Climate Feedback
Everyone's talking about the CRU data hack. Quirin Schiermeier reports on Nature News:
One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.
The full story is here:
Olive Heffernan
This week's Nature [subscription required] is the third in a series of special issues celebrating the life of Charles Darwin. It focuses on the dire challenges to Earth's biodiversity — and finds some reason for hope.
Among the numerous biodiversity-related contributions is an opinion piece by Will Turner of Conservation International with Michael Oppenheimer and David S. Wilcove of Princeton University. They argue that natural ecosystems offer some of our greatest tools in mitigating climate change and, as such, must be made a bulwark against climate change, rather than a casualty of it. They write:
REDD is just one of many possible ways to exploit the potential of natural ecosystems to slow climate change and lessen its effects on people. Natural habitats are a hugely valuable tool in the fight against global warming. Use them wisely and they could save many lives and vast sums of money in the decades to come. Abuse them, and much of Earth's biodiversity could be lost, along with the fight against climate change. Urgent action is needed to understand how best to exploit this promise and develop mechanisms that can be woven into the practices of governments, corporations, communities and institutions worldwide.
Turner and co-authors say that natural ecosystems are a clear mitigation option because of their sequestration potential, but also because "the maintenance and restoration of natural habitats are among the cheapest, safest and easiest solutions at our disposal in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and promote adaptation to unavoidable changes". See the full article here.
Olive Heffernan
I've just returned from a two-day visit to the UK Met Office, where scientists are gathered this week to present and discuss the results of a five-year research initiative known as Ensembles. An EU-funded project led by the Met Office Hadley Centre, Ensembles brought together 66 research international institutes with the express aim of developing climate models and projections and applying the newly developed tools to studying climate impacts on agriculture, health and other sectors.
One of the most exciting outcomes from Ensembles is the development of a climate mitigation scenario and its analysis by a variety of state-of-the-art climate models, many of which include carbon cycle feedbacks. As I explain over on Nature News, this is a radically different approach from the gold-standard climate projections, which are run by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nation's climate body.
Up until now, the IPCC has run models for a range of 'what if' scenarios that make various assumptions about the future, such as the level of emissions, technological and economic development. None of these scenarios account for the impact of policy on climate change.
The Ensembles scenario, known as E1, works the other way around. It assumes that atmospheric levels of CO2 equivalents cannot rise above 450 parts per million if we are to avoid 'dangerous' climate change of more than 2 ºC and then looks at the mitigation that policy-makers would need to pursue to achieve that.
Most of the models suggest that emissions will need to be near zero by 2100 in order to stabilize atmopsheric concentrations at 450 ppm. But the Hadley Centre model, HadCM3, suggests that we'll need to start actively removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere - by artifical or natural means - by 2050, if we are to keep temperatures within a 'safe' level.
Although E1 won't be be used by the IPCC in its next report (AR5), due out in 2013, E1 is the forerunner of a very similar scenario that will feature prominently in AR5.
The full story is here [subscription].
Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), has denied claims that it prevents researchers from publishing work on politically-sensitive issues such as climate change, reports Nature News [subscription].
An ecological economist at the agency, Clive Spash, had a paper accepted for publication in the journal New Political Economy earlier this year, only to find out two weeks later that it had been withdrawn by a CSIRO official because it had not yet been through an internal approval process.
In the article, Spash reportedly criticized carbon trading schemes for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, commenting that they are ineffective even if politically popular.
CSIRO staff are prevented from commenting on matters of policy. The agency has a process in place to ensure that staff only communicate on the results of their research, but Spash argues that such a policy presents real difficulties for academics working in socio-economics. As Nature News reports:
“There's a real issue here about people working in the socio-economic area," [Spash] told one reporter. "It's not at all clear to me how these people are supposed to work and do their job while trying to meet these general guidance principles that have been interpreted at present to say that we're not allowed to comment on any government policy at any level of government, anywhere in the world."
Spash apparently submitted the paper before an internal decision was made, having become frustrated with the slowness of the process and with wrangling over specific wording.
A CSIRO employee told Nature News last Friday that the incident stemmed more from management styles and conservative interpretation of the rules, rather than from any political pressure.
Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson will be at the United Nations climate summit from 2-6 November 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. It is the last negotiating period before the seminal climate summit in Copenhagen in December. He'll be blogging at Nature's In the Field blog and here on Climate Feedback. For more on the UN negotations, see www.nature.com/roadtocopenhagen.
Olive Heffernan
532,151,027,622: that’s the amount of carbon in tonnes that we’ve released into the atmosphere over the past 250 years from burning coal, making cement and chopping down forests, according to the calculations of Oxford University researchers.
You can watch this number climb rapidly on the newly launched website, trillionthtonne.org. Hosted by the Oxford e-Research Centre, it shows in real time just how close we are to reaching one trillion tonnes of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, the maximum level allowable if we are to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.
The concept of restricting cumulative emissions to one trillion tonnes comes from work by Oxford climatologist Myles Allen and collaborators, who, in April this year, published two seminal papers in Nature [subscription]. They also wrote a commentary in Nature Reports Climate Change [free access] at the time, explaining the policy implications of their work: essentially, their point is that we need an overall carbon budget, as well as short term emissions targets. That’s because CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere for millennia, which means that peak warming is determined by cumulative emissions, rather than by the rate at which CO2 is emitted over the short-term.
Though a trillion tonnes may sound like rather a lot, the fact that we’re more than half way there is alarming. Unless we start to reduce emissions rapidly, we’ll have released the trillionth tonne by 2045, shows the counter on the website. And we could go way beyond a trillion tonnes by the second half of this century, unless we mitigate, because there are several trillion tonnes of carbon available in fossil fuel reserves.
To make matters worse, the researchers estimate that to have less than a one-in-four chance of global warming exceeding 2°C, we may well need to keep our cumulative emissions to 750,000,000. The challenge is large: emissions will need to start to fall between 2 and 4.5 percent per year immediately and indefinitely if we are to avoid dangerous warming, according to these estimates.
The website was launched on October 22 to coincide with the unveiling at London’s Science Museum of a one tonne heap of anthracite coal, representing the trillionth tonne of carbon to be released into the atmosphere.
Olive Heffernan
![oct2009_1_3_orig[2].jpg](http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/oct2009_1_3_orig%5B2%5D.jpg)
“Imagine farmers being able to determine what to plant and where based on drought forecasts three to five years out”, said Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, in Geneva last month.
Speaking to delegates at the World Climate Conference, Lubchenco was lending her voice to the vision of climate services, which would deliver climate predictions as reliable and useable as weather forecasts, and tailored to meet the needs of specific end-users. Underlying the vision of climate services is the assumption that further research will result in reliable climate predictions indispensable to adaptation planners.
In July, Germany opened a centre in Hamburg to provide the nation with such services. The Waxman-Markey Bill, passed by the US House of Representatives in June, would launch a similar service within the US, and headed by NOAA, to develop and distribute climate information and predictions to decision-makers.
But in a new Commentary on Nature Reports Climate Change, Mike Hulme and co-authors urge caution in relying on climate predictions to aid adaptation. They write:
Scientists and decision-makers should treat climate models not as truth machines, but instead as one of a range of tools to explore future possibilities.
They highlight that unlike weather forecasts - whose value in informing decision-making can routinely be tested over time by comparison with observed weather patterns - the skill of climate predictions is unknown, especially at the decade-to-century timescale.
Hulme and co-authors illustrate the perils of relying on the predict-then-adapt mode of planning with an example from the Australian state of Victoria. In this case, predictions from a 2005 study of the water supply to Melbourne assured decision-makers that existing plans provided a sufficient buffer against projected climate change up to 2020. But by 2006, water supply levels had dropped far below that predicted even for the most severe climate change scenario (see figure below).
Continue reading "Climate Prediction: keeping it in perspective " »
Hopes that the UN conference in Copenhagen will result in an ambitious climate treaty have faded, with UN climate chief Yvo de Boer now conceding that reaching a legally binding agreement will be impossible this year.
If December’s summit fails to deliver a strong accord, there will be some obvious culprits: the global recession, which has made nations reluctant to commit cash to the problem, and the US Senate, where horn-locking among lawmakers has delayed the passage of domestic legislation.
But even without these bumps in the road, some say the challenge set for negotiators in Copenhagen may simply have been too great from outset. In a feature out today on Nature Reports Climate Change (free access), Mason Inman looks at the UN summit from the perspective of researchers who study cooperation, some of whom argue that trying to get an effective multi-faceted treaty agreed between 192 nations is a waste of time. Many behavioural economists say — and common sense dictates — that a strong agreement would be more easily negotiated between fewer parties.
The legitimacy of this claim is perhaps evidenced by the recent bilateral talks between two of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, China and India, who last week signed a five-year pact to present a united front at international climate negotiations. Now, the US is now seeking to broker similar agreements, and according to some reports, US climate envoy Todd Stern says that such bilateral deals — with Russia and Brazil also — could be the building blocks for an international agreement in December.
From the perspective of political haggling, this makes sense. Cooperation in Copenhagen will only be achieved if those responsible for the majority of emissions can agree on how to apportion responsibility for climate change fairly, as well as on the incentives and deterrents that will ensure compliance, rather than encourage free-riding.
And according to those who study cooperation, it’s all about the carrots and sticks. Writes Inman:
Suppose there’s a country — call it Slackistan — that is emitting loads of carbon dioxide, and doesn’t want to cut back. If Slackistan can somehow convince all the other countries to take action, but do nothing itself, it gets all of the benefits of a cooler climate with none of effort. In game theory lingo, that’s called free riding.An effective global deal on climate change has to, therefore, use carrots or sticks to nudge countries away from the default strategy — that of Slackistan — and towards cooperation. Figuring out how to create these incentives is the key, many game theorists say, to breaking the current stalemate and to keeping a strong agreement running for many decades.
Continue reading "Climate games: small pacts are no big deal" »
Getting a climate deal agreed in December will require an ‘uphill battle’ said UK energy and climate change Secretary Ed Miliband in London yesterday, despite incremental progress from the world's largest economies on agreeing the way forward.
Miliband addressed the press following a two-day meeting of the Major Economies Forum, a US-inspired initiative that includes 17 of the world's developing and emerging economies. The meeting aimed to address some of the key obstacles to securing a global treaty and involved six guest nations, including some of the world’s poorest such as Ethiopia.
Although the forum is not part of the formal UN negotiation process, its members collectively account for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so any shift in their positions will significantly affect prospects for reaching an agreement in Copenhagen.
I attended the press conference and reported the story for Nature News [subscription]. It’s interesting, as Andy Revkin points out over on Dot Earth, that the final communiqué from the meeting was seen by some observers as empty rhetoric but by others as containing substantial signs of progress.
Miliband certainly gave the impression that the meeting was successful, saying “there was a sense that substantial progress had been made”. That was reflected to some extent in the press coverage.
But Miliband was scant on the details of what exact progress had been made. He highlighted three areas where agreement had been reached: the need to substantially increase funding for adaptation and mitigation in the developing world (but he didn’t say by how much or by when), how that money will be transferred (this presumably relates to the decision that the UN, rather than the World Bank, will administer the fund) and the need for an international deal to reflect current commitments by both rich and poor nations (an issue that’s important to the US; Stern said there won’t be an agreement without this).
A cursory look at the communiqué suggests that progress by the MEF this week was incremental, and perhaps even insignificant, given the larger issues on the table. The address by US climate change envoy Todd Stern last night suggested that getting a deal that involves the US will be tricky.
I’ve elaborated on this in the full story, but in short, the US is unlikely to sign up to targets if the Waxman-Markey bill hasn’t passed through the Senate by December. And if it has passed, the issue of the legal framework of the treaty will be contentious: many developing nations want a Kyoto-style protocol, whereas the US isn’t keen on such an agreement, instead favouring one that commits both developed and developing nations to mid-term targets for 2020.
Speaking yesterday in London, Stern said that the US is “historically the biggest emitter, but the capacity of the world to get where we need to go [will] be more determined by what happens in China and other major developing nations in the future. It has to involve the major developing economies – that’s the only way it’s going to work”.
Olive Heffernan
Image: PurestockX
As promised, here's the YouTube version of the Nature film on climate change:
The authors of the bestselling Freakonomics, which was largely an attempt to make sense and fun of economics for those who don’t think they care about such things, are now back with a title that sounds like a bigger and better version of the original: Superfreakonomics. Exploring the topics of global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance, economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner are again unabashedly aiming for mass appeal.
But on the topic of global cooling….(er, don’t they mean warming, or is that just the theme of the week?), critics are none too impressed with Levitt and Dubner’s analysis. Having tried their utmost to discredit global warming, the authors none-the-less propose a solution, which goes something like: basically, let’s forget about mitigation, pump a load of sulphur into the atmosphere and be done with it.
The trouble here, as Joe Romm and William Connolley have already detailed on their respective blogs, is that Levitt and Dubner clearly have virtually no understanding of atmospheric science. As such, they fail to account for some of the other planetary woes their proposed scheme - a sulphur-spewing 18-mile-long hose pipe - would engender. Ocean acidification? Ozone depletion? Alan Robock’s latest paper gives a more complete list.
"We could end this debate and be done with it," Levitt says, in Monday’s Guardian, "and move on to problems that are harder to solve."
Sorry guys, but it looks like we’ll still need to redefine our energy system and the global economy too.
Olive Heffernan
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.
The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology – an international body that traditionally has represented marine industry and more recently, scientists too – today released its position statement on climate change.
The institute has been somewhat slower than many scientific bodies to release such a statement, perhaps given that much of its member base is in shipping, oil and gas. I was involved in helping to ensure the scientific accuracy of the statement, and I joined a panel discussion at the institute this morning, together with oceanographer Ralph Rayner of the London School of Economics (and various other institutes), Colin Summerhayes (executive director of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research), commercial oceanographer Mark Calverley (who instigated IMarEST’s observer status with the IPCC), Ian Leggett (formerly with Shell, now the head of Metocean Engineering for Europe) and Malcolm Newell (marine engineer and former consultant for Shell, Golar, Exxon Mobil, among others).
I was prepared for a certain amount of scepticism from the audience, which may seem surprising in this day and age (or maybe not, given the recent news coverage). But reassuringly this morning’s discussion suggested that views in the industry are now aligned with the scientific evidence. Without exception, members were keen to discuss the practicalities of how to reduce emissions from shipping, and how to move to a low carbon economy.
The institute now has the task of putting together detailed synopses on the science, impacts, mitigation, and adaptation, with specific relevance to the marine sector. I’ll update as and when those reports come out.
Olive Heffernan
International climate policy is largely focused on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. But even if we reduce emissions now, a proportion of CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for millennia. A faster-acting strategy is needed if we’re to avoid dangerous climate change in the short term. That’s the message from a team of experts writing in the latest issue of PNAS.
What’s needed to mitigate climate change fast, Nobel laureate Mario Molina and colleagues argue, is a focus on phasing out short-term warming agents. They pinpoint four non-CO2 gases and particles that could be regulated under existing legislation. Complementing cuts in CO2, these faster-acting mitigation strategies could “begin within 2–3 years, be substantially implemented in 5–10 years and produce a climate response within decades”, write the authors.
Their message on the need to regulate short-lived warming agents such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and black carbon is not new. To some extent Molina and co-authors reiterate the call for early action that appeared in a Nature editorial back in July. They, too, recommend that the Montreal Protocol be amended to include the phase-out of atmospheric HFCs, currently regulated under the Kyoto Protocol. But they go further in their recommendations for dealing with black carbon, suggesting possible technologies to reduce its production from cooking stoves and diesel emissions, as well as feasible institutional and political arrangements to put these technologies in place.
In addition, they call for efforts to reduce pollutant gases such as methane and nitrous oxides that ultimately increase ozone - a significant greenhouse gas - in the lower atmosphere. Regulating emissions from agriculture and transport would be crucial here. Last on their wish list is more and better biosequestration - through means such as biochar - to give carbon sinks a much-needed boost.
Olive Heffernan
As promised, Nature’s film on climate change went online last week on October 1. You can view the film in full on nature.com (it lasts about twenty minutes in total). It will also be on YouTube next week, at which stage I’ll embed it here.
The film was shot this July on location in Lindau at the 59th meeting of Nobel Laureates, and follows three young researchers – Brian Krohn, Faroha Liquat and Brandi Kiel Reese – on a journey to discover how their work on various aspects of chemistry can help solve the climate change problem.
Brian Krohn is interested in how algae can be used as a source for biofuels. He was based at the company SarTec Inc. in Minnesota at the time of filming, where he was converting oil extracted from algae to biodiesel using a novel process that is more economical and more environmentally friendly than traditional methods. Now Brian is at the University of Oxford studying for a degree in Environmental Change and Management, for which he received a Rhodes scholarship. He’s going to use this opportunity to look at how governmental policies can best stimulate alternative energy research.
