Climate Feedback

Olive Heffernan
This week's Nature [subscription required] is the third in a series of special issues celebrating the life of Charles Darwin. It focuses on the dire challenges to Earth's biodiversity — and finds some reason for hope.

Among the numerous biodiversity-related contributions is an opinion piece by Will Turner of Conservation International with Michael Oppenheimer and David S. Wilcove of Princeton University. They argue that natural ecosystems offer some of our greatest tools in mitigating climate change and, as such, must be made a bulwark against climate change, rather than a casualty of it. They write:

REDD is just one of many possible ways to exploit the potential of natural ecosystems to slow climate change and lessen its effects on people. Natural habitats are a hugely valuable tool in the fight against global warming. Use them wisely and they could save many lives and vast sums of money in the decades to come. Abuse them, and much of Earth's biodiversity could be lost, along with the fight against climate change. Urgent action is needed to understand how best to exploit this promise and develop mechanisms that can be woven into the practices of governments, corporations, communities and institutions worldwide.

Turner and co-authors say that natural ecosystems are a clear mitigation option because of their sequestration potential, but also because "the maintenance and restoration of natural habitats are among the cheapest, safest and easiest solutions at our disposal in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and promote adaptation to unavoidable changes". See the full article here.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 19, 2009
Categories: Biodiversity and Ecology, Communicating Climate Change, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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publication in the journal New Political Economy earlier this year, only to find out two weeks later that it had been withdrawn by a CSIRO official because it had not yet been through an internal approval process.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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 09, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Olive Heffernan

“Imagine farmers being able to determine what to plant and where based on drought forecasts three to five years out”, said Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, in Geneva last month.

Speaking to delegates at the World Climate Conference, Lubchenco was lending her voice to the vision of climate services, which would deliver climate predictions as reliable and useable as weather forecasts, and tailored to meet the needs of specific end-users. Underlying the vision of climate services is the assumption that further research will result in reliable climate predictions indispensable to adaptation planners.

In July, Germany opened a centre in Hamburg to provide the nation with such services. The Waxman-Markey Bill, passed by the US House of Representatives in June, would launch a similar service within the US, and headed by NOAA, to develop and distribute climate information and predictions to decision-makers.

But in a new Commentary on Nature Reports Climate Change, Mike Hulme and co-authors urge caution in relying on climate predictions to aid adaptation. They write:

Scientists and decision-makers should treat climate models not as truth machines, but instead as one of a range of tools to explore future possibilities.

They highlight that unlike weather forecasts - whose value in informing decision-making can routinely be tested over time by comparison with observed weather patterns - the skill of climate predictions is unknown, especially at the decade-to-century timescale.

Hulme and co-authors illustrate the perils of relying on the predict-then-adapt mode of planning with an example from the Australian state of Victoria. In this case, predictions from a 2005 study of the water supply to Melbourne assured decision-makers that existing plans provided a sufficient buffer against projected climate change up to 2020. But by 2006, water supply levels had dropped far below that predicted even for the most severe climate change scenario (see figure below).

Continue reading "Climate Prediction: keeping it in perspective " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 29, 2009
Categories: Climate prediction, Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, WCC-3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.”

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 23, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Keith Kloor, Opinion, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reaching a climate deal in Copenhagen will depend on rich nations’ proactive commitment to making mandatory emission cuts at home, prominent experts from India and China reiterate in a couple of opinion pieces in Nature [subscription] today. And it will require exceptional diplomatic skill, adds a veteran climate negotiator.

While accepting the United Nation’s principle of ‘common but differentiated’ responsibility, India cannot yet agree to mandatory domestic emissions limits, says Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. At the most, India might offer “at an appropriate stage of the negotiations” the country’s National Action Plan on Climate Change as part of a global package of commitments.

In return for voluntary domestic action, India will expect from the developed world technical and financial aid for switching to low-carbon technologies and adapting to anticipated climate change, Pachauri explains. “India feels strongly that on the basis of historical responsibility and consideration of equity, developed countries should provide financial support for adaptation in developing countries,” he says.

