, seems distinctly on the modest side. As far as I can see from the press room and by searching the papers' web sites there's no-one here from national papers (the Paris-based International Herald Tribune is a sort-of-exception) and not much broadcast. Time is listed as a media partner, but I haven't seen Bryan Walsh here. The rest of the world is represented at a pretty low level, but still here -- I was struck by a biggish contingent from Bangladesh.
Does it matter? Hard to say. The conference is hitting headlines, there are a lot of journalists for specialised outlets here, and the press room people say they are very happy with the level of coverage: Stefan Rahmstorf's sea-level talk on Tuesday, which I didn't see but which people here are talking about a lot, is getting a lot of pick up, to judge by Google News. But in the plenaries this morning John Schellnhuber and Nick Stern were reminding the thousand or so people in the room that this is one of the biggest stories in the world, and they were doing so pretty effectively. And part of the point of this meeting, as I understand it, is to take that same sort of approach and use it to set a scientific stage for the COP 15 "son of Kyoto" meeting, which will take place in the same large shed-like structure this December. By that standard, the coverage that I have seen (and I've been busy, to be fair, just talking to people at sessions, and may have missed lots of good stuff) seems a little thin.
It appears that the action on Wednesday afternoon was where I was not: in the session on tipping points. Chris Jones of the Met Office's Hadley Centre presented some studies of the Amazon (abstract in pdf) that have caused a big media stir. The studies suggest that a) there is a threshold level of warming beyond which much of the Amazon forest is committed to die back (probably being replaced by savanna) and b) that for significant parts of the forest that threshold is alarmingly low. Indeed it is quite possibly either unavoidable in the near future or already dwindling in the rear-view mirror. As I understand it from people who saw the presentation, models in which all the warming already in the pipeline (ie with no further emissions) is realised leave the forests pretty much committed to some dieback, and modest further warming seals the deal. I wasn't able to check that with Jones himself, but it seems to fit with what he and his colleagues write:
We present results to show a possible climate threshold beyond which some dieback is committed and this commitment rises dramatically for global temperature rise above 2 degrees C, a threshold often used by policy makers in their definition of dangerous climate change. Any subsequent recovery is on such a long timescale as to make the dieback effectively irreversible on any pragmatic level.
I'll see if I can find Chris Jones, or some Brazilians, or both to talk about this with on Thursday.
Cross-posted from Heliophage
For those not eager to trawl through the aforementioned geoengineering tweetstream here's the most interesting thing I took from the geoengineering session -- a point on which, interestingly, David Keith and Ken Caldeira, who are keen to see and do more research on the topic, are close to agreeing with David Santillo of Greenpeace, who isn't.
The problem is in some ways pretty obvious: No one knows whether geoengineering can really be made to work. As Keith pointed out, even for the best characterised putative intervention -- a stratospheric aerosol like those produced by volcanoes -- the comparatively cursory research to date has turned up a wealth of complexities that have not yet been addressed by proponents, and more research will turn up even more of them. To Keith and Caldeira, this raises a nightmare scenario: that the world will have in the back of its mind that geoengineering is there as a fallback, will find that it needs a fallback, and will then find out that the fallback is not there in any practical sense. On this basis the sooner it is clear that there is no way out the better: time to do some serious research.
That is similar to Santillo's position, except he doesn't want to do the research needed to find out for sure. I took it from his talk that he wants instead to create a climate of opinion where the nagging hope that geoengineering might save us was firmly shut down more or less a priori, with commitment to emission cuts the sole and reaffirmed goal of all.
In making this argument, he came up with a nice pithy account of what he sees as the 5 drivers for geoengineering research: desperation, aspiration, fascination, delegation, remuneration. The first two he sees as essentially reasonable, the third -- "it is just such fun to play with these ideas!" -- troubling, the fourth -- "O good, someone else can solve the climate I don't have to" -- dangerous and morally defective (my term not his), and the fifth beyond the pale. (Actually in the presentation he didn't call the fifth driver "remuneration" he just called it "money" -- but he told me later he'd thought about listing it as remuneration, and I think it's slicker that way...)
What all these people agree on is that the lopsided way in which geoengineering is discussed, with a level of prominence in the media (and the unpublished musings of researchers, in my experience) and the imagination disproportionate to the actual level of knowledge among experts, needs to be seen as a real problem. Geoengineering is widely enough discussed that the thought it might be there as a last resort is widespread and quite possibly spreading wider, even though it still may be an illusion. Keith laid out the argument for reducing this disproportionality in a more formal way, looking at scenarios comparing the value of "Early Learning" v. late learning. I didn't note down all the details, but Early Learning seemed, by the economic metric he was using, to be a big, big winner.
PS: Those interested in the twittering per se may possibly want to check out this further post at Heliophage
There's a technical session on geoengineering at the meeting today, and I thought I'd try twittering from it. Since this is a personal experiment and may not pan out, I'll be using my personal twitterfeed, http://twitter.com/eaterofsun, not the naturenews feed.
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will head up a new climate and energy research institute at Yale University from this Fall.
The announcement was made by Yale University President Richard C Levin today at the plenary session of the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.
Pachauri will serve at the Yale Institute on a part time basis and will retain his current positions as IPCC chair and director-general of India’s Energy and Resources Institute, TERI.
Further details of the centre are available over on Economic Times.
Olive Heffernan
"I don’t want to bring home a dead-on-arrival agreement. We tried that. It didn’t do the world a lot of good."
US climate envoy Todd Stern dismisses stringent 2020 emissions targets proposed by the EU, saying he will push for a Copenhagen agreement that the US Senate can ratify.
"Because tropical forest lizards aren't very heat tolerant and they live in environments that are already warm, any further warming could push them over the edge."
The narrow temperature range of tropical forests has left lizards who live there poorly prepared for climate change, says ecologist Raymond Huey.
Even hybrid vehicles emit carbon dioxide when blown up.
FOX's drama '24' is going green and carbon-offsetting its explosions.
"Thankfully it was sort of, I think, organic and non-toxic."
On his way to a low-carbon energy summit, UK business minister Peter Mandelson was doused with green custard by a woman protesting the Heathrow third runway plan.
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.
“15 percent of all Washington lobbyists spent at least some of their time on global warming in 2008.”
The Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism organization based in Washington DC, reports that the number of lobbyists working to influence US federal climate policy has ballooned 300% in five years.
"We want to switch the current perception of Bangladesh from the iconic vulnerable country — where all these journalists fly to to see vulnerability — to make it the iconic adaptive country, so everyone flies there to see how they are coping."
Saleemul Huq's pitch for the new International Centre for Climate Change and Development that he plans to start in Bangladesh.
"The CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern."
This opinion goes on the record as US Congressional testimony for the first time, after being censored by the Bush administration in 2007. Howard Frumkin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave the testimony Wednesday.
Ag smarts versus cow farts
The Australian agriculture ministry will invest $27 million to fight methane emissions from livestock.
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
Cross-posted from The Great Beyond
Lucky American readers can now get an instant carbon-guilt trip, all courtesy of Google and NASA.
Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana, with funding from NASA, have shoehorned a wealth of data on carbon dioxide emissions into the interactive globe tool that is Google Earth. It’s a timely move, given that the Environmental Protection Agency seems to be preparing to regulate carbon dioxide for the first time (NY Times) and NASA is about to launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (Nature Reports Climate Change).
The data for this new addition to Google Earth comes from the Vulcan system which graced this blog last year (see: ‘Vulcan’ shows carbon dioxide’s death-grip - April 08, 2008).
“From a societal perspective, Vulcan provides a description of where and when society influences climate change through fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions,” says researcher Kevin Gurney of Purdue (press release).
“Users can see their county or state in relation to others, and see what aspects of economic activity are driving fossil-fuel emissions. Vulcan could help demystify climate change and empower people in the same way as seeing the miles-per-gallon number on the dashboard of a hybrid car.”
At the moment this is limited just to the United States, although Canadian and Mexican versions are being prepared. There is not a whisper though of ‘Project Hestia’, the global version of Vulcan that is supposedly in the works.
More coverage
Google Earth maps carbon dioxide emissions – LA Times
Scientists map CO2 emissions with Google Earth – AFP
Boilermappers: Purdue Researchers Put Emissions on Google Earth – WSJ
Daniel Cressey
Image: Purdue University/Google Earth
Climate change 'could reverse malaria patterns'
At the AAAS meeting, researchers say daily temperature fluctuations altered by climate change could kill off the malaria parasite in some areas and introduce it in others.
“I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oil sands, but also coal.”
Obama touts carbon capture and storage. After a discussion with Candian PM Stephen Harper on importing oil from Canada's tar sands, the White House announced a forthcoming US-Canada pact on clean energy technology, including CCS.
"If we can build [a zero-emissions] station in Antarctica, we can do that elsewhere in our society.”
Alain Hubert, project director of a new Antarctic research station that runs on wind and solar power.
“According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
Washington Post columnist George Will dismisses global warming threats.
"It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.”
The Arctic Climate Research Center responds that global sea ice levels are 1.34 million square kilometres less in February 2009 than in February 1979. (h/t TPMuckracker, where there’s more Will-debunking on offer)
Last week I noted that the new bosses in Washington DC, in their swift stride towards distinctly post-Bush environmental policies, had yet to touch the outgoing administration’s 11th-hour battle against applying the Clear Air Act to greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
They didn’t maintain the suspense very long.
Yesterday the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, said the EPA would put up for review a December memo on the issue from ex-EPA admin Stephen Johnson - and that the agency is set to announce new thinking on this type of regulation.
Continue reading "Greenhouse gases up for a rethink at the EPA" »
"It is an idea whose time has come and I would like to make it happen."
A National Climate Service to provide information on local climate change impacts gets thumbs up from Jane Lubchenco, nominated head of NOAA, at her Senate confirmation hearing.
"The art world is made of materials that bugs like."
Jose-Luis Ramirez of UN University on how climate-driven ecological changes threaten art treasures of the tropics.
"Overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening."
Scientists making exaggerated claims of catastrophic change distract from the genuine threat of global warming, says the UK Met Office's Vicky Pope.
Northern Ireland environment minister receives no-confidence vote
Sammy Wilson, who has denied human-caused climate change, was censured after he banned a TV ad for emissions cuts.
"Without a massive turnaround in policies, aside from the tragic loss of life and property, we will be asking firefighters to put themselves at an unacceptable risk."
The United Firefighters Union of Australia calls on PM Rudd for tougher climate policy to avoid more frequent bushfires.
Signs of our interesting times: airlines and oil companies are apparently now queuing up to have their greenhouse gas emissions regulated.
A communiqué to the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen has been signed by three European airlines and an Asian one - British Airways, Air France/KLM, Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific - along with the European airport operator BAA. Calling themselves the Aviation Global Deal Group, they say they recognize “the need to find a global solution to our emissions that meets environmental and developmental needs whilst ensuring a level playing field in our markets.” Namely, they want carbon dioxide emissions from aviation to be regulated with a sectoral approach that applies to their overseas competitors.
As things stand, the EU’s emissions trading scheme is due include plane exhaust starting in 2012, which should make it more expensive to fly through Europe. For long-haul flights from Asia by carriers like Cathay Pacific, the EU will count total emissions rather than just gases released in European airspace, Reuters notes.
Across the pond, the New York Times reports that oil companies are in much the same mood, aiming to shape low-carbon policies they see as inevitable under Obama.
Anna Barnett
The LA Times reports that two US federal agencies in the business of financing international fossil fuel projects like oil refineries and power plants have agreed to start scrutinizing the carbon output of these big emitters.
Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private Investment Coporation - finance agencies that help drive US exports and aid development overseas - had been fighting a seven-year lawsuit by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and four US cities. The plaintiffs argued that carbon dioxide emissions from projects funded by the two organizations are hurting these cities economically: “global warming, the suit argued, influences Santa Monica's water supply, the sea level near Oakland's airport and the snow on Rocky Mountain ski slopes” near Boulder, Colorado, according to the LAT story. They said these impacts should have been assessed ahead of time under the National Environmental Policy Act, the seminal US environmental law.