Faroha Liquat, a PhD researcher based at Quaid-i-Azam University in Pakistan, is interested in devising novel ways to harness the power of the sun for the benefit of mankind. She’s especially interested in developing cost-effective photovoltaic cells. During the film, she has a very valuable interaction with the IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri on whether developing countries can prosper and be part of the climate change solution. She’s currently visiting Pachauri’s institute, TERI, in Delhi.
Brandi Kiel Reese is also doing a PhD and is based at Texas A&M. Having previously worked as an environmental consultant, Brandi is now looking at how humans are impacting the Gulf of Mexico, a region that has become increasingly devoid of oxygen due to the massive influx of nitrogen fertilizers and due to warming.
During their week at Lindau, our young researchers hear about the changes already underway from climate experts, they challenge (and in some cases agree with) the views of political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, and they learn about the social responsibilities of scientists from the Nobel Laureates who first discovered the danger of CFCs.
Through these interactions, they explore the challenge of keeping global temperatures to within the 2 °C target. Their take: we have the brains and the tools to solve this problem, we just need the political willpower. Despite the expert nature of many of our interview subjects, the film provides a great overview of the climate change problem for anyone in need of an update in the run-up to Copenhagen.
What are the chances of staying within 2 °C? Let us know what you think.
Olive Heffernan
In 2006, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggested that we might need to start deliberately engineering the climate if no progress could be made on curbing our emissions. Since then, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have continued to rise. So it’s perhaps no surprise that what once seemed like a outlandish idea has recently become a subject of serious scientific endeavour.
Injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere has been one of the various proposed ‘geoengineering’ schemes; others include fertilizing the ocean with iron and stimulating cloud formation.
A new study [subscription] led by Alan Robock at Rutgers University in New Jersey now looks at the prospects for stratospheric ‘geoengineering’ in terms of its benefits, costs and risks. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they highlight the pros of injecting a sulphate gas into the stratosphere in the face of a climate catastrophe: it would cool temperatures, stop the melting of sea and land-based ice, slow sea level rise and increase the planet’s ability to sequester greenhouse gas.
But if the public sees geoengineering as a low-cost and easy ‘solution’ to climate change, then it could erode backing for mitigation, say the researchers, who weight the benefits against the associated risks and costs. Among the dangers of such a scheme is the risk of substantial ozone depletion, including delayed the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, they say. Other risks include regional drought, ocean acidification, a reduction in sunlight and the end of blue skies. The cost would ultimately depend on how the gas was deployed. Robock and colleagues say that using existing US military planes would be the cheapest option, at roughly several billion dollars per year. Lofting the gas using artillery shells or balloons would be more expensive. Other options, such as pumping the gas through a tall tower or lifting it into the stratosphere using a space elevator, may be possible in the future, say the scientists, but their cost cannot be evaluated just yet.
The dangers, rather than the cost, will ultimately limit the potential of geoengineering as a solution to climate change, conclude Robock’s team.
Olive Heffernan
Considered by some a silver bullet and by others a hopeless dream, the idea that we can simply capture our carbon dioxide emissions and store them safely away is nothing if not compelling. After all, it lends an air of practicality to the notion that human ingenuity can somehow continue the unabated use of fossil fuels over the coming decades without dangerously warming the climate.
This week’s Science (subscription) looks at how close we are to being able to capture carbon dioxide, both from the point of emission at coal- or gas-burning power plants, and directly from air. A series of news, opinion and review articles shows that while many obstacles need to be overcome before carbon capture and storage (CCS) is implemented effectively, there are also abundant reasons to hope that it will happen.
But the scale of the challenge is palpable. In a review, Stuart Hazeldine of the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that the construction of many tens to hundreds of large CCS plants worldwide would be needed to reduce future worldwide emissions from energy by 20%. And in order for the technology to make a substantial contribution to climate mitigation, a viable CCS industry needs to be in place between 2020 and 2030. Construction would have to start now if plants fitted with CCS technology are to be operational by 2014, giving enough time to demonstrate commercial credibility by 2020.
Last year, G8 leaders called for upwards of 20 demonstration CCS projects around the globe. A recent report from
the U.S. National Research Council reiterated this statement, calling for a suite of 15 to 20 power plants with CCS to be built before 2020. Today, a few such projects are in development, each of which is shown on a map accompanying the Science news feature. Most of these projects will take CO2 from natural gas reservoirs and bury it or pump into oil reservoirs to force more oil to the surface, thus making the whole process commercially viable. One such project is China’s first large-scale CCS effort, which is due to launch at a site on the plains of Inner Mongolia in the coming weeks.
But many more such plants are needed, and despite a recent boost in available money for CCS, Hazeldine notes that there is still a “lamentable lack of financial commitment to real construction”. His take home message? Technology isn’t the bottleneck in getting CCS off the ground. On the 10 year timescale, it’s legal permission, business development, and public opinion that could prevent CCS from being up and running by 2020.
Also featured in the Science special issue is a perspective by David Keith on the potential for direct capture of CO2 emissions from air, which Nicola Jones covered in a news feature for Nature (subscription) back in May. The special also has a number of perspectives on the technological aspects of CCS, from capturing CO2 to storing it onshore in geological formations or offshore in deep-sea sediments.
Olive Heffernan
Image credit: Carbon storage at Sleipner field, North Sea. Alligator film /BUG / StatoilHydro
Despite the apparent stress that humanity is causing to the Earth system, defining sustainable limits for our own existence has proved to be something of an intractable problem. But what if we could define global sustainability numerically?
In this issue of Nature, a group of renowned earth system and environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre make a first attempt at estimating boundaries for the biophysical processes that determine the Earth’s capacity for self-regulation.
Using existing data, Rockström and colleagues put ‘acceptable’ upper limits on seven environmental parameters: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater use, biodiversity loss, the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and land-use change. Crossing even one of these boundaries, they say, would risk triggering abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. And if one boundary is transgressed, then others are at serious risk of being breached.
For some parameters, such as nitrogen loading and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we may have already stepped out of our safety zone and need to back-pedal quickly. For others, such as ocean acidification, we may still have enough time to avoid catastrophic change if we act wisely.
But do we understand the Earth system well enough to know the real limits to environmental degradation? And if we can define them, even roughly, would doing so would ultimately help or hinder efforts to protect the planet? We posed these questions to seven leading experts, who were invited to respond to the ‘planetary boundaries’ proposal. Each author brings specific expertise to evaluating one aspect of the proposed framework. Their responses can be freely accessed at Nature Reports Climate Change. We’ve weighed in with our own thoughts in an editorial in Nature, and with a podcast. All of Nature’s coverage, plus a full length version of the paper by Rockström and colleagues, can be accessed here.
The commentaries are available individually at the following links:
William H. Schlesinger, President of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York comments on the boundary for global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (html|pdf).
Steve Bass, senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development, UK comments on the boundary for land-use change (html|pdf).
Myles Allen, physicist and climatologist at the University of Oxford, UK comments on the boundary for climate change (html|pdf).
Mario J. Molina, director of the Mario Molina Center for Strategic Studies in Energy and the Environment in Mexico City comments on the boundary for stratospheric ozone depletion (html|pdf).
David Molden, deputy director general for research at the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka comments on the boundary for freshwater availability (html|pdf).
Peter Brewer, ocean chemist and Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California comments on the boundary for ocean acidification (html|pdf).
Cristián Samper, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC comments on the boundary for biodiversity loss (html|pdf).
For the most part, our respondents agree that the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework is a useful and worthwhile endeavour. But they also issue words of caution in choosing upper limits on environmental degradation. Some such as ocean chemist Peter Brewer question whether we know enough to choose the right parameters; on ocean acidification, for example, does an upper bound on aragonite saturation fully represent the potential detriment of loading the ocean with CO2?
A new study in Geophysical Research Letters [subscription] adds to the evidence that glaciers in high mountain regions are under threat from climate change.
The research, by Ray Bradley at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and colleagues, looks at changes in the altitude at which temperature reaches 0 degrees Celsius – known as the freezing level height – in the tropical Andes.
They find that, over the past three decades, freezing level height has increased over most of the region, which is a good indicator that high elevation glaciers are losing mass due to surface melting. Their finding is consistent with observed changes in surface temperature and upper air data in the region, which has experienced a 0.1 degree Celsius increase in temperature per decade over the past half century.
Strikingly, they find that the summit of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru – the largest body of ice in the Tropics – frequently experiences daily maximum temperatures above freezing between October and May. At the ice cap margin at 5200m, temperatures rise well above freezing for much of the year.
Bradley and co-authors say this phenomenon is likely to be affecting other high elevation glaciers in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, with potentially serious implications for the region’s water supply.
Olive Heffernan
Heads of state agreed yesterday in Geneva to establish a global framework to deliver climate services to society. “We agreed on the need for climate services across all nations”, says Martin Visbeck, chair of the committee of scientific experts to the World Climate Conference.
The global framework will oversee the supply of demand-driven climate data to end-users such as farmers to water-resource managers, with the ultimate aim of aiding adaptation to climate change. Climate services would particularly help developing nations, for example, many of which lack access to the weather and climate observations needed to plan their global-warming adaptation strategies.
But the implementation of such services will face several political and scientific hurdles. Over the next four months, an independent task force set up by World Meteorological Organization, which convened the conference, will work out how to make this vision a reality. An arduous 12-month consultation process with signatory nations will then follow.
I’ve reported this for Nature News in full here. The news story covers the scientific challenges ahead in moving from climate ‘projections’ to decadal scale ‘predictions’, and also looks at the issue of data sharing, which will be require some careful negotiating over the coming months.
Ultimately, delegates expressed optimism about the vision agreed in Geneva this week, but there are concerns about how tough its implementation will be. According to Visbeck, the deal was much stronger on Tuesday, but “an unfortunate negotiation” meant that a couple of keys aspects were changed late in the day. One crucial change is that WMO is now ‘convening’ the implementation strategy rather than leading on it. Lacking one organization at the helm, the process of decision making could become that much harder. Secondly, a clause was added that says to all UN member states can weigh on each stage of the implementation plan before the final report is delivered to WMO in January 2011. “We didn’t achieve the maximum achievable”, says Visbeck.
In the meantime, however nations are charging ahead with implementing serivice-oriented climate science on their own steam. In July, Germany opened a national climate services centre in Hamburg, and the US is currently discussing plans for a national climate service in Congress and among relevant agencies.
Olive Heffernan
Following the recent discussion here on access to climate data, it’s been interesting to see the theme emerge in Geneva this week at the third World Climate Conference.
Almost 2,000 climatologists, weather forecasters and policy makers have come together to discuss the need to develop climate services that will enable adaptation to climate change. Better predictions of the changes to come will form the basis of such services. But in order to predict climate change more accurately and over smaller areas and time periods, investments in observations, research and computing will be necessary.
Delegates here are hoping that governments will commit to investing in these areas, but some say it’s also crucial that observational and modelled data become available to others. “It’s absolutely crucial. The societal importance far outweighs any commercial benefit”, says Ralph Rayner, chair of the scientific committee of the Global Ocean Observing System, an international effort to monitor marine variables. José Achache, director of the Group on Earth Observations, agrees. “We need more observations. Commerce and security are limiting the availability of some necessary and useful climate data”, says Achache.
That’s a bit of a thorny topic here, because some Met services package proprietary data and sell it to users. But it’s also a complex issue, says Vicky Pope of the UK Met Office, which operates as a trading fund. She says that a lot of data are made freely available by Met services, but that detailed climate data has commercial value. Pope also points out that nothing is ever free. "The tax payer is actually paying, and one of the reasons we charge users is so that the taxpayer doesn't pay too much".
Speaking at the conference on Monday, Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, promoted sharing of climate data. “We are sharing our data. We are providing our data to African nations and are cooperating with other nations”
There have been vast improvements in data sharing in recent years, says Achache, but he warns that there is the risk of moving backward in certain areas. For example, some nations are calling for restrictions on data collected from ARGO oceanographic data buoys when they drift inside a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone, he says.
Kuniyoshi Takeuchi, director of the International Center for Water Hazards and Risk Management in Japan says that lack of access to climate data other than by climate professionals in rich nations is a problem. “Local ownership of climate information is needed for human empowerment” says Takeuchi.
Climatologist Jerry Meehl of the National Centre for Atmopsheric Researc in Boulder, Colorado says “it would make things a lot easier” if climate data were openly available to all, though he says that scientists probably should be allowed a grace period in which they have exclusive access to the results.
Olive Heffernan
Climate scientists, weather forecasters and policy makers are gathered in Geneva this week to discuss the need for reliable climate predictions to help society adapt to climate change.
The third World Climate Conference of the World Meteorological Organization, which runs from 31 August to 4 September 2009, aims to produce a new global framework for delivering climate information to end users.
Scientists at the conference are hopeful that with sustained support for climate research and improved computing capabilities they could reliably predict climate impacts at much higher resolution – perhaps down to several tens of kilometres over the coming decades. The ultimate goal , and one that was voiced at last year’s World Climate Modelling Summit in Reading (which we covered here) is to produce climate predictions that are as reliable and useable as weather forecasts.
That would be a vast improvement on the projections available from today’s global climate models. Most of these enable estimates of how temperature, and other climate variables such as rainfall, will change over areas of several hundred kilometres up until the end of the century and beyond.
While a large focus of the conference is on improving climate modelling in order to make reliable predictions, delegates in Geneva are also discussing the need to tailor information to the needs of specific end-users.
“A forecast in not enough; our challenge is to communicate what we know that the future in a manner that can allow people to make decisions”, said Gro Harlem Brundtland, special envoy of the UN secretary-general on climate change, at the opening session on Monday. At the end of the 5-day conference, delegates will issue a declaration of their intent to establish a new global framework to meet this challenge.
But major advances will be needed in the science of prediction before climate information is of real service to society. “In 10-15 years we may have climate forecasts like we now have weather forecasts”, said Guy Brasseur of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado to delegates here on Monday. “We have the international vision, expertise and scientific commitment to deliver climate services”, said Brasseur, but he also warned of the difficulties in developing climate models of sufficiently high spatial resolution and reliability.
One hurdle is the massive investment needed to fund one or more supercomputers; others include accessing data and sustaining long-term observations. Despite these, several attempts to improve predictive capability are underway worldwide. One of these, being championed by Tim Palmer of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is the concept of ‘seamless prediction’, in which one modelling system is used to predict atmospheric conditions on time scales varying from hours to decades. Other efforts, being headed by scientists from the UK Met Office and elsewhere, are focused on how climate change will pan out in the coming decades, and combines aspects of seasonal forecasting with centennial prediction (which I won’t go into now, but hope to come back to). Still another approach is Earth System Modelling, which attempts to model the whole earth system – including feedbacks - more comprehensively than climate models, at spatial scales of 150km across.
Scientists at the conference are excited at the possibility that such efforts will lead to greater predictability, but are also concerned that end-users could have unrealistic expectations of what that means. “We’ll never be able to produce absolute predictions of what will happen in the future”, says Vicky Pope of the UK Met office. She says that scientists must work within a risk management framework so that people don’t misuse the data. “We are nervous about the uncertainties and errors associated with the models we are using”, says Jerry Meehl of NCAR, adding “That needs to be part of the message that gets out with climate services”.
Olive Heffernan
I’ll be heading to Geneva this coming Sunday to attend the World Meteorological Organisation’s third World Climate Conference. The conference, which runs from August 31 until September 4, takes climate prediction as its theme, and aims to establish an international framework to guide the development of climate services, linking climate predictions with climate-risk management and adaptation. This should an interesting opportunity to look in more depth at the issue of whether climate prediction is indeed scientifically feasible and if so, at what it will take to move from climate projections to predictions.
I’ll be blogging from the conference daily to Climate Feedback, and you can follow me on twitter@oliveh
Olive Heffernan
The trailer for the Nature film series from Lindau has just been released. You can watch it here. The trailer introduces the Lindau Meetings and the six films that follow – we’ll be releasing the films one a week from Thursday. The climate film, ‘The Two Degree Target’ is the grand finale and will be released on Thursday 1st October at around 6pm London time.
Many of our readers will no doubt be aware of the long-standing dispute between Steve McIntyre and members of the climate science community whose data McIntyre is keen to get hold of.
For those of you less familiar with the story, here’s some background. McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog, is best known for questioning the validity of the statistical analyses used to create the ‘hockey stick’ graph. The ‘hockey stick’ is the graph that illustrates the past 1000 years of climate based on palaeo proxy data and was published by Penn state climatologist Michael Mann and co-authors in Nature back in 1998.
More recently, McIntyre has turned his attention to criticizing the quality of global temperature data held by institutes such as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held jointly by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as HadCRU , extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850.
Since 2002, McIntyre has repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of CRU, for access to the HadCRU data. Although the data are made available in a processed gridded format that shows the global temperature trend, the raw station data are currently restricted to academics. While Jones has made data available to some academics, he has refused to supply McIntyre with the data. Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58 freedom of information act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests of its own.
I’ve reported the full story for this week’s Nature, but here’s a breakdown, plus some details that didn’t make the cut.
Why does McIntyre want the data?