Jiahua Pan of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies in Beijing follows a similar line of thought in outlining China’s position. The G8’s intention to halve global emissions by 2050, with 80% cuts by the developed and 20% by the developing world, translates into lasting inequity, he argues. A fair deal, says Pan, would require wealthier countries, which currently emit greenhouse gases at almost five times the per capita rate of developing nations and economies in transition, to cut their emissions by at least 40 % by 2020.

“The developing nations will have every reason to follow suit if the rich nations demonstrate leadership,” he says.

A successful deal at Copenhagen will furthermore depend on financial resources for adaptation measures in poorer countries, including technology transfer, he says. He points out that China already invests more heavily in low-carbon energy than most rich nations. But he cautions that the shift to carbon-free energy sources comes with competitive disadvantages. Fears that a premature shift will slow economic development are virulent throughout the developing world, he says.

“Developed countries are concerned with immediate negative economic effects, whereas the developing countries are worried about their future well-being if they sign up to a legally binding, but unrealistic, target.”

In a third piece, Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the Argentine diplomat who led the negotiations that produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, argues that success in Copenhagen will critically depend on the skills of the lead negotiator.

Estrada-Oyuela recounts the delicate international diplomacy, seasoned with episodes of near-failure and last-minute breakthroughs, which brought about the all-too modest Kyoto treaty. Inexperience on the part of the Danish minister of energy and climate, Connie Hedergaard, who will officially preside over the Copenhagen talks, could prove a stumbling block on the road to a more ambitious successor agreement, he warns.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 22, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Opinion, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The authors of the bestselling Freakonomics, which was largely an attempt to make sense and fun of economics for those who don’t think they care about such things, are now back with a title that sounds like a bigger and better version of the original: Superfreakonomics. Exploring the topics of global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance, economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner are again unabashedly aiming for mass appeal.

But on the topic of global cooling….(er, don’t they mean warming, or is that just the theme of the week?), critics are none too impressed with Levitt and Dubner’s analysis. Having tried their utmost to discredit global warming, the authors none-the-less propose a solution, which goes something like: basically, let’s forget about mitigation, pump a load of sulphur into the atmosphere and be done with it.

The trouble here, as Joe Romm and William Connolley have already detailed on their respective blogs, is that Levitt and Dubner clearly have virtually no understanding of atmospheric science. As such, they fail to account for some of the other planetary woes their proposed scheme - a sulphur-spewing 18-mile-long hose pipe - would engender. Ocean acidification? Ozone depletion? Alan Robock’s latest paper gives a more complete list.

"We could end this debate and be done with it," Levitt says, in Monday’s Guardian, "and move on to problems that are harder to solve."

Sorry guys, but it looks like we’ll still need to redefine our energy system and the global economy too.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 14, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Economics, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, Technology | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The United Nation’s upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen threatens to get caught in a trap between high expectations and the immense complexity of the task at hand, warns the author of an opinion piece in Nature today [subscription]. Since diplomats cannot possibly produce a useful treaty for the December meeting in the remaining twelve weeks, negotiations should focus on a small number of realistic goals, and leave the rest for later, says David Victor, an expert on international relations at the University of California in San Diego.

A rushed and over-ambitious agreement in Copenhagen, even if it had the superficial appearance of success, could in fact prove a “legal zombie” – neither delivering nor dying – and might be counterproductive for long-term climate protection efforts, argues Victor.

He suggests that negotiators in Copenhagen focus instead on few topics, such as reiterating and extending existing emission targets by developed countries and continuing the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, whose expiration would shatter the very credibility of international climate diplomacy. A ‘standby’ agreement, shallow though it might appear, could within two years be developed into a fair and efficient global climate strategy.

The post-Copenhagen process, says Victor, would best be led by the small number of rich nations that account for the bulk of global emissions. Given the endlessly cumbersome UN diplomacy that resulted in the meagre 1997 Kyoto Protocol and that weighs heavily on pre-Copenhagen negotiations, “smaller, more flexible approaches offer the only realistic expectations for making progress in 2010 and beyond,” he says.

