Climate Feedback

Mere exposure to green products can make people behave more altruistically, but purchasing those same products can have quite the opposite effect, suggests a new study in press at the journal Psychological Science.

Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto conducted three experiments to gauge how people’s interaction with green products affected their other social interactions. The first experiment involved 59 students, who were asked to rate green consumers against conventional consumers in terms of various positive attributes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the participants rated those who buy green products as being more cooperative, altruistic and ethical than those who purchase conventional products.

In a second experiment, each of 156 students was randomly assigned to shop at either a conventional or ‘green’ online store, in which they were either exposed to or offered to purchase items. The same students then participated in a game that involved sharing money with an unidentified person in a separate room. While those exposed to the green products shared more money than those exposed to the conventional products, participants who had actually bought green products shared less money.

Continue reading "The greedy side of green consumers " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 13, 2009
Categories: Olive Heffernan, Personal action, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

At the UN climate conference in Copenhagen this December, talk will turn to scientific, political and economic issues with a global reach and a long history — not easy to pick up from the daily news. We asked select experts on climate change what books we should be reading ahead of the big event.

Here's a peek at some well-informed desks, bookshelves and bedside tables. Read the full roundup here - and join in our pre-Copenhagen book club by commenting below.

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And Al Gore's new book delivers, says Joe Romm, the voice of Climate Progress at the Centre for American Progress. Gore's Our Choice collects the most effective climate change solutions that policymakers could put in place now.

Tony Juniper, the campaigner and onetime director of Friends of the Earth, picks out Mark Lynas's Six Degrees (also a favorite of the Royal Society). The book vividly paints the changes expected as the world warms - revealing the practical implications of compromises we could see at Copenhagen.

A lively new book by an ex-oilman and geologist tells some of the insider history behind the UN talks - an eyewitness account of shifting views on climate change within the oil industry. Lord Ron Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell, says Brian Lovell's Challenged by Carbon is an instant tonic for 'climate change fatigue'.

Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado science-policy expert, argues that climate negotiators are failing to learn from history. He recommends the 1998 book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which recites a litany of failed attempts at centralized planning.

Oliver Tickell's climate policy proposal Kyoto2 is just the thing a truly intelligent species would come up with, according to Mark Lynas, environmentalist and Six Degrees author. But it's nothing like what's on the table for December.

Can we 'solve the climate crisis'? In Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia asserts that "climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'" but rather is an idea whose shape can differ completely depending on one's political and cultural biases. New York Times reporter and Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin recommends the book and sketches out its implications for Copenhagen.

In turn, Mike Hulme points to a book that looks beyond the usual dichotomy of climate change 'believers' and 'sceptics' to find a more fundamental split in thinking. John Foster's The Sustainability Mirage explores some crucial social and psychological realities of climate change that you won't be hearing much about during the conference.

Another good read when you want to lift your head from the trenches, the new book Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand takes an overview of environmental issues in the twenty-first century. Former Nature editor (and sun-eater) Oliver Morton dubs it a lucid big picture put together with experience, wisdom and optimism.

Could you call yourself ready for Copenhagen without taking a look at the IPCC report? Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says their 2007 Synthesis Report - a sum-up of the masses of policy-relevant research reviewed by the three working groups - has perhaps been the panel's most effective report thus far in creating awareness across every section of society.

Here are the book reviews in full. What do you think - are these the right reads to get ready for the conference? What others should be on the list?

Anna Barnett

Image: © iStockphoto / Pertunisas

Posted by Anna Barnett on October 02, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Immersing yourself in the impacts of extreme climate change can give rise to a certain amount of gallows humor. Conversation among my dinner companions last night turned to whether this week's 4 Degrees and Beyond conference or March's Copenhagen Climate Congress provided "more apocalypse for your conference fee". The far more serious question, of course, is how much upheaval and human suffering would come with the substantial warming that delegates here are contemplating. Some interesting talks today looked at the facets of sea level rise and population displacement.

Stephan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research had an intriguing update on a 2007 Science paper in which he'd come up with a new method for projecting sea level rise. Rahmstorf throws out any attempt to use complex climate models on this controversial problem and instead starts from scratch, with observed relationships between temperature rises and sea level rises. Now, working with Martin Vermeer of the University of Technology in Helsinki, he's upgraded the extremely simple equation he used in 2007 to an only slightly less simple equation - one that takes account of the rate of warming and the amount of water that humans sequester in reservoirs. They use this to reconstruct a remarkably faithful record the last millennium's sea levels.