Given McIntyre’s track record in critiquing data that comprise a significant part of the evidence for global warming, one might wonder whether he is in fact interested in having a go at reproducing the global temperature record. But McIntyre insists hat he’s not interested in challenging the science of climate change, or in nit-picking; rather he is simply asking that the “data be made available”.
Why won’t Jones give McIntyre the data?
Jones says that he tried to help when he first received data requests from McIntyre back in 2002, but says that he soon became inundated with requests that he could not fulfill, or that he did not have the time to respond to. He says that, in some cases, he simply couldn’t hand over entire data sets because of long-standing confidentiality agreements with other nations that restrict their use.
Although Jones agrees that the data should be made publicly available, he says that “it needs to be done in a systematic way”. He is now working to make the data publicly available online and will post a statement on the CRU website tomorrow to that effect, with any existing confidentiality agreements. “We’re trying to make them all available. We’re consulting with all the meteorological services – about 150 members of WMO – and will ask them if they are happy to release the data”, says Jones. But getting the all-clear from other nations could take several months and there may be objections. “Some countries don’t even have their own data available as they haven’t digitized it. We have done a lot of that ourselves”, he says.
Are there likely to be 'holes' in the data’?
Everyone agrees that raw station data are imperfect; that’s why they are cleaned up before being handed over to the UK Met Office. Jones says that existing issues include stations being relocated without being renamed, but he emphasises that these minor errors do not affect the global temperature trend, because there are thousands of individual stations collecting data worldwide at any one time.
McIntyre says that he does not expect to find any major errors in the data. But he also believes that too few resources are put into quality checking climate data, and that independent professional statistical services should be employed to check the data. Any thoughts on who might offer such services?
What was the CRU ‘data purge’ about?
A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that McIntyre had in fact retrieved some of the HadCRU data from a server on the CRU website. On realizing this, CRU immediately removed the data from their website, leading to speculation about a CRU ‘data lockdown’ over on Climate Audit. It transpires, however, that these data were on an anonymous ftp server intended for Met Office Hadley Centre project partners only, and were not for public use.
What’s next?
Given that McIntyre’s wish for access to the data will take time to be granted, this dispute will likely continue for some time. He’s especially aggrieved by the fact that hurricane expert Peter Webster at Georgia Tech University was recently provided with data that had been refused to him. McIntyre’s point here is that he should be treated as a legitimate academic given his background and publication record.
But Webster points out that he was allowed access because of the nature of his request, which was very specific and will result in a joint publication with Phil Jones. “Reasonable requests should be fulfilled because making data available advances science”, says Webster, “but it has to be an authentic request because otherwise you’d be swamped".
Once the data become publicly available, Jones wants McIntyre to produce a global temperature record. “Science advances that way. He might then realize how robust the global temperature record is”, says Jones. Asked if he would take on the challenge, McIntyre said that it’s not a priority for him, but added “if someone wanted to hire me, I’d do it”.
Olive Heffernan
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
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
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.
Since 1951, Nobel laureates have been meeting yearly in Lindau on Lake Constance to pass on their gems of wisdom to the next generation. Young scientists eager to learn from the very best in their field are nominated to come to Lindau and meet the laureates whose work they most admire.
The idea for the Lindau meeting was originally conceived - together with two physicians - by Count Lennart Bernadotte of Wisborg, a member of the Swedish royal family, who had a lifelong interest in science. Wisborg saw the meetings as a “window to the world” for the international scientific elite of present and future generations.
This year’s event, which runs from this Sunday until Friday July 3rd, is dedicated to chemistry, and will be attended by 23 Nobel Laureates and 580 young researchers from 67 countries.
I’ll be traveling there tomorrow with colleagues and a film crew to meet with some of the best world’s best atmospheric chemists. Attending Lindau this year are Mario Molina, Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen, who jointly received the Nobel Prize in 1995 for their work on stratospheric ozone depletion, which led to the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer.
Also on this year’s programme is a panel discussion with Rajendra Pachauri and Thomas Stocker of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN climate body that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
While at Lindau, we’ll be making a short film about the role of climate scientists in speaking on and advising on policy. When Molina and Rowland first published their results on ozone depletion in a 1974 Nature paper, they were conventionally understated in communicating the wider implications. But when the research failed to grab much attention, they went public on their concerns and called for a worldwide ban on CFCs. Their call was successful and ultimately led to the formation of the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty designed to phase out the use of CFCs.
There is perhaps much to be learned from their experience today. Climate scientists are increasingly being asked to communicate the implications of their research to policy makers, and indeed to make their research more policy relevant. Clearly, the solution to climate change will not nearly be as simple as the phasing out of CFCs. But while some climate scientists (and perhaps one in particular) have not held back in speaking their minds openly on policy, many others have. Perhaps this is out of concern that by becoming advocates they would damage their credibility as independent scientists. But with so much at stake, is that position justifiable? I’ll be exploring this question, among others, next week in Lindau.
You can follow the Lindau meeting here on Climate Feedback, where I'll be blogging daily.
Olive Heffernan
The UK's Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government's Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The loss of £4.3 million (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.
"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. "The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now."
The Met Office is now in negotiations with other goverment departments in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding.
Read the full story over on Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
Image: UK Met Office
Climate Feedback has recently become part of the Guardian Environment Network, a website from the Guardian that brings together the world's best websites focusing on green topics. This means that we’re listed with other noteworthy climate blogs on their site and that some of our content will appear on their site from time to time. Needless to say, we’re very pleased to join GEN.
We’ll be moving to a new blogging platform soon, and will have more updates on the blog then. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for additions to our blogroll, please list them in the comments section or email them to us at climatefeedback@nature.com
Long-awaited projections of how climate change will impact the UK have been met with caution by scientists.
The projections, released yesterday in London, offer the most detailed picture yet of how the UK - piece by piece, in sections just 25 km sq - will be affected by various climate impacts.
Their main message is that without substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time by the 2080s. While the risk of flooding will worsen in the North West, the South East will face an anticipated 22% decline in summer rainfall. If emissions continue to rise, London will likely experience a 2-6°C degree rise in temperature and sea-level rise of 36cm.
The UK government hopes the information will enable citizens and local authorities adapt to the changes that lie ahead, but some fear the projections provide misleading information.
That’s because the method used to produce these highly detailed projections of the future is new – and hasn’t yet been through peer-review. Bob Watson, chief scientist with the UK Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is confident it’s just a matter of time before the methodology is used on a broader scale. He expects it “will be taken up by other regions and highlighted by the IPCC in their next report”.
But while the projections were originally slated for release last November, an independent committee was convened at the eleventh hour to check out the methodology.
Oxford climatologist Myles Allen was on the committee, and he’s concerned that the results stretch the science beyond its current capabilities. His main worry is that as recently as 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t think that climate variables could be reliably resolved at spatial scales beyond a couple of 1000kms. And no research published since has challenged that view.
He spoke to me about this for Nature News, where I’ve covered the story in detail. He also spoke of his concerns on yesterday’s Newsnight, which is definitely worth a look.
Continue reading "Cautious response to UK climate projections " »
International organizations are calling for fisheries to be included in a new global deal on climate change.
Earlier this week, a consortium of 16 organizations including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank and the WorldFish Center issued a policy brief to delegates meeting in Bonn from June 1-12 for the latest round of UN climate talks.
Their key message was outlined in a Commentary by two of the authors of the brief published May 28 on Nature Reports Climate Change. Nick Dulvy, Canadian Research Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and Eddie Allison, director of the WorldFish Center in Penang, Malaysia, argue that climate impacts represent a serious threat to those who depend on fisheries and aquaculture resources both for protein and as a source of income.
While agriculture and freshwater resources have featured prominently in climate policy discussions, the future of fisheries resources has been largely ignored, write Dulvy and Allison. Yet, one third of the world's 6 billion people rely on fish and other aquatic products for at least one-fifth of their annual protein intake, and more than 36 million people worldwide are employed in the fisheries and aquaculture sector.
And with little ability to diversify to other modes of employment or to adapt to change, those in the developing world will be hardest hit as fish migration routes and spawning and feeding grounds change from those that fishers have learnt to harvest. Fishing communities will also suffer indirectly as extreme events such as floods and hurricanes become more frequent.
The latest round of UN talks on climate change kicked off Monday in Bonn, where delegates will spend the next two weeks pouring over a draft negotiating text that contains various proposals for a new global climate deal.
The 53-page document has been “basically welcomed as a good starting point for the negotiations”, and delegates are thus far infused with cautious optimism that the process could pick up speed now the US is playing a proactive role under Obama’s leadership.
But on one of the key issues – how much industrialized nations should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the short-term – nations remain at an impasse. To agree a global deal in Copenhagen in December, it must be clear what reductions industrialised nations are aiming for by 2020, says UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, who is leading the negotiations.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), developed countries would need to slash their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 to constrain global warming to 2ºC. If temperatures rise more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, dangerous climate impacts are highly probable.
Speaking in London last week, leading scientists – including 20 Nobel prize winners – reiterated that message, adding that to get on the right pathway, global greenhouse gas emissions must also peak by 2015 at the latest.
With the exception of Japan, whose position is expected in the coming weeks, almost all industrialized nations have now roughly stated where they stand on reducing their emissions by 2020. Germany has pledged reductions of 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and the European Union as a whole will decrease its emissions by 30% of 1990 levels by 2020 if other nations agree to binding targets.
But the current level of US commitment falls far short of the near-term targets needed by developed nations. Under proposed legislation, the US will decrease its emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, which is equivalent to bringing them back down to 1990 levels by 2020. In the meantime, emerging economies such as India and China are calling for all rich countries to sign up to the same level of commitment as Germany.
Speaking at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureates Symposium in London last week, US energy secretary and Nobel laureate Steven Chu implied that the US may, however, go further in its commitment to tackle climate change in Copenhagen. “I hope we can deliver more than we've promised," said Chu. "I have always liked to over-deliver on promises."
Whether emerging economies – especially China, now the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – should also take on targets is another bone of contention. I asked Chu in London last week about the need for China to commit to specific targets. He said that "to declare Copenhagen a failure if countries don't sign to binding targets is not helpful at all. The success of Copenhagen will be determined by what countries do after."
But according to Alistair Doyle reporting for Reuters, Washington clearly wants to see a greater effort overall from China. In a defensive response, China’s climate ambassador has said that rich nations should focus on keeping pledges to curb greenhouse gases rather than place new demands on the poor.
Collectively, the proposals currently on the table for emissions reductions just don’t amount to the required reductions, as Peter Spotts of the Christian Science Monitor points out. With just six weeks of full time negotiations left, something needs to give if an effective global deal based on targets is to be agreed in Copenhagen.
Olive Heffernan
In the latest issue of Science, Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK and a group of social scientists have a letter of complaint [subscription] regarding media coverage of the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, held March in Copenhagen, and point in particular to Science’s own coverage from the event.
I and my colleague Oliver Morton covered the Congress here. Its overall aim was to update the assessment of global warming ahead of the UN negotiations on climate change taking place in the same venue in December.
Hulme et al. point out that the dominant mode of media reporting after the event was of impending doom, even though nearly half of the research presented at the Congress was from scholars in the social sciences and humanities offering new insights on how to avoid the catastrophic outcomes foreseen by biogeophysical scientists,
They’re right, of course, and I think it’s worth thinking about why there was a bias in the type of material covered by the media from the Copenhagen Congress. Is it simply that reporters like to be scaremongers or that editors are only interested in hard figures? Admittedly, there could be some truth in both of those statements, but I think it’s more complex than that.
Partly, the issue is that the responsibility for coverage also lies with those communicating the science – a point that was overlooked by some both during and after the event.
The stated aim of the conference was to update the science on global warming since the IPCC’s 2007 assessment. So the first question on every reporter’s lips was ‘What’s new?’. A partial answer to that question came on the first day in the form of a press conference with climatologists Konrad Steffen, Stefan Rahmstorf and others giving revised estimates of sea-level rise based on new evidence. Needless to say, this resulted in a slew of media reports on the topic - and more than a few dismayed attendees wondering why the media had focused almost exclusively on sea level, at the expense of all other topics on offer. Well, that was hardly surprising considering that sea-level rise was the only topic during the Congress that had a press conference devoted to it.
Some might argue, or course, that by covering this, reporters were simply picking the low-hanging fruit rather than seeking out diverse news stories amid the numerous (57) sessions on offer (each with about 10 presentations). But if you have to file on deadline, then getting a heads-up on new exciting research with sources in attendance isn’t a bad strategy.
Continue reading "Copenhagen Congress: why the biased reporting?" »
Real Climate blogger Gavin Schmidt has teamed up with photographer Joshua Wolfe to create a new book on climate science and its implications for the planet and policy. Climate Change: Picturing the Science is something of an illustrative adventure, but it’s the book’s essays that really get the message across. So says Bill Hewitt, of the Foreign Policy Association’s Climate Change blog, who has penned a review for us over on Nature Reports Climate Change. Check out the full review here.
Olive Heffernan
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.
Economist Nicholas Stern released his new book just a couple of weeks ago, in which he updates his assessment of the costs of tackling climate change from his 2006 review for the UK government. In Blueprint for a Safer Planet, Stern frames this as an affordable, effective global deal that could be adopted at the UN negotiations in Copenhagen in December.
Fellow economist Frank Ackerman, who has written extensively on the costs of climate change, and who has critiqued Stern’s 2006 Review, gives his take on the new book over on Nature Reports Climate Change. Here are are some excerpts on the science. Ackerman writes:
Stern’s latest offering updates his arguments from 2006. For a start, the science has grown even more ominous, prompting him to revise his recommendation for the upper limit at which we should aim to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. Now he says they should be held below 500 parts per million (p.p.m.) of CO2-equivalent (roughly 450 p.p.m. of CO2 alone) — compared to 550 p.p.m. CO2-equivalent in the Stern Review — and then reduced further over time if necessary.
Ackerman later questions whether Stern’s analysis understates the severity of the problem and the extent of the action required:
Climatologist James Hansen, among others, has argued that stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at 450 p.p.m. would leave them at a dangerously high level and has called for a safer limit of 350 p.p.m. Stern responds that his global deal, putting us on track to 450 p.p.m., is at the outer limits of what is politically feasible in the near term; achieving Stern’s goals for 2050 would position us to revise global targets downward in the future, if needed.
Overall, Ackerman gives the book the thumbs up, writing:
This book is not fundamentally aimed at advancing knowledge of either science or economics. Rather, it uses what we know about those fields as the basis for a sweeping policy proposal. With the Copenhagen conference fast approaching, the book outlines a vision for a global deal that could be acceptable to all major parties to the negotiations.
His conclusion highlights the striking congruence between parts of the Stern proposals and parts of UK climate policy:
It is not clear which came first: earlier government policies may have shaped Stern’s sense of what is possible; conversely, the Stern Review has served as a basis for revisions of some government positions. Coming from a country that has done less on the issue than Britain to date, I don’t view this as a mark against either Stern or his government. The British Empire was rarely so skilfully and persuasively served by its citizens and scholars.
Read the review in full here.
Olive Heffernan
“We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table. We might get desperate enough to want to use it.”
US science advisor John Holdren comments on the possibility of using geoengineering to tackle climate change.
George Will’s colleagues get tired of his disinformation.
Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan contradict columnist George Will in a news story (and everyone notices).
“It’s a matter of survival for us, also. So we are among the most vulnerable countries, economically.”
Whereas many countries are concerned about the threat of climate change, Saudi Arabia concerns itself with the threat of climate change policy.
“It's like being lost in the desert, miles from anywhere and eating your own legs to sustain yourself during your search for help.”
Ed Gillespie comments on Tesco’s ‘flights for lights’ initiative on the Guardian’s Ethical living blog.
Last year, I reported on efforts to merge climate modelling with weather forecasting to create probabilistic climate predictions, with the ultimate aim of providing information that could aid adaptation.
Given enough money to build a world climate research facility with hundreds of petaflops of computing power, scientists could study simulations at the kilometre scale, and answer some of the big questions in climate science, such as how and when regions will be affected, concluded the World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction last May.
Now, a group of scientists led by Suraje Dessai of the University of Exeter and the Tyndall Centre, UK argue that better climate predictions will not necessarily aid adaptation, and that waiting for better predictability in order to act on climate change would be a ‘significantly flawed’ approach.
Writing in the latest issue of EOS, a newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, Dessai and co-authors say that, in any case, the ability to predict future climate is limited by inherent uncertainty that will always leave ‘some level of irreducible ignorance in our understanding’. Furthermore, our ability to predict other factors that are likely to influence the outcome of adaptation efforts, such as population growth or changes in technology, is even more limited than our ability to predict the climate.
But this lack of predictability should not be seen as an excuse to postpone strategies for adaptation, they argue. After all, many organizations such as water authorities only need to know the range of possible representations of future climate to better understand their vulnerabilities. The authors call on decision makers to examine their adaptation strategies over a wide range of potential future scenarios of climate and other economic, political and cultural factors. Society will benefit more, they say, from knowing the vulnerability of climate-influenced decisions in the face of large uncertainty than from any foreseeable increase in the accuracy and precision of climate predictions.
