Climate Feedback

If there was an eye in the sky keeping watch on our greenhouse gas emissions, what carbon crimes would it reveal?

The ability to measure greenhouse gases from space, soon to become a reality, could answer this question.

Currently, it’s virtually impossible to identify the exact source – and destination - of greenhouse gases, a prominent theme at this year’s European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna.

But, according to scientists speaking today at the conference, this is all set to change within the coming year when two major satellites designed to monitor greenhouse gases will be launched into space.

Due to leave Earth on December 15, the first of these is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a US$300 million-or-so innovation of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The Japanese version, known as the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, has an anticipated launch date in January or February 2009.

For a detailed low-down on the satellites and how they will work, see Amanda Haag’s news feature in Nature (subscription) last December. Since then, the scientists have mostly been testing and calibrating the instruments to make sure they work once they’re orbiting the Earth.

Within a year or two, if not sooner, they will enable scientists to identify major sources and sinks or carbon, says Charles Miller, one of the Principal Co-ordinators of the OCO mission. The greenhouse gas measurements taken by the instrument, which will orbit the planet 14.5 times per day, will be three times more precise than any trace gas measurements ever taken from space.

All-in-all, the missions represent an unprecedented effort to collect global climate data from space. While this is fascinating from a scientific perspective, it should also have some interesting political implications by enabling the easy identification of climate culprits.

“If one were to imagine a way to monitor or verify [emissions], then this would be the way to go”, says Miller. For instance, it should quash (or raise, depending on who you’re talking to) fears that nations claiming credits for avoiding deforestation under the Kyoto Protocol will be able to divert the problem elsewhere.

Miller says they often joke that the instrument could detect the greenhouse gas emissions of serious carbon heaveyweights from space. But while the new satellites won’t realistically help reporting on individual carbon crimes, it could act as a ‘big brother’ to keep countries in line with their Kyoto commitments. Personally, I’m curious to know the OCO’s own carbon footprint!

That’s all from me from this year’s European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna. Over and out….

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 18, 2008
Categories: Atmospheric Science, Conferences and Meetings, EGU 2008, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The North Atlantic Ocean may still be an active storehouse for atmospheric carbon dioxide, said scientists at the European Geosciences Union here in Vienna yesterday.

Following evidence published last year showing that both the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic Ocean have weakened as carbon sinks in the past two decades, the new results suggest that the trend has recently reversed in the North Atlantic.

Scientists have feared that the weakening trend could be a long-term impact of global warming and that it could be typical of the ocean as a whole, which absorbs an estimated 25 per cent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions yearly. If the ocean switches from a storehouse to a source of the greenhouse gas, this would jeopardise efforts to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.

Speaking at a press conference at the EGU assembly yesterday, Ute Schuster from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK and Christoph Heinze at the University of Bergen, Norway, presented the results of a yearly analysis of carbon dioxide fluxes across the North Atlantic Ocean.

Previously, Schuster and colleagues showed that carbon uptake by the North Atlantic had halved between the mid-1990s and the early 21st century. But further analysis of the data on a year-by-year basis has shown that the uptake of carbon dioxide in the region has been increasing since 2002 and showed an even greater increase, relative to the early 2000s, in 2005.

The researchers caution that the results are preliminary and are not yet published. The coverage was poor in 2006 and they have not yet finished the analyses for 2007, but they say that the results so far indicate that the trend in weakening of the North Atlantic carbon sink is not linear.

The reasons for this variation are unclear. “I personally think we can’t say with confidence that the trend [in weakening sinks] is attributable to [anthropogenic] climate change”, says Schuster. Surface circulation in the North Atlantic has changed in recent years, she says, but these changes could be due to natural climate variability. Specifically, the North Atlantic Oscillation, a large-scale atmospheric pattern that has important impacts on European climate, could be influencing the rate of carbon dioxide uptake.

Continue reading "EGU: North Atlantic Ocean may regain status as carbon sink" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 17, 2008
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, EGU 2008, Ocean science, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday evening , we held a 'Meet the Editors' event at the Nature stand here at the European Geosciences Union conference, and invited scientists to join editors from Nature Geoscience and Nature Reports Climate Change for beer and pretzels.