Turning it to IPCC temperature projections, the team finds that sea level rise by 2100 could range, depending on the emissions scenario, from 0.75 to 1.9 metres, and a 4-degree world would likely see 0.98 to 1.3 metres of rise this century. A caveat: the recent sea-rise data that inspired and calibrated this equation and the past data that it explains don't include the full effects of melting ice sheets that could lie ahead. That means 0.75 to 1.9 metres may be a conservative estimate.

But if we're concerned with how creeping seas affect coastal populations, the amount of rise is not the only matter to settle. This was a key argument made by Francois Gemennes of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. Gemennes' talk was based on a study of environmentally induced migration that I covered earlier this year. When it comes to climate refugees, he says, the numbers that are often tossed around - such as 200 million new migrants by 2050 - are based on the assumption that greater climate impacts will push more people around. What they aren't based on is empirical data about how populations respond to environmental change. But according to the recent EACH-FOR project - the first global-scale survey of environmental migrants - the size of impacts isn't the crucial variable at all: migration largely depends on policies making it possible for people to react to impacts by migrating. In particular, Gemennes argues, the poorest and most vulnerable will not be able to migrate unless they are given resources and exit routes - if we don't encourage migration as an adaptation strategy, they'll be trapped in the frying pan (or flooding delta).

The next event of the conference is a panel discussion on "4 degrees of climate change: alarmist or realist?", which I'll be tracking over on Twitter. Follow @annabarnett.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 29, 2009
Categories: 4 Degrees and Beyond, Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Ocean science, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unless major breakthroughs in policy, industry and individual behavior turn around our emissions trajectory pronto, this century could well see average global temperatures 4 degrees Celsius or more above their pre-industrial baseline. That's the starting point for the 4 Degrees and Beyond conference in Oxford this week. Here, 130 scientists and policy experts are taking a detailed look at a world warmed by twice the amount that's usually considered dangerous.

Putting weight behind the 4-degree premise was new modelling research presented this morning by Richard Betts of the UK Hadley Centre (press release, Guardian). Betts's team used a complex, coupled ocean-atmosphere model to simulate the IPCC's extreme-emissions A1FI scenario (the FI stands for fossil fuel intensive) - an emissions trajectory that's previously been run only on simpler models. It's time to take this scenario seriously, argues Betts, given that our emissions are running at the upper end of what the IPCC projected a decade ago.

They also tried out weakening climate sinks on land and sea - feedbacks that are increasingly apparent in recent research, Betts says. Depending on the strength of the feedbacks, 4 degrees of average warming could be reached well before 2100 - as early as 2060 in a worst case scenario, and in the 2070s according to the team's best guess. Regional warming would be far greater, they found - 7 degrees in many areas, up to 10 in western and southern Africa, and 10 or more in the Arctic.

Sessions afterwards started sketching out consequences in detail. Philip Thornton of the University of Edinburgh looked at agriculture in Africa, where projected impacts are predictably devastating, with yields falling over 50% for certain crops and crop failure years growing more frequent in many regions. Adaptations for this amount of change are a big question mark. Intensive agriculture in highlands - among the few spots that will benefit - may be one possibility for preserving the food supply.

Meanwhile in Finland - where you might expect balmier weather to be a boon - intense climate change may also prove a curse to farmers, reports Reimund Rotter of MTT Agrifood Research Finland. The picture there is complicated - the possible responses depend on many variables. A new type of barley that might compensate for losses to rising temperature or drought would only work in certain soil types, for example. But it's clear that the North as well as the South will have its problems with the radically different 4-degree world.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 28, 2009
Categories: 4 Degrees and Beyond, Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 10, 2009
Categories: In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Geoff Brumfiel on The Great Beyond

I got to hear Al Gore speak today at the close of the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, and I was amazed to be treated to a pop neuroscience lecture.

Rather than climate, Gore opened by talking about human psychology and physiology. Climate change, he said, is "ultimately a problem of consciousness". He went on: "What is being tested is the proposition of whether or not the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable construct on this planet".