Olive Heffernan
A letter in the latest issue of Science [subscription] from a group of esteemed scientists and communicators calls for a concerted effort to close the information gap between scientific understanding of climate change and society’s ability to use the available knowledge. Having an accessible climate language, they say, would help stakeholders to better understand climate risks, as well as trade-offs and response options.
The authors – Tom Bowman, Edward Maibach, Michael Mann, Susi Moser and Richard Somerville – call for a convergence in the terminology used for two critical climate concepts. Scientists and science editors should strive for commonality, referring to the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that would result in a given amount of warming as “carbon dioxide equivalents”, rather than as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide alone (in terms of the resultant warming, 500 parts per million of CO2-equivalent is the same as 450 ppm of CO2 alone). Similarly, global temperatures should always be compared with a common pre-industrial baseline, rather than with any other point in time, say the authors.
Having a ‘common climate language’ for policy negotiators would seem like a worthy extension of this proposition. For a start, it could prevent documents, such as the communiqué from the 2008 G8 summit, appearing substantial when in reality leaders had failed to agree the baseline year from which to make the proposed reductions in greenhouse gases.
Does anyone know of plans to have an agreed climate change lexicon in place ahead of the Copenhagen talks?
Olive Heffernan
Economist Nicholas Stern laid out his new vision for and a safer and more prosperous planet today in London.
Speaking at the launch of his new book ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity’, Lord Stern urged world leaders to see the opportunity for a green recovery from the economic downturn. His hope is that the Group of 20 developed and developing economies meeting in London this Thursday will emphasize the need for a transition to bouyant green economy. “It’s the only option. Low economic growth in a world that has poverty and that is aspirational is unacceptable”, said Stern today at the London School of Economics.
A former World Bank economist, Stern is best known for his landmark report on the Economics of Climate Change, which was published at the behest of the UK government in 2006. The 700-page dossier reframed climate change from being an environmental issue to one of concern to industry and investors alike.
Since then, “emissions have grown faster than we had assumed and the buffering capacity of the planet has lessened", said Stern. "But the pace of technological change has been faster than expected and the level of political commitment is now stronger than it was 2-3 years ago”, he added optimistically.
Still, in his new book Stern has scaled down his recommendation for where atmospheric greenhouse gas levels ought to be stabilized. Whereas his 2006 report suggested an upper limit on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of 550 ppm CO2-equivalent, Stern now says we should hold levels below 500ppm CO2-equivalent [or 450 ppm of CO2 alone]. “We will be at 450ppm CO2* within 6 or 7 years anyhow, but it’s possible to hold levels below 500ppm and to then come down from there”, he said.
Asked whether he was advocating the use of geoengineering to reduce atmospheric concentrations from 500ppm, Stern said it will be part of the solution, but suggested that technologies such as biomass or carbon capture and storage could perhaps be used to sequester the gas rather than “throwing dust or mirrors into the sky”. He also critized efforts to allow new coal fired power stations, such as the one at Kingsnorth, Kent, to proceed without such schemes in place to capture the emissions.
Whether stabilizing below 500ppm in the short term will go far enough to avert dangerous climate change is questionable. Some scientists such as James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, now think that we need to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350ppm to avoid a dangerous level of warming.
But While Stern acknowledged today that 'it's quite possible that Hansen's target is a sensible one for the long term", he is adament that “the first thing is to stop atmospheric concentrations from rising and then to assess the risks. We can’t eliminate the risk [of dangerous climate change], but we can bring down those risks”.
Stern called on world leaders meeting later this week to send out a strong signal on the urgent need to agree a global climate deal in December.
A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (Random House) is out on April 2.
Olive Heffernan
Correction added April 1st: This should refer to 450ppm CO2-equivalent
In the latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, economists Nicholas Stern and Michael Grubb, along with European Commissioner Janez Potočnik, share their views on whether governments will agree a global climate deal at the UN climate change conference in December in Copenhagen. Check out the interactive video available here or read the transcript.
"The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate intervention technology”
Stanford University's Ken Caldeira comments on the news that the research arm of the US defense department has set its sights on geoengineering (h/t Gristmill).
UN accuses the EU of backtracking on Bali agreement
European officials call for developing countries to produce plans for emissions cuts before receiving financial aid; UN climate chief Yvo de Boer says could undermine Copenhagen talks.
UK climate targets not tough enough, say scientists
A report from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says that cutting national emissions 34% by 2020, as advised by the Committee on Climate Change, will not be sufficient to avoid dangerous warming.
Americans prioritize economy over environment
Gallup poll shows majority preferentially support economic growth for first time in 25 years.
Olive Heffernan
The clear message to emerge from the 3-day climate congress that wrapped up yesterday here in Copenhagen is that the prognosis on global warming is worse than anticipated by the IPCC in 2007. I reported the full story over on Nature News yesterday (no* subscription required). Here’s an excerpt:
The latest results made for bleak listening at times. Scientists cautioned that some of the impacts of global warming, such as sea level rise and loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, are happening much sooner and more severely than scientists had estimated just two years ago. "What we are seeing now is that some aspects are worse than expected," says Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a plenary speaker at the congress.
What is also clear from my news story is the growing sense of frustration that the urgency of climate change is failing to permeate. While I imagine the climate community has felt that way for some time, it was palpable at a different level this week, I felt. For one, there seemed to be a lot of finger pointing – at the media for poor reporting, at policy makers and the public for failing to understand, and at scientists for failing to make the implications of their work more policy prescriptive.
I can’t help feeling that’s not going to bring us much closer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the final plenary session of the congress, Danish PM Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that scientists who want a significantly more ambitious global carbon cut target of 80 percent by 2050 must not move the goal posts.
If this sense of frustration can be channelled into very clear communication on what needs to be done and when we need to start, could it increase the chances of an effective deal being reached in Copenhagen?
Olive Heffernan
*Correction: This article is now subscription only
I took part in a session today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the role of the media in communicating climate change. Organised by Max Boykoff at the University of Oxford, the session brought together a diverse panel of journalists and academics who study media trends.
The backdrop to this session was quite interesting. Throughout the 3-day conference, there was a palpable sense of frustration among the scientific community that the media simply hasn’t done an adequate job in reporting climate change, and that it may be partly to blame for lack of public understanding and for inaction of the part of policymakers. This theme emerged in many of the talks on the first day alone.
There were many highlights from today’s session, but I’ll just mention a few. William Freudenberg of UC Santa Barbara said that climate scientists on the whole are being too optimistic about the prognosis for global warming and called for a new era of media coverage to highlight the conflict within the scientific community between what is ‘consensus’ and the reality of a more serious situation.
Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego, famous for her 2004 Science paper on the scientific consensus, said that the scientists needs to rethink their strategy on communicating climate change and asked whether they should collaborate with PR agencies to get their message across (she wasn’t advocating this, but asked whether this or other strategies could be employed to inform discussions on science more effectively).
James Kanter of the International Herald Tribune spoke of the role of the media as watchdog and pointed to a feature he investigated over five months last year on how electricity companies are making billions in windfall profits from the European ETS. RWE, a major German power company, and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe, received an estimated windfall of roughly €5 billion in the first three years of the system, more than any other company in Europe. The feature, which made the front page of the IHT in December, provoked a response from REW, which acknowledged the profits it had made (although said they wouldn’t be pocketed) and could serve as a warning to other cap-and-trade schemes under consideration.
My talk looked at the issue of whether a topic of socially and scientifically complex as climate change can be communicated effectively on blogs. The answer to this, in my view, is an unequivocal yes, for the following reasons. Back in August, Nature hosted the first international science blogging conference, where it was evident that bloggers are increasingly taking on the role of journalists in breaking news and providing genuine investigative reporting. That’s likely to become an emerging trend in the current economic climate, where traditional media outlets (think CNN) are seeing cutbacks in science reporting. Perhaps more importantly, as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate previously pointed out, blogs can provide context to news and explain the significance of new research in a level of detail that can never by achieved by newspapers, which have a limited number of column inches dedicated to science.
Unlike many bloggers, journalists who blog have access to embargoed information, which means they can cover science stories as soon as they break, reaching a wide audience effectively and rapidly. But blogs can also provide a forum for scientists to engage more directly with society. While some argue that scientists (and indeed science journals such as Nature) should channel all discussion of research through formal routes such as ‘letters to the editor’, this will only ever reach a limited number of well-informed readers.
To communicate science to a wider audience, a faster and more accessible route is necessary.
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will head up a new climate and energy research institute at Yale University from this Fall.
The announcement was made by Yale University President Richard C Levin today at the plenary session of the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.
Pachauri will serve at the Yale Institute on a part time basis and will retain his current positions as IPCC chair and director-general of India’s Energy and Resources Institute, TERI.
Further details of the centre are available over on Economic Times.
Olive Heffernan
Over 2000 delegates from 80 nations have gathered this week in Copenhagen to update the global assessment of climate change, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of them.
Over the next few days, the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change will hear from world experts including climatologists, social scientists and economists on how the prognosis for global warming, and its physical and societal impacts, has changed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its last report in 2007. The science in the 2007 report is now effectively 4-5 years out of date, so it’s clearly time for an update, which is why experts are here this week.
The updated assessment will be in the format of a 30-page synthesis document, to be published in June.
It will be peer-reviewed but not IPCC-style; that's because the ultimate aim of the congress is to deliver a hard-hitting message on the urgency of climate change to policymakers and the media ahead of the UN Conference in December, where delegates will again converge on Copenhagen, this time to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
Among the speakers who kicked off proceedings this morning was congress chair and marine scientist Katherine Richardson, who spoke to me ahead of time about why the congress is taking place and what it hopes to deliver. Read the full interview here.
I’ll be speaking in a session on Thursday on communicating climate change (and particularly on the role of blogs) and both I and my estimable colleague, Oliver Morton, will be blogging over the next few days on anything that especially surprises or interests us. For the full programme, see here.
Olive Heffernan
A short while ago, stand-up economist Yoram Bauman reviewed Frank Ackerman’s ‘Can We Afford the Future?: the Economics of a Warming World’, a layman’s guide to one of the most pressing and complex questions of out time, over on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Ackerman objected to the review and I invited him to respond with a letter to the editor. You can find it in the latest issue, but I’ve also copied it here:
To the Editor - Yoram Bauman has written a hostile and dismissive review of my book, Can We Afford the Future?: The Economics of a Warming World (Zed Books, 2009). With my book, he says, "the bumper-sticker culture of cable TV news has finally reached ... the economics of climate change." I allegedly failed to recognize the virtues of mainstream economics and oversimplified the subject "for the masses".Oddly enough, Bauman is best known for performing as a stand-up comedian making fun of mainstream economics. His signature performance offers a flippant 'translation' of ten principles of economics from a leading textbook. How could a stand-up comic dislike bumper stickers and communication with "the masses"? I plead guilty to summarizing a complicated subject in four provocative, non-technical statements suitable for printing on bumper stickers. This was an intentional strategy to combat the 'eyes glazing over' effect that technical economics has on most people, and to lead the reader into substantive discussion of the big issues about the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation.
One noteworthy observation at December’s AGU conference – the latest and largest ever gathering of earth and space scientists – was the attention being given to a threat conceivably worse than carbon dioxide. In numerous talks, during poster sessions and over coffee, scientists were discussing methane – a greenhouse gas with a warming potential 25 times that of CO2.
Researchers have long speculated that climate change will unleash vast stores of the gas from where it lies frozen beneath the sea floor and locked up in the Arctic, triggering rapid warming.
Until recently, however, there has been little cause for concern. But that could all be changing, reports Amanda Leigh Mascarelli in a feature online today (no subscription required). Several observations made in 2007 to 2008 and reported at the AGU suggest that we could be in danger of waking a sleeping giant.
For one, a group of researchers working in the shallow waters of the Siberian Shelf noticed that their methane measurements were usually high compared with previous observations made in the same location. Added to that, they saw large rings of gas — sometimes as wide as 30 centimetres in diameter — trapped in ice, as well as plumes bubbling to the ocean surface over hundreds of square kilometres.
Then a separate group of scientists reported that global atmospheric concentrations of methane had spiked in the same year, following almost a decade of stability. While scientists can’t say whether either of these observations are anomalies or part of a long-term trend, they are certainly paying closer attention to the problem than ever before. “If there’s a ticking bomb in the room, you’d like to know the possibility of it going off,” says geochemist James White of the University of Colorado. “The fact that it’s there at all is unnerving.”
Mascarelli’s feature gives the low-down on the latest science – from the role of methane in past warming events to projections of what might occur in the future – and looks at what experts are doing to avert the problem. Some intriguing approaches abound, from parts of re-wilding Siberia with large animals that literally stomp the permafrost to keep it intact to using natural methane leaks as a power source for remote villages.
But if understanding the methane problem sounds like all work and no play, think again. Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, whose work is featured by Mascarelli, has produced some amazing videos while studying methane bubbling up from lake bottoms in the Arctic. Here her team drills through lake ice, then lights the escaping methane.
Anna Barnett and Olive Heffernan
Image: The average atmospheric concentration of methane shot up suddenly in 2007, having remained stable for a decade. Data shown are from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, courtesy of Matt Rigby.
The loss of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which last week ended up in the ocean rather than in orbit, is a hard blow not only to the team who devoted much of the last decade to getting it off the ground but to scientific – and especially climate - research.
There is quite literally of sense of grief among the climate research community, evident in the story by Jeff Tollefson and Geoff Brumfiel over on Nature News. My colleague Anna Barnett interviewed David Crisp, OCO Principal Investigator, ahead of the launch. His excitement about the mission was palpable as he spoke of how the NASA satellite would measure atmospheric carbon dioxide at a resolution 3 times higher than any previous space measurement of a trace gas.
The Japanese space agency successfully launched their Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) in January and undoubtedly this will provide some of the data that OCO would have collected. But OCO would have provided an unprecedented spatial resolution. Taking half a million carbon dioxide measurements per day, the satellite would have located specific sources of the greenhouse gas, differentiating cities and freeways from adjacent forested areas.
Not only is this a huge loss for exploratory science, the timing of the incident is especially unfortunate. With emissions rising and a global climate deal in the balance, pinpointing the origin and fate of carbon dioxide has never been more urgent — a task that the US$280-million mission would have accomplished skillfully.
So what’s next for NASA? Personally, I think the agency should make every effort towards a rapid re-launch, as I’ve detailed in my latest editorial. Getting an OCO replacement into orbit within the next few years would offer at least a brief period of data verification with GOSAT – one advantage of having two CO2 trackers in space simultaneously – and would have the added advantage of monitoring carbon heavyweights from space during the early stages of a post-2012 global climate deal.
NASA’s long-awaited carbon dioxide detector, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), crashed into the ocean near Antarctica today following a launch failure.
The $280 million mission would have provided much needed information on the origin and fate of carbon dioxide emissions. The instruments aboard the satellite were designed to measure carbon dioxide at a precision higher than any current space-based measurements of a trace gas, and would have helped scientists to identify sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas. Although the project was intended as a science mission, its results would also have been relevant to policymakers.
The loss of OCO marks a huge setback for the climate science community, and especially for the scientists who have worked so hard to get the satellite off the ground. Geoff Brumfiel reports over on Nature News (subscription):
It's a major setback," says Paul Palmer, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who is part of the OCO science team. It will be particularly devastating for the tight-knit group of scientists and engineers who have devoted much of the past decade to the project. "These guys have sweated OCO for seven or eight years," he says.
The data from OCO would also have complemented those being collected by another satellite launched in January. The Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), a project of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, will now have to verify its measurements of methane, water vapour and carbon dioxide against those taken from ground-based stations.
Olive Heffernan
"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California."
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu warns of the threat posed to vineyards and farms from warming.
"The phase-out law will be abolished. The ban in the nuclear technology law on new construction will also be abolished."
Citing concerns about climate change and energy dependence on Norway and other suppliers, the Swedish government plans to overturn a nearly 30-year-old moratorium on new nuclear power plants.
"What's important is the UK's impact on global warming and that includes other issues like aviation and consumption."
Green Alliance director Stephen Hale, criticizing the government for not counting imports, shipping and aviation in figures that show greenhouse gas emissions falling 1.7% in 2007.
"I have relearned a basic lesson re interviews – which will have to be fewer and more guarded."
Climate scientist James Hansen becomes wary of the media, following the upset over his refusal to back protesters opposing the expansion at Heathrow airport.
Among the many proposed techno-fixes for climate change, ‘air capture’ seems like one of simplest solutions – what could be more straightforward than sucking greenhouse gases out of air and storing them somewhere else?
But various proposals for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere have largely been sidelined from serious discussions on climate control. Noteworthy scientists and engineers – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – have regarded the technology as a non-starter owing to the large amounts of energy involved. After all, energy costs money and unless we find ourselves in ‘climate crisis’ mode, solutions to climate change will be considered on economic grounds as well as on efficacy.