Either the word on the street that geoscientists have a great fondness for beer is not simply an urban legend, or the research community is very interested in how we're extending our reach further into the earth sciences. I suspect it's a combination of both.

Most of those I spoke with asked one or more of the following:

Should I submit my paper to Nature or Nature Geoscience?

What are the chances of getting my manuscript published in Nature Geoscience?

If my paper is rejected from Nature, can I resubmit to Nature Geoscience?

When will Nature Geoscience have an impact factor?

Why did you cover such and such a story in Nature or on Nature Reports Climate Change? (geoengineering was a big one here; I guess readers were curious about why we might cover something that's still quite conceptual, such as the Lovelock and Rapley proposal). Personally, I think such topics are worthy of discussion within the scientific community especially at the conceptual stage. I for one, am interested in whether our readers think that research efforts and funding should be directed towards such big potential solutions with high risk of failure).

Others were curious as to why Nature, recognised for its rigorous editorial control, has so firmly embraced blogging, which again raises the split opinions on whether web 2.0 is a worthwhile means of communicating science, as discussed recently here and on RealClimate.

Continue reading "EGU: Meeting the scientists " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 16, 2008
Categories: EGU 2008, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

On Nature Reports Climate Change , Gywn Prins of the LSE has reviewed The Hot Topic by science writer (and once climate change editor at Nature) Gabrielle Walker and former UK chief science advisor Sir David King.

The book has with the odd exception, received mostly favourable - and a few oustanding reviews - namely Chris Mooney's for New Scientist and Dave Reay's in the March 6 issue of Nature.

Indeed, Reay compares it Rachel Carson’s celebrated Silent Spring in its ability to engage millions and commends its even-handed coverage of the ‘climate debate’. Reay writes:

The Hot Topic has an authoritative clarity that scythes through the junk science and brushes aside the brigades of doom-mongers and overly earnest environmentalists.

Over on The Intersection Chris Mooney refers to it as "the best global warming book I've ever read", and has a similar stance to Reay. Of Walker and King, he writes:

Their overview of the science and policy of climate change is a model of clarity, comprehensiveness and, above all, sanity. It truly does find a middle ground in the climate debate.

On the contrary, Prins (who authored a Commentary in Nature last year with Steve Rayner calling for a radical alternative to the Kyoto Protocol) argues that the book is both “troubling” and “relentlessly normative” in that it represents “an unquestioning acceptance of the received wisdom”.

Prins is especially disgruntled with how Walker and King, in his view, polarize perspectives on the way forward on climate policy:

[They] have no scintilla of doubt that the Kyoto Protocol is the road to follow and that anyone who deserts it is wrong and possibly corrupt. So we have as heroes the EU, which doesn't "duck" the problem, and as villains the US, languishing under the rule of "President Bush and his fiercely partisan advisers". They lump all "sceptics" — anyone who disagrees with them — together like the damned in a Hieronymus Bosch painting of heaven and hell.

He then compares The Hot Topic to Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (albeit at the other end of the polemical spectrum) in it’s treatment of uncongenial information, essentially making the point that the authors choose their supporting arguments carefully and disregard the rest.

Continue reading "Review of The Hot Topic: The road well travelled " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 17, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Climate Science, Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year on Climate Feedback, Kevin Vranes wrote about some of the unintended consequences of climate policy – namely how the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism was increasing greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of HCF-23 in developing countries – as well as increasing ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere.

Now, the drive to tackle climate change – and fast - has landed us back in the land of unintended consequences, though for a whole host of other reasons.

A few particularly noteworthy examples have come across my radar in the past couple of weeks.

First up, is the increasing demand from alternative energies on the world’s water supplies, a factor not helped by the complete lack of cohesion between energy, water and climate policy. A prime example, as reported by Brian Hoyle on Nature Reports Climate Change, is the extensive irrigation required for those waving fields of midwest grain that supply the ethanol for biofuels.

“At least 40 gallons [of water] go into every mile travelled by an ethanol-powered vehicle” according to Michael Webber of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas-Austin.

And gas-electric hybrid vehicles fare little better. “We need to move from our old way of thinking — miles per gallon — to gallons of water per mile," says Webber.