Global warming, says Victor, is ultimately a problem of economic cooperation, and must be dealt with using the tools and negotiation strategies that have proved most successful in global trade agreements. In trade issues small forums and even unilateral action have indeed shown to be more efficient than global talks.

But is a last-minute ‘plan B’ for Copenhagen simply a polite paraphrase of the climate summit’s foreseeable failure – and an apology in advance?

No, says Victor. A well-managed disaster in Copenhagen is ultimately more likely to pave the way for effective climate protection than a stapled-together deal.

Quirin Schiermeier

Image: Getty

What do you think? Must climate diplomats change their strategy? Join the discussion here on Climate Feedback.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 15, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, Opinion, Quirin Schiermeier, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Commentary by Andrew Dessler

There is an emerging view among some experts that recoverable fossil-fuel reserves are far smaller than previously thought. If so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) highest emissions scenarios could be unrealistically high, thus limiting the worst-case climate change during the 21st century. This view of a constrained fossil-fuel supply points to a potential convergence of thinking about policies and actions needed to address the seemingly divergent problems of energy supply and climate change.

One of the standard techniques for estimating future oil production is the method pioneered by M. King Hubbert. Briefly, Hubbert’s theory involves fitting historical production data to a logistics curve; extrapolation of the curve allows estimation of future production. Hubbert successfully predicted domestic U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s, and his theory predicts that world oil production should be peaking about now, which production figures seems to be confirming. Application of Hubbert’s theory to world-oil production suggests that total future recoverable conventional oil is ~1.2 trillion barrels or 7 Zeta Joules (ZJ). Figure 1 shows oil consumption from emissions scenarios produced by the IPCC, along with this estimate based on Hubbert’s method. All IPCC scenarios assume integrated oil production greater than the Hubbert estimate of recoverable oil.

For coal, the canonical wisdom is that there are hundreds of years of availability. However, several recent analyses have cast doubt on this. A recent NRC report on U.S. coal availability concluded, “… there is probably sufficient coal to meet the nation’s needs for more than 100 years at current rates of consumption. However, it is not possible to confirm the often-quoted assertion that there is a sufficient supply of coal for the next 250 years.” Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech has applied a Hubbert-like analysis to coal production data and concluded that the availability of coal is overstimated. The Energy Watch Group, a German think tank, has performed a detailed country-by-country analysis of coal reserves. Integrating their estimate of future coal production, we get 11 ZJ for world coal production from 2008 to 2100 — about one-ninth of the coal reserves cited by the IPCC (Table 4.2 of the fourth assessment report). As is the case for oil, the IPCC’s scenarios’ projected coal consumption generally exceeds this estimate of available resources.

Continue reading "Energy vs Climate: A surprising confluence of goals" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 11, 2008
Categories: Andrew Dessler, Energy, Mitigation, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Is the global financial crisis good or bad for green issues? The ongoing controversy over the European Union’s ambitious climate and energy package suggests the latter might be the case. But political and economical analysts seem to be increasingly confident that the current crisis might give rise to environmentally healthier policies and investment decisions.

The EU heads of state are still determined to finalise the package before the end of the year, but they expect tough negotiations with a group of reluctant countries led by Poland.

An editorial in this week’s Nature lays out the options and prospects for EU climate policies in light of the financial crisis:

“Striking the required bargains may require more time than the remaining two months under French presidency. But a well-weighed set of rules is far and away preferable to a rushed political compromise that would substantially water down the EU’s ambitious climate plan. (…) Meanwhile, the current economic turbulence cannot be allowed to serve as a pretext for lessening climate protection efforts.”

Meanwhile, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said in a statement that the EU plan “could also be a boon for the economy, generating millions of new jobs at a time when the world is suffering from the financial crisis.”