That's pretty deep, but Gore got deeper. Evolution, he said, had trained us to to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with "a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract", we don't do so well. Citing functional magnetic resonance imaging, he said that the connecting line between amygdalae, which he described as the urgency centre of the brain, with the neocortex is a one way street: emotional emergencies can spark reasoning, but not the other way around.

Gore went on to speak about lots of other stuff: how better management of soil would be critical to solving the climate crisis. How geothermal energy had the potential for enormous development, and how existing technologies, such as coal-fired power plants had to become more efficient.

But in the end, he brought it back to human consciousness. Until the majority of citizens perceive climate change as a true crisis, he said, politicians will be sluggish to act. That's the bad news. The good news, though, is that when we do decide to act, we will be able to do so more rapidly than anyone currently thinks is possible. "Just remember, when we become aware of what we have to do, and when we have the tools available to us to get the job done, it can change", he said. "We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of joy."

I'm not sure what it says about human consciousness, but it certainly is an interesting insight into Mr. Gore's psychology. I'm curious to hear what neuroscientists make of his analysis.

If you want to hear the whole speech, have a listen here (audio quality isn't brilliant, sorry about that).

Geoff Brumfiel is a senior reporter for Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 07, 2009
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It’s Wednesday in Lindau and I’ve spent a chunk of the past 24 hours recording sections of the film about climate change that we’re making here.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Mario Molina and Sherry Rowland about their work on ozone and their views on science informing policy. We were joined by three young, enthusiastic scientists who are working on various aspects of climate research – solar technology, biofuels and ocean health – and are here at Lindau to interact with the laureates.

Molina and Rowland have a lot to say on the issues of ozone and policy, of course. When they called for a worldwide ban on CFCs, following their discovery that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, they were, in many respects, pioneers. But though their efforts ultimately led to the phasing out of CFCs, their results – and outspoken views – were initially greeted with caution from the scientific community. I asked them what the young scientists working on climate change can learn from their experience.

Rowland was adamant that young scientists should not be afraid to speak up on the implications of their research. I queried them on how far researchers should go in speaking up. Would they, for example, now call for a worldwide ban on the use of coal, given that coal is such a significant contributor to the problem of climate change? They both responded that a worldwide ban would be appropriate, if carbon capture and storage (CCS) was available. Molina added that we should be cautious of building new power plants that will tie us into using coal for the next 30-50 years, unless we have developed CCS technology.

I met the young researchers – Brandy and Brian from the US, and Faroha from Pakistan – again this morning at 730am to catch up on their experiences at Lindau so far. They all got a lot out the session with Rowland and Molina, who were both thoroughly engaging. Of course, I can tell you all of this on the blog, but it will be much more convincing to see the film once it is on nature.com. Out of an hour of filming, I’m guessing that five minutes, at most, of yesterday’s session will make it into the final cut.

After hearing talks on sustainability and energy from Harry Kroto and Walter Kohn, this afternoon, I recorded some of the narrative links for the film. The face-to-camera pieces are by far the trickiest!

The next piece will be recorded Friday as we make our way by boat to Mainau island – home of Countess Bettina Bernadotte – where a panel on climate change is being convened. I’ll be back with an update from that on Friday.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 01, 2009
Categories: Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 2009, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Heffernan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Lindau09: Scientists in society" »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Report disperses migration myth" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 11, 2009
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Today, at the AGU Joint Assembly, I looked into two kinds of risk: of drought leading to civil violence and of the odds that extreme weather events may cause other types of disruption.

It’s always encouraging to see undergraduates engaged in scientific research, the more so when it is interdisciplinary. That’s what surprised me about a poster with the intriguing title, “Climate Change and Civil Violence,” which turned out to be a class project at Princeton University, stretching over three semesters, with three successive classes of students involved in the research.

The students, led by their professor, Gregory van der Vink, focused on a swath of West Africa - 21 countries from Mauritania to the Central African Republic, including most of the semi-arid Sahel region, as well as coastal forests. They looked at the likelihood that climate change, especially increasingly severe drought, will lead to civil violence in each of the countries studied. It is obviously difficult to attribute specific environmental causes to social phenomena, but the students—majoring in politics, various sciences, pre-engineering, and other fields—gave it a good try.