Not only do these golden fields of corn pose a threat to water supplies, the massive amounts of fertiliser used in growing them are increasing nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and worsening the existing ‘dead zones’ in the Gulf associated with fish kills. The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , notes that this is in direct conflict with existing policy targets to reduce the oxygen-depleted area in the region.

And on an unrelated topic…the trail of unforeseen outcomes continues overseas…as highlighted last week in The Washington Post, which reported the toxic waste being left behind by solar energy companies in China, posing a severe threat to human health.

As much as climate policy is urgently needed, it seems it would be worth remembering that climate is not the only sustainability issue.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 14, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Energy, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

For anyone interested in the consensus on climate change, there’s a very interesting feature by Joseph Romm who blogs over on Climate Progress on Salon today, in which he argues that opinion on the cause of global warming is irrelevant. What is relevant, says Romm, is the overwhelming body of well-tested science and real-word observations.

Romm makes the case that the perpetual use of the word ‘consensus’ by the media, scientific community, and others mistakenly frames climate change as an issue of opinion, rather than one of scientific scrutiny based on data and evidence:

“Science doesn't work by consensus of opinion. Science is in many respects the exact opposite of decision by consensus…One of the most serious results of the overuse of the term "consensus" in the public discussion of global warming is that it creates a simple strategy for doubters to confuse the public, the press and politicians: Simply come up with as long a list as you can of scientists who dispute the theory. After all, such disagreement is prima facie proof that no consensus of opinion exists.

So we end up with the absurd but pointless spectacle of the leading denier in the U.S. Senate, James Inhofe, R-Okla., who recently put out a list of more than 400 names of supposedly "prominent scientists" who supposedly "recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called 'consensus' on man-made global warming."

Opinion polls on the climate consensus crop up from time to time. Coincidentally one such poll came to my attention this week, via email, and is being discussed over on Roger Pielke Sr’s blog.

The posts basically describe the rejection, first by the AGU journal EOS and secondly by Nature Precedings, of a research poll by Pielke Sr, James Annan and Fergus Brown surveying whether there is agreement among climate scientists on the IPCC fourth assessment report.

Pielke Sr. writes:

“It is clear that the AGU EOS and Nature Precedings Editors are using their positions to suppress evidence that there is more diversity of views on climate, and the human role in altering climate, than is represented in the narrowly focused 2007 IPCC report”.

There’s a further post and comment stream over on Brown’s blog.

I’m not privy to the inside information on why their paper was rejected from both EOS and Nature Precedings, but it seems to me that there are (at least) two point to be made here:

Continue reading "Climate consensus: is opinion even relevant? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 27, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston -

Whether technology can cure the world’s ills has been a hot topic at this year’s AAAS conference.

I joined Alok Jah and James Randerson as a guest commentator on the Guardian’s weekly science podcast yesterday to discuss, among other highlights from the AAAS meeting, whether we can rely on technology as our sole solution to climate change.

We recorded in Toscanini’s ice-cream café in Cambridge, MA, an institution as famous for its clientele (nobel and ignoble laureates and the Dalai Lama), as much as for it’s delectable ice-cream….the wort variety comes highly recommended!

The impetus for our technology discussion was the release of a report at AAAS by a specialist panel convened to predict the great engineering challenges that humanity will face in the 21st century.

A select group of big names and big thinkers, the blue ribbon panel included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, entrepreneur, geneticist and billionaire, Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Ray Kurzweil, futurologist, software engineer and alleged recipient of some 14 honorary doctorates.

Kurzweil sees no end to the possibilities of what technology can achieve this century – from creating artificial intelligence to match the human intellect to reversing the signs of aging. His basis for these assertions is the rate at which technology is advancing – a doubling every two decades. Though this may sound modest, its cumulative effect is worth contemplating – that’s 32 times more technical progress over the next 50 years than there has been in the past half-century!

The views of the panel are positively circumspect in comparison to Kurzweil’s, though are none-the-less fascinating.