Any agreement will come too late for the international climate talks next month in Poznan, Poland (of all places). But a strong European commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 % would be a much-needed signal to the UN climate meeting in Copenhagen 2009, where nations hope to conclude on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

Continue reading "From greed to green?" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on October 23, 2008
Categories: Business, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, GHG emissions, Opinion, Politics, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 24, 2008
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Policy, Climate Science, Communicating Climate Change, Features, In the News, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't grieve the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner climate bill, urges Joseph Romm in a Nature Reports Climate Change Commentary this week. Romm, voice of the Climate Progress blog, writes:

Although hailed as landmark legislation, the proposal, which died after it failed to muster close to the required 60 votes [in the US Senate], would not have put the nation on the path required to help avert catastrophic climate change.

The bill, like most climate plans now up for serious debate around the world, relied heavily on imposing a financial penalty for carbon emissions. But Europe's up-and-running emissions market has done little to curb the continent's appetite for carbon, and that should make legislators and negotiators queasy, argues Romm.

"The United States simply cannot wait another decade to find out whether domestic cap-and-trade legislation will drive carbon dioxide to a high enough price to curb emissions growth sharply," he says. Nor is new technology the answer:

Such is the urgent need to reverse emissions trends by deploying a multitude of low-carbon technologies that we must rely on technologies that either are already commercial or will very shortly be so. Fortunately, venture capitalists and public companies have begun to inject many billions of dollars into the development and short-term commercialization of most plausible low-carbon technologies. Governments should now focus their R&D spending on a longer-term effort aimed at a new generation of technologies for the emissions reduction effort after 2040, but the notion that we need a Manhattan Project or Apollo programme for technology development is mistaken. Instead, what is urgently needed is an effort of that scale focused on the deployment of technology.

Romm said more about this Thursday in a cross-posted entry at Climate Progress and Grist, in the process resurrecting a set-to with Roger Pielke, Jr, on their respective blogs in April and May.

Romm at that time argued for the importance of carbon costs - though only as one prong on the pitchfork he was wielding against a Nature Commentary by Pielke and co-authors.

Meanwhile, the most recent opinion Pielke's offered on our site is that the need for R&D isn't up for debate anymore - it's all about how to price carbon.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 23, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Opinion, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the development of Web 2.0, science communication has entered a new era.

Here at Nature, for example, we now have almost 20 blogs covering various topics in science, we own islands in Second Life where we host lectures, we produce our own podcasts and in the past year, we have launched a range of interactive sites such as Nature Reports.

While all of this enables us to reach our audience in new ways – and to communicate science in a more engaging and rapid manner – the scientific community remains divided on whether Web 2.0 is good for science communication.

That’s one of the topics under discussion in this month’s issue of Nature Geoscience (subscription) which features a pair of Commentaries, one by Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS and one by Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, giving their respective opinions on whether blogging is a worthwhile means of communicating science, and specifically climate change.

Needless to say, Schmidt, who is an active blogger over on RealClimate, argues that blogs are invaluable and that even if every scientist doesn’t need to have one, every scientific field does. Schmidt points out that scientists have the depth of knowledge and experience to discern true scientific advances in their field from research that provides showy headlines, but lacks substance. Blogging provides a way of communicating this knowledge to those, such as journalists, who want to place the latest papers and headlines in context. He writes:

Blogs provide a rapid, casual, interactive and occasionally authoritative way of commenting on current issues, new papers or old controversies.

Allen, on the other hand, warns of the dangers of communicating science in the rapid, casual and interactive way afforded by Web 2.0 tools such as blogs.

Detailing as an example the blog coverage (and subsequent reporting) of a 2005 Nature paper that he co-authored, Allen makes the case that blogs have the ability to criticise – and even discredit - scientific work without being subjected to the same peer-review process as the original research, thereby creating an uneven playing field. As a result, Allen argues that science communication must maintain both rigor and civility. He advises:

If a science journalist wants to follow a story, there just isn’t an alternative to reading those peer-reviewed papers, and painstakingly interviewing researchers for whom English is a third language. And if a member of the public wants to follow a story, then they are still best off getting it the oldfashioned way, via a science journalist whose reputation depends on getting such stories more-or-less right most of the time. If, as a scientist, you feel you have to communicate non-peer-reviewed opinions to a journalist or member of the public, then stick to communicating one-to-one and make it clear you are speaking off the scientific record. Better still, don’t, even if it might cost you a mention in the papers.