The choice of drought as the key climatic factor was based on the expectation that the Sahel will further dry, shortening the growing season by at least 20% over the next 40 years. Nomadic herdsmen will, for example, have to move further south or adopt a more sedentary life, or both.

Another key factor is the resiliency of the population, its ability to cope with the coming climatic changes. This factor varies considerably from country to country, the researchers found, and is related to population size, political system, natural resources, and other variables. The relative significance of each of these is difficult to assess, of course.

Bottom line: after exhaustive analysis, the students concluded that the five countries in the study that are most vulnerable to drought-induced civil violence are Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and Gambia. Of these, three—Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali—have already experienced conflicts that included an environmental factor, they say. Of the five, only Gambia has not experienced any violent conflict during the past 10 years.

The study, as the students themselves note, was a preliminary effort to correlate environmental and socio-economic risk factors that could lead to civil violence. They are not predicting specific events in particular countries, but there seems little doubt that this topic is one that will assume increasing importance in coming years to policy makers and civilian populations alike, and not just in Africa.

Continue reading "AGU 2009 Joint Assembly: Climate risk research " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 27, 2009
Categories: AGU 2009 Joint Assembly, Extreme Events, Harvey Leifert, Research, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Uncertainty in regional climate projections isn’t going away, and that’s an inconvenient truth the development community will have to face, says Christoph Müller of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany.

Müller recently authored a report on expected climate change impacts in sub-Saharan Africa, at the behest of the German Development Institute (GDI), a Bonn-based think tank. A top recommendation of the final report, published 24 April and presented at the IHDP conference last month, is that adaptation strategies should not be motivated by specific impact projections, but instead should work on reducing vulnerability to environmental change in general.

An expert on climate impacts on agriculture and land-use, Müller found while scoping the report for GDI that there was a mistaken assumption by development experts that many of the current uncertainties in predicting climate change will soon clear up. “In the adaptation community, they often have the feeling that if we wait for another five years, we will know exactly what the weather will be,” he says.

So he turned the focus of the report around from cataloging impacts to dealing with uncertainty. “This report basically is trying to raise awareness that you will never get very accurate projections of what you will have to adapt to. Don’t wait for that. You have to adapt to uncertainty,” says Müller.

I talked to Müller to find out more about what adaptation planners in sub-Saharan Africa are up against and how they might tackle changes they can't forsee. What climate models agree on is that the continent will warm a bit more than the global average - roughly 2.0 to 4.5 degrees centigrade, according to three emissions scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“But that’s where the certainty stops,” he says. Precipitation projections, for example, are important for many impacts studies - of freshwater availability, agricultural production, and development of water-hungry industries - but global climate models differ wildly on precipitation in African locales. “There’s maybe only a few locations in sub-Saharan Africa where you don’t have a scenario that says it’s going to get significantly wetter and another scenario that says it’s going to get significantly drier,” Müller points out.

A particular problem for sub-Saharan Africa is that observational data from meteorological stations is sparse, and many stations formerly sending out data have stopped ('historical' stations on map, below) - making it hard to produce local projections. This is usually achieved through a technique called ‘downscaling’, which involves using weather statistics and interpolating data to add details between the distant grid points of a global climate model. But without recent observations to constrain the calculations, it becomes near impossible to fill in this extra information with any degree of accuracy.

Continue reading "Development community must accept uncertainty" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 27, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Society, Uncertainty | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 21, 2009
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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.

Continue reading "Q&A: Anthony Costello " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 19, 2009
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Some of my fellow Open Meeting attendees were musing at dinner about how many Bonn Declarations exist. The top ten Google results point to six different texts named after the eminent city. The organizers of this conference originally proposed to add yet another Bonn Declaration to the list, one laying out the way forward for research on human dimensions of global change. But it turned out not to be easy to articulate a common vision that the motley group gathered here - who work on everything from emissions scenarios to development policy to the sociology of knowledge - could accept.

Continue reading "IHDP: the Bonn Declaration that wasn't" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 01, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A group of ambassadors from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) stopped by the IHDP conference yesterday and held a panel discussion on dealing with the leading edge of dangerous climate change. For AOSIS countries that stand to be swallowed by rising seas or devastated by droughts and storms, their continued existence is on the line in this year's climate negotiations. At the UN meeting here in Bonn in March, the group issued a statement saying, "The survival of the small island states should be the benchmark for the success of the Copenhagen agreement." I nabbed AOSIS chair Dessima Williams of Grenada for a quick interview on the island states' agenda.