Continue reading "Can technology stop the world from warming (and my ice-cream from melting)? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 18, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Conferences and Meetings, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston –

I went along to the COMPASS ‘marine mixer’ (picture an alcohol-laced gyre awash with journalists and marine science/policy types) last night. In the 7th year now, it has become quite the who’s who of marine science.

At one point, I was chatting to Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, who is moderating a panel here at AAAS today on the effects of climate change on the ocean.

Lubchenco and colleagues have a brief communication in this week’s Science, reporting the expansion of a low-oxygen or ‘dead’ zone off the US west coast, which they believe is partly attributable to climate change.

While scanning video footage off the seabed off the Washington and Oregon coast, Lubchenco and her fellow marine ecologists came across a mass of dead marine organisms. After some investigation, they found this was due to the expansion of a dead zone both toward the coastline and throughout 80% of the water column.

The region, known as the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, is one the world’s four eastern boundary current systems, which are some of the most productive areas in the ocean and produce 20% of the world’s fisheries.

The number of such ‘dead zones’ throughout the world’s oceans has increased dramatically in recent decades. Most, however, such as the well-known Gulf of Mexico dead zone, are caused by excessive nutrient run-off from land increasing the nitrogen content of the water, and sucking out the oxygen.

Under normal conditions, the region off the US west coast is characterised by the upwelling of nutrients from deep waters, driven by strong winds. Plentiful nutrients provide the nutrition necessary for an algal bloom, which forms the basis of a rich food web.

But too much nutrition…and it all goes horribly wrong.

Continue reading "AAAS: Marine mixing, dead zones and climate change " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 17, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Correction Appended

AAAS, Boston-

One of the most interesting, and popular, sessions I’ve been to so far at AAAS was the panel discussion on how the media communicates climate change.

Though there wasn’t any news in the talks about news by various well known science communicators, the room was packed to the rafters and the lively discussion spilled over into the next session.

Andy Revkin of the New York Times , who recently started the excellent Dot Earth blog, spoke of the tyrannies of news and the difficulty of getting climate-related news on the front page without a peg like Hurricane Katrina. He also pointed out that the more complex a story is (as is so often the case in climate science), the less space it gets.

Matt Nisbet, who runs the Framing Science blog, talked about how sources of information frame people’s perceptions of the issue, with the example that Gore’s ‘climate crises’ gets referred to more frequently by the media than the IPCC, NOAA or NASA.

David Dickson, director of Scidev Net warned that journalism is at risk of losing its independence and becoming a voice for various NGOs, as they become increasingly strategic at media relations. Some NGOs apparently paid for a large contingent of journalists to attend the UN conference on climate change in Bali, with the explicit understanding that they would cover their stories*.

John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Centre, aired his frustration at various aspects of how climate change is reported by the mainstream media, including references by journalists (other than Revkin) at the NYT to “global warming, [which] is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe”.

Holdren has been trying convince journalists to use ‘global climate disruption’ rather than the misrepresentative ‘global warming’. Good luck to him – it would up the word count, and, as we've heard, there just ain’t no space for that.

Yesterday morning, I took part, with a national environment reporter from a popular broadsheet, in an interview on how journalists communicate climate change. The interviewer was a grad student from MIT who is doing her PhD on the topic. She asked me a lot of questions about sources of information - the issue of NGOs came up again and also the question of where to draw the line with quoting scientists on policy recommendations. The differences between us and a national paper were very interesting - I get way less bumf from NGOs, for a start!

Olive Heffernan

*Dickson has since clarified that the agreement was that journalists would cover the conference rather than the activites of the NGO at the conference.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 17, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston –

A host of unwelcome visitors could invade the Antarctic seafloor within the next ten to fifteen years, as ocean temperatures rise with global warming, said researchers today at the AAAS meeting here in Boston.

The scientists expect King crabs to be the first invaders, with sharks to follow.

The communities under threat from these invasions are extremely unique and highly diverse, with weird and wonderful inhabitants such as ribbon worms, sea spiders, and the aptly-named brittle stars, which break apart at the slightest touch, but can fortuitously regrow their limbs.

For hundreds of millions of years, these ancient communities have enjoyed a relatively safe haven in Antarctic waters, which are free of modern predators with crushing mouthparts such as crabs and sharks.