Continue reading "Web 2.0: friend or foe? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 03, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This Thursday, take-no-prisoners environmental writer George Monbiot of The Guardian steps up to the podium at Second Nature, Nature's archipelago in the virtual world of Second Life, to give a talk on climate change.

In his 2006 book Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning, Monbiot argued for 90% emissions cuts by 2030 to stop dangerous climate change. With the UK and other governments struggling toward a consensus that 80% cuts must be made by 2050, we'll see how he feels about the planet's current prospects.

Monbiot speaks at 17:00 GDT (12:00 EDT). Second Life avatars can attend here.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 19, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

A group of scientists from the estimable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change yesterday presented ministers of more than 180 nations in Bali with the overwhemling evidence on climate change. I caught up with IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri after the event to get his take on the state of play in Bali…and beyond.

Since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with former US vice-president Al Gore for their work on climate change, the IPCC has become something of a household name and Pachauri, or ‘Patchy’ as he is known to friends, has come as close to celebrity as is possible in science. With the recognition comes constant requests ...not least for interviews from pushy journalists, I imagine.

We meet in the lobby of the palatial Aston Bali Resort and Spa, where during our brief meeting, he is stopped and congratulated by vitually every passer by. He humbly reminds his admirers that the winning work was that of the many hundreds of scientists who make up the UN body on climate change.

I query if he ever tires of the praise, but he admits that he’s a sucker for it…and says it’s unlikely to last longer than a few weeks anyhow. If anything, he seems to take from it a renewed vigour for communicating the urgency of global warming, a task at which he is certainly adept.

The IPCC has been assessing the status of climate change for nearly 20 years and this November issued a synthesis report, the result of almost two years work that acts as a primer on the scientific understanding of climate change.

The synthesis is not merely a summary of the three latest reports released by the panel in the first half of 2007, which each give a detailed discourse on the science, impacts and options for dealing with climate change, respectively. In addition, the neat 23-page document clearly sets out the consequences of various courses of action. The IPCC presentation at the plenary session here in Bali brought that work formally into the UN negotiating process.

Notable at this round of UN talks on climate change, the 13th conference of its type, no-one is questioning the science. A few lonely looking sceptics can be seen outside handing out flyers and openly admitting ‘We’re the least popular people here”.

Pachauri believes that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has convinced people of the magnitude of the issue. “It brings home that climate change is an issue that affects the future of humanity and a dimension that people haven’t really thought about previously – if we don’t deal with this in time, it could become an issue of peace and national security”, he says.

Continue reading "Interview: Rajendra Pachauri in Bali " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 08, 2007
Categories: Recent contributors, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

This year marks not only the release of a clarion IPCC report and the convening of an enormous UN climate conference, but also the 50th anniversary of the Keeling curve -- the longest continuous recording of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, revealing a gradually rising carbon dioxide profile that helped trigger early concern about global warming. As part of this week's Earth Observation special (subscription required), Nature has a commentary by Euan Nisbet, atmospheric scientist at Royal Holloway, on the Keeling curve -- which "ranks very high indeed among the achievements of twentieth-century science", he says -- and similar studies in the field of Earth monitoring. Nisbet writes:

Monitoring is science's Cinderella, unloved and poorly paid. Sustaining a long-term, ground-based programme that demands high analytical standards remains challenging. Funding agencies are seduced either by 'pure' notions of basic science as hypothesis-testing, or by the satanic mills of commercial reward. Neither motive fosters 'dull' monitoring because meeting severe analytical demands is not seen as a worthwhile investment. At one stage, Keeling was ordered to guarantee two discoveries per year and today, modern research has become a planned journey through set 'milestones' to deliverable destinations.

What do you think -- how important is this 'Cinderella science' to ongoing climate research and policy, and how could we secure reliable long-term support?

Image credit: Global Warming Art

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 05, 2007
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Science, GHG emissions, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

How expensive is climate change, what's the cost of stopping it, and should we pay now or pay later? Scientific American gets a three-sided look at these questions in side-by-side interviews with Nicholas Stern, Bjorn Lomborg and Gary Yohe.