The agencies settled the suit Friday, a few weeks into Obama’s tenure - no coincidence, suggests Bill Hewitt over on his blog. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” agrees Salon’s Andrew Leonard, pointing out that last week the Obama EPA started its own lawsuit over a coal power plant upgrade in Kansas that allegedly failed to add in required pollution controls. The finance agencies’ settlement is intriguing because the battle they're conceding is reminiscent of others that Bush’s people fought tooth and nail until their very last days. Earlier in this suit over fossil fuel funding, says the LAT, the Bush administration argued that "alleged impacts of global climate change are too remote and speculative" to be part of project reviews. We heard essentially the same rationale in December when they pre-empted the possibility of using impacts on endangered species as the basis for limiting emissions. A parallel struggle over regulating power plant carbon footprints under the Clean Air Act (see this post and subsequent developments) has yet to be addressed by the Obama team.
The settlement has the agencies committing $250 million each to renewable energy projects, reports the LAT. Friends of the Earth announced that the EIB has promised to take emissions into account when evaluating new ventures and to develop a carbon policy, while OPIC will aim to reduce its projects’ greenhouse gas emissions 20% over the next ten years. That could add up: an earlier LA Times investigation (h/t DeSmogBlog), based on data from Friends of the Earth, counted up at least 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from just a subset of the projects the two funded in 1993-2006.
Anna Barnett
"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California."
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu warns of the threat posed to vineyards and farms from warming.
"The phase-out law will be abolished. The ban in the nuclear technology law on new construction will also be abolished."
Citing concerns about climate change and energy dependence on Norway and other suppliers, the Swedish government plans to overturn a nearly 30-year-old moratorium on new nuclear power plants.
"What's important is the UK's impact on global warming and that includes other issues like aviation and consumption."
Green Alliance director Stephen Hale, criticizing the government for not counting imports, shipping and aviation in figures that show greenhouse gas emissions falling 1.7% in 2007.
"I have relearned a basic lesson re interviews – which will have to be fewer and more guarded."
Climate scientist James Hansen becomes wary of the media, following the upset over his refusal to back protesters opposing the expansion at Heathrow airport.
I may need to start a file for ‘ocean impacts we hadn’t thought of’. First there was the projection that the seas will get noisier as a result of ocean acidification, which whale conservation groups were running with at a UN conference in December. Now researchers report in PNAS that ocean acidification may make fish larvae lose the sense of smell they use to find a home.
Most coastal marine species are swept out to sea during their larval stage and have to find their way to a habitat they can settle down in. Orange clownfish - yes, that’s the famously lost fish from Finding Nemo - must get back to reefs, often ending up in the same ones where they hatched. Philip Munday and Danielle Dixson of James Cook University in Australia have been studying olfactory cues the clownfish may follow.
But they and their colleagues report that clownfish larvae reared in aquariums at pHs of 7.8 and 7.6 don’t respond to smell tests the same way as control fish. These pHs are low compared to the 8.15 the fish live with today, but a business-as-usual rise in carbon dioxide emissions could take the ocean to 7.8 by 2100 and 7.6 in the following century.
Larvae reared at pH 7.8 favour the pungent smell of a swamp tree that clownfish normally avoid. They also fail to discriminate between the smells of their parents and other adults, suggesting that acid-addled Nemos might end up inbreeding more often. The pH-7.6-reared fish don’t swim toward any of the tested scents, suggesting they've stopped smelling altogether.
It’s not just clownfish that smell their way home. If acid damages fish's olfactory capabilities the researchers say, many other coastal marine species could be affected.
One question the paper doesn’t take up is whether an ocean pH of 7.6 would leave any reefs for clownfish to come back to. The danger to reefs, and other better-known impacts of acidification, have meanwhile been highlighted in a declaration by 155 ocean scientists from 26 countries - and they want action.
Continue reading "Ocean acidification disorients fish, riles up scientists" »
“If someone’s basement floods and they lose their job on the same day, it is certainly an unlucky day. But they would not wait until they found a new job before pumping the basement and fixing the leak.”
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Ditmas channels Joe the Plumber in an open letter to Obama on climate policy (h/t Green Inc.), the day before the EU unveiled its pre-Copenhagen proposal.
"Just days after taking office, US President Barack Obama has appointed a climate envoy and cleared the way for new rules to force automakers to produce cleaner cars.”
UNEP on Obama’s first week, which put a California vehicle emissions law blocked by Bush back up for review.
“It is foolhardy to demonise all biofuels as unsustainable and environmentally damaging when some, which are already on the market, can play an important role, right now, in helping us to tackle climate change.”
Responding to the UK’s new target of using 3.25% biofuel for vehicles in 2009-2010 - a bit more than the 3% a recent government review recommended - Jeremy Woods at the Royal Society defends plant-derived power.
Global renewables agency launched as support falters
The US and UK decline to sign onto the International Renewable Energy Agency. London is thought to be concerned that the new body will undermine the International Energy Agency.
“Obama’s goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.”
IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri criticizes the new president’s policy at a Worldwatch event before Obama's inauguration.
U.S. carbon emissions during Bush era 20% greater than official estimates.
According to Brian Angliss over on Scholars and Rogues, US emissions are 20% above reported values owing to the failure of official estimates to account for greenhouse gas emissions generated by other nations as a result of the US outsourcing goods and services (h/t Climate Progress).
A dark cloud settles over a once sunny industry.
The solar-energy industry, which until recently had been booming, starts to feel the pinch of recession.
“No proposed or final regulation should be sent to the Office of Federal Register for publication unless and until it has been reviewed and approved by a department or agency head appointed or designated by the President."
On Barack Obama's first day as US president, a memo to federal agencies from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel freezes all of the Bush administration's new and pending 'midnight regulations'.
Ah, January in London. It’s gray. It’s clammy and damp. As I write, it’s begun to bucket rain unreservedly and, in my view, rather un-Britishly. Where’s the fog?
Heading here from the US last winter, I vaguely expected Dickensian mists to greet me. It was only after expatriation that I learned the old 'pea-soupers' were laden with noxious coal smoke, dispelled by environmental laws after a particularly deadly fog in 1952. Now a new paper in Nature Geoscience (subscription) quantifies similar trends across Europe - and the warming that has resulted.
Averaging visibility data from 342 weather stations across Europe, Robert Vautard at the Atomic Energy Commission in France and colleagues found what they call a “massive decline” - of roughly 50% - in foggy, misty and hazy days when visibility fell below 8 kilometres, 5 kilometres or 2 kilometres. [Update: That decline was over the last 30 years.]
The trend is particularly pronounced in eastern Europe. Tellingly, three available long time series show that visibility in Potsdam, in the former East Germany, didn’t start improving until sulphur dioxide emissions dropped off with the decline of the communist economy - noticeably later than the turnaround in the Netherlands and Switzerland. When Vautard et al. compare their visibility records to an inventory of SO2 emissions, they find that places with greater reductions in the pollutant from 1990-2000 also had greater increases in visibility.
Fog forms around airborne particles, including pollutants, Dave Britton of the UK Met Office explains to the Guardian: "Go back to the 1950s and the big pea-soupers in London came from the amount of crap that people were putting out of their chimneys from coal fires." Since then measures like London's Clean Air Acts have played a role in clearing things up.
But they also may have inadvertently warmed the continent, the authors say. A standing problem in climate science is to account for the 0.5 C average temperature rise in Europe in the last three decades, which models don’t reproduce. Correlations between visibility and temperature suggest that lifting the fog could have contributed 10-20% of daytime temperature rises in Europe overall, and about half in central and eastern Europe.
We were referring to a Google search that may involve several attempts to find the object being sought and that may last for several minutes.
The Times clarifies their statement that a Google search produces 7 grams of carbon dioxide - after it turned out to be based on a study that made no mention of Google.
It's inconceivable you can hold those two things in your mind at the same time: [that] you're really going flat out for rapid decarbonisation and perfectly reconciled to expansion of aviation.
Jonathan Porritt comments on the UK government’s decision to give the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow. The verdict has caused some to speculate that the government was really just having a laugh when it comitted to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% of 1990 levels last autumn.
One tell-tale symptom of anti-science syndrome is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.
Joe Romm gives his take on the climate skeptic blog ‘Watts Up With That?’, which the public voted as Best Science Blog of 2008, ahead of RealClimate, run by real climate scientists.
Finally, in response to popular demand, we comment on the likelihood of a near-term global temperature record.
NASA's annual summary of temperature trends says 2009 or 2010 will likely be the warmest recorded year, sticking by last year's assertion that an El Niño is on the way.
Monday was George W. Bush's last press conference as president, and the administration seized the day to release new security directives on US interests in the Arctic - where disappearing sea ice has the five bordering countries on edge about who will get their hands on assets set to be freed up.
Reuters reports that the new US policy contradicts Russian claims to seabed rich in oil and gas. Canadian press like the National Post are focused on the Northwest Passage: the US has asserted its right to sail the newly navigable waterway, which the White House calls an international strait but Canada says it owns.
The directives even look toward opportunities for terrorism in a warmer Arctic, says a press release reprinted at Dot Earth (alongside links and details on the new docs). The release is clear about the new reality up north:
Fourteen years have passed since the last review of federal Arctic policy. Our understanding of climate change in the Arctic has caused all Arctic nations to reassess their policies in the Arctic. In addition, with the increase in summer melting of Arctic sea ice, human activity is increasing. This raises new questions about the potential expansion of fisheries, pollution, energy exploration and development, and the nature of sustainable economic development in the region.
"When it comes to energy, the notion isn't a race to the Arctic to put our flags down," a National Security Council spokesman told Reuters - in a seeming jibe at Russia's flag-planting expedition at the underwater North Pole. "Our approach is going to be dealing with our fellow Arctic nations in finding ways to access and develop, when it comes to energy specifically, that takes into account conservation and the environment."
Stimulating algal growth by adding iron to nutrient-poor ocean regions is one of several geo-engineering methods that could possibly mitigate greenhouse warming. But given widespread worries about possibly harmful side-effects on marine life, large-scale ocean ‘fertilization’ is currently not considered advisable.
Predictably, environmental groups have therefore jumped on an iron fertilization experiment which an international team of oceanographers is set to conduct over the next two months in the Southern Ocean near the island of South Georgia. Critics claim that LOHAFEX violates the moratorium on ocean fertilization activities which the United Nations had agreed upon last year. The Nature news story here has more details.
The somewhat ambivalent wording of the legally binding UN Convention on Biological Diversity adds to the controversy. ‘Small-scale’ scientific experiments in ‘coastal waters’ are exempted from the moratorium, it reads. But ‘small-scale’ is a relative term, and where exactly coastal waters give way to the open ocean remains also undefined.
Picture: The Polarstern (Alfred Wegener Institute)
The team on board the German ‘Polarstern’, who plan to spread 20 tonnes of iron sulphate over less than 20 by 20 kilometres-large patch of ocean surface in the Scotia Sea, hope that the study will provide new insight into how ocean ecosystems respond to fertilization – the very data, hence, that are needed to assess whether or not larger-scale future activities might be justified. But opponents counter that such doing already qualifies as an activity banned by UN law. Pressure groups have launched a signature campaign aimed at stopping the Polarstern crew, which will reach its destination by the end of the week, from dumping its load.
A number of companies, such as the now defunct Planktos Inc., had in the past hoped to commercialize ocean fertilization for the carbon credit market. Scientists and institutes participating in LOHAFEX stress that the experiment has no commercial background whatsoever.
UPDATE:
The Indo-German ocean fertilization experiment, LOHAFEX, has been suspended. The German science ministry, in response to environmental concerns, has asked the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven that an additional independent assessment be conducted before the planned activities can commence.
Meanwhile, the Polarstern, scheduled to reach the planned study region in the Scotia Sea by the end of the week, will continue its journey as planned. On arrival, the 48 scientists on board will start doing preparatory work, but the team will have to await permission from the ministry before they can dump any nutrients into the ocean. AWI has today commissioned two undisclosed institutions to carry out the required extra assessment. It hopes the reports will be delivered within ten days.
Quirin Schiermeier
Whose opening lines are these: "The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable ... but that can - and must - be altered.”