But a new study by Roger Pielke, Jr. (of the University of Colorado and Prometheus blog) shows that air capture could be a cost-competitive mitigation option. His analysis, soon to be published in Environmental Science and Policy [uncorrected proofs available from Pielke], compares the average costs of air capture over the 21st century to other mitigation options (namely international greenhouse gas regulation under the UN framework convention) assuming that technologies available today are used to fully offset net human emissions of carbon dioxide. He runs the analysis for 3 different (and citable) estimates of the cost of air capture – $500, $360 and $100 per ton of carbon. The IPCC estimate falls near the middle of this range.
For the two upper values, the cost of air capture would be comparable to the estimated cost of stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide at 450 ppm or 550 ppm given by Nick Stern in 2007 and by the IPCC in its last report. But if the costs of air capture decrease to $100 per ton of carbon, then it would prove much more cost-effective than stabilizing at 450 ppm or 550 ppm. We must therefore give air capture the same attention as other approaches to mitigation, argues Pielke, Jr.
“If someone’s basement floods and they lose their job on the same day, it is certainly an unlucky day. But they would not wait until they found a new job before pumping the basement and fixing the leak.”
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Ditmas channels Joe the Plumber in an open letter to Obama on climate policy (h/t Green Inc.), the day before the EU unveiled its pre-Copenhagen proposal.
"Just days after taking office, US President Barack Obama has appointed a climate envoy and cleared the way for new rules to force automakers to produce cleaner cars.”
UNEP on Obama’s first week, which put a California vehicle emissions law blocked by Bush back up for review.
“It is foolhardy to demonise all biofuels as unsustainable and environmentally damaging when some, which are already on the market, can play an important role, right now, in helping us to tackle climate change.”
Responding to the UK’s new target of using 3.25% biofuel for vehicles in 2009-2010 - a bit more than the 3% a recent government review recommended - Jeremy Woods at the Royal Society defends plant-derived power.
Global renewables agency launched as support falters
The US and UK decline to sign onto the International Renewable Energy Agency. London is thought to be concerned that the new body will undermine the International Energy Agency.
Among the many technologies contending for a role in the future energy mix, thermoelectricity is one area where researchers have hoped that a big breakthrough in technology could reap equally large benefits in improving energy efficiency.
Up until this point thermoelectric technologies, which use materials to draw electricity from heat, haven’t been widely applied to electricity generation owing to their high cost and inefficiency. But changing the materials and their properties could — in theory at least — make a wide range of products more energy-efficient at a lower cost.
Last year the field made some important gains and seemed to be at a high point in terms of both the science and business potential. Early in the year, a MIT spin-off focused on energy efficient thermoelectric products won seed funding from venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Then in July researchers reported in Science [subscription] that adding trace amounts of thallium to lead telluride, a thermoelectric material used to produce electricity onboard deep space probes, could double its performance.
“Obama’s goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.”
IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri criticizes the new president’s policy at a Worldwatch event before Obama's inauguration.
U.S. carbon emissions during Bush era 20% greater than official estimates.
According to Brian Angliss over on Scholars and Rogues, US emissions are 20% above reported values owing to the failure of official estimates to account for greenhouse gas emissions generated by other nations as a result of the US outsourcing goods and services (h/t Climate Progress).
A dark cloud settles over a once sunny industry.
The solar-energy industry, which until recently had been booming, starts to feel the pinch of recession.
“No proposed or final regulation should be sent to the Office of Federal Register for publication unless and until it has been reviewed and approved by a department or agency head appointed or designated by the President."
On Barack Obama's first day as US president, a memo to federal agencies from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel freezes all of the Bush administration's new and pending 'midnight regulations'.
The research below, which I blogged from the AGU conference in December, is published today in Nature [subscription].
New research presented at the AGU today suggests that the entire Antarctic continent may have warmed significantly over the past 50 years. The study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle and soon to be published in Nature, calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century. [Update: To be more specific here, incomplete records previously suggested that the interior was cooling].
Steig and colleagues combined satellite thermal infra-red collected over 25 years with weather station data for the region. Although the satellite data span a shorter time period and are accurate only for blue sky days i.e. when there is no cloud cover, they provide high spatial coverage of the region, which cannot be obtained from discrete ground measurements. In contrast, the weather station data provide complete temporal resolution over the past half-century.
Using an iterative process to analyse the data, they found warming over the entire Antarctic continent for the period 1957-2006. Restricting their analysis to 1969 to 2000, a period for which other studies have found a net cooling trend, Steig’s study found slight cooling in east Antarctica, but net warming over west Antarctica.
As well as uncovering evidence of warming over a wider region than previous studies have shown, the researchers found that warming occurred throughout all of the year and was greatest in winter and spring. In contrast, cooling over east Antarctica was restricted to autumn.
We were referring to a Google search that may involve several attempts to find the object being sought and that may last for several minutes.
The Times clarifies their statement that a Google search produces 7 grams of carbon dioxide - after it turned out to be based on a study that made no mention of Google.
It's inconceivable you can hold those two things in your mind at the same time: [that] you're really going flat out for rapid decarbonisation and perfectly reconciled to expansion of aviation.
Jonathan Porritt comments on the UK government’s decision to give the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow. The verdict has caused some to speculate that the government was really just having a laugh when it comitted to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% of 1990 levels last autumn.
One tell-tale symptom of anti-science syndrome is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.
Joe Romm gives his take on the climate skeptic blog ‘Watts Up With That?’, which the public voted as Best Science Blog of 2008, ahead of RealClimate, run by real climate scientists.
Finally, in response to popular demand, we comment on the likelihood of a near-term global temperature record.
NASA's annual summary of temperature trends says 2009 or 2010 will likely be the warmest recorded year, sticking by last year's assertion that an El Niño is on the way.
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 " »
More than two years have passed since Nick Stern’s report on the economics of climate change was published, yet the question of how to weigh the costs against the benefits of acting on climate change – and whether such an approach in even ethical – is still being hotly debated.
Stern's adherents, on the one hand, support the stance of the former World Bank economist who argues that taking strong, early action on climate change outweighs the costs of doing nothing, or of delaying action. On the other hand, some of Stern’s detractors – most notably ‘skeptical environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg - argue that although climate change is happening, major reductions in carbon emissions are simply not worth the money. (Others argues that Stern was right for the wrong reasons, but I won't go into that here).
The latest to weigh on the issue is Frank Ackerman, a research economist at Tufts University in Massachusetts, whose new book Can We Afford the Future?: the Economics of a Warming World is reviewed by Yoram Bauman over on Nature Reports Climate Change. Bauman teaches at the University of Washington, but he is perhaps better known for adding levity to such impenetrable topics as climate economics with his stand-up comedy routines.
Bauman picks out some highlights of Ackerman's analysis, namely his policy prescription for massive government-funded clean-energy R&D and his coverage of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman's work on improbable, but not impossible, catastrophic climate change.
Ultimately though Bauman concludes that Ackerman is the perfect odd couple match for Lomborg.
Continue reading "Ackerman: Odd-couple match for Lomborg? " »
The loss of ice from Greenland ranks as one of the most troubling, and poorly understood, aspects of climate change. Melting of the colossal ice sheet, which is already undoubtedly underway, has the capacity to raise global sea levels by an astounding 7 meters.
Not only is Greenland losing mass from direct surface melting, its outlet glaciers (those that terminate in the sea) are spewing large icebergs directly into the ocean at an increasingly alarming speed as they retreat. Many have worried that these changes are a sign of what’s in store. But a new study published this week in Nature Geoscience [subscription] suggests that the recent rapid retreat of many of Greenland’s outlet glaciers will be short-lived.
A team led by Andreas Vieli at Durham University, UK, used a computer model to reconstruct the recent behaviour of the Helheim Glacier, one of Greenland’s largest outlet glaciers. Helheim retreated some 7 kilometers between 2002 and 2005, during which time it discharged considerable volumes of ice into the ocean.
Vieli’s team looked at whether the recent changes observed in the Helheim Glacier could be explained by one of two hypotheses; the first was that increased surface meltwater reaching the base of the glacier was speeding its slide toward the sea. The second potential explanation was that changing conditions in the area where the glacier meets the sea would trigger a domino effect on the glacier itself, leading to even faster ice flow and thinning upstream.
Their model showed that only the second hypothesis could explain past changes in the Helheim Glacier. Though they only analysed changes in this one outlet glacier, the authors say it is representative of many outlet glaciers south of 70°N that have recently thinned and rapidly released ice to the ocean.
Continue reading "Rapid retreat of Greenland's outlet glaciers may be temporary " »
A Chinese expedition is expected to start work this week on a new Antarctic base that will faciliate novel research in climate science as well as in other fields, reports Jane Qiu over on Nature News [subscription].
The Kunlun base will be located at Dome Argus, or 'Dome A', some 4,093 metres above sea level. It will be China's third Antarctic research facility and is being built as a legacy of International Polar Year, a major two-year scientific programme that comes to an end in March.
According to radar studies of the region, Dome A sits atop ice over 3,000 metres thick. Scientists hope that extracting ice cores of that depth at this particular site could extend the record of past climate changes back to 1.5 million years. Qiu writes:
A key focus of research is finding sites where ice cores stretching back further in time than any others could be drilled. A core obtained at a site known as Dome C — about 1,000 kilometres from Dome A (see map) — reached 3,200 metres deep and helped to reconstruct past climate going back 800,000 years. Many believe that Dome A promises older ice because it is higher and has less snow, meaning that researchers can get more years of climate records in a given thickness of ice.
Work on the station is expected to be completed by January 28, before temperatures drop tobelow –50 °C. At that stage it will have room for 25 people, with 11 sleeping units. I'm guessing they use that rotational bed-sharing system scientists sometimes use at sea?
Olive Heffernan
Image:P. Huybrechts, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
In the latest issue of Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a round-up by Amanda Leigh Mascarelli of some of the major breakthroughs in climate science in 2008. This is a just a pick of the top five; there are of course others we could have mentioned. Also listed are those issues where large gaps remain in our knowledge, such as how fast Greenland is melting, or on which agreement has yet to be reached, such as where to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
All illustrated with a cartoon by Marc Roberts:
Please share others with us in the comments.
US President-elect Barack Obama has selected two key advocates for action on climate change to serve in his administration.
The appointments of physicist John Holdren of Harvard University as White House science advisor and marine biologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University as the first female head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are expected to be announced tomorrow, according to Juliet Eilperin and Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post.
Following from the appointment last week of Steven Chu of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as Energy Secretary, the selections bring high hopes for strong national action on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
Over on Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has the lowdown on the appointees, both of whom have received MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants.
Lubchenco has been a leading voice on marine conservation issues in recent decades. Holdren has been consistent in calling for tough action on climate change but has had a bugbear with the term itself, which he believes is a misnomer. Instead he would rather ‘global climate disruption’; I wonder if we’ll hear more of that in the future?
Olive Heffernan
As speculation grows that agreeing a global deal on climate change may extend well beyond the 2009 deadline, the risk of overshooting the EU’s target to limit the increase in global temperature to 2°C over pre-industrial levels looks increasingly likely.
The target is based on scientific evidence that below a 2°C increase, some of the worst impacts of climate change would be avoided. In its fourth assessment report, the IPCC calculated that limiting warming to that extent would mean stabilizing atmospheric concentrations at roughly 450 ppm CO2-equivalents.
But it’s clear at this year’s AGU that much uncertainty, and disagreement, remains on whether 2°C is an appropriate target and on the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations that equate to a given amount of warming.
Speaking here yesterday, James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, called for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to be restricted to 350ppm. Hansen also recently advised the UK government’s Environmental Audit Committee that the 2°C target should be revised to a 1°C increase above pre-industrial levels. Meanwhile, many of the scientists presenting work here are wrangling with whether stabilizing at 450ppm – or higher – is economically and technologically feasible.
The debate on where to stabilize is largely due to what Stanford’s Stephen Schneider dubs ‘double-barrelled uncertainty’ a term that encompasses the unknown factor in how far we can reduce emissions and in how the climate system will respond to any reductions we make.
The latter uncertainty – that inherent in the system – is measured in terms of climate sensitivity i.e. how much warming would occur if atmospheric GHG concentrations were doubled. This is currently estimated at 2-4.5°C, but Schneider said here on Tuesday that it’s more important for society to know the uncertainty around this range i.e. the chance that we will see a much larger degree of warming than anticipated for various atmospheric concentrations.
Given the fact that a massive reduction in emissions in the coming decades it is very unlikely, he says, and the fact that we could overshoot our target anyway, we need to take a serious look at the consequences. Schneider suggests that the IPCC should take it on board to evaluate climate scenarios for overshooting to 600 ppm and then subsequently reducing atmospheric concentrations to say 500ppm or 450ppm.
Continue reading "AGU 2008: Uncertainty and overshooting 2°C" »
Whether peak oil is good news for the climate ultimately depends on what replaces oil as our staple fuel source. It will be unsurprising to most that replacing dwindling oil reserves with coal would do little to solve the climate problem, but how much coal remains is also highly uncertain, according to Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech, who spoke to the press at the AGU this morning.
Andy Dessler of Texas A&M touched on this in a guest commentary posted here last month. In short, Dessler called for a global IPCC-like assessment of our fossil fuel reserves, pointing to a new analysis by Rutledge that shows the world’s available coal reserves are far lower than traditional estimates would suggest. If Rutledge’s estimates are correct, combustion of all remaining conventional oil, gas, and coal reserves would produce an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of approximately 470 ppmv in 2100, near the stabilization target that many climatologists argue we must achieve to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
While Rutledge’s estimates suggest that the worst-case scenarios of the IPCC may be unachievable, Ken Caldeira of Washington’s Carnegie Institute had a more sobering message. Caldeira and colleagues used a climate and carbon cycle model to look at how running out of oil could affect future climate scenarios. Their analysis showed that if we replaced oil with liquefied coal fuel promptly, we would reach 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures in 2042 instead of 2045. Replacing oil with renewables, however, would delay reaching 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures by 11 years. This is simply because per coal emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil; add to that the energy costs associated with conversion of coal to liquid fuels, a likely option if we run out of oil.
I hadn’t anticipated quite so much rain during the AGU’s Fall conference in San Francisco, but apparently this exact week is, on average, the city’s wettest of the year. Or so I heard at today’s session on how the region is likely to be impacted by climate change.
California has been long recognized as a leader on climate policy, both on the home front and even internationally. It passed its first climate bill twenty years ago and just last week, the state adopted the nation's most sweeping climate action plan to date, pledging to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2020.
A close look at how the region is expected to fare under various warming scenarios makes its leadership in this arena look a lot like common sense. While temperatures in California are expected to increase in line with global averages, more worrying for the state is the projected water shortages, according to Dan Cayan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, San Diego, who spoke at AGU today. California faces the possibility of a 10% decrease in precipitation over the course of the century and could concurrently lose half of its late spring snowmelt. That's bad news for a region that is already heavily reliant on external water sources.
Sea-level rise will also be part of the equation, especially for the numerous coastal properties with little protection, said Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland, California –based Pacific Institute. Should those in the interior think they’re better off, though, climate models show that inland regions will warm more rapidly than the coast and will likely be more populated in the future owing to lack of available living space on the coast.
This evening at AGU there was a special screening of Crude, a film about our love affair with petroleum– oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
The documentary won Richard Smith of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this year’s AGU Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, a prestigious prize for outstanding reporting that makes geophysical science accessible and interesting to the general public. In Crude, Smith explores the geological formation of oil, its discovery and ascendancy in society and the potentially catastrophic consequences of our absolute dependence on it. Ironically, the very conditions under which oil was originally formed – a greenhouse world with elevated CO2 levels – are exactly those that its consumption could return us to.
Smith does an excellent job of conveying how oil, formed from the compressed remains of tiny plants and animals, could cause the demise of the most sophisticated species to have ever lived. And although we may be running out of the stuff, its pervasiveness in society means that weaning ourselves off oil will be no mean feat. There are no clear estimates of exactly how much oil is left in the ground, but the overwhelming message in Crude is that there are easily enough fossil fuel reserves to radically alter our climate should we use them all.
Overall, well worth a watch…
Olive Heffernan
Over the past 24 hours, some 15,000 earth scientists descended on San Francisco for the annual Fall conference of the American Geophysical Union. Delegates were a dead give away at the airport and on the BART yesterday with their large poster tubes in tow. It’s my first AGU and it could be the jet lag, but I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed by the sheer size and number of parallel sessions; at any given time I could be at one of at least four climate-related talks and invariably find myself wondering why the session next door is receiving louder applause.
A number of talks today focused on the need for climate science to become less curiosity driven and more specific to the needs of stakeholders such as local authorities and natural resource managers.
This is a topic that’s been getting a lot of attention recently. Earlier this year, for example, scientists called for a billion dollar investment in climate computing facilities to enable regional scale climate predictions on decadal time scales. At a press conference this morning, scientists including Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona and Jack Fellows of UCAR highlighted the importance of partnerships between universities and decision makers in enabling states and regions to plan for climate change.