Stern and Yohe push raising the price of carbon emissions via caps and taxes, respectively, as insurance to ward off big future risks, with Lomborg taking the contrarian view that we shouldn't mitigate until renewable energy is cheaper -- and shrugging off the risks. (Lomborg thinks that other problems like HIV/AIDS and malaria need money more immediately, an argument Olive Heffernan took on in NRCC's editorial last month.) Interesting discussions of the values assigned to human lives in the present vs. future (Stern, Lomborg), and to lives threatened by asbestos vs. temperature rise, also ensue.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 29, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Olive Heffernan

Having been off the airwaves for a while, I’m back with some further musings on climate change surveys, which (unwittingly) seems to be becoming a bit of a pet topic of mine.

Today saw the launch of ‘Future Friendly’, a partnership between four British NGOs, the Energy SavingTrust, Global Cool, Waste Watch and Waterwise and multinational consumer goods giant Protocol and Gamble aimed at helping and inspiring people to live more sustainable lives.

While the initiative, launched this morning in London, sounds laudable, it smells strongly of corporate greenwash.

The idea is that, by using products displaying the Future Friendly logo, shoppers will save energy, water or reduce waste. In tandem with the launch of the ‘Future Friendly’ brand logo, which will appear on certified products as of next week, the partnership announced the results of a survey on citizen’s attitudes towards sustainability and a ‘Future Friendly’ award, given to individuals who are heroes in encouraging sustainability on a local level.

The products that have thus far received the green stamp of approval include Ariel, Lenor, Fairy Liquid, Fairy Active Bursts and Flash, all, interestingly, manufactured by Proctor and Gamble. The criteria on which their green credentials are based seem a little dubious; for instance, Ariel is “asking the nation” to turn the dial down to 30 degrees to save up to 40% of the energy used per load, while Flash All Purpose Cleaner “enables you to do your cleaning with cold water”. So, it seems their sustainability criteria all rely on things that consumers have to do themselves while using the products, rather than the products themselves having ‘greener’ ingredients or packaging or being manufactured in some more efficient way.

Then comes the survey on consumers’ attitudes to sustainable living . Conducted by think tank The Future Laboratory, the results are based on a multiple choice questionnaire issued to 1,000 people in 12 UK counties this autumn. The main finding is that ‘green is the new norm’ and that environmental issues are galvanizing 'a new breed of citizen’ in the UK committed to living a sustainable lifestyle. It’s great to have individuals feeling friendly about the environment and about its future, but as is the case with so many of these surveys, the questions tend to polarize opinion and naturally frame opinion within the context of predefined questions. In relation to climate change, for example, 41% of respondents said individual action was the only way forward in solving the problem. I’d like to know what the alternatives were, but strangely there wasn’t a question relating to climate in the questionnaire, so that one remains a mystery.

Having said all of that, I think we should commend anything that encourages the public to lead more sustainable lives as do the ‘Future friendly’ awards. Developed by the partnership, they grant £10,000 to each of four winners to help fund their efforts to encourage sustainable living. But we should also bear in mind that to live sustainable lives, we’d have to each reduce our emissions by around 90%, something that requires a lot more than using fairy liquid…

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 06, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hans von Storch and Dennis Bray

In 1996 and 2003 we surveyed the opinions on climate change held by climate scientists. The results of these surveys have been subject to many misuses and erroneous claims. Some have selected individual statements out of context (scroll down to number 5) to bolster their claims, while others have argued that the 2003 part of the survey would be strongly biased by skeptics misusing the online-sampling for multiple submissions.

With respect to the latter – the survey was conducted first in 1996 with a mail-out format, which nobody claimed could be biased and the results were published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The second survey from 2003 was conducted on the internet, a procedure that in principle could have been misused by multiple submissions by those skeptical or alarmist on climate change who shared the password. However, the 2003 results are internally consistent with the 1996 results. In 2003 scientists expressed increased satisfaction and agreement with the IPCC and increased confidence in the tools of the science. In comparison to 1996, no anomalies were found in the response to questions.