Sound like another renewables naysayer upholding the fossil-fuel status quo? That's what the International Energy Agency is being accused of in a report picked up by the Guardian on Friday and endorsed by Grist today.
The IEA is slammed by an international group of legislators and scientists called Energy Watch, best known previously for their oil-has-peaked stance. The group’s new report, on wind-power prospects, is one of a handful it has to its name. In the wind report, the Guardian’s David Adam writes,
The experts … say the International Energy Agency (IEA) publishes misleading data on renewables, and that it has consistently underestimated the amount of electricity generated by wind power in its advice to governments. They say the IEA shows "ignorance and contempt" towards wind energy, while promoting oil, coal and nuclear as "irreplaceable" technologies.
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
With serious talk about geoengineering options now on a serious roll (“Not so sotto voce any more” is how RealClimate put it back in August) 80 climate researchers have been polled by the Independent about whether we should prepare techno-fixes such as ocean fertilization or aerosol clouds as an emergency lever on the Earth system.
The paper reports today that 54% - i.e. 43 of them - think we should draw up such plans. Here's the actual poll question - not reprinted by the Independent, but reproduced by a recipient (via the geoengineering Google Group):
Do you agree that we now need a “Plan B” whereby a geoengineering strategy – research, development and possible implementation – is drawn up in parallel to a treaty to reduce carbon emissions (subject to international agreements and a scientific assessment of risk)?
35% disagreed and 11% were undecided.
This survey of scientists is hardly a scientific survey, as climatologist Myles Allen of Oxford points out in a Tyndall Centre newslist post. But it does give some kind of temperature reading - especially in the scientists’ direct comments, which the Independent has published for about half the respondents (listed roughly in order of famousness).
There’s a lot more nuance in those comments than ‘Plan B or not plan B?’ But the overall temperature? Lukewarm.
While we wait for Stoat’s response to our 2008 climate science year-in-review, here are some of the annual roundups popping up elsewhere.
First, the science: the most thorough state-of-the-Earth report is on Earthbeat Radio, where Andrew Revkin and Joe Romm sum up trends in temperatures (more on RealClimate), receding sea ice (one of Nature's top science stories this year), and other climate impacts.
“Change” was the word of the year, says Chris Tobias at Celsias, and we’re not just talking climate. It was the inescapable mantra behind Barack Obama’s victory in the US election - 2008’s number-one ‘green story’, according to both Time and Grist. (Link-clickers will note that Time’s list is almost absolutely America-centric. For the UK equivalent, check the Telegraph, which posits that “The whole year has been building up to the Climate Change Bill”.)
The world's most advanced simulation of extreme weather on a warming Earth completed its first run last Friday - though the data won't be fully digested into human-readable format until spring. Yesterday I talked to meteorologist Greg Holland, co-leader of the study, at the Willis insurance company's London office - whose cycle racks, I can report, are tucked away discreetly across the street from its intimidatingly curved and purple-lit lobby.
Willis's research arm funded the work, along with the offshore oil industry, the US Department of Energy and the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where Holland is based. They all want to know how climate change will alter hurricane patterns in the Atlantic. At the request of several US state governors, the project is also looking at rainfall over the Rockies and winds in the Great Plains. Says Holland:
I'm not going to forecast a squall line through New York in 2050. But what we want to do is be able to say: "What are the statistics of squall lines going through New York in 2050?" or "What are the statistics of hurricanes coming into Miami in 2050?"
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 Arctic tundra is letting loose a large and unexpected burst of methane in the autumn, finds a new study out in Nature today. Unlike the oceanic methane bubbles that made headlines a few months ago, this isn’t suggested to be an effect of climate change – it’s the formerly overlooked (or rather, never-looked-for) tail of a natural seasonal cycle. But it’s important for understanding natural methane-emitting processes that may be affected by future warming. I’ve got the full story over on Nature News.
The newly discovered surge of greenhouse gas is brought to you by International Polar Year. Thanks to that research push, a team led by biogeochemist Torben Christensen of Lund University, Sweden, got a two-month extension on the usual field season at a monitoring station in northeast Greenland. Scientists have been measuring methane emissions from far-northern tundra during the growing season for decades, but it had been assumed that once methane levels taper off in late summer, they stay at next to nil over the freezing fall and winter.
Far from it. Emissions actually spike as the ground starts to frost over, the researchers found, and cumulative emissions during the freeze-in are about equal to those in summer. If all wet meadow tundras release a similar methane burst, they calculate, about 4 million tonnes may be emitted each winter. That’s not enough to affect estimates of the total annual methane emissions from tundra (30 to 100 million tonnes), but it’s just right to account for an observed autumn surge in atmospheric methane over the frozen north that had previously gone unexplained.
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.
There’s a line around the block to give advice to Barack Obama, the latest offering being a 400-page environmental policy paper backed by 29 NGOs (hat tip to Climate Progress). Amid the many recommendations, a proposed bureaucratic shake-up of US Earth science has also resurfaced.
The idea is to combine research programs at NOAA and the USGS into a new, streamlined Earth Systems Science Agency, or ESSA. Published as a Policy Forum in Science this past July (subscription required; also see NRCC story and blog), it is now very much dwarfed by buzz about a possible National Energy Council complete with a czar to be crowned. But ESSA hasn’t fallen entirely off the radar of influential democrats - more on this below. And there’s just been an interesting dialogue over at Prometheus on whether the NOAA-USGS merger makes sense.
Continue reading "Attn Obama: Earth science agency merger" »
Shortly after finishing up this week’s Nature story (subscription required) on the upcoming climate talks in Poland, I finally secured an interview with US Ambassador Harlan Watson, the United States' chief climate negotiator.
Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
There’s nothing like a good climate change-denial article to get the internet all riled up, and boy has Erika Lovley done some riling.
She’s penned not one but two articles for the right-leaning Politico newspaper, which are being torn to shreds as we speak.
The one generating most ire is the frankly spectacular ‘Scientists urge caution on global warming’. This claims there is “a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation”.
David Roberts on the Gristmill blog calls Lovley’s pieces, “two of the most jaw-droppingly moronic stories I've ever seen”. The version of his story on the Huffington Post website comes with the headline, “Politico Reporter Erika Lovley Embarrasses Politico, Self, Profession of Journalism, Humanity”.
You know this isn't going to end well for her don't you?
The Southern Ocean’s carbon-sponging capacity has been getting a scientific rethink lately, and a paper in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription required) offers new info on what assistance we can expect from these frigid waters. Unfortunately, the wire report on the paper garbles its bottom line.
According to one long-term prediction, the Earth’s oceans - our greatest natural ally in any war on climate change - will soak up 70 to 80% of the entire industrial era's anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions over the next several centuries . The Southern Ocean accounts for some 15% of that storage. Last year, however, a widely reported study (Science, subscription required) led by the University of East Anglia’s Corinne Le Quéré concluded that the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb the gas was weakening.
The new paper, by Claus Boening of IFM-GEOMAR and colleagues, has garnered a Reuters article that unsurprisingly doesn't go into detail about past studies. But the summary from Reuters wrongly implies an about-face on worries over a weakening ocean sink. The story leads with:
The Southern Ocean has proved more resilient to global warming than previously thought and remains a major store of mankind's planet-warming carbon dioxide, a study has found.
and it later continues:
The analysis shows the Southern Ocean has maintained its ability to soak up excess carbon despite changes to currents and wind speeds.
Actually, though, the Boening et al. paper doesn’t evaluate carbon-soaking ability - current and wind speeds are what it's all about. In contrast, storage capacity is the primary concern of Le Quéré et al. So the direct contradiction between today's story, Southern Ocean changing but still major CO2 sink, and the 2007 Reuters report on Le Quéré et al., Southern Ocean saturated with carbon dioxide, looks like an oversimplification.
I called Boening to clarify. “We don’t have anything to directly challenge that conclusion [of Le Quéré et al.],” he says. “We are just challenging the scenario behind that conclusion, namely changing circulation patterns.”
Obama's Environmental Protection Agency may not have a director yet, but it already has its hands full. In the final year of the Bush administration, the EPA has simply procrastinated on greenhouse gas control: the Supreme Court in 2007 ordered the agency to assess the dangerous impacts of emissions under the Clean Air Act, or else justify its lack of action, but the result was a hopelessly conflicted report with a comment period that outlasts the presidential turnover. Now adding pressure to sort this out, pronto, are an EPA decision on coal plants last week and the threat of a new lawsuit over ocean acidification.
On Thursday the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board rejected the permit for Utah’s new Bonanza Coal Power Plant - a ruling that could halt as many as 100 other coal plants on the EPA docket until the agency can decide how to regulate their carbon dioxide output. For details, see the thorough coverage on Wired Science and Climate Progress. AP summarizes:
The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order limits on carbon dioxide. This is "an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting process," the panel said.
The Sierra Club conservation group filed the Bonanza appeal and argued it on the basis of the Supreme Court ruling. Their victory wasn't absolute, explains Alexis Madrigal on Wired Science:
The Board did not actually side with the Sierra Club's interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but in deciding to send the decision back to the EPA with the instruction to come up with a nationwide plan for regulating greenhouse gases, the Sierra Club effectively stopped new coal plants in their tracks.
"It's going to stop everything while EPA mulls over what to do next," Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder told the AP. "And that will be decided by the next administration."
Meanwhile, the Center for Biological Diversity has appeared to the EPA as the Ghost of Lawsuits Yet to Come. Skipping the Clean Air Act (and other federal laws cited in past cases against carbon, as noted by Dot Earth), the CBD say they will invoke the Clean Water Act in defense of acidifying oceans. The group petitioned last year for an update in the EPA's pH standards, which haven't been revised since 1976 - a problem flagged in a July 2007 Science commentary (subscription required).
Their followup is a notice of intent to sue. A win in court could open yet another door to EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions - something the CBD is going after explicitly in separate, state-level petitions.
Though experts have pegged China as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter for well over a year, it was only two weeks ago that the government first openly admitted China's emissions have caught up with the US (just barely, they insist).
This acknowledgment came the day after a senior Chinese climate policy official said rich nations should earmark a wopping 1% of their GDP to help the developing world tackle climate change. Swift to follow was an international climate conference in Beijing, run jointly by China's government and the UN, which ambitiously proposed a new international agency to push technology transfer. Jane Qiu reports the meeting’s outcome in Nature this week (subscription required).
In short, it’s not just the rather ghastly Christmas tree in my hairdresser’s window that’s signaling December is around the corner. Next month ushers in the UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, a major stop on the road between Bali and the Son of Kyoto treaty to be hammered out next year in Copenhagen. The formerly reticent China seems to be after a louder voice at the table.
"There's growing external pressure on China and also its own problems with energy and the environment, and these factors are coming together to make it more active and focused on climate change," said Goerild Heggelund, an expert on Chinese climate change policy at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway.President-elect Barack Obama's entry into the White House early next year, vowing greater action on climate change, will also lift expectations of China, said Guan Qingyou, a climate policy researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
"With U.S. policy changes, there will also be more pressure on China to show initiative," he said. "Eyes will be on us."
The 1% of GDP demanded last month, Qiu says, would cash out at US$284 billion - more than twice what the eight largest economies pledged to the climate-challenged developing world at July’s G8 summit. Even if the North agreed to such a sum - or the 0.5% or 0.7% the Chinese have previously suggested - countries heading toward a global recession seem unlikely to improve on their poor records of delivering foreign aid.
Perhaps more UN-friendly is the new plan for stepping up the transfer of technologies that would allow the South to produce clean energy and adapt to unavoidable climate change. Writes Qiu:
Under the framework proposed in brainstorming sessions at the Beijing conference, the new inter-government agency would be an independent body able to make and implement decisions and monitor compliance. It would oversee and verify mitigation targets of developing countries, identify barriers to technology transfer, and propose countermeasures. Developed countries would commit to providing it with a steady stream of income for its primary operating budget, possibly supplemented with money from the private sector and other sources.
Continue reading "Pre-Poznan: China makes the first move " »
Cross-posted from The Great Beyond
The Paris-based International Energy Agency came out with its annual World Energy Outlook report yesterday. And it makes for gloomy, and expensive, reading (Press release, Calgary Herald, Greentech Media).