I'll be heading to the 2008 AGU Fall meeting this weekend.
Join me here next week for daily climate coverage from the largest annual earth science event, taking place this year in San Francisco from December 15-19.
The latest UN negotiations on a global climate deal taking place in Poznan, Poland are failing to make fast enough progress to secure a treaty by next December in Copenhagen, according to various media reports.
Reuters reported yesterday that even the eternally buoyant UN climate chief Yvo de Boer believes that it will only be possible to nail "the key political issues" by this deadline. But he still maintains that an overarching treaty must be signed with specific greenhouse gas reduction targets for developed nations, writes Jeff Tollefson on In the Field.
Over on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, says it’s time to press the panic button. He points out that the UN negotiations are acting as though the 2007 IPCC report still reflects the latest science, when in fact we’ve had three years of peer-reviewed research since – and a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change.
His advice for Senator John Kerry, who is reportedly acting as incoming US President Barack Obama’s ‘eyes and ears’ in Poznan:
Suggest on behalf of the US Senate that the IPCC should be reconvened as early as possible in 2009 to undertake an emergency review of all the science that has emerged since 2005. It should be asked to report to the UN by the end of June, giving just enough time to inform the debate about appropriate policy responses before the Copenhagen conference in November.
In the meantime, Obama has met with Al Gore to discuss the state of the climate and has promised to treat climate change as a matter of urgency and national security.
Olive Heffernan
The latest round of UN climate talks kicked off in Poznan, Poland yesterday. Jeff Tollefson has a nice round-up over on The Great Beyond of how the first day of the conference went down - unsurprisingly, with world leaders calling for immediate action. [Update: All Poznan-related posts from Jeff T, who will be at the talks next week, can be found here].
As I mentioned here last week, it’s generally accepted that the current negotiations will not address the really crucial issues of a post-Kyoto climate deal, namely how far to reduce emissions and how to do so equitably. So much as for fighting the urge to postpone everything until Copenhagen.
But what can be expected to emerge from Poznan is greater clarity on how various players will position themselves for next year's endgame, a point that I elaborate on in my latest editorial on Nature Reports Climate Change.
In what could be good news for the Earth’s ability to mitigate warming, scientists have reported that deep convection has resumed in the North Atlantic after more than a decade of little activity.
Also known as overturning, deep convection transports cold water to depths of more than 1000m, bringing carbon dioxide with it and keeping the greenhouse gas out the atmosphere for centuries. It's also partly reponsible for maintaining the global climate system, as we know it - at high latitudes, deep convection forms a mass of cold water that drives the Atlantic oceanic conveyor belt and carries warm water northwards.
In the past decade, however, the process of deep convection has been sluggish, causing some to speculate that warming of surface waters due to climate change is already taking its toll on ocean circulation.
Its recent return has now been independently reported by two groups of scientists; the first team, led by Kjetil Våge of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, publish their data in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience. Igor Yashayaev and John Loder of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, Canada, have a forthcoming paper in Geophysical Research Letters.
Next Wednesday, Nature is co-hosting a conference with Imperial College London on the Elucian Islands archipelago in Second Life on carbon capture and storage. Details here. Attendance is free – you’ll just have to direct your avatar accordingly….
It’s well accepted that the upcoming climate talks in Poznan will not be the time or place for agreeing the architecture of a new deal on climate change. An idea that is less well received, but one that is gaining traction, is that the same could be true of the negotiations in Copenhagen a year from now.
While the election of Barack Obama as US president brings renewed energy and hope to the UN process, President Bush will be holding court when environment ministers from some 192 nations meet next week in Poznan. And with Harlan Watson in place as the US chief climate negotiator, any serious shifts in the US position will be on hold until January. In addition, some are speculating that even the modest ambitions of the talks — to settle how to finance emissions cuts and aid adaptation in developing countries — are likely to be eclipsed by the world's financial woes.
But of far graver concern are the growing reports that the US won’t be ready to sign a global deal on climate change in Copenhagen either, given the time needed to enact domestic climate legislation.
As far back as October, Elliot Diringer, Director of International Strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, wrote the following in an op-ed for the Transatlantic Climate Policy Group:
Any near-term action may come in the form of energy legislation that, while helping to reduce U.S. emissions, will not achieve the levels of reduction envisioned under a cap-and-trade scenario. Enactment of a comprehensive climate package, including cap-and-trade, is unlikely in 2009. It may come at the earliest in 2010.The world can ill afford a replay of Kyoto, with Europe demanding more than can be delivered and the United States ultimately walking away. We need realism, not brinksmanship. Instead of a full and final deal in Copenhagen, we must aim for what is in fact feasible, and set expectations now so that it is received as a success. The risks and consequences of failure are otherwise far too great.
Just last week Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, reflected this sentiment, saying that the financial crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a federal cap-and-trade system would likely preclude action in 2009.
The world’s first climate collective intelligence experiment is looking for participants.
The aim is to develop a comprehensive, distilled, visual map of the issues, evidence, arguments and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, that will be available for all to explore and enrich across the web, writes event organiser Dr Simon J. Buckingham Shum over on Nature Network.
The event kicks off in January and will culminate in a conference in April. Now in its pre-launch phase, the organisers are trying to bring together teams of scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers to work with the tool developers on specific aspects of the complex set of issues around climate change.
So, if you are a scientist, industrialist, campaigner, policy maker, tool maker — or someone with other ideas and resources to contribute — and are interested in participating, check out the site here.
Olive Heffernan
Scientists have reported the first direct evidence of a link between flooding underneath the Antarctic ice sheet and the rate at which glaciers are discharged into the sea. The study, which was published online on Nature Geoscience yesterday [subscription], has important implications for understanding how ice released into the ocean from the Greenland and Antarctic land masses could raise sea level.
Led by Leigh Stearns of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, the trio of researchers found that ice on the Byrd Glacier in East Antarctica accelerated just as there was a massive release of water from lakes beneath the ice.
Over the past 20 years, researchers have discovered more than 150 lakes beneath the Antarctic ice pack, the largest of which (Lake Vostok) is equal in size to Lake Ontario in Canada.
And more than a year ago, researchers reported that these subglacial lakes could actually lubricate the flow of ice off the continent and into the ocean, as I reported over on Nature News at the time.
Continue reading "Under-ice floods speed glaciers towards the sea " »
Following Obama’s landslide victory in the US presidential elections last night, pundits are already speculating on how he will deal with the formidable challenges in his in-tray, not least of which will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the economy into clean-energy mode.
The news that Obama will be the 44th President of the US has been met with jubilation by environmentalists (as reported here and here), who are hopeful that the new administration will come good on promises to protect the planet.
Over on the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog, James Kanter reports that hopes have soared in Europe toward global cooperation on climate change following Obama’s appointment as President-elect. Earlier today, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, welcomed a new start for transatlantic relations on issues including climate change and invited Mr. Obama to address the European Parliament next spring. That would be the first time a U.S. president has spoken at the European Parliament since Ronald Reagan’s address in Strasbourg in 1985, writes Kanter.
Back on the home front, corporate carbon giants are less happy about the potential impacts of an Obama administration. CNNmoney says that companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp are concerned that policies such as windfall profits tax and market intervention will target the fossil fuel industry unfairly. Some southern utility companies, such as Duke Energy Corp have lobbied against a federal renewable portfolio standard, though some encourage state mandates, writes Ian Talley.
Continue reading "Obama victory brings new hope for climate policy, dark days for fossil fuels " »
The third and final debate in the US Presidential elections took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York last night. Moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS news, it took as its theme domestic policy.
As pointed out over on Gristmill, the debate yielded nothing new from either candidate on climate and energy issues, though it did serve to highlight the differences in the candidates’ positions as well those topics where they differ from their party positions.
John McCain set himself aside from the GOP is taking credit for "bringing climate change to the floor of the Senate for the first time", while Barack Obama noted that his support for clean coal technology “doesn't make me popular with environmentalists."
The discussion on climate and energy focused almost exclusively on energy independence, and on the timescale to eliminating foreign oil imports. Here’s the transcript of that part of the debate (taken from CNN politics):
Continue reading "Focus on energy independence in final debate " »
Now that remarkable headway has been made into understanding the physical science of climate change, there’s a feeling among climate experts – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and among funding agencies of the need to shift the focus of climate research from identifying the cause to assessing the impacts, whether hurricanes, oceanic dead zones or forest fires.
A case in point is the new study just launched by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the US to examine how climate change will influence hurricane activity in the coming decades.
In an excellent news feature in Science magazine, Eli Kintisch takes up the issue by looking at how the $1.8 billion available for the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is likely to be reoriented towards climate impacts research under a new administration.
But evaluating climate impacts will require more than a shift in CCSP’s vision. As Kintisch points out, the research budget available to CCSP has declined from $1.9 billion in 1994, whereas climate research advocates estimate approximately $4.5 billion will be needed by 2014 to sustain the needs of both academic and federal climate scientists. The widening gap between escalating costs and narrowing research budgets is placing a strain on basic earth monitoring and means that fewer scientists are tackling increasingly complex issues, such as the impacts of aerosols, writes Kintisch.
For anyone interested in the state of the earth’s climate, the most recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are essential - if not exactly bedtime - reading (I prefer a bit of Proust myself).
Fair enough, the panel’s synthesis report collapsed the three prior encyclopaedic volumes into a summary of what one really needs to know about climate change, its impacts and what we could/ought to do about it, but it’s still not the most accessible synopsis I’ve seen.
Now this problem has been solved with a diminutive and accessible translation in the form of Mike Mann and Lee Kump’s Dire Predictions, reviewed here for us by Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Gulledge, who briefs decision-makers in various sectors on the science and projected impacts of climate change, applauds the fact that he no longer has to consider whether to lug around three books the size of the Los Angeles telephone directory, and can instead use this “lavishly illustrated volume”, which he says is “little more than a centimetre thick and fits neatly in the outer pocket of my backpack”.
With climate change as environmental problem number one, the nuclear industry has proclaimed itself as part of the solution and is starting to enjoy a reputation as a green power provider after decades of bad press.
As a result, political support for nuclear energy is reaching at all time high – the US government is offering the nuclear industry $18.5 billion in loan guarantees and billions more in production tax credits and both US presidential candidates have voiced their support for nuclear power as a means of meeting climate goals. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain is bracing itself for a revival of the nuclear industry now that EDF and British Energy have agreed a deal whereby France will help the UK develop a new generation of nuclear power stations.
But as the ‘nuclear renaissance’ comes to fruition, many are starting to question whether nuclear energy is a feasible part of the solution to global warming.
Several studies have queried the low-carbon credentials of the nuclear industry, an issue that Kurt Kleiner explores over on Nature Reports Climate Change. While it's understood that an operating nuclear power plant has near-zero carbon emissions, it's the other steps involved in the provision of nuclear energy that can increase its carbon footprint.
Critics claim that other technologies would reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions more drastically, and more cost effectively, but the nuclear industry and many independent analysts respond that the numbers show otherwise, writes Kleiner.
"The fact is, there's no such thing as a carbon-free lunch for any energy source", says Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst for Greenpeace in Washington DC. But "for every dollar you spend on nuclear, you could have saved five or six times as much carbon with efficiency, or wind farms", concludes Benjamin Sovacool, author of a recent study in Energy Policy on the lifetime emissions of nuclear power plants.
And as Oliver Morton pointed out here last week, even if nuclear does the job of reducing emissions from the generating sector, if the rest of the economy keeps growing and burning fossil fuels in cars and heating systems and factories, the overall reduction of emissions will be pitiful.
Continue reading "Nuclear energy: falling out of favour? " »
For some time, the received wisdom has been that a post-Bush administration will herald a new era in which the world can move boldly forward on climate change. But the present political - and financial - climate is calling that wisdom into question, as I've written in my latest editorial, and below.
Whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain wins the White House next month, the elected president will face a daunting list of challenges in making climate change a priority both on the home front and internationally. Yet there are several reasons to believe that reducing greenhouse gases may not be given the high priority it deserves.
Firstly, while both candidates made climate change a signature issue early on in their campaigns, McCain's choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee weakens the Republican message. Having publicly questioned the contribution of human activity to climate change and championed aggressive offshore drilling, Palin is positioning herself to the right of the existing administration on the issue, casting doubts on whether a McCain–Palin administration would carve out a new direction for the Republicans.
Secondly, and arguably of graver concern, is the escalating financial crisis, which is reverberating worldwide and, which teamed with rocketing fuel prices and insecure energy supplies, could push rising emissions far down the political agenda regardless of who is in office.
Indeed, both presidential candidates have already had to pull back from positions held early on in the election. As oil prices soared to over $140 a barrel earlier this year, McCain and Obama were forced to rethink their opposition to offshore oil drilling, though Obama has done so a lot more cautiously than his opponent.
I wrote here yesterday that ‘I don’t think that anyone knows for sure how close we are to reaching tipping points in the climate system’. As it so happens, a pair of articles published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week illustrates this point nicely.
The first is a Perspective by atmospheric scientist V Ramanathan and postdoctoral researcher Yan Feng from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who argue that the Earth is now committed to a 2.4°C rise in temperature above pre-industrial levels.
Anything above a 2°C increase is generally considered to be ‘dangerous’ climate change and would likely trigger several of the Earth’s tipping points, such as the complete loss of Arctic summer sea ice and melting of the Greenland ice sheet. And according to the IPCC, a rise in global temperature by 1-3°C will commit the planet to widespread loss of biodiversity, widespread deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and a major reduction of area and volume of Hindu-Kush-Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for most major river systems of Asia.
The authors argue that for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to remain constant at 2005 levels for the rest of the century, aggressive emissions reductions would be required – yet emissions are rising.
Currently, the warming effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is being masked by the cooling effect of other air pollutants – such as smoke from cooking and agricultural waste burning – that create a dimming effect at the Earth’s surface.
Assuming policies to reduce these air pollutants are successful, the full warming potential of greenhouse gases will soon be realized. So as air pollution measures become effective (and much headway is being made here), the need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions becomes even more urgent, say Ramanathan and Feng.
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
Last week NASA climatologist Jim Hansen came to London to testify on behalf of activists who defaced the Kingnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which we recently blogged about here on Climate Feedback. Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen in a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered. You can read the full story over on Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
As residents of New Orleans prepare to return home and breathe a sigh of relief that Hurricane Gustav was less damaging than feared, new research published today in Nature [subscription] suggests that the strongest tropical cyclones will pick up speed in the coming decades.
Weighing in on the long-running and at times very stormy debate over whether and how warmer seas will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes is a team led by climatologist James Elsner of Florida State University.
Using a 25-year archive of satellite data, Elsner and colleagues derive wind speeds for tropical cyclones over the globe. They find that the maximum wind speeds reached by the strongest tropical cyclones increased from 1981-2006 in most ocean basins, with the greatest changes in the North Atlantic and Northern Indian Oceans.
There was no trend in the intensity of cyclones occuring over the South Pacific, however, and the upward trend observed over a couple of ocean regions was not statistically significant. The researchers also found no increase in either the frequency or average intensity of tropical cyclones over the globe.
The approach taken by Elsner and colleagues – looking at whether the most severe cyclones will hit a higher speed limit during their lifetime – is both novel and socially relevant, simply because the most severe storms do the most damage if they make landfall. Once tropical cyclones reach speeds of over 74mph, they are officially classified as hurricanes.
The real bone of contention within the scientific community has been whether hurricanes will become more intense and more frequent as a result of human-induced climate change. Elsner and colleagues steer well clear of linking the trend to global warming though - they can’t attribute cause as their study doesn’t investigate other factors such as cyclone origin and duration, proximity to land, El Niño conditions and solar activity.
Continue reading "As Gustav subsides, new study says strongest cyclones will pick up speed" »
This week on Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a news feature on a topic that has been considered something of a conservation taboo: assisted migration – in other words manually relocating species that are under threat of extinction from climate change.
There’s been a spate of coverage on assisted migration the last year, but as Emma Marris reports, experts are now starting to give serious consideration to how it might work in reality.
Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from August 1 to 3 ahead of this year’s Ecological Society of America was a group of scientists, lawyers, land managers, economists and ethicists, some of whom feel that relocating species would most likely be a disaster. But it looks like even those opposed to the idea are concerned enough to consider it an option.
Ok, so no-one is really suggesting we move polar bears to the Antarctic (I just liked the cartoon)! More likely is shifting the quino checkerspot butterfly several hundred kilometers north.
But with climate change impacting biological systems throughout the globe, the reality is that many species may have to adapt to climate change in situ or say sayonara as part of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction. And for those that could up and leave to a better place if they were not hemmed in by human barriers, giving them a helping hand could make all the difference.
But as Emma details in her news feature, proposals to relocate species are likely to meet some significant barriers - and not just of the physical kind.
Continue reading "It’s conservation – but not as we know it " »
Carbon’s colourful rise to infamy has been something of an underreported story, at least until now. Swamped by innumerable accounts of its current status as public enemy number one, it’s easy to forget that this element has a rather glorious past and present.