On the skeptical side, the survey has often been used to create the impression that most scientists were not in support of anthropogenic causes of ongoing climate change: Specifically, it was noted that “For example more climate scientists ‘strongly disagree’ than ‘strongly agree’ that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” This interpretation is certainly biased.

We had requested responses on a scale from 1-7 to the question “Climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” – with 1 representing “strong agreement” and 7 “strong disagreement”. Thus, scales 1-3 signal agreement, 4 an ambivalent position, and 5-7 disagreement. The frequency distribution for the two surveys in 1996 and 2003 are:

Thus, the statement, that more respondents strongly disagree than strongly agree is technically correct (10% vs. 9%), but highly misleading. If we pool the 1-3 positive responses to “agreement”, and 5-7 to disagreement, then the ratio in 1996 was 41:45 in favor of disagreement; in 2003, however, this ratio has become 56:30 in favor of agreement; all scales 1-3 have seen strong increases in frequency, while 5-6, with the notable exception of scale 7, have seen marked reductions.

Continue reading "Climate scientists' views on climate change: a survey" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 08, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Hans von Storch, In the News, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (2)

Olive Heffernan

I've been asked to chair a debate on climate change in Malta in November. The debate, taking place at the Pacem in Maribus XXXII conference on 5-8 November, is being hosted by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology and is aimed at engaging your marine professionals in climate issues.

So, the debate will be looking at some of the issues surrounding climate change of particular relevance to this community, such as the respective role of engineers and scientists in mitigating and adapating to climate change, the role of the shipping industry in contributing to and in mitigating climate change, and the role of individual action versus government leaders in effecting change.

I'd welcome any comments and suggestions and of course if you're interested in joining us or know of others who would be, check out the programme at the link above or register for the debate.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 13, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Olive Heffernan

HSBC announced the results of their international survey on public attitudes to climate change in London this morning.

The survey found a gulf between public opinion on climate change in developed and developing nations, with people in developing economies showing greater concern, commitment and optimism in solving global warming compared with respondents in developed countries. The results challenge the myth of committed developed world countries leading on climate change with reluctant developing nations trailing behind, said Jon Williams, Head of Group Sustainable Development at HSBC, speaking at the event.

Conducted in 9 countries (UK, France, Germany, USA, Mexico, Brazil, China, Hong Kong and India) during April 2007, the internet survey asked 1000 participants in each nation to rank their level of agreement on four statements on a 1-7 scale (with 1 representing strong disagreement and 7 representing strong agreement) as follows:

“Climate change and how we respond to it are among the biggest issues I worry about today”.

“The people and organisations who should be doing something about climate change are doing what is needed”.

“I am personally making a significant effort to help reduce climate change through how I live my life today”.

“I believe we can stop climate change”.

Europeans, it seems, are a bunch of ‘sceptical pessimists’, with the lowest scores overall. While we are reasonably concerned about climate change, we have little confidence, optimism or commitment in solving it. Only 6% of UK respondents agreed with the statement “I believe we can stop climate change” compared with 18% in the US and 45% in India.

UK respondents also showed a surprising lack of belief that they are making a significant effort to reduce their personal carbon footprint, in contrast to 44% of those interviewed in China, 47% in both Brazil and India and 23% in the US. And why would we? It seems, according to the survey, we’re not really that concerned about climate change, being far more freaked out by terrorism. On levels of concern, UK citizens (22%) and Germans (26%) scored lowest.

In contrast, Mexico, Brazil and India make up the ‘committed concerned’, with approx 60% worried about climate change. Almost half are certain they are making the necessary changes to avert a climate catastrophe. Some of the findings are somewhat less surprising – US citizens are ‘sceptical optimists’ – more confident and optimistic than their cynical European counterparts that we will solve the global warming problem. China and Hong Kong, the ‘committed confident’, show the greatest belief that the people and organisations responsible are already doing what they should be doing to tackle the problem.

Continue reading "Developing nations lead on concern for combating climate change, shows survey " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 12, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)