The agency bases its findings on a reference scenario that assumes no new government policies are introduced. In this scenario, the IEA says that between now and 2030 world energy demand will grow by 1.6% a year, requiring energy-supply investments of $26.3 trillion (yep TRILLION dollars). “Yet the credit squeeze could delay spending, potentially setting up a supply-crunch that could choke economic recovery,” says the press release.
A week ago, Reuters pre-empted the report, with a story focusing on the slim chance we have to limit warming of the planet to 2 degrees Celsius. “The scale of the challenge ... is immense,” IEA has warned.
Continue reading "Oil crisis, financial crisis, total crisis" »
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.
The European Parliament’s environment committee yesterday voted largely in favour of the ambitious European climate action plan (subscription) proposed in January.
The decision, although preliminary, allows the European Union (EU) to go into the upcoming next round of international climate negotiations with a common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across Europe by at least 20 % by 2020. The European commission, Council and Parliament must yet formally agree on details of the plan, but substantial changes are now considered unlikely.
Power plants in Europe will no longer receive free allowances for their greenhouse-gas emissions.TRAVELPIX/GETTY
Most hotly contested were the amendments to the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) which the European commission had proposed in January to strengthen the effectiveness of the scheme.
Introduced in 2005, the ETS is as yet the only mandatory emissions trading system in the world. Until now, power stations and other large European industries have benefitted from generous supply of free permits to release carbon dioxide. Much of the commission’s proposed reform was aimed to end the over-allocation of emission allowances.
The compromise now agreed upon in parliament doesn’t pull the teeth out of the original plan. As of 2013, power stations will not receive free emission allowances anymore. Instead, they will have to obtain 100% of allowances at auction.
Other energy-intensive industries, such as steel and cement facilities which, unlike the power sector, have to compete with suppliers outside the EU, will in a first phase merely have to obtain 15% (rather than 20 % as the commission had initially proposed) of emission allowances at auction. But the allocation of free allowances to manufacturing industries is to be gradually phased out by 2020.
The environment committee did make some concessions to industry, though. The threshold for facilities – currently around 10,000 - which participate in the ETS is to be raised from 10,000 to 25,000 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions.
Tomorrow’s been dubbed Super Tuesday for EU climate policy, with the EU Parliament set to vote on proposals that follow up the climate change legislation proposed at the start of the year.
But what was once touted as a cutting-edge vision has turned into a tough sell. By the end of last week, Polish leaders announced they’d added a sixth country, Greece, to the coalition they’ve been building against parts of the plan - creating a large enough minority to block a decision.
Their beef is with auctioning of emissions permits under a revamped European carbon-trading system, scheduled to start in 2013. The financial turmoil that’s muddied the political path in the US is also having an effect here, sharpening countries’ concerns about their high-emissions industries - whose lobbyists have protested all along that the cost of buying permits will push them out of Europe. “This crisis changes priorities,” said German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier last week. “One cannot rule out that interest in protecting the climate will change.”
So various cushions are on offer. Companies may be allowed to buy half their permits from carbon-offset projects in the developing world, which makes them cheaper; and there’s a leaked list of industries that could get their emissions rights spooned out for free, though such get-out clauses weren’t supposed to be inked until after the UN attempts a global climate change deal in Copenhagen in December 2009.
These solutions don’t work for Poland. Its problem is reportedly not manufacturers that have to compete with Chinese and Indian counterparts, but its electricity industry, overwhelmingly based on Polish coal. As The Economist explains thoroughly and sympathetically, making coal too expensive - which is the whole point of the policy - will push Poland toward natural gas supplied by the increasingly scary Russia.
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.
If carbon dioxide is trump, then methane is the joker in the greenhouse game. The flammable gas (CH4) is produced in wetlands, landfills and in the guts of cattle and sheep, and it is stored in vast amounts in so-called clathrates, or gas hydrates, in the ocean floor.
The latter stuff has always kindled imagination. In the 1930s, dumbfounded Russian sailors who had lit dynamite for navigational purposes in the Siberian Arctic reported that the air around them started to burn. Had they set on fire methane released from clathrate reservoirs? Perhaps.
Less likely is that methane bubbling up from the ocean floor can makes the water so foamy that ships floating above sink like a rock. File this under Bermuda triangle myths.
But catastrophic methane bursts do seem to be linked with anomalous warming episodes in the Earth’s past, such as the one that occurred at the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum around 55 million years ago. Dissociating clathrates may well have been the culprit then.
What had uncorked the bottle is unclear. But in any case, reports this week of methane emissions from sub-sea permafrost beneath the Siberian shelf, and from the seabed off Svalbard, sound alarming.
Geologists assume there are large methane hydrate reservoirs in both regions. Are they beginning to destabilize? Have we lit a time bomb? Is global warning getting out of control?
Media reports this week imply all this, some more and some less cautiously. It’s a wonderful story of course: Weird things happening in the Arctic, strange tales from the bottom of the ocean, Apocalypse Soon! It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s scary - no wonder journalists love it.
But wait a minute. The methane system discovered off Svalbard has probably been active for thousands of years, it’s only that no-one has ever looked for it.
The methane emissions detected in the Laptev Sea are also not a new phenomenon. Russian scientists have observed methane plumes there since the mid-1990s when they began to regularly visit the remote and inaccessible region. It does seem that there are many more, and possibly more vigorous, emission hotspots than was previously thought. But observations are still few; it’s not too much of a surprise that the harder they look the more they will find. I have tried to put the recent discoveries in context in my news story here.
That’s not to say that rising methane emissions, and thawing permafrost, are no concerns. They are, and their sources and causes need to be studied carefully. Long-overlooked methane emissions from living plants, as were just recently confirmed, are proof enough for how poorly methane cycles are actually understood.
But not only in matters climate change there’s a danger of confusing people by media coverage that alternates between alarmism and appeasement. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has appositely termed the effect a journalistic whiplash for the public.
Science, although intrinsically a never-ending process, will every so often generate journalistic scoops - and sometimes journalistic kitsch. The methane story is exciting, but inflationary use of ‘dramatic’, 'alarming' etc in science stories produces only cheap thrills.
Quirin Schiermeier
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" »
At the IPCC’s twentieth birthday party Sunday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon urged the diplomats present to get moving - now - on the post-Kyoto climate treaty. "We must fight the urge to postpone everything until Copenhagen,” where the treaty is to be finalized in 2009, he said. “Surely we can make concrete progress on some issues."
How much progress? The glass-half-full view is that the latest talks, wrapping up in Accra, Ghana, last week, already took some modest but visible steps forward - particularly on reducing emissions from deforestation and heavy industry. On the other hand, the major climate conference in Poznan, Poland, this December happens while President Bush is still in office, meaning that any change in the US stance is on hold until 2009.
And if this year’s meeting prepares the ground well enough to avoid bitter eleventh-hour struggles over crucial divisions in Copenhagen, it will be a historic first.
To mark the IPCC’s anniversary, NRCC debuted a timeline of the international policy debates that first gave birth to the IPCC, and then were shaped by its findings. In sifting through accounts of past climate negotiations while working on the timeline, I was struck by the invariable tales of gruesome battles into the wee hours. The classic was Kyoto in 1997, as reported by the Washington Post:
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 " »
Arctic permafrost has been the subject of much global warming worry, but not so much detailed research. A new survey of North American Arctic permafrost published in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription required) breaks new ground, literally.
News accounts have focused on the paper’s bottom-line estimate: there is 60% more carbon frozen up there than previously thought. That’s a total of 98.2 billion tonnes of carbon, one-sixth of the amount currently circulating through the atmosphere.
Existing estimates already show more permafrost carbon around the globe than atmospheric carbon. If warming - which is happening faster in the Arctic than anywhere else - releases even a small portion of that store into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, the results won’t be pretty, especially if the amount frozen in the Asian north is also more than expected. Permafrost has been called a “slow-motion time bomb”, and the effects of its melting are not included in most global climate models.
The new research is by Chien-Lu Ping of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and colleagues. How did they do it?
USA Today has staked out the environmental-news angle on the annual American Psychological Association conference, ongoing this weekend. The behemoth meeting has some 16,000 attendees flocking to talks on everything from Pharmacotherapy to Peace Psychology. Those are actual topic headings in the programme, whereas Green Psychology is not. But the paper’s reporter Sharon Jayson cleverly rounds up a few 'green' presentations - new, unpublished research about how sustainability messages filter through the brain of the poor media-besieged layperson.
For example, scolding doesn’t work - and may lead the scolded to quietly give up on greening up. Though this study surveyed undergraduates, there is preliminary evidence that its findings also apply to presidential administrations.
Continue reading "Undergraduates are rational, and other findings from Green Psychology" »
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?
Protests at the climate camp in Kingsnorth, Kent, the site of a proposed new coal fired power plant, reached a climax this weekend, as reported by various news sources. Demonstrators, who promised to reach the site by air, land and sea, reached about 3,000 in number during the course of the week, but – met by some 1,500 police officers - failed to halt business at the site’s existing plant.
There was an excellent article in Saturday’s Guardian on how the outcome of Kingnorth will have implications for similar plants under development worldwide. In total, approx 100 similar plants are in the planning stage – more than half of these are in China, with the others split between the UK, Germany and the US – and governments are watching closely to see what decision is taken in the UK.
The main question is whether the UK government, which has argued for tough international regulations on climate change, will allow the power plant to go ahead without carbon capture and storage (CCS). UK energy minister Malcolm Wicks argues that new coal fired power plants such as the one being proposed in Kent are needed to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS technology, which remains unproven. This may be true, but if demonstrating CCS really is the priority, then why is it that there is no obligation for the owners of Kingsnorth to use CCS, should it be proven?
Continue reading "Debate on coal heats up as climate protests reach climax" »
An elegant Reuters headline from the paleoclimate world:
Climate chill came exactly 12,679 years ago: study
I got a kick out of this story, having read Gavin Schmidt and Elisabeth Moyer’s NRCC op-ed last week on the chilly gap between paleoclimatologists and climate modellers (and the perhaps-even-chillier one between climate scientists and economists). Schmidt and Moyer point out that while the paleo crowd may “assume that modellers have a myopic view of climate history”, modellers “may assume that palaeo-science is too anecdotal, qualitative and localized to be of use for quantitative modelling.”
Per that headline, however, paleo researchers occasionally make delightfully precise statements - when they get their hands on a sample that yields data at the right timescale. But even then, connecting snapshots of the past with future climate scenarios is not straightforward.
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" »
A ruling came in yesterday on complaints about the UK documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. On The Great Beyond, Katharine Sanderson notes that despite very negative headlines about the ruling,
you might say that Channel 4 got off pretty lightly for their documentary that suggested that global warming wasn’t caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Ofcom [the complaint board] charged the programme with misrepresenting certain scientists, which leads to those critical headlines, but ultimately the regulators said that the programme didn’t mislead viewers.
Stop the presses! The rising profile of global warming and "unprecedented media emphasis on weather" are inspiring too many bright-eyed young meteorologists-to-be.
Score one backhanded hit for climate writers against "the tyranny of the news peg" (in Andy Revkin’s much-quoted phrase) and other obstacles to effective coverage.
Or sheer brute-force coverage, as some say. The Guardian today spends a special supplement worrying that the oversaturated public has "climate fatigue" (self-fulfillingly, I’m sure - their harping on this story is making me wonder if it's time to adapt The Economist's recession index to environmental journalism).
So how to tell a climate story that does manage to cut through the haze? That seems, a bit surprisingly, to be the central concern of a new indie docu-comedy.
In case anyone doubted the Bush administration’s resolve on climate policy during these last lame-duck months, they’ve just used the thump of a 500-page EPA report hitting the bin to hammer it home.
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
Ross Garnaut, the down-under equivalent of Nicholas Stern, offered up a draft report Friday on the costs of climate change in Australia and an emissions trading scheme for dealing with it.
The reaction? Garnaut mania, says Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond. The report's server was overloaded at the time of this blogging - despite the gauntlet of rewrites that still stands between this document and actual legislation, as Daniel points out.