What kind of agreement is needed for small island states to survive?

Continue reading "IHDP: No time for pessimism, says small islands leader" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I caught a speedy summary of the climate vulnerability of Nigerian cities that included a glimpse into public perceptions there. Felix Olorunfemi of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research surveyed 300 people door-to-door in the city of Ibadan and found that awareness of climate change was low, that it was seen as a complex and abstract problem, and that knowledge of such environmental problems wasn't correlated with action taken to address them.

What was striking about this 'not our problem' attitude was that it also cropped up in another case study during the same session. Research presented by Johanna Wolf from the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia revealed it among people whose lives may in fact be directly at risk from global warming: elderly English pensioners.

Continue reading "IHDP: From London to Ibadan, 'it's not our problem'" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 29, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Popping up at the IHDP conference are signs of a certain gap in perception of climate change risks - one that economist Frank Ackerman pointed to in a letter to NRCC recently. "Climate change can't be both a fundamental threat to the conditions that support human life, according to scientists, and a mid-sized policy puzzle that can be solved by an adjustment in tax rates, according to economists," Ackerman wrote.

Much of the social and environmental research on offer here falls into the "fundamental threat" camp. But the blasé attitudes of some mainstream economists came up after last night's roundtable on ways forward for social science in the 21st century - and made a bold showing in a plenary talk today.

Continue reading "IHDP: Blasé economics" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 28, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in the hall that once housed the West German Parliament, a glass-covered fish tank of a building on the Rhine, which nowadays has become the Bonn World Conference Centre. For the next four days, the politicians' microphone-studded desks will be lined by experts in the field of 'human dimensions of global change' - given the impressively broad nickname 'human dimensions' among this crowd. About 1,200 participants are here to give 800 talks that make up the Open Meeting of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), a research arm of the UN.

One of today's opening keynotes was from Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. After a daunting rundown of climate change threats, Schellnhuber - a physicist in a sea of human-dimensioners - urged social science to take the front seat on the problem. "Speaking as a natural scientist," he said, "I think 90% of research [on global change] will have to be done by the social scientists."

Physicists, he told me at the coffee break, can describe climate threats increasingly vividly and can tell decision-makers that technological solutions are out there. But it's up to social science, he says, to figure out how we bring about massive economic and social transformation on a tight deadline.

Case in point: feeding solar power from the Sahara where it's plentiful to Europe where it's highly in demand, one of Schellnhuber's favorite ideas. "All the technical problems have been solved," he says, "but it cannot be done." We don't have the legal framework, the transboundary agreements, the international will for this mode of energy delivery.

This is where policy experts, economists, and even anthropologists come in. But, he says, "I don't think the social science community has grasped the scope of the challenge." Operating on the basic principle that all groups are different, 95% of social science papers are local case studies, not global-scale work, he says. And indeed, there are an awful lot of case studies among this week's 800 talks. It remains to be seen whether the picture emerging from the conference will be piecemeal or planet-wide.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 27, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Winners were announced Friday Thursday in a contest organized by the World Bank for short-short films - two to five minutes long - documenting the social dimensions of climate change. The 'Vulnerability Exposed' contest put out an open call last autumn for films to be posted on YouTube, with a special plea for documentation of developing-world impacts.

And the winner for vulnerability exposure is... Bangladesh! The judges' top pick and the runner-up focus on unpredictable floods in the country and its salinization by the rising sea - some of the same issues Mason Inman wrote about in NRCC recently.

The first-prize film, "Flood Children of Holdibari" by Mary Matheson, looks at children working out an adaptation plan for floods on their river-island home.

Second prize went to Rosa Rogers for "Climate Change in Bangladesh: Who Will Pay?", a film on how salinization and other effects are changing agricultural patterns in the southern delta.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 26, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change, Regional climate, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although the Inuit people of the North American Arctic are generally thought to be vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the wake of record sea ice loss, it can be difficult to quantify all of the risks to their way of life. In a new paper in Climatic Change, a group of researchers led by Gita Laidler of Carleton University assessed the ability of the residents of Igloolik, a coastal community north of the Arctic Circle, to adapt to changing conditions. The team reports that although the hunters have so far adapted to thinning ice and changing seasons, societal changes among the younger generations may leave the community increasingly at risk.