But a rise in sea temperature of a few degrees could change this, said marine biologist Richard Aronson of Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

At very low temperatures and high pressures, the concentration of magnesium in crab’s blood becomes toxic. As sea temperatures increase, crabs will be able to extend their range into areas that they are no longer off limits due to this physiological obstacle.

Similarly, sharks have a chemical called triethylamine oxide (TMAO), which is needed to counterbalance the build up of urea generated by their continuous movement. But TMAO is needed in greater doses at lower temperatures and so there appears to be a thermal cut off point of how much they produce.

The Antarctic has previously marked that cut off point, but the researchers highlighted that this is one of the fastest warming regions of the planet. It’s currently warming at a rate of approximately 1 degree Celsius each 25 years.

Cheryl Wilga, associate professor of physiology at the University of Rhode Island, described the Antarctica biodiversity as a “smorgasbord” for invading predators.

“There will be winners and losers”, said Aronson, who predicts that brittlestars will be “hammered” by the invasion, but that brachiopods, commonly known as lampshells, will probably hold up fairly well.

For further information, see the news coverage on Discovery News , National Geographic and the Telegraph.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 15, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m at the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in Boston, which runs from Feb 14-18 and will be following the climate and energy streams over the next few days, so check here daily for the highlights.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 15, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Currently on Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a review by Michael Oppenheimer of Mark Bowen’s lastest book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth About Global Warming.

As suggested by the title, the book documents the White House-led censorship of James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who bravely spoke out about the dangers and urgency of global warming long before many of his fellow climate scientists. Oppenheimer writes:

In doing so, Hansen staked a claim to unfettered speech far beyond the usual scientist's model of announcing research findings. If there was ever a pure test of the rights of government scientists, this was it.

As well as narrating “the step-by-step attempts of a low-ranking NASA press staffer and right-wing ideologue, along with other officials, to censor Hansen”, the book delves into the story of Hansen as research scientist who made important discoveries on the greenhouse effect and documents his personal journey as an individual.

While commending the book overall, Oppenheimer criticizes Bowen’s unyielding reverence for Hansen:

Bowen provides a fascinating tour of Hansen's scientific mind and mental voyage over 30 years, including the basis for his prescient assertions about the future course of warming. But here the story swerves off course into a morass of condescension and inaccuracy. Rather than providing a slice of science history, Bowen feeds the reader hagiography, as if he feels the need to enhance Hansen's stature — a completely unnecessary exercise — by reducing that of other scientists.

Continue reading "Censorship and an outspoken scientist " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 22, 2008
Categories: In the News, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the road that will lead from Bali to Copenhagen in December 2009, where the world is set to agree a new global climate deal, and the euphoria of seeing the US yielding under global pressure has begun to fade, the question is emerging of whether Bali actually accomplished what it set out to achieve.

So, was Bali a success? I give my take on Bali on the latest Climate Podcast from Nature, which covers highlights from the two weeks of talks as well as a round-up on what was agreed at the eleventh hour.

On ClimateBiz, James Murray takes the pragmatic view that it’s too early to tell:

There are still plenty of reasons to be confident that a solid successor to Kyoto will be agreed in 2009, but at the same time any Chinese leader commenting in 200 years time on whether the Bali conference was a success or not may sadly be doing so from a coastal resort in the Himalayas.

Murray rightly points out that whether you judge Bali as a success depends on whether you had realistic expectations to begin with:

The fact is Bali has achieved everything it was ever going to achieve. This was always going to be a meeting about future meetings and the environmentalists and European politicians who worked themselves up into a frenzy of excitement over the prospect of getting emission targets agreed were always going to be left disappointed.

Over on Open Democracy, which features a diversity of informed views on the outcome of the Bali conference, Oliver Tickell of the Kyoto 2 initiative gives a far bleaker take on Bali:

And is the world saved? Far from it. It is going to hell in a handcart….If this is success, well, give me failure! At least failure would give us a chance to start again and devise an effective framework that really could cut greenhouse-gas emission effectively, while delivering the goods on adaptation, forests, soils, peatlands, farming and the decisive shift we need to a low carbon global economy.