If global warming goes unmitigated, Garnaut figures projected GDP will drop 4.8% and real wages 7.8% by 2100. Agriculture is one sector set to take a beating - and that's in the context of droughts that have already dug into Asia's rice supply (thanks to Grist for link; more on climate, energy and global food supply here).
The proposed emissions market has a broad scope, including transportation and petroleum products. It won't be a revenue-raiser though - households are supposed to get half the proceeds to offset rising prices, businesses another 30% against international competition, and the last 20% goes to developing and commercializing new technologies. For wonkier details, see Reuters' factbox.
Worth noting: At the national level, what Garnaut's recommending is a short-term band-aid plan. From the report summary:
Australia's mitigation effort is our contribution to keeping alive the possibility of an effective global agreement on mitigation.
Any effort prior to effective, comprehensive global agreement should be short, transitional, and directed at achievement of global agreement.
Image: Coal-fired power plant in Western Australia. If carbon consumption goes unmitigated, says the Garnaut report, coal-addicted Oz can expect quadrupled emissions, mostly from power. Credit: Nachoman-au on Wikimedia.
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
From claims that obese Westerners are devouring the world's produce to pleas that panicked developing nations stop hoarding it, recriminations were flying at a two-day UN conference focused on soaring international food prices this week - and The Guardian reports that anger ran highest over US policies aggressively promoting biofuels farming. Small wonder: the International Monetary Fund has estimated that the trend toward farms producing fuel instead of food is responsible for 20-30% of recent price spikes, the International Food Policy Research Institute, a US think tank, came up with 30%, and the clean-energy research firm New Energy Research offered a more conservative 8%. But US agriculture secretary Ed Schafer would own up to only 3%.
And while the food riots resulting from price rises are easy to see, the environmental benefits of biofuels are not. Report after report this year has warned that flight from fossil fuels to biofuels could see forests cleared and cropland diverted while both food costs and greenhouse emissions rise.
Ethanol fuel made from corn - big business in the US - has taken particularly heavy blame for food prices, as it uses up grain that could feed people and livestock, and fields that could be planted with other edible crops. Last year's US energy bill included a full-steam-ahead target to quintuple ethanol production in 15 years - a commitment that John McCain and 23 other Senate Republicans last month urged the EPA to ignore because of the food crisis. Across the pond, the EU is still trying to figure out how to insert sustainability caveats into its controversial plan to make 10% of all transport fuel renewable (i.e. plant-based) by 2020.
Aside from the ethanol acrimony, the UN meeting heard another strident message: Ban Ki-moon's call for 50% more agricultural production by 2030 to support a rising global population. To make this much food, the world may not be able to spare many fields for ethanol.
For more on what's driving food prices - including the possibility that we've lost some arable land to global warming and are set to lose more - Grist's breakdown and this International Food Policy Research Institute report are good places to start. And this recent Nature News story (subscription required) has a look over the biofuel industry's horizon.
Anna Barnett
Photo: Harvey Leifert
The predicted effects of climate change can be counted on to shake up international relations, even far from the impoverished, politically wobbly regions where the most obvious conflicts loom. A case in point is the tranquil Arctic seabed, believed to hold a substantial fraction* of the world's undeveloped oil reserves - which, as the summer sea ice extent decreases year by year, is suddenly set to become accessible for extraction.
As such, the Arctic Ocean is a new source of friction among the five countries that claim portions of it as their sovereign territory: the US, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Russia, the latter of which elicited clucking from some of the others in August when it sent a submersible to the sea bottom and planted a titanium national flag at the underwater North Pole. And more than the pole is up for grabs. In a great piece on the politics of Arctic climate change in Vanity Fair, Alex Shoumatoff writes:
Last summer, Canada’s Northwest Passage was nearly free of ice and completely navigable for a few weeks—for the first time since records have been kept. This fabled route to the Orient, which eluded Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, and was finally navigated by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1905, would reshape global trade, being thousands of miles shorter than most currently used shipping routes, though it won’t be clear long enough to be commercially viable for at least another 15 to 20 years. Canada has claimed the passage as its internal waterway since the early 1970s, but the U.S. maintains that it is an international strait, through which any vessel, including submerged submarines gathering intelligence, has the right of “transit passage.”
On Wednesday, the five Arctic-bordering nations met in the tiny town of Ilulissat, Greenland, with the intention of staving off inconvenient squabbles over the newly unfrozen oil and gas sources. The high-level delegates sent to handle the promise of a new oil rush agreed to proceed in an orderly fashion and allow the UN to decide who owns what (Reuters, New York Times, FT).
When the UN rules on territorial rights, it will be ruling on geoscience. At issue is how far the continental shelf under each nation extends into the ocean - the criterion for sovereignty under the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention (still not ratified by the US Senate, which will apparently have to overcome past reluctance in order to achieve the country's Arctic aims). Wednesday's declaration gives the claimants time to gather scientific evidence to present to a commission on continental shelves.
The agreement also avoids aiming for a treaty like the one concocted to settle wrangling over Antarctica in the 1950s. A 1991 addition to the Antarctic treaty forbids exploitation of mineral resources until 2048, which may be why the delegates in Ilulissat hastened to hand their disagreements over to the UN and emphasize that no special laws would be necessary up north. Environmental groups, excluded from the meeting, would naturally prefer a treaty that could offer strong protection for Arctic ecosystems already stressed by warming.
Anna Barnett
Photo: North Pole sign set up by the crew and scientists of the German research vessel Polarstern; Hannes Grobe
*Often said to be 25% - erroneously, according to Shoumatoff.
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
With much of the corporate world competing to be ahead of the decarbonization curve, it's not uncommon to see investors actually begging governments for more regulations, as a prominent group in the US did this week. More remarkable is witnessing oil goliath Exxon Mobil torn by a climate-driven shareholder revolt and its backlash.
On fossil fuels and climate change, Exxon in the past has not so much failed to read the writing on the wall as actively attempted to efface it. That's changed, but not enough, say the heirs of John D. 'Standard Oil' Rockefeller, whose ancestral ex-monopoly forms Exxon's core. The Rockefellers are sponsoring four shareholder resolutions that will come to a vote at the company's annual shareholder meeting May 28. According to The Independent, they say Exxon needs to research how climate change will affect the developing world, fund alternative fuels, reduce its carbon footprint, and spur more managerial debate by splitting up the roles of chariman and CEO - both posts are currently held by Rex Tillerson. At last year's meeting, says The Guardian, a call to split up Tillerson's jobs got 40% yays, and addressing climate change got 30%. With a vast green tide and 19 institutional investors backing up the Rockefellers (who own only 0.006% of Exxon's stock, the company says), this year could see even greater support.
But the Wall Street Journal - ever the champion of the little guy - noted in an editorial yesterday (subscription required) that blue-collar investors have struck back. According to the Journal, US police union leader Chuck Canterbury wrote to Tillerson that the resolutions
would impose "rigid, ideologically-based conditions on the company's future," would nullify "the judgment of a highly successful management team," and would "undercut every project and business operation." This would "hamstring ExxonMobil's profitability and growth, thus directly harming the police officers, firefighters, teachers and public employees whose retirement savings are invested in the company."
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
In debates over how to mitigate the effects of climate change, is the burgeoning human population an elephant in the room? A projected 9 billion people will have to share a warming planet by 2050, yet as Kerri Smith writes in Nature Reports Climate Change this week, the climatic effects of their rising numbers and shifting demographics has received surprisingly little study.
Population is a touchy subject, bringing to mind oppressive campaigns against growth - like China's one-child system, or forced sterilization programs - as well as false past predictions of an imminent catastrophe. But it’s becoming clear that the problem is more complex than a ticking ‘population bomb’. Numbers are exploding in the world’s poorest societies - a trend that CIA chief Michael V. Hayden recently chose above climate or energy issues as one of the key changes facing the 21st century. Because of the low emissions per head in these societies, Smith explains,
Reducing population growth in Niger, for example, where the population size is predicted to triple by mid-century, would not have a dramatic effect on emissions right now. And in many countries in Europe — where reducing emissions levels is more pressing — populations are declining, so a demography-based climate strategy would be ineffective. In a generation's time, however, when developing countries begin industrializing apace, a large population could be bad news.
An aging industrialized world could wrinkle the picture further, as could increasing urbanization. Meanwhile, Hayden fears that the population patterns themselves will precipitate political instability - which climate change is expected to exacerbate.
The solutions to this complex problem could be subtle, or at least subtler than enforcing a small average family size. Fred Meyerson, an ecologist, demographer and environmental policy researcher, told Smith that simply improving access to family planning in the last 50 years has very effectively reduced population growth, and the UN Population Division's Thomas Buettner pointed out the knock-on effect that this has had on greenhouse gas emissions. (A new book by the WorldWatch Institute’s Robert Engelman puts a finer point on it, arguing that in countries where empowerment of women gives them say over the matter, they invariably choose to have two children or fewer on average.)
And this month's headlines show how far-reaching the links are between slowing population growth and preventing climate-induced crises, Meyerson added in an email:
Each million/billion [people] we add puts more people in the path of natural disasters such as the recent Asian cyclone and drought/starvation, some of which are climate change-induced. Adaptation to those changing conditions (including migration, if needed) is obviously much more manageable with 8 rather 11 billion people. And emissions mitigation - for instance, a move from fossil fuels to biofuels - is also much more problematic if the lion's share of the solar energy budget of the terrestrial surface is needed to meet the food needs of a large population and not available for energy production. (That debate is already ongoing with the spike of food prices and the use of corn for ethanol production, but it will surely increase as we add ~75 million people each year to the population over the next few decades.)
Anna Barnett
Photo: Lusi, SXC
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
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 " »
A paper in this week’s Nature predicts that, rather than warming, North Atlantic sea surface temperatures may actually decrease slightly in the next decade. What’s more, the paper suggests global surface temperatures may not actually increase either.
Has global warming stopped? Is this a nail in Al Gore’s coffin?
Well, no.
Despite headlines such as ‘Doubt is cast over global warming’ and ‘Global warming could stop NATURALLY for ten years, say scientists’ that is not what this paper is about.
What this new paper by Noel Keenlyside, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, sets out to do is incorporate data on short term variations in climate into our models of climate change. By doing this they push us into the arena of creating shorter term predictions, in this case of the next decade.
In a “News and Views” commentary on the piece in the same issue of Nature Richard Wood explains:
Keenlyside and colleagues’ model uses a very simple ocean initialization method in which they add heat to or remove it from the ocean surface until sea surface temperatures across the globe are close to observed values. They use their model to produce a set of retrospective ‘forecasts’ starting from earlier states, which they test against what actually happened. Their system produces refined temperature predictions a decade ahead for large parts of Europe and North America.
Whether their prediction of a plateau for warming for a decade in North America and Europe is correct or not, their research may signal a shift that many climate researchers have been calling for for awhile now — toward service-oriented climate science ...
I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.
Cross posted by Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
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
James Hansen and Michael McCracken - two extremely prominent and vocal climate scientists - have rallied behind a US high-school senior who questioned statements in his civics textbook that play up scientific uncertainty on global warming. Now the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, is promising to reassess its accuracy (AP, Dot Earth, Grist, Treehugger). From the AP:
Legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded. They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools.
The student, Matthew LaClair, was already an experienced secondary-ed whistleblower, having taped and exposed religious comments his history teacher made in class last year. He contacted the Center for Inquiry, a pro-science think tank, to point out passages like:
"Science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."
"The earth has become warmer, but is this mostly the result of natural climate changes, or is it heavily influenced by humans putting greenhouse gases into the air?"
Some wording that LaClair highlighted from the 2005 textbook used in his class was toned down in a more recent edition. For example, "Science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all," was changed to simply "Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is." Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth parses this:
As we’ve written many times, the climate system’s response to rapidly rising greenhouse gas concentrations remains laden with uncertainty. A doubling of concentrations from the long-term ceiling of 280 parts per million for carbon dioxide before the industrial revolution would most likely raise global temperatures 3.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, by the latest I.P.C.C. analysis. So in that legalistic sense, it’s true that science hasn’t defined “how bad” climate change will be.