Continue reading "Climate and society in the Arctic" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on January 23, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Alicia Newton, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK will get an intriguing new climate research centre next week, with the launch of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds. In a Q&A for Nature Reports Climate Change, I've interviewed Andrew Gouldson, who will co-direct the centre with Judith Rees under chairman Lord Nicholas Stern - and who envisions a strong focus on regional impacts of climate change.

CCCEP's experts will be closely in touch with policymakers and other local stakeholders, Gouldson says, in a way that "builds both their capacity and ours — ours to do good research, and theirs to use that research to take better decisions on climate change." One of the stakeholders, and a funder of one of the five research streams at the new centre, is the insurance company Munich Re. As I wrote last month, another new project that aims for the cutting edge of policy-relevant research is a hurricane model projection that Greg Holland is now wrapping up at NCAR - also partly insurance industry-funded. Could these academic-public-private three-ways be the way forward? Let us know in the comments.

I thought the most interesting part of the interview was what Gouldson had to say on the new UK Climate Change Act, which imposes a legally binding requirement to cut emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Here's an extract:

AG: At the national level, I think Britain's been very proactive indeed. The government has been quite brave signing up to this medium- to long-term target which is really quite ambitious. But I don't think there's a public understanding, or possibly even a public acceptance, of what a low-carbon economy might look like — one which is 60, 70, 80 per cent decarbonized.

AB: Does that make it less likely that the policy will actually come through with results?

AG: In the next 10 to 15 years, not necessarily, because there are lots of mitigation options that are relatively affordable and technologically viable. I think the question is what happens in the phase after that. Is there a political appetite to do some really quite painful things which would involve some powerful people or parties losing out? I think there's a need now, in the next few years, to build some sort of broad consensus on the need to shift towards a low-carbon economy.

Read the full interview here.

Anna Barnett

Image: Andrew Gouldson, photographed by Stevie Kilgour at the University of Leeds.

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 23, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Economics, Politics, Regional climate, Research, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As a vast, flat delta, Bangladesh is perhaps the country most clearly associated with the threat of rising seas – without protective barriers along the coast, even a moderate increase in sea level could cause flooding deep inland. Estimates suggest that even a one-metre rise could swallow 15 to 20 per cent of the land area, where some 20 million people reside.

But while sea level rise may pose the greatest challenge for Bangladesh, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is likely to be felt at ‘ground zero for climate change’ in numerous different ways – among them dwindling water supplies, saltwater damage to crops, loss of biodiversity and fiercer storms tearing through the region.

Over on Nature Reports Climate Change, a feature by Mason Inman looks at the changes that are already being witnessed on the ground in Bangladesh and how the region is preparing for the changes yet to come. Mason travelled to Bangladesh in November to report this feature with support from a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism.

In areas such as Bhola, where people have lost land to the ocean, many are looking to the Netherlands for inspiration – and calling for strengthening of existing embankments as well the construction of new, taller and stronger sea walls.

Continue reading "Bangladesh’s battle with climate change " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 15, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent food crisis, which saw crop prices sky rocket in 2007/08, demonstrated the fragile nature of the world’s food system. Coping with the short-term challenges of food price volatility is daunting, but the longer-term challenge of avoiding a perpetual food crisis due to global warming could be far more serious.

Temperatures in crop growing seasons across the world will exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures on record by the end of the century, new research suggests.

View image

Writing in the latest issue of Science, David Battisti at the University of Washington and Rosamond Naylor at Stanford University warn that unprecedented seasonal average temperatures will threaten global food security unless adaptations such as heat and draught tolerant crops, the creation of jobs outside of agriculture for those regions where farming will no longer be viable and appropriate irrigation systems are introduced.

In a new study, they use data from 23 global climate models produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 scientific analysis to show that there is a 90% chance that the tropics, sub-tropics and temperate regions will experience unprecedented seasonal average temperatures by the end of the 21st century.

Their research looks at historical case studies of three regions – France, the Ukraine, and the Sahel in Africa – that have experienced extreme heat waves, to illustrate the size of the impact on food production. For example, France felt some of the greatest impacts of the 2003 heat wave in Western Europe, which saw temperatures rise to 32 -33°C in June to August - nearly 4°C higher than the country’s average historical temperature for those months. Over this period, production of maize fell by 30%, fruit harvests declined by 25% and wheat harvests dropped by 21%.