Former Time magazine reporter Eric Roston chronicles the story of carbon and its significance in the wider universe in his first book ‘The Age of Carbon’, which Mark Lynas reviews over on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Lynas, who has just recently been awarded the 2008 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, calls Roston’s book “a welcome slew of context for the humdrum daily dose of ‘low-carbon this, high-carbon that’ now peppering the newspapers”.
From its origins as the ash of helium fusion, carbon takes on a starring role in the story of life on Earth, adopting a variety of forms both by itself and in combination with other elements. Roston details its role in the evolution of the most primitive life forms on Earth right through to the appearance of the (as Lynas writes) "hubristically self-named Homo sapiens, then the internal combustion engine and other paraphernalia of the Industrial Revolution, turning up the planetary thermostat in the blink of a geological eye".
As well as giving a chronological account of carbon, Roston also goes off on some rather specific tangents - such a whole discursive chapter on the gingko tree – at times in great detail and at the expense of holding the narrative, says Lynas, who also commends its "wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach".
You can access the full review over here.
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" »
Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is one contestant in a ‘climate war game’ taking place this week in Washington, where four teams representing China, India, Europe and the United States are negotiating a new deal on curbing global greenhouse gas emissions.
As Daniel Cressey reported yesterday on The Great Beyond blog:
"Today the participants woke up in the year 2015, and the outlook on global warming is significantly worse than it was just seven years earlier. ... Droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events are on the rise. Some 250,000 refugees from Bangladesh are camped out on the border of India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon." “It feels a bit like a grown-up version of Dungeons and Dragons to me, but I'm willing to give it a try,” says Tollefson.
If yesterday's roleplay scenario is anything to go by, it seems the EU and US may completely swap stances on climate policy by 2015! For an explanation of just how that might happen, check out Jeff's progress over on Nature's conference blog.
Toyako, Japan
The climate vision put forward by G8 leaders here in Toyako, Japan yesterday has recieved widespread criticism for failing to make clear its commitment to cutting greenhouse gases.
Developing nations, led by China and India, rejected the deal outright ahead of today's major economies meeting where they met with G8 nations to discuss targets for greenhouse gases and the respective efforts that would be required of rich and poor nations, as well as emerging economies.
Despite the inclusion of a goal for 50% cuts by 2050 in the G8 declaration, it's not at all clear what this alledged target means. If, as suggested by Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, they are intending to cut emissions by 50% of current levels, then that's not nearly as ambitious as cuts based on a 1990 baseline.
The statement, which seems purposefully vague, also fails to clarify which nations would have to make the deepest cuts in emissions to reach this global target of 50% and whether the target would be legally binding. Responding to the offer, Mexico, Brazil, India, China and South Africa said yesterday that G8 nations should slash their emissions by 80% by 2050 and set firm nearer term targets if they are to agree on a global deal.
As a result, US President Bush's meeting of major economies made no progress beyond their meeting held June in Seoul.
I've reported the full story for Nature News and will provide a link here once it's online. All for now...it's getting really late here...
Olive Heffernan
Toyako, Japan –
At about 4pm today, just over half way into the the latest gathering of the G8 Summit, leaders released a draft communiqué on climate change.
In the run up to the Summit, it looked as though the more immediate problems of oil prices and global food shortages would bump climate change off the G8 agenda. But with climate change having taken centre stage at the talks, the mood has been reasonably hopeful that a statement due for release today would go somewhat beyond the agreement made by the same clique of rich nations last year in Heiligendamm, Germany.
Yet the proposal seems to simultaneously take a step forward and backward, which perhaps would explain the wide variety of media reports, some calling it a success, others highlighting its flaws and others perhaps undecided – see this report from the BBC, which appears to have been republished (Google link reads: G8 agrees tough action on climate, but header reads: G8 aims to halve greenhouse gases).
I’ve reported the full story for Nature, but in brief, the down side is that the document seems to actually take a step back from last year’s declaration by the G8 to ‘seriously consider’ cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% of 1990 levels by 2050. This agreement, which unlike its predecessor includes the US, commits to a vision of halving emissions by 2050, but doesn’t specify a baseline year. When questioned on the baseline year, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda said earlier today that it was 2005, rather than the UN framework year of 1990.
And despite international pressure to set specific, clear nearer-term targets for reducing emissions, the statement merely recognizes ‘aspirational’ mid-term goals, with no mention of dates or the level of cuts needed. Given that seven of the G8 nations agreed to work toward cutting emissions by 25-40% of 1990 levels by 2020 in Bali last December, its seems that they’ve had to make a large concession to appease the US in this forum.
On the plus side, though, the US has agreed to the declaration, which is a small step forward from last year. And the document does recognize the need for mid-term targets, even if it hasn’t been specific on what those should be or what ‘mid-term’ means.
Tomorrow, the statement will be rolled out as the basis of discussions with eight other ‘big polluting’ major economies, who will join the G8 for the major economies meeting. Opinion here is divided on whether the draft communiqué goes far enough to meet their expectations of the big eight.
Olive Heffernan
Image: G8 leaders at working lunch on climate change. Image courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan
Toyako, Japan-
Tomorrow, delegates are expected to finally get down to the real discussions here at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, with climate change scheduled as the topic of a working lunch. Experts here are musing over the various ways in which leaders could move forward on the issue.
Kim Carstensen, Director of the Global Climate Initiative for conservation organisation WWF International, said that they hope that constructive proposals being put forward by developing nations, such as India,will spur concrete engagement from rich nations. Specifically WWF’s position statement echoes recent calls from scientists for at least 80% reductions on 1990 emissions levels by 2050, though in reality Carstensen says he’s be happy if they agreed to at least 50% cuts by mid century.
Also monitoring the talks here is Philip Clapp, Deputy Managing Director at the Pew Environment Group, a non-profit organization in Washington DC. According to Clapp, a new proposal put forward by developing nations, however, is being considered by negotiators. The proposal, expected to be issued as a formal statement here tomorrow afternoon, could be the key to resolving the issue of how to bring developing nations on board a deal with emissions targets while ensuring rich nations take the lead.
In the proposed deal, developing nations including China would be willing to slash emissions by 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 if unindustrialized nations are willing to agree to a clear specific emissions reduction target by 2020. And given that they haven’t said what the 2020 target would be, the idea would likely be acceptable to many of the delegations here – with one exception; the US.
“It would have to be some sort of package”, says Clapp, who remains optimistic that an agreement could be reached. It will be a “difficult agreement”, he says, and is “entirely depends on what President Bush is willing to give. If the President wanted to enumerate he could have an historic agreement. If not, then this is the end of the road for him on climate change”.
But as Clapp acknowledges “Presidents do some unexpected things when faced with the end of their terms”.
Olive Heffernan
Image: US President George Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda meet today at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido
Toyako, Japan-
I finally arrived at the G8 summit this morning after somewhat of an arduous journey. Not that I didn’t think it would be a schlep to Hokkaido from London, but I hadn’t quite bargained on the detour that was in store.
Having handed over the logistics completely to our trusted travel agent, I sort of hoped I’d end up in the right place. On taking off from Tokyo, though, I decided to plan my journey from the airport (somewhat late, maybe, I know!) and realised I was headed for a remote outpost nearer to Russia than the location of the G8 Summit. Though still in Hokkaido, Wakkanai is a small fishing port known for spotting harp seals and drying kelp; it’s about as far north as you can go in Japan, some 60km from Russia, and a good eight hours overland from my intended destination.
Luckily for me, an Italian reporter and a Nigerian sherpa had found themselves in the same predicament, and so we shared the long trip back, which was fun, if a bit like something from an Aki Kaurismaki film.
It certainly seems that the organisers of this year’s summit went of their way to host it in a remote location where the customary protests that accompany the event could be kept at a distance. Few protestors reached the resort of Toyako itself, where world leaders arrived yesterday, but more than 1,000 marched in Sapporo (the city I should have flown in to!) over the weekend.
The media are for the most part more than an hour away from the actual event in mountain lodges, and security measures for photo opportunities are super tight. Today has largely been taken up with formalities such as meetings between individual heads of states, photo shoots and fine dining experiences (whilst discussing world food shortages, no doubt).
But talks should get down to details tomorrow…
Olive Heffernan
Image: Train station at Wakkanai, Hokkaido
Next week, here on Climate Feedback, I'll be reporting directly from Hokkaido, Japan's nothernmost island, where leaders from rich nations and emerging economies will be meeting to discuss some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Gathering from July 7-9 will be the Group of Eight (G8) - an exclusive but informal bloc of nations, comprising the world's seven leading economies Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus Russia. This year's summit will extend to an additional eight industrialised nations on the final day to facilitate US President George Bush’s Major Economies Meeting.
Climate Change is expected to top the agenda of both meetings. Pressure is on G8 delegates to go above and beyond the political breakthrough of the 2007 Summit in Heilegendamm, Germany, where leaders agreed to seriously consider slashing emissions by half of 1990 levels by 2050. And George Bush seems keen to leave some sort of a legacy on tackling climate change through this meeting of major economies (or just any sort of a legacy other than Iraq actually).
But are binding emissions a realistic expectation of the G8? Will oil prices and global food shortages bump global warming down the agenda? And what progress on climate change is likely under the current US administration? I've written a preview in this week's Nature on what's being hoped for, and expected, from what should be a very interesting round of talks.
Tune in here from next Monday to follow the events as they take place.
Olive Heffernan
Twenty years ago yesterday, Dr. James Hansen gave a landmark testimony to US Congress in which he told senators that global warming was real, it was happening, and humanity was to blame.
Yesterday, he appeared before Congress, where he told most of official Washington we are now at the point of a “planetary emergency”.
For the low-down of yesterday's speech, and links to the best media coverage, check out Alex Witze's post over on The Great Beyond.
Olive Heffernan
“People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced”, concludes the latest poll on public opinion of global warming by social marketing group Ipsos Mori.
Despite the deluge of media reports in the last year documenting the scientific consensus on climate change and the startling rapidity at which impacts are being seen around the world - most notably perhaps the ever-decreasing Arctic sea ice - 60% of the British Public is uncertain that climate change is caused by humans, and many others believe that scientists are overstating the problem.
Writing in Sunday’s Observer, Juliette Jowit provides the following explanation:
There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.
While it’s reassuring to know that the public questions the status quo, if Jowitt is correct, what’s frustrating is the ability of blatantly misrepresentative arguments to sway public opinion.
The Great Global Warming Swindle resulted in a record 250 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom (including the first ever peer reviewed complaint), but that’s still a fraction of the 2.5 million viewers. Like many of those who saw the Channel 4 documentary, readers of Lawson’s offering on climate change ‘An Appeal to Reason’ are probably unaware it has been scientifically discredited in almost every review, including one on Nature Reports Climate Change by Sir John Houghton, Honorary Scientist at the UK’s Hadley Centre.
As Sir Houghton writes:
Promised as a "rare breath of intellectual rigour" and a "hard headed examination of the realities" of climate change, this offering is neither cool nor rational….and is largely one of misleading messages.
Lawson’s fundamental misunderstanding of basic scientific concepts is first displayed in his interpretation of the temperature records for the first part of this century, with which he attempts to discredit the science of climate change, and the work of many thousands of researchers who’ve dedicated entire careers to the problem. More recently, he repeats this in an amusing attack on the recent Nature paper by NASA’s Cynthia Rosenzweig.
Writing as a guest over on Susan Hills’ blog, Lawson’s piece starts off with a failure to grasp the term 'meta-analysis' – he clearly thinks that this is merely a lumping together of existing data. On the contrary, Rosenzweig and colleagues have used a powerful scientific tool to analyze changes in early 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - no mean feat - and in doing so, have shown that warming is aready having a worldwide impacts.
As Houghton rightly points out, Lawson is in need of climate science 101. But then, it seems, he's not alone - at least on that count.
Olive Heffernan
For all tree huggers out there, this week’s Science is dedicated to ‘forests in flux’, paying tribute to the trees and their contribution to the greater good. A special collection of articles in print, with complementary and online material, examines the fate of the world’s forests, in the face of climate change and an escalating human population.
If it’s been a while since you’ve had the chance to appreciate the languid leafiness of forest foliage, check out the online video. Or for those of you hoping for a more ‘hands on’ experience, there’s a whole section of Science Careers dedicated to opportunities in forest ecology.
There’s lots of serious science, with six Perspectives and one Review by researchers from all over the globe who give their tuppence worth on what’s needed to better understand forests and manage them properly.
Of particular relevance to discussions on how forests can mitigate global warming, Lera Miles and Valerie Kapos have a Perspective highlighting the risks involved in proposed schemes such as REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) and how to minimize them. Also on this topic, Josep Canadell and Michael Raupach write on what science currently tells us is the best way to manage forests for sequestering carbon.
Drew Purves and Stephen Pacala discuss how forest dynamics remain one of the largest uncertainties in predicting future climate change and detail some of the efforts underway to improve their representation in models. Or for a really solid review of how forests affect climate change, check out Gordan Bonan’s piece here.
Or if that seems like a lot of tree pulp to get through, here are some interesting stats from the issue:
Forests cover ~42 million km2 in tropical, temperate, and boreal lands, and cover ~30% of the land surfaceThey store ~45% of terrestrial carbon and account for ~50% of terrestrial net primary production.
Forests hold more than double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Carbon uptake by forests in the 1990s contributed to ~33% of anthropogenic carbon emission from fossil fuel and landuse change.
Olive Heffernan
Image: Plantations of Pinus radiata and Eucalyptus nitens in Gippsland (Victoria, Australia); courtesy of Michael Ryan.
Whether and how to put a price on carbon has been something of a hot topic this week, primarily due to the proposal of a landmark climate change bill to the US Senate that would "cap and trade" emissions of the greenhouse gas.
Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the climate change bill offered by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, and Warner died today in the Senate after Democrat leaders fell a dozen votes short of the 60 needed to defeat Republican obstruction.
Republicans opposed the global warming bill over fears of the economic costs of pricing the greenhouse gas, though Democrats argued there would be no cost to consumers, who would be aided with tax relief. The debate over "cap and trade" legislation is now expected to be postponed until next year, when there is a new president in the White House.
Both presidential nominees back mandatory greenhouse gas reductions and indicated they supported moving forward on discussing the bill offered to the Senate this week, but whether "cap and trade" is the the best way to price carbon remains contentious.
The issue is taken up this week on Nature Reports Climate Change by Roger Pielke Jr who reviews Earth: The Sequel by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn of the Environmental Defense Fund. The basic tenet of the book is that a US carbon market with tradable credits would provide the profit incentive needed to energize potential innovators of low or no-carbon technology – thus meeting the world's escalating demand for green energy. But Pielke Jr argues:
By placing their attention on the need for innovative energy technologies, Krupp and Horn have focused on the one area where advocates for action on greenhouse gas reduction are in strong agreement. They have avoided engaging in the real debate over the policies necessary to decarbonize the growing global economy and, crucially, over whether and how to put a price on carbon dioxide.
You can read the full review here.
Meanwhile, over on Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has written about an alternative, though less popular, pricing approach known as “cap and dividend”. The scheme, being strongly endorsed by NASA climatologist James Hansen, is based on the principle of making the polluter pay without placing the burdening of rising costs on the consumer, the most commonly cited down-side of "cap and trade" (discussed by Pielke Jr in the above review).
Revkin explores two proposals for “cap and dividend”: one by Hansen that involves taxing fuels by their carbon content, and another by investment pioneer Peter Barnes that entails selling a steadily declining number of permits for emitting carbon dioxide. The latter would force polluters to eventually pay the full whack of their carbon consumption, and the revenue would be returned to citizens. You can read the full story here.
Olive Heffernan
Cutting global greenhouse emissions by half of 1990 levels by 2050 will not be sufficient to prevent major damage from climate change, say scientists in a Commentary published today on Nature Reports Climate Change.
Earlier this week, environment ministers from the world’s leading industrialised countries, the Group of Eight, called for a deal to slash global greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by mid-century.
This would still commit the world to substantial harm, even if it is “widely considered to be the most stringent politically achievable target”, says Martin Parry, who co-chaired the impacts assessment group for the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, and others.
By analysing the regional and global impacts that would occur by 2050 and 2100 for various greenhouse gas emissions targets, Parry and co-authors argue that compared with 50 per cent cuts, slashing emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by mid-century would substantially reduce the damage caused; for example, halving the number at risk of water stress and flooding.
They call on world leaders at the forthcoming UN climate change talks in Bonn in June and July's G8 summit in Hokkadio, Japan to boldly declare their commitment to dramatically reducing greenhouse gases.
The current global food crisis should serve as a ‘wake-up call’ to G8 and UN leaders, they say, who suffer from “false optimism’ that “we can find a way to fully avoid all the serious threats of climate change”.
They caution, however, than even with 80% cuts, damages will still be large, which is why world leaders must also step up their commitment on funding adaptation. Current efforts are vastly below par, with a mere US$67 million donated to date of the estimated tens of billions needed for developing-world adaptation alone.