And that's about the best you can say of these passages, as Revkin, Hansen, McCracken and the Center for Inquiry all make clear in their point-by-point critiques. A response from Houghton Mifflin posted by Revkin falls well short of addressing the problem: the book's authors are describing a climate debate that sounds almost nothing like the IPCC's painstakingly agreed reports. Instead, as Hansen wrote, "these statements are aimed at giving students the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain" - a strategy that's familiar to Hansen.
Anna Barnett
Photo: dcJohn
The BBC is facing allegations that it altered a news story about climate at the behest of an activist.
A series of emails from BBC reporter Roger Harrabin and activist Jo Abbess were posted on the Campaign Against Climate Change website on April 4th.
After a series of back and forths Harrabin writes “Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. ... We have changed headline and more”.
The original headline - Global Warming ‘dips this year’ – changed to the current Global Temperatures ‘to decrease’. Needless to say as soon as these emails were noticed they were picked up by unhappy sceptic bloggers (here, here and here for example).
The BBC told us:
A minor change was made to the "Global temperatures 'to decrease'" piece on our website to better reflect the science. A few people including the report's authors, the world meteorlogical organisation, pointed out to us that the earlier version had been ambiguous.
It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth.And also:
I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.The News Sniffer site highlights some changes other than the headline*. These were already annoying some sceptics even before the emails surfaced.
Making corrections to an article in response to a complaint is not necessarily wrong.
It’s certainly a bit much to string up Harrabin as a result of this exchange. I’ve certainly gone over things I’ve written and thought “I wish I’d put that differently.”
To my mind there are only two questions to be answered here.
The first of these is should the BBC have flagged the article as having been changed? The answer here is yes if they thought the original version was wrong, and no if they thought they were just altering for readability. As they think the change is minor then there isn’t really a need to flag it**.
The second question is why on earth Abbess put up the email exchange. Anyone could have predicted the response from the sceptics out there...
*| Old version [top three paragraphs] | New version |
| Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. | Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. |
| The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer. | The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer. |
| This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years. |
But this year's temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases. |
** Here’s an extract from a blog post by a BBC editor from 2006:
When we make a major change or revision to a story we republish it with a new timestamp, indicating it’s a new version of the story. If there’s been a change to a key point in the story we will often point this out in the later version (saying something like "earlier reports had said...").But lesser changes - including minor factual errors, corrected spellings and reworded paragraphs - go through with no new timestamp because in substance the story has not actually progressed any further. This has led to accusations we are "stealth editing" - a sinister-sounding term that implies we are actively trying to hide what we are doing. We’re not. It’s just that continually updating the timestamp risks making it meaningless, and pages of notes about when and where minor revisions are made do not make for a riveting read
Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
Declan Butler has a feature (subscription required) in this week's Nature on the potential of green architecture for mitigating climate change. On his blog, he writes:
It’s been one of the most challenging articles I’ve had to write, as I had to leave out so much, but at the same time one of the most satisfying. This is a hugely important topic. Buildings account for up to half of all energy consumption, and are the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Much attention is given to exotic future remedies, such as carbon sequestration and clean coal. But a way to slash emissions using existing technologies is sitting under our noses: simply rethinking how we design the buildings we live and work in, to use much less energy.The arguments for building with energy needs met largely by marrying with the local environment and passive strategies are so compelling that the research for this article is persuading me to switch my own plans to buy a place in French Touraine, where I live, to instead build a zero-energy home — no small challenge, though, given that French builders are far behind their German, Swiss, and Austrian neighbours here.
Image: Low-income “passive” terrace houses in Lindas, Sweden; M. Wall
Today Australia sees the opening of the world's largest trial carbon storage plant (Sydney Morning Herald, BBC, Reuters), the construction of which was covered by Hannah Hoag in Nature Reports Climate Change last year. Since then, soaring costs have prompted the US to junk plans for its FutureGen clean coal power plant, and the down-under demo project is the most massive noncommercial carbon burial site to make it off the drawing board (this Nature News feature rounds up the other contenders as of 2006; subscription required).
For background on how natural rock formations are being used to trap carbon dioxide - and why environmentalists have called the plant a waste of time and money - check out Hannah's report.
Anna Barnett
The Guardian was far from alone in reporting this week that "A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists." On The Great Beyond, Quirin Schiermeier points out that the the most noteworthy thing about this delicately poised hunk of the Wilkins ice shelf may be its media visibility: the loss of a 400-square-kilometre piece of the same shelf earlier this year received no such fanfare.
Still, that visibility is pretty spectacular. Check out this mashup of the Twin Otter plane's flyover footage with the satellite images that tipped off British Antarctic Survey scientists:
"The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."
Anna Barnett
Canadians are set to slap the first price tag on their greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to some very different initiatives in the works.
Reuters reported Friday that the long-awaited Montreal Climate Exchange will open on May 30, buying and selling voluntary emissions reductions in the same fashion as the Chicago Climate Exchange, its US partner.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government had a few days earlier put out the details of its plan for mandatory emissions reductions, which had likewise been in the works for over a year (a good summary is here; registration required). They're proposing to cut absolute emissions 20% from 2006 levels by 2020 (for those scoring at home, 20% down from 2005 levels would be 0% below 1990 levels, compared to the standard-bearing EU's 20% cut from 1990 levels).
But absolute emissions isn't what they'll limit - they're talking about regulating emissions intensity, or the amount of emissions per unit of production, from 2010. That could make it tough to integrate into a global climate deal, since the EU caps absolute emissions and all three US presidential candidates want to do the same. Interestingly, the plan also mandates carbon capture and storage for oil sands, a carbon-intensive economic lynchpin of the country.
Besides the voluntary market, local measures could already be in play when and if these limits come down. British Columbia is leading the way with what is to be the first carbon tax implemented outside of Europe. Although the tax hasn't been looking very popular and faces the same too-much-is-never-enough criticism that the EU climate bill came in for, liberal leader Stephane Dion now says he'd like the national strategy to be a carbon tax - or something. Anything. "We can talk about what the best model for putting a price on carbon across Canada might be –– but the fact is we need to JUST DO IT. That is what this provincial government has done, and that is what a Liberal government will do," Dion said in a speech in Vancouver.
Conservatives, who will be defending their control in the next election, countered with praise for the Montreal market. And while other provinces remain skeptical of the carbon tax, B.C. and Manitoba are considering joining western US states in a new cap-and-trade system - so a regulatory patchwork looks likely. As in the US recently, though, the question is no longer whether the Canadian government should intervene to raise fossil fuel costs, but how.
Anna Barnett
Last year on Climate Feedback, Kevin Vranes wrote about some of the unintended consequences of climate policy – namely how the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism was increasing greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of HCF-23 in developing countries – as well as increasing ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere.
Now, the drive to tackle climate change – and fast - has landed us back in the land of unintended consequences, though for a whole host of other reasons.
A few particularly noteworthy examples have come across my radar in the past couple of weeks.
First up, is the increasing demand from alternative energies on the world’s water supplies, a factor not helped by the complete lack of cohesion between energy, water and climate policy. A prime example, as reported by Brian Hoyle on Nature Reports Climate Change, is the extensive irrigation required for those waving fields of midwest grain that supply the ethanol for biofuels.
“At least 40 gallons [of water] go into every mile travelled by an ethanol-powered vehicle” according to Michael Webber of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas-Austin.
And gas-electric hybrid vehicles fare little better. “We need to move from our old way of thinking — miles per gallon — to gallons of water per mile," says Webber.
Not only do these golden fields of corn pose a threat to water supplies, the massive amounts of fertiliser used in growing them are increasing nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and worsening the existing ‘dead zones’ in the Gulf associated with fish kills. The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , notes that this is in direct conflict with existing policy targets to reduce the oxygen-depleted area in the region.
And on an unrelated topic…the trail of unforeseen outcomes continues overseas…as highlighted last week in The Washington Post, which reported the toxic waste being left behind by solar energy companies in China, posing a severe threat to human health.
As much as climate policy is urgently needed, it seems it would be worth remembering that climate is not the only sustainability issue.
Olive Heffernan
In the race to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the Royal Society now plans to back promising new technology with venture capital as well as intellectual clout. The Society announced Thursday it will sink its first-ever investment fund into businesses developing carbon capture and renewable energy, along with water purification and other world-saving innovations (Financial Times).
Continue reading "Royal Society to fund carbon capture and renewables ventures" »
Judging by the press coverage, it would appear that the Bush administration just turned green. A flurry of stories has hit the press after James Connaughton, a senior environmental advisor, suggested the White House would be willing to “enter into an international agreement” on climate change, “if other countries do, too.” That’s according to the New York Times. The BBC focused on three words - “binding international obligations” - uttered by Daniel Price, a national security advisor to President George W. Bush.
Although it remains unclear what, exactly, this means, it is perhaps telling that such statements could grab headlines around the world. The administration seems eager to clarify what it considers misunderstandings about its position on global warming (namely the general perception that it will stop at nothing to quash or at least cripple any international treaty to protect its industry friends). Bush’s critics aren’t going to buy it, of course, but they appear to be more than happy to watch the president try to wiggle out of what has become an increasingly lonesome political corner.
The problem here is that there isn’t much new. In trying to explain the president’s call for “aspirational” climate goals last year, Connaughton used similarly vague language. Under Bush’s plan, countries could institute various voluntary and regulatory measures at the national level. Those commitments would become binding under an international treaty, he said.
So are those the same “binding international obligations” that Connaughton discussed this week? The answer would appear to be no: Most stories suggest that “binding obligations” refers to various proposals to reduce emissions by some percentage by a specific date.
If that were the case, this might be newsworthy. But Connaughton’s suggestion that major developing nations (think China and India) would have to do the same is, if interpreted literally, a tad unrealistic. It also goes against the administration’s entire strategy for global warming, which has up until this point emphasized a decentralized approach based on various national strategies that could be developed by countries according to their specific needs and resources.
Oddly enough, this is one area where the Bush administration’s arguments seemed to (quietly) resonate. Following the principle of “common but differentiated” responsibilities for poor and wealthy nations, many in the climate community had already come to accept the idea that a one-size-fits-all approach simply would not work. If, on the other hand, Connaughton meant to say that major developing nations could sign up for various national policies as opposed to strict emissions targets, the question is then whether the United States would be able to do the same thing. If that were the case, nothing would have changed.
Where does all this leave us? I’m not sure. Connaughton says he is trying to reframe the administration’s position on climate change by emphasizing what it is willing to do, rather than what it is not willing to do. If would be easier to evaluate if the administration would offer some numbers.
Cross posted from Jeff Tollefson on The Great Beyond
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? " »
The primary election results from “Super Tuesday” are still trickling in, but one thing is clear: all of the leading presidential candidates in the United States endorse mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. Given the past seven years of obfuscation and, many claim, outright obstruction from the administration of President George W. Bush, this will come as a relief to scientists and many policymakers in the US and abroad.
The news comes from the right side of the political spectrum. While leading Democrats have formulated official and strong positions on global warming, the Republican field until now has been a bit of a mixed bag – in part because little attention has been focused on the issue. But with voters in 21 states weighing in, the GOP candidate with the strongest and clearest position on global warming, John McCain (pictured), came out with a commanding lead. (NY Times).
The Arizona senator bucked Republican leaders on the issue long ago, and is currently sponsoring legislation that would create a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 60% below 1990 levels by 2050.
On the Democratic side, the battle between New York senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois senator Barack Obama will continue in the coming weeks – and perhaps months. Both, however, have endorsed cap-and-trade programs to cut emissions 80% below 1990 levels by mid-century.
Cross-posted from Jeff Tollefson on The Great Beyond
Image: John McCain 2008 / www.JohnMcCain.com
In what was billed as the largest teach-in ever, over 1,500 universities, colleges, schools, and community organizations across the US held seminars and events on climate change yesterday.
Organized by student volunteers and driven by a project called Focus the Nation, professors of science, economics, engineering and anthropology - among other disciplines - spoke on panels and brought their classes to the discussions. Meanwhile, students staged information fairs and awareness-raising stunts: in Missouri, they stacked up 20 tons of coal to create a 3D graphic of campus energy use, and in Vermont, the fictional protagonist of a one-woman show promoted a boycott on sex as an effective focusing strategy (Focus the Nation, Christian Science Monitor).