Continue reading "Adaptation needed to avoid world food crisis" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 08, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Features, Journal Club, Natasha Gilbert, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

With a new year comes a new version of the Bible. Well not exactly new, but fairly recent. This past summer, Harper Bibles published an eco-friendly version of the Bible known as The Green Bible . In addition to being printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink, The Green Bible highlights all the passages that encourage people to care for the Earth in, of course, green ink. While the verses themselves are not new (the text comes from the New Standard Revised Bible), the focus on the Earth is. And this version also includes an introduction from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as well as essays by prominent theologians and information on how to get involved.

Continue reading "The Greening of Christianity" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on January 08, 2009
Categories: Alicia Newton, Communicating Climate Change, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What do Boston, London, New York, Frankfurt, San Francisco, and Paris have in common? They have all been destroyed by asteroid impacts—in the movies. The death toll was enormous in every case. Understandably, people are worried that such a catastrophe might actually occur within their lifetime.

Actually, says climate scientist Mark B. Boslough, “if you’re going to stay up late at night worrying about something, worry about climate.” Boslough, a researcher at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US, says, “you are much more likely to die from climate change than from an asteroid impact by a factor of something like a thousand.” He presented his findings at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.

Boslough cannot put a precise number on that ratio, because climate science is still replete with gaps in the relevant data. He is much more confident about the asteroid threat, though. He says that there is no evidence that anyone has died from an asteroid or meteorite impact—ever. He does not make a distinction between asteroids and meteors, saying the latter are basically fragments of the former and there is no size boundary to distinguish one from the other.

Looking at worst case scenarios for asteroid impacts and climate change over the next 100 years, Boslough estimates that the largest asteroid to impact Earth would be around 50 metres in diameter. It would explode in the atmosphere and not make an impact crater, he says, and it would kill no one. Asteroids larger than 50 metres across and likely to cross Earth’s orbit are rare, and the larger they are, the rarer they are. They are also well tracked. Smaller ones are more numerous, but even less likely to cause death and destruction on Earth.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: Asteroid impacts and climate change: which is the greater threat?" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 19, 2008
Categories: Recent contributors, AGU, Communicating Climate Change, Earth science, Harvey Leifert, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Impacts research – the next frontier" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 15, 2008
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent Summer Olympics in Beijing has drawn international attention to China’s efforts to improve air quality and reduce pollution, both during the Olympics and in the long term. According to Chinese officials, they have made tremendous strides in raising air quality levels since 1998, reporting ever increasing numbers of 'Blue Sky Days’.

However, a new study by Steven Q. Andrews of Princeton University in Environmental Research Letters suggests this may have more to do with reporting than actual increases in air quality. Andrews reanalyzed air quality data and found that much of the improvement reported for Beijing can be attributed to changes in the locations of monitoring stations and revisions to the air quality standards, rather than changes in the level of pollutants. Using the 1996 air quality standards and the original monitoring stations, Andrews finds 55 fewer ‘Blue Sky Days’ in 2007 than the official reports.

Continue reading "Clouding the Blue Skies" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on October 02, 2008
Categories: Alicia Newton, GHG emissions, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had the good fortune this week to take part in some very interesting – and inspiring – initiatives aimed at communicating climate change by merging science with the arts.

The first of these was Tipping Point’s Oxford Conference, which brought together an eclectic mix of over 100 social and natural scientists, authors, journalists and a wide variety of artists from ceramicists to ‘circus theatre makers’.

As someone who spends most waking hours thinking about climate change in a rational way, I found it refreshing – and fun - to come at it from a completely different angle. We had ‘show and tell’ workshops where we discussed objects relating to climate change that hold special personal significance, and ‘coaching’ sessions to think about how our own actions might make a difference. Participants became innovative in the use of improv objects – from eggs to suitcases – in putting together 2-minute productions on climate change.

The Oxford workshop is just one event hosted by TippingPoint, which aims to ‘harness the power of the imagination to help stabilise the climate’ and was originally founded by Diana Liverman, director of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute with artist David Buckland and its current executive director Peter Gringold.