Continue reading "The road from Bali" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 03, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

In the disabling humidity of Bali, former US vice president Al Gore last night urged delegates gathered here at the UN conference on climate change to continue efforts towards an international climate change deal, despite attempts by the US delegation to stall progress.

Gore said, to loud applause, that the US was “principally responsible for obstructing progress” at the UN conference, which aims to set out an agenda for how negotiations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol should proceed over the next two years.

Delegates have now reached agreement on a number of key issues for the ‘Bali roadmap’, including reducing deforestation, providing financial assistance for adaptation and transferring technology to developing nations.

But there are fears that the science that has informed the process is now being sidelined.

The main bone of contention is how the most recent findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, will be acknowledged in the final text agreed to in Bali.

Most delegations believe that the text should refer to the need for developed nations to reduce emissions by 25-40% on 1990 levels by 2020. But the US says that to do so would be ‘prejudge the outcome’ of the process. Japan and Canada agree with the US and Australia agreed with this stance earlier in the week, though it’s position is a little less certain at the moment.

The EU is standing strong behind the need to include specific numbers on future emissions reductions, arguing that it would be pointless to agree on a roadmap without a destination. “It is crucial for us that we must have an idea where we are heading to – it’s not only to science to show us the destination, but the destination must be consistent with the science”, said Portuguese secretary of state for the environment, Humberto Rosa yesterday in Bali.

European commissioner Stavros Dimas warned US under secretary of state Paula Dobiansky in a meeting yesterday morning that unless a substantive agreement was reached in Bali, there would be little point in the EU attending the Major Economies Meeting to be hosted by the US in February in Hawaii. Rosa and Dimas said this was not a threat, but an acknowledgment of the fact that the Major Economies Meeting is designed to feed into the UN process.

In his address last night, Gore advised negotiators to move beyond their anger and frustration at the US and to recognize that a new US administration, which will take over from Bush in little over a year, will likely embrace more climate-friendly policies.

"Do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save a large, open, blank space in your document and put a footnote by it [that says] this document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway."

But this morning, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo De Boer, said that option would be unfeasible.

“It would be impossible to advance here without the US, as this is a consensus”, said De Boer. “It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to craft a climate change regime without one of the major economies and the major emitter”.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 14, 2007
Categories: Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

As anticipated, deforestation has emerged as something of a thorny issue at the UN conference on climate change, currently nearing a close in Bali.

It was announced yesterday that measures to avoid further destruction of tropical forests, such as the Amazon, will be included in the agreement to come out of the talks at the end of this week. The Bali agreement is expected to act as a guideline for negotiations on an international climate change deal up until the end of 2009.

Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole Research Centre, US said today in Bali that the Amazon rainforest is expected to see a 55% dieback by 2030 through deforestation, logging and drought. Rainforests in other nations, such as Indonesia are facing similar pressures. So, any effort to avoid deforestation, which accounts for an estimated 20-25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is to be commended. But the solution being put forward to in Bali , known as REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is being met with opposition on many sides.

Under the proposed scheme for ‘avoided deforestation’, carbon sequestered by forests in developing countries that are not being cut can be traded on the carbon market, where developed countries can buy the credits and ‘offset’ them against their own emissions targets.

A draft text on deforestation is ready to go forward for discussion by the high level ministers, who arrived at the Bali conference today, said executive secretary of the UN conference on climate change, Yvo De Boer.

Countries such as Indonesia and numerous conservation NGOs are celebrating inclusion of the scheme. And given that emissions from deforestation were omitted from the Kyoto Protocol, it is the first such international effort of its kind.

But much remains to be agreed upon. The issue of whether such a scheme should include forest conservation is a remaining “bone of contention”. As reported in the Hindustan Times, the Indian delegation wanted to add 'conservation' to 'avoided deforestation' , owing to the fact that India is one of the few developing countries where the forest cover is going up, not down. “We should not be penalised for that” said secretary of the ministry of environment and forests, Meena Gupta

Continue reading "Deforestation a ‘thorny’ issue at the Bali talks " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 12, 2007
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

As celebrations got underway to mark the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, disputes over whether its successor will be a bigger, better deal intensified at the UN climate-change conference in Bali, Indonesia.