I talked to a few of the scientists involved about how the events went at their universities. Ecologist Tom Sherry of Tulane University in New Orleans was brimming with excitement about the sessions there, which were attended by a total of about 750 students and faculty and included a Q&A that carried on for a lively two hours.
Continue reading ""Largest teach-in ever" focuses US on climate change" »
The European Commission's draft blueprint for tackling climate change, announced January 23rd, is praised in today's Nature editorial for hitting "the sweet spot" between politically pragmatic but shortsighted proposals and implausably idealistic ones. Other groups - idealists and pragmatists alike - have reacted differently.
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)*.
Currently on Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a review by Michael Oppenheimer of Mark Bowen’s lastest book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth About Global Warming.
As suggested by the title, the book documents the White House-led censorship of James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who bravely spoke out about the dangers and urgency of global warming long before many of his fellow climate scientists. Oppenheimer writes:
In doing so, Hansen staked a claim to unfettered speech far beyond the usual scientist's model of announcing research findings. If there was ever a pure test of the rights of government scientists, this was it.
As well as narrating “the step-by-step attempts of a low-ranking NASA press staffer and right-wing ideologue, along with other officials, to censor Hansen”, the book delves into the story of Hansen as research scientist who made important discoveries on the greenhouse effect and documents his personal journey as an individual.
While commending the book overall, Oppenheimer criticizes Bowen’s unyielding reverence for Hansen:
Bowen provides a fascinating tour of Hansen's scientific mind and mental voyage over 30 years, including the basis for his prescient assertions about the future course of warming. But here the story swerves off course into a morass of condescension and inaccuracy. Rather than providing a slice of science history, Bowen feeds the reader hagiography, as if he feels the need to enhance Hansen's stature — a completely unnecessary exercise — by reducing that of other scientists.
Climate change is being blamed for problems at the annual ice festival in Harbin, China. Huge intricate sculptures are disappearing before the thousands of tourists that flock to the festival get to see them.
“"The average temperature of winter in Harbin is 5 degrees Celsius higher than historical records,” says Yin Xuemian, a senior meteorologist at the Heilongjiang Observatory (Reuters). “In December 2002, ice lanterns in Harbin melted right after they were sculpted. [In 2006] Lots of money and energy were spent on redoing the sculptures. As the temperature rises, the period of ice and snow activities have shortened dramatically.”
AFP says this year’s festival has been a big success. Participants are concerned though, one told China Daily, “We’re all worried that the things will just collapse.” The festival is supposed to run until February. “We're worried it won't last that long this year,” Sun Lei, an official involved in the festival, told the BBC.
A rise of 5 C is pretty large. Estimates are generally far lower although these tend to be averaged over large areas. See Late-Twentieth-Century Climatology and Trends of Surface Humidity and Temperature in China.
Alternatively, you can geek out with the raw data from NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, which allows you to make maps of the trends. There’s even monitoring data from Harbin itself, although this isn’t totally up to date.
Image: Getty
Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond
From the BBC radio show Digital Planet:
Bali has not been the only island to host a climate change conference recently.The science journal Nature has purchased a little archipelago of islands in Second Life called Second Nature.
While participants at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Bali have been agreeing on a roadmap to replace the Kyoto protocol, climate experts – or their representational avatars – have been hosting talks and discussions on one of the Second Nature islands.
Timo Hannay, publishing director at Nature, tells Digital Planet how they went about achieving this series of virtual talks.
The Digital Planet podcast episode with the interview is worth a listen, especially if you're wondering how a conference in Second Life's virtual world stacks up against one in the real word (or First Life, as it's known to enthusiasts) - or against a traditional webcast.
The Second Nature climate conference was announced on CF here; Second Life avatars can visit Second Nature here.
Anna Barnett
Bali, Indonesia-
In the disabling humidity of Bali, former US vice president Al Gore last night urged delegates gathered here at the UN conference on climate change to continue efforts towards an international climate change deal, despite attempts by the US delegation to stall progress.
Gore said, to loud applause, that the US was “principally responsible for obstructing progress” at the UN conference, which aims to set out an agenda for how negotiations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol should proceed over the next two years.
Delegates have now reached agreement on a number of key issues for the ‘Bali roadmap’, including reducing deforestation, providing financial assistance for adaptation and transferring technology to developing nations.
But there are fears that the science that has informed the process is now being sidelined.
The main bone of contention is how the most recent findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, will be acknowledged in the final text agreed to in Bali.
Most delegations believe that the text should refer to the need for developed nations to reduce emissions by 25-40% on 1990 levels by 2020. But the US says that to do so would be ‘prejudge the outcome’ of the process. Japan and Canada agree with the US and Australia agreed with this stance earlier in the week, though it’s position is a little less certain at the moment.
The EU is standing strong behind the need to include specific numbers on future emissions reductions, arguing that it would be pointless to agree on a roadmap without a destination. “It is crucial for us that we must have an idea where we are heading to – it’s not only to science to show us the destination, but the destination must be consistent with the science”, said Portuguese secretary of state for the environment, Humberto Rosa yesterday in Bali.
European commissioner Stavros Dimas warned US under secretary of state Paula Dobiansky in a meeting yesterday morning that unless a substantive agreement was reached in Bali, there would be little point in the EU attending the Major Economies Meeting to be hosted by the US in February in Hawaii. Rosa and Dimas said this was not a threat, but an acknowledgment of the fact that the Major Economies Meeting is designed to feed into the UN process.
In his address last night, Gore advised negotiators to move beyond their anger and frustration at the US and to recognize that a new US administration, which will take over from Bush in little over a year, will likely embrace more climate-friendly policies.
"Do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save a large, open, blank space in your document and put a footnote by it [that says] this document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway."
But this morning, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo De Boer, said that option would be unfeasible.
“It would be impossible to advance here without the US, as this is a consensus”, said De Boer. “It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to craft a climate change regime without one of the major economies and the major emitter”.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
As anticipated, deforestation has emerged as something of a thorny issue at the UN conference on climate change, currently nearing a close in Bali.
It was announced yesterday that measures to avoid further destruction of tropical forests, such as the Amazon, will be included in the agreement to come out of the talks at the end of this week. The Bali agreement is expected to act as a guideline for negotiations on an international climate change deal up until the end of 2009.
Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole Research Centre, US said today in Bali that the Amazon rainforest is expected to see a 55% dieback by 2030 through deforestation, logging and drought. Rainforests in other nations, such as Indonesia are facing similar pressures. So, any effort to avoid deforestation, which accounts for an estimated 20-25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is to be commended. But the solution being put forward to in Bali , known as REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is being met with opposition on many sides.
Under the proposed scheme for ‘avoided deforestation’, carbon sequestered by forests in developing countries that are not being cut can be traded on the carbon market, where developed countries can buy the credits and ‘offset’ them against their own emissions targets.
A draft text on deforestation is ready to go forward for discussion by the high level ministers, who arrived at the Bali conference today, said executive secretary of the UN conference on climate change, Yvo De Boer.
Countries such as Indonesia and numerous conservation NGOs are celebrating inclusion of the scheme. And given that emissions from deforestation were omitted from the Kyoto Protocol, it is the first such international effort of its kind.
But much remains to be agreed upon. The issue of whether such a scheme should include forest conservation is a remaining “bone of contention”. As reported in the Hindustan Times, the Indian delegation wanted to add 'conservation' to 'avoided deforestation' , owing to the fact that India is one of the few developing countries where the forest cover is going up, not down. “We should not be penalised for that” said secretary of the ministry of environment and forests, Meena Gupta
Continue reading "Deforestation a ‘thorny’ issue at the Bali talks " »
Bali, Indonesia-
As celebrations got underway to mark the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, disputes over whether its successor will be a bigger, better deal intensified at the UN climate-change conference in Bali, Indonesia.
I've reported the full story over on Nature News,
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
Whether we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change will ultimately be determined by whether we are willing to finance it.
Finding an effective means for financial assistance and investments to flow from north to south could be a make or break issue at the UN conference on climate change here in Bali, where delegates from almost 190 nations have convened to agree a ‘roadmap’ for an international climate agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
NGOs and delegates from the world’s poorest nations, some of which are already beginning to experience the harsh affects of a warming climate, are calling on developed countries to boost funding to help them adapt, and to transfer technology that will help them green their economies.
Under the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Adaptation fund’, a paltry $163m has been pledged by rich donor countries to developing nations, and just $67m of this has actually been delivered. Yet the sum actually needed to finance adaptation and capacity building in the south is in the region of several tens of billions of dollars, according the World Bank (and reported by the Associated Press). Oxfam says that the very poorest nations also need an up front payment of $1-2bn immediately to address urgent adaptation needs.
The fund, which will finance projects such a building sea walls and irrigating crops, is currently derived from a 2 percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the scheme that allows industrialized nations to pay for carbon credits produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world and credit then against their own emissions targets. But it now looks as though the UN will have to expand its funding for adaptation, potentially through a direct tax on emissions.
The transfer of clean technologies to developing nations is another goal of the Kyoto Protocol that has clearly not been met. In part, this is owing to lack of funding from the public sector and a lack of interest from the private sector, says Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change.
The solution, says De Boer, will require the creation of investment potential through mechanisms such as the carbon market that can send a clear price signal to private investors, who are expected to fund 86% of future clean energy technology projects in the south. It will also require “intelligent financial engineering, to make public and private money go where it has never gone before” akin to “embarking on a star trek expedition”, says De Boer.
A group of finance ministers is now trashing out the details in side meetings at the Bali talks. By the end of the conference, it should be clear whether the worlds’ richest nations are willing to cough up their portion of the much needed cash.
Olive Heffernan
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister who won his recent election on a green platform (Nature News - subscription required) and signed Australia onto the Kyoto Protocol as his first act in office, now refuses to support a proposed 25-40% cut on 1990 emission levels by 2020. The worst part: he rejected the cut days after an Australian delegate to the UN climate conference in Bali promised support for it (Herald Sun).
What's holding up Rudd's vision of a greener Australia? A bad case of sticker shock -- specifically, fear of spiking electricity prices. According to the Herald Sun, the Energy Supply Association of Australia has reported that cutting 30% of 2000 emissions levels by 2030 would raise power costs by 30%, and energy industry representatives are telling Rudd that a faster cut would be much more expensive because of current technological obstacles. So it turns out that Rudd is happy to agree to deep long-term cuts whose price tag is harder to predict, but he won't ask Australians to get out their checkbooks in the next few years. For that, he says, he'll need more economic advice.
A BBC survey (PDF) this year found that worldwide, "most people say they are ready to make personal sacrifices – including paying more for their energy – to help address climate change". A whopping 81% of Australians agreed that prices needed to rise -- a majority second to none in the developed world. But like Rudd's long-term emissions pledge, the poll didn't mention any specific price.
How high an electric bill would you pay - and insist that neighbors and businesses pay - to meet the 2020 target?
Anna Barnett
Bali, Indonesia-
The chances of the world’s major emitters agreeing to mandatory emissions reductions are becoming an increasingly unlikely outcome of the UN talks on climate change here in Bali.
“Nothing has been ruled out yet”, said Yvo de Boer, secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) today in Bali, but he described the possibility of binding emissions cuts for developing nations such as China and India as “crawling towards the edge of the table”.
China has been receiving praise for its proactive role on addressing climate change and its willingness to enter into talks on a post-Kyoto agreement, but De Boer said that India has not been at the forefront of the discussions this week in Bali.
Both India and China have introduced strategies to mitigate climate change this year in a notable departure from historic concerns that to do so would threaten economic growth. Rajenda Pachuari, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that neither China nor India has had sufficient time to act on climate change since introducing their respective strategies and expects that they will demonstrate more significant efforts in the coming months.
In the meantime, NGOs are hoping that the passage of two climate relevant bills through the US House of Representatives this week will put increasing pressure on the Bush administration to sign up to binding emissions targets.