Buckland’s other brainchild is Cape Farewell, which brings together a similar – if somewhat smaller (and rather illustrious) – mix of people on an annual voyage to the Arctic. This year’s expedition will see over 40 participants – including musicians Laurie Anderson, KT Tunstall and Martha Wainwright – head to Disko Bay on the east coast of Greenland. The team sets sail on 25 September, but they had a launch event in London’s Science Museum on Tuesday evening. I caught up with Buckland and oceanographer Simon Boxall from the UK National Oceanography Centre, Southampton beforehand to get the low down on the biggest – and most ambitious - Cape Farewell trip yet. The full story is over on Nature News.

Olive Heffernan

Image: Ice Texts, 2004-2005, David Buckland

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 18, 2008
Categories: Olive Heffernan, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 11, 2008
Categories: Daniel Cressey, Features, In the News, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 08, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 03, 2008
Categories: Atmospheric Science, Extreme Events, Features, In the News, Journal Club, Ocean science, Olive Heffernan, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 15, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Continue reading "Climate research funding slashed " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 13, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Jeff Tollefson, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 10, 2008
Categories: Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 28, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Slap on the wrist for 'Swindle'" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on July 22, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Communicating Climate Change, In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 07, 2008
Categories: Features, G8 Summit 2008, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Development economist Jeffrey Sachs, famous for the economic turnarounds he's helped engineer as an advisor to Latin American and Eastern European governments, is also known for his optimism that the living standards of the world's poorest can be raised much higher without sacrificing either the wealth of the industrialized world or crucial natural resources. But among analysts of global change, optimism is relative. "I believe that there is most likely a path of sustainable development, but we can't quite be sure," Sachs told a sold-out lecture hall at the London Zoo last night. "It's a question mark."

Sachs spoke on big themes from his new book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, notably the need for expansion beyond market-based thinking to face problems not dreamt of in Adam Smith's philosophy. Before and after this rousing overview (if you'd bet ahead of time that Sachs would quote John F. Kennedy at length, you'd have won), I had the chance to get some nittier, grittier details on how Sachs wants to deal with climate change.

More and better government investment in foreign aid and green tech is the number-one key for Sachs - only the US presidential turnover seemed to run a close second, and cap-and-trading was off in the distance. So he didn't hesitate to offer a laundry list of projects that he thinks need much more political commitment - among them carbon capture and storage, passively heated and cooled green buildings, and super duper climate computers.

Technological solutions often raise ownership problems, though. If, for example, the agrobiotech industry produces new 'climate-proof' crop varieties that survive floods and droughts - an innovation Sachs welcomed at a recent climate modelling summit - can the developing world afford to buy the seeds?

"One of the things we’ve learned from the battle over access to anti-retroviral medicines," Sachs said - and this was a battle he himself fought - "is that it’s possible to create hybrid systems where you have intellectual property rights applied mainly in the high-income markets and you have access at the cost of production, or on a no-profit basis, in the poor countries."

In the case of African food shortages, he added, simple, readily available remedies like chemical fertilizers and high-yield non-GMO crops had been "sitting on the shelf" until the global food price crisis grabbed headlines. We shouldn't have to wait for disasters before we take the equivalent action on climate change, he said.

What about politics? Since Sachs's talk didn't go much beyond sighing relief at Bush's departure, I asked him afterward about his hopes for the upcoming G8 conference in July. More dubious optimism here: "There are a lot of things I'd hope for. That doesn't mean I'm expecting much to happen."

Honoring commitments to monetary aid and technology transfer is the first step, he told me. To get a global climate agreement out of the UN process, he also thinks we need to start by welcoming the economic growth of rapidly developing nations like China and India. "That's the icebreaker on this first date," he said. From that viewpoint, country-specific emissions targets can be set that correspond to growth along the greenest possible paths.

By 2050, he explained, that might mean that the North cuts its greenhouse emissions by 80% while India's emissions are allowed to double - a contraction-and-convergence plan. Because China and India have even more to fear from climate change than does the wealthier world, he said, it's an ultimatum they'll have to accept: "You're going to develop. But you're going to do it with the best technology."

Anna Barnett

Photo: Sachs working in the Millennium Village of Mwandama, Malawi.

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 18, 2008
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 04, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Energy, In the News, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 16, 2008
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)