I've reported the full story over on Nature News,

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 11, 2007
Categories: Recent contributors, Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

Whether we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change will ultimately be determined by whether we are willing to finance it.

Finding an effective means for financial assistance and investments to flow from north to south could be a make or break issue at the UN conference on climate change here in Bali, where delegates from almost 190 nations have convened to agree a ‘roadmap’ for an international climate agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

NGOs and delegates from the world’s poorest nations, some of which are already beginning to experience the harsh affects of a warming climate, are calling on developed countries to boost funding to help them adapt, and to transfer technology that will help them green their economies.

Under the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Adaptation fund’, a paltry $163m has been pledged by rich donor countries to developing nations, and just $67m of this has actually been delivered. Yet the sum actually needed to finance adaptation and capacity building in the south is in the region of several tens of billions of dollars, according the World Bank (and reported by the Associated Press). Oxfam says that the very poorest nations also need an up front payment of $1-2bn immediately to address urgent adaptation needs.

The fund, which will finance projects such a building sea walls and irrigating crops, is currently derived from a 2 percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the scheme that allows industrialized nations to pay for carbon credits produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world and credit then against their own emissions targets. But it now looks as though the UN will have to expand its funding for adaptation, potentially through a direct tax on emissions.

The transfer of clean technologies to developing nations is another goal of the Kyoto Protocol that has clearly not been met. In part, this is owing to lack of funding from the public sector and a lack of interest from the private sector, says Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change.

The solution, says De Boer, will require the creation of investment potential through mechanisms such as the carbon market that can send a clear price signal to private investors, who are expected to fund 86% of future clean energy technology projects in the south. It will also require “intelligent financial engineering, to make public and private money go where it has never gone before” akin to “embarking on a star trek expedition”, says De Boer.

A group of finance ministers is now trashing out the details in side meetings at the Bali talks. By the end of the conference, it should be clear whether the worlds’ richest nations are willing to cough up their portion of the much needed cash.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 10, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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 (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

The chances of the world’s major emitters agreeing to mandatory emissions reductions are becoming an increasingly unlikely outcome of the UN talks on climate change here in Bali.

“Nothing has been ruled out yet”, said Yvo de Boer, secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) today in Bali, but he described the possibility of binding emissions cuts for developing nations such as China and India as “crawling towards the edge of the table”.

China has been receiving praise for its proactive role on addressing climate change and its willingness to enter into talks on a post-Kyoto agreement, but De Boer said that India has not been at the forefront of the discussions this week in Bali.

Both India and China have introduced strategies to mitigate climate change this year in a notable departure from historic concerns that to do so would threaten economic growth. Rajenda Pachuari, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that neither China nor India has had sufficient time to act on climate change since introducing their respective strategies and expects that they will demonstrate more significant efforts in the coming months.

In the meantime, NGOs are hoping that the passage of two climate relevant bills through the US House of Representatives this week will put increasing pressure on the Bush administration to sign up to binding emissions targets.

First up is the Energy Bill, which is the only piece of legislation in over 30 years to require a rise in vehicle fuel efficiency. Designed to improve energy security while reducing emissions for transport, the bill would raise fuel economy by 40% by 2020. Second is the Liebermann-Warner Climate Security Act, which would cut emissions from the power and industrial sectors by 70% by 2050 relative to 2005 levels.

The passing of these bills sends a clear signal to the world that the political centre of gravity in the US has shifted on global warming, but all signs indicate that domestic policy is unlikely to sway the stance of the US on the international front.

Both bills have yet to pass through the Senate and White House, and President Bush has already threatened to veto them. But according to Angela Anderson of the National Environmental Trust in the US, this would be rather ironic given that these are exactly the kind of measures that other major emitters have enacted into their own legislation - the very nations that the US is currently engaging with a serious of talks parallel to the UN process.

Yesterday, Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said that neither the passing of these acts to limit US domestic emissions nor the move by Australia to ratify Kyoto would change their stance in Bali. "We're not changing our position," he said.

Given that the US is the only nation that appears to be cutting its fossil fuel emissions, while those signed up to Kyoto have failed to meet their targets, some say that binding cuts may not be the way to go after all.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 07, 2007
Categories: Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)