First up is the Energy Bill, which is the only piece of legislation in over 30 years to require a rise in vehicle fuel efficiency. Designed to improve energy security while reducing emissions for transport, the bill would raise fuel economy by 40% by 2020. Second is the Liebermann-Warner Climate Security Act, which would cut emissions from the power and industrial sectors by 70% by 2050 relative to 2005 levels.
The passing of these bills sends a clear signal to the world that the political centre of gravity in the US has shifted on global warming, but all signs indicate that domestic policy is unlikely to sway the stance of the US on the international front.
Both bills have yet to pass through the Senate and White House, and President Bush has already threatened to veto them. But according to Angela Anderson of the National Environmental Trust in the US, this would be rather ironic given that these are exactly the kind of measures that other major emitters have enacted into their own legislation - the very nations that the US is currently engaging with a serious of talks parallel to the UN process.
Yesterday, Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said that neither the passing of these acts to limit US domestic emissions nor the move by Australia to ratify Kyoto would change their stance in Bali. "We're not changing our position," he said.
Given that the US is the only nation that appears to be cutting its fossil fuel emissions, while those signed up to Kyoto have failed to meet their targets, some say that binding cuts may not be the way to go after all.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
For the first time this week at the UN conference on climate change, scientists today sounded their views on the specifics they believe the road from Bali should lead to if we are to avoid catastrophically changing the climate.
Signed by more than 200 of the world’s most eminent climatologists, the ‘Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists’ issues a stark warning to negotiators that unless they take immediate, bold action on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, many millions will be at high risk of some of the most sinister effects of global warming including extreme sea level rise and increased drought and heatwaves.
“This declaration makes a clear and unambiguous statement about what our emissions targets have to be. To achieve these targets, we need action now, this week, here in Bali, said Matthew England, climate modeller at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Specifically, the document states that atmospheric GHG concentrations need to be stabilised long-term at 450 ppm CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) or lower to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Formally announced at a press briefing in Bali this morning, the declaration calls on governments to reduce emissions “by at least 50% below 1990 levels by the year 2050”.
Though the science is taken from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the signatories comprise the most prominent IPCC authors, the policy-prescriptive statement is distinct from the UN process which assesses the current understanding of climate change. “This is simply outside the charge of the IPCC process”, said Richard Somerville, meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
Not all of those invited signed. England, one of the coordinators of the declaration, reckons they had at least a 70% success rate with getting authors on board. According to Andrew Pitman, a climate scientist also at the University of New South Wales, Australia, some authors didn’t sign because they felt the emissions cuts called for were simply not tough enough.
The declaration advises stabilising at 450ppm CO2e, yet this would only give us a 50% chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, explained Pitman. To increase that chance to 75%, we would need to bring atmospheric GHG levels down to 400ppm CO2e. With emissions steadily increasing, the urgency of the situation is brought home by the fact that we are now at GHG levels close to those at which the scientists recommend we stabilise.
Developed nations party to the Kyoto Protocol agreed in Vienna in August that emissions should be cut by 25-40% by 2020, based on 1990 levels. England confirmed that the target announced today is in line with this figure.
But the scientists won’t go as far as to say when the targets should be implemented or how nations should go about reducing their emissions. “We don’t have recommendations for how the negotiations should proceed”, said Somerville. He added that there is no magic bullet and that all approaches to reducing emissions will need to be considered.
As for whether their recommendations are likely to be taken on board, it’s probably too early to say. Diana Liverman, climate policy expert at Oxford University, UK and signatory of the statement, said that she hasn’t seen any evidence of the talks derailing yet and that a consideration of stricter targets than those under Kyoto may come next week.
On being asked for his response to the consensus document, US Senior Climate Negotiator Harlan Watson said that he wasn’t aware of it. He added that the US administration wholly approved of the IPCC, but that they wouldn’t endorse any specific scenarios from the latest report.
The IPCC will present their synthesis report at the plenary tomorrow morning – watch this space….
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
The road to building a Bali roadmap was looking increasingly rocky today, as the vastly differing expectations of what will emerge from the two weeks meeting of the 13th conference of parties (COP) to the UNFCCC became increasingly apparent.
One of the biggest bones of contention, of course, is whether the roadmap will include an agreement on the need for binding emissions targets from 2012, which signals the end of the second period of commitment of the Kyoto Protocol.
At the opening plenary talk on Monday, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary said that “A marriage contract is not something to discuss on a first date”, eluding to the fact that the willingness of nations to co-operate must first be established here before they get down to the nitty gritty of asking parties to act on their promises.
But many feel this is a COP-out. Today, Matthias Duwe of Climate Action Network, a worldwide association of some 400 NGOs, retorted to De Boer’s comment, saying “These parties have been dating for over 15 years now, so we’re not exactly on a first date here”.
Duwe is one of many who believe that a process without an end date and without specific substance will be insufficient for the enormity of the task at hand.
But others feel that pushing for targets now will rock the boat…and possibly capsize it.
Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth International basically agrees with De Boer. She believes that there needs to be more evidence of good will from industrialised nations before we can reach that point. “To put the targets on the table right now would be going in the wrong direction”, said Raman.
There’s also the argument that you need to have the right tools for the job, lest we (again!) agree to targets we fail to meet.
De Boer compared setting targets first to being asked to swim across the Atlantic without knowing whether you’d have a team, be allowed breaks, use rescue equipment etc. Basically, you’d hardly sign up for the task without knowing the details beforehand.
This approach, however, would be a flip on the order in which the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, which set targets first and then looked at how to achieve them. And that’s bound to ruffle feathers.
Among all the political wrangling and finger pointing, there has been some light hearted relief takes on the Bali talks, such as the giant thermometer erected by Greenpeace outside the conference venue and the Fossil of the Day Awards announced each evening by the Climate Action Network. The prize is in recognition of the efforts of countries that block progress at the conference.
Yet again, Saudi Arabia won first prize today for complaining that the protocol has an unfair focus on CO2 (and then called for prioritisation of CCS, which is concentrated on CO2). And secondly, for saying that article A "should not attach an economic element to the noble cause of fighting climate change"--when for years, they have been trying to undermine the fight against climate change specifically by campaigning by alleging adverse economic effects!
Olive Heffernan
While the world’s climate experts meet in Bali, the rest of the world is getting on with the serious business of elaborate hoaxes and stating the obvious. First up: activists from the Rising Tide movement successfully impersonated a major business group and pretended they were going to cut carbon emissions by 90%.
“Leading scientists say decisive action must happen now to reduce our emissions. However, corporate interests have stymied substantive action and are derailing genuine efforts of civil society to adequately address climate change,” says Matt Leonard, member of the movement (press release). Wired has a full interview.
The spoof press release was supposedly from the US Climate Action Partnership, which counts General Motors, Shell, and environmentalists’ bête noire Rio Tinto among its members. Both blogs and news sources were taken in: examples with later retractions at Thomson Financial News (story, correction) and It’s Getting Hot In Here (original, correction).
USCAP issued the following terse statement (reproduced in its entirety):
A fraudulent news release was distributed today that misstates the positions of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). In addition, the release cites a website that does not represent USCAP or its views. Neither USCAP nor its member organizations were involved in the development of this website or the distribution of today's announcement. This fraudulent website has been shut down.
Below the fold – why it’s all the fault of drunk Canadian divorcees anyway...
Continue reading "Climate hoaxes and divorced Canadian drunks " »
Bali, Indonesia-
The long-awaited United Nations Conference on Climate Change kicked off this morning on the idyllic island of Bali, where some 10,000 delegates from 187 nations will spend the next two weeks discussing how to reach an international agreement on climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
International governments are now feeling the pressure for urgent action on climate change as the world watches in hope of a Bali breakthrough. At the opening address of the conference, Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s environment minister and newly appointed president of the thirteenth session of the conference of parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP13) said “We now have a better understanding of the complexity of the climate problem. What we need is political will. I hope that Bali can deliver the breakthrough the world is waiting for”.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, described the mood as “very upbeat and encouraging”. He highlighted Pakistan’s statement on behalf of the G77 member states and China indicating their willingness to engage in international dialogue on climate change.
Up until now, failure of two of the world’s largest industrialised nations, the US and Australia, to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been seen by many as a major obstacle to its success. And buy-in from both nations is believed to be crucial to agreeing a workable ‘son of Kyoto’.
One day into the talks…and half of that goal has already been achieved. Newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who defeated conservative leader John Howard nine days ago, today pledged to ratify Kyoto just hours after being sworn in. Rudd also announced his intention to attend the talks in Bali next week.
De Boer described the response from delegates to the news as “an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant decision on the part of the Australian government” . He said that “the long applause reflected people’s appreciation for Australia to engage even more strongly internationally on climate change”.
But achieving the other half is likely to prove much more difficult. The shift in Australia’s stance will undoubtedly leave the US feeling out in the cold in Bali, but not enough to pressurise the Bush administration to change its stance on ratifying Kyoto.
Responding to the announcement, Harlan Watson, US Senior Climate Negotiator and Special Representative, said today in Bali that it was “up to each individual nation how to move forward” and that the US “respected the decisions of other nations and likewise expected them to respect their decision”.
Watson wouldn’t comment on what the US may be willing to agree to, but said that that it “wants a regime that is both environmentally friendly and economically viable” and that any agreement must “include all major emitters and developed and developing nations”.
Judging from various statements made at the plenary session this morning, it seems that many expect the Bali conference to lead to a very general rather than detailed roadmap on how to proceed on climate change over the next two years. While this may be the only way to get the US on board, it hardly seems like the urgent international response that it being called for. While the EU is very strongly in favour of binding international commitments that can be monitored, President Bush has made it clear that he favours a voluntary approach to cutting greenhouse gases.
But some believe that whatever the US says in Bali will be largely irrelevant, given the forthcoming presidential elections next November.
More delegates are expected to arrive in Bali next week, when any agreements will be finalised, including former US vice –president and Nobel laureate Al Gore and Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the meantime, I’ll be keeping you updated with daily posts direct from the talks in Bali here on Climate Feedback.
Olive Heffernan
The appearance of a massive swarm of jellyfish, and their subsequent decimation of an Irish salmon farm, are this week being blamed on global warming.
Stock worth £1million were suffocated in their cages by the swarm, which is estimated to have covered 25 square kilometres of sea and been up to 10 metres thick. The fish farm's director said “It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about, it, absolutely nothing.” says Northern Salmon Company managing director, John Russell (Telegraph). The full story is on The Great Beyond.
This isn't the first time climate change has been linked to jellyfish outbreaks. Last summer, the same jellyfish (Pelagia notiluca) was spotted in unusually high concentrations in the Mediterranean, again prompting speculation about impacts of sea temperature rise (New Scientist). Reuters reported that a volunteer campaign had removed eight tons of jellyfish from the Spanish coastline. Both reports mention temperature and decline in predators as causes.
A recent study linked increasing populations of jellyfish in the North Sea to climate change and predicted that more jellyfish would appear over the next 100 years.
If the two events are truly linked the UK's salmon industry may have to be added to the list of climate change victims.
Image via Wikipedia
Daniel Cressey and Anna Barnett
Leaders of 16 Asian countries, including top polluters China and Japan, committed to “stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the long run”, says Reuters. The ‘pact’, struck at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Singapore, does not set caps on emissions or otherwise quantify what efforts might be made to reduce the impacts of climate change (though it does promise they will “work to achieve an EAS-wide aspirational goal of increasing cumulative forest cover in the region by at least 15 million hectares of all types of forests by 2020”); and leaders emphasized that economic growth remains a priority for them.
"Climate change has to be addressed -- but they cannot leave people in absolute poverty," Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Reuters. "This is a declaration of intent, not a negotiated treaty of what we are going to do to restrict ourselves.”
The declaration is posted on the ASEAN website.
At the same meeting, Japan pledged to provide US$2 billion over the next five years in aid of fighting environmental problems in East Asia (Japan Times).
Behind-the-scene details can be found in the AFX report on Forbes’ website, which adds that the countries are in favour of nuclear power, and has some interesting notes on how a goal for reducing energy intensity by a set value was dropped after apparent objections from India.
Cross-posted from Nicola Jones on The Great Beyond.