At the same time as world leaders are being urged to consider stricter targets for 2050, others are urging them to seriously consider shorter term targets – for 2020 – a goal believed to be important if emissions are to peak within the next 10 to 20 years.
Olive Heffernan
A new study, published online Sunday by Nature Geoscience, presents solid evidence that temperatures in the Earth's lower atmosphere are increasing in line with temperature changes on the ground.
This issue has been hotly disputed in the past, partly owing to the fact that temperatures measured in the troposhere - the portion of the atmopshere stretching from 12 to 16 kilometeres above the Earth's surface - by satellites and weather balloons in the early 1990s didn't mirror the changes on the ground.
This fact was used as evidence against climate change, despite the fact that it has been long known that there were problems with the original data collection and analysis.
In the search for more accurate measurements, two scientients Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood of Yale University, have now developed a novel approach using wind rather than temperature data. Their research shows that the lower atmosphere has indeed warmed since 1970, as projected by most climate models, and in sync with warming on the ground measured using temperature data.
In a related News and Views article, aslo on Nature Geoscience, Peter Thorn of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the world's premier climate modelling facilities, writes:
This is not simply an interesting academic aside — not knowing where observational problems begin and modelling limitations end undermines our ability to understand and predict global climate change.
For further reading on the topic, check out the post over on Real Climate last week discussing the same issue, and highlighting some upcoming papers in the Journal of Climate.
Olive Heffernan
Hurricanes may become rarer in the Atlantic throughout the 21st century if the world continues to warm, suggests a new study. The research is the latest to address the question of how – and whether - global warming will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
Globally, the number of major hurricanes has shot up by 75% since 1970. And although rising ocean temperatures are generally accepted as the key culprit – hurricanes can only form where sea surface temperatures exceed 26ºC - the link to global warming has remained a contentious issue.
In the new study, published online yesterday in Nature Geoscience [subscription], Thomas Knutson of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and colleagues showed, using a regional climate model of the Atlantic basin, that the trend in increased hurricane activity in the Atlantic over the past 25 years will not continue into the future, though hurricanes in the area may become more intense and associated with heavier rainfall.
Though they use a different model, the results generally concur with the recent paper by hurricane specialist Kerry Emanuel, which shows that hurricanes are likely to decrease in frequency but increase in intensity in certain locations as temperatures rise.
I’ve written the full story here for Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
Image: NASA / Univ. Wisconsin-Madison
Nearly 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - from the timing of plant flowering to the rate of ice melting - are being influenced by human-induced global warming, according to the first study to formally link trends in biological and physical systems to rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the analysis, published in this week's Nature, brings together data from numerous different studies stretching back to 1970 to gain a big picture view of how climate change is impacting the planet.
Although the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that human-induced climate warming is "likely" to have had a discernible effect on physical and biological systems, attributing such changes in natural systems to specific causes in notoriously difficult, as highlighted in the related News and Views article by Francis Zweirs and Gabriele Hegerl, both IPCC panelists.
Rosenzweig and collaborators made this link first by mapping changes in global average suface temperature between 1970 and 2004. They then looked at whether changes in natural phenomena in each region were consistent with warming or inconsistent with warming e.g. earlier blooming of flowers would be expected in a warmer climate.
In more than 90% of cases where there was a trend, it was consistent with the predicted effects of a warming world. As Emma Marris points out in an online news story, the bulk of the data come from Europe and several hundred more come from elsewhere in the world, but Africa, Australia and Latin America are poorly represented.
Olive Heffernan
Image credit: David Inouye
While most Londoners spent last week maximising their time spent basking in the glorious sunshine that so rarely comes our way, I spent it largely indoors - at a place that predicts these sorts of unusual occurrences, otherwise known as the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading.
The World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction held there last week was itself something of a rare event – a union of the weather and climate communities, who met to discuss whether – and how – they can eventually provide climate predictions that are as useful, and as useable, as weather forecasts.
The four-day summit culminated in a call for a massive investment, around a billion dollars, to fund a new global research facility or facilities with computer and research resources that would ‘revolutionize’ climate modelling capabilities, bringing into view the holy grail of ‘seamless’ weather-to-climate prediction.
We’ve covered the summit in some detail in this week’s Nature [subscription], in my news story and an editorial by Oliver Morton.
In short, the idea is that an injection of cash on this scale could bring about a quantum leap in climate simulations by funding climate computers far beyond those in use today. Currently, computers used for modelling the climate are in the 10-teraflop range, which means that they operate at inconceivably high speeds and run models that divide the globe into 100 kilometre cells to roughly project how global climate is likely to change in the long-term.
Though these models have had a key role in warning us of the gradual warming of our planet, they’ve fared pretty poorly when it comes to gauging the likelihood of extreme localised events, such as flooding or more frequent hurricanes. But scientists at the conference said that if they had access to supercomputers – with speeds in the range of hundreds of petaflops (basically 10,000 times more processing power) - they could resolve climate globally on the scale of kilometres, potentially creating models good enough to inform nations of the specific regional challenges they can expect in adapting to climate change.
Continue reading "A revolution - for climate model evolution " »
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
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" »
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.
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.
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 " »
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
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? " »
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)? " »
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 " »
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Bali, Indonesia-
In the disabling humidity of Bali, former US vice president Al Gore last night urged delegates gathered here at the UN conference on climate change to continue efforts towards an international climate change deal, despite attempts by the US delegation to stall progress.
Gore said, to loud applause, that the US was “principally responsible for obstructing progress” at the UN conference, which aims to set out an agenda for how negotiations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol should proceed over the next two years.
Delegates have now reached agreement on a number of key issues for the ‘Bali roadmap’, including reducing deforestation, providing financial assistance for adaptation and transferring technology to developing nations.
But there are fears that the science that has informed the process is now being sidelined.
The main bone of contention is how the most recent findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, will be acknowledged in the final text agreed to in Bali.
Most delegations believe that the text should refer to the need for developed nations to reduce emissions by 25-40% on 1990 levels by 2020. But the US says that to do so would be ‘prejudge the outcome’ of the process. Japan and Canada agree with the US and Australia agreed with this stance earlier in the week, though it’s position is a little less certain at the moment.
The EU is standing strong behind the need to include specific numbers on future emissions reductions, arguing that it would be pointless to agree on a roadmap without a destination. “It is crucial for us that we must have an idea where we are heading to – it’s not only to science to show us the destination, but the destination must be consistent with the science”, said Portuguese secretary of state for the environment, Humberto Rosa yesterday in Bali.
European commissioner Stavros Dimas warned US under secretary of state Paula Dobiansky in a meeting yesterday morning that unless a substantive agreement was reached in Bali, there would be little point in the EU attending the Major Economies Meeting to be hosted by the US in February in Hawaii. Rosa and Dimas said this was not a threat, but an acknowledgment of the fact that the Major Economies Meeting is designed to feed into the UN process.
In his address last night, Gore advised negotiators to move beyond their anger and frustration at the US and to recognize that a new US administration, which will take over from Bush in little over a year, will likely embrace more climate-friendly policies.
"Do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save a large, open, blank space in your document and put a footnote by it [that says] this document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway."
But this morning, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo De Boer, said that option would be unfeasible.
“It would be impossible to advance here without the US, as this is a consensus”, said De Boer. “It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to craft a climate change regime without one of the major economies and the major emitter”.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
As anticipated, deforestation has emerged as something of a thorny issue at the UN conference on climate change, currently nearing a close in Bali.
It was announced yesterday that measures to avoid further destruction of tropical forests, such as the Amazon, will be included in the agreement to come out of the talks at the end of this week. The Bali agreement is expected to act as a guideline for negotiations on an international climate change deal up until the end of 2009.
Daniel Nepstad of Woods Hole Research Centre, US said today in Bali that the Amazon rainforest is expected to see a 55% dieback by 2030 through deforestation, logging and drought. Rainforests in other nations, such as Indonesia are facing similar pressures. So, any effort to avoid deforestation, which accounts for an estimated 20-25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is to be commended. But the solution being put forward to in Bali , known as REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is being met with opposition on many sides.
Under the proposed scheme for ‘avoided deforestation’, carbon sequestered by forests in developing countries that are not being cut can be traded on the carbon market, where developed countries can buy the credits and ‘offset’ them against their own emissions targets.
A draft text on deforestation is ready to go forward for discussion by the high level ministers, who arrived at the Bali conference today, said executive secretary of the UN conference on climate change, Yvo De Boer.
Countries such as Indonesia and numerous conservation NGOs are celebrating inclusion of the scheme. And given that emissions from deforestation were omitted from the Kyoto Protocol, it is the first such international effort of its kind.
But much remains to be agreed upon. The issue of whether such a scheme should include forest conservation is a remaining “bone of contention”. As reported in the Hindustan Times, the Indian delegation wanted to add 'conservation' to 'avoided deforestation' , owing to the fact that India is one of the few developing countries where the forest cover is going up, not down. “We should not be penalised for that” said secretary of the ministry of environment and forests, Meena Gupta
Continue reading "Deforestation a ‘thorny’ issue at the Bali talks " »
Bali, Indonesia-
As celebrations got underway to mark the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, disputes over whether its successor will be a bigger, better deal intensified at the UN climate-change conference in Bali, Indonesia.
I've reported the full story over on Nature News,
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
Whether we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change will ultimately be determined by whether we are willing to finance it.
Finding an effective means for financial assistance and investments to flow from north to south could be a make or break issue at the UN conference on climate change here in Bali, where delegates from almost 190 nations have convened to agree a ‘roadmap’ for an international climate agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
NGOs and delegates from the world’s poorest nations, some of which are already beginning to experience the harsh affects of a warming climate, are calling on developed countries to boost funding to help them adapt, and to transfer technology that will help them green their economies.
Under the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Adaptation fund’, a paltry $163m has been pledged by rich donor countries to developing nations, and just $67m of this has actually been delivered. Yet the sum actually needed to finance adaptation and capacity building in the south is in the region of several tens of billions of dollars, according the World Bank (and reported by the Associated Press). Oxfam says that the very poorest nations also need an up front payment of $1-2bn immediately to address urgent adaptation needs.
The fund, which will finance projects such a building sea walls and irrigating crops, is currently derived from a 2 percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the scheme that allows industrialized nations to pay for carbon credits produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world and credit then against their own emissions targets. But it now looks as though the UN will have to expand its funding for adaptation, potentially through a direct tax on emissions.
The transfer of clean technologies to developing nations is another goal of the Kyoto Protocol that has clearly not been met. In part, this is owing to lack of funding from the public sector and a lack of interest from the private sector, says Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change.
The solution, says De Boer, will require the creation of investment potential through mechanisms such as the carbon market that can send a clear price signal to private investors, who are expected to fund 86% of future clean energy technology projects in the south. It will also require “intelligent financial engineering, to make public and private money go where it has never gone before” akin to “embarking on a star trek expedition”, says De Boer.
A group of finance ministers is now trashing out the details in side meetings at the Bali talks. By the end of the conference, it should be clear whether the worlds’ richest nations are willing to cough up their portion of the much needed cash.
Olive Heffernan
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.
Bali, Indonesia-
The chances of the world’s major emitters agreeing to mandatory emissions reductions are becoming an increasingly unlikely outcome of the UN talks on climate change here in Bali.
“Nothing has been ruled out yet”, said Yvo de Boer, secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) today in Bali, but he described the possibility of binding emissions cuts for developing nations such as China and India as “crawling towards the edge of the table”.
China has been receiving praise for its proactive role on addressing climate change and its willingness to enter into talks on a post-Kyoto agreement, but De Boer said that India has not been at the forefront of the discussions this week in Bali.
Both India and China have introduced strategies to mitigate climate change this year in a notable departure from historic concerns that to do so would threaten economic growth. Rajenda Pachuari, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that neither China nor India has had sufficient time to act on climate change since introducing their respective strategies and expects that they will demonstrate more significant efforts in the coming months.
In the meantime, NGOs are hoping that the passage of two climate relevant bills through the US House of Representatives this week will put increasing pressure on the Bush administration to sign up to binding emissions targets.
First up is the Energy Bill, which is the only piece of legislation in over 30 years to require a rise in vehicle fuel efficiency. Designed to improve energy security while reducing emissions for transport, the bill would raise fuel economy by 40% by 2020. Second is the Liebermann-Warner Climate Security Act, which would cut emissions from the power and industrial sectors by 70% by 2050 relative to 2005 levels.
The passing of these bills sends a clear signal to the world that the political centre of gravity in the US has shifted on global warming, but all signs indicate that domestic policy is unlikely to sway the stance of the US on the international front.
Both bills have yet to pass through the Senate and White House, and President Bush has already threatened to veto them. But according to Angela Anderson of the National Environmental Trust in the US, this would be rather ironic given that these are exactly the kind of measures that other major emitters have enacted into their own legislation - the very nations that the US is currently engaging with a serious of talks parallel to the UN process.
Yesterday, Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said that neither the passing of these acts to limit US domestic emissions nor the move by Australia to ratify Kyoto would change their stance in Bali. "We're not changing our position," he said.
Given that the US is the only nation that appears to be cutting its fossil fuel emissions, while those signed up to Kyoto have failed to meet their targets, some say that binding cuts may not be the way to go after all.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
For the first time this week at the UN conference on climate change, scientists today sounded their views on the specifics they believe the road from Bali should lead to if we are to avoid catastrophically changing the climate.
Signed by more than 200 of the world’s most eminent climatologists, the ‘Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists’ issues a stark warning to negotiators that unless they take immediate, bold action on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, many millions will be at high risk of some of the most sinister effects of global warming including extreme sea level rise and increased drought and heatwaves.
“This declaration makes a clear and unambiguous statement about what our emissions targets have to be. To achieve these targets, we need action now, this week, here in Bali, said Matthew England, climate modeller at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Specifically, the document states that atmospheric GHG concentrations need to be stabilised long-term at 450 ppm CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) or lower to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Formally announced at a press briefing in Bali this morning, the declaration calls on governments to reduce emissions “by at least 50% below 1990 levels by the year 2050”.
Though the science is taken from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the signatories comprise the most prominent IPCC authors, the policy-prescriptive statement is distinct from the UN process which assesses the current understanding of climate change. “This is simply outside the charge of the IPCC process”, said Richard Somerville, meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
Not all of those invited signed. England, one of the coordinators of the declaration, reckons they had at least a 70% success rate with getting authors on board. According to Andrew Pitman, a climate scientist also at the University of New South Wales, Australia, some authors didn’t sign because they felt the emissions cuts called for were simply not tough enough.
The declaration advises stabilising at 450ppm CO2e, yet this would only give us a 50% chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, explained Pitman. To increase that chance to 75%, we would need to bring atmospheric GHG levels down to 400ppm CO2e. With emissions steadily increasing, the urgency of the situation is brought home by the fact that we are now at GHG levels close to those at which the scientists recommend we stabilise.
Developed nations party to the Kyoto Protocol agreed in Vienna in August that emissions should be cut by 25-40% by 2020, based on 1990 levels. England confirmed that the target announced today is in line with this figure.
But the scientists won’t go as far as to say when the targets should be implemented or how nations should go about reducing their emissions. “We don’t have recommendations for how the negotiations should proceed”, said Somerville. He added that there is no magic bullet and that all approaches to reducing emissions will need to be considered.
As for whether their recommendations are likely to be taken on board, it’s probably too early to say. Diana Liverman, climate policy expert at Oxford University, UK and signatory of the statement, said that she hasn’t seen any evidence of the talks derailing yet and that a consideration of stricter targets than those under Kyoto may come next week.
On being asked for his response to the consensus document, US Senior Climate Negotiator Harlan Watson said that he wasn’t aware of it. He added that the US administration wholly approved of the IPCC, but that they wouldn’t endorse any specific scenarios from the latest report.
The IPCC will present their synthesis report at the plenary tomorrow morning – watch this space….
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
The road to building a Bali roadmap was looking increasingly rocky today, as the vastly differing expectations of what will emerge from the two weeks meeting of the 13th conference of parties (COP) to the UNFCCC became increasingly apparent.
One of the biggest bones of contention, of course, is whether the roadmap will include an agreement on the need for binding emissions targets from 2012, which signals the end of the second period of commitment of the Kyoto Protocol.
At the opening plenary talk on Monday, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary said that “A marriage contract is not something to discuss on a first date”, eluding to the fact that the willingness of nations to co-operate must first be established here before they get down to the nitty gritty of asking parties to act on their promises.
But many feel this is a COP-out. Today, Matthias Duwe of Climate Action Network, a worldwide association of some 400 NGOs, retorted to De Boer’s comment, saying “These parties have been dating for over 15 years now, so we’re not exactly on a first date here”.
Duwe is one of many who believe that a process without an end date and without specific substance will be insufficient for the enormity of the task at hand.
But others feel that pushing for targets now will rock the boat…and possibly capsize it.
Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth International basically agrees with De Boer. She believes that there needs to be more evidence of good will from industrialised nations before we can reach that point. “To put the targets on the table right now would be going in the wrong direction”, said Raman.
There’s also the argument that you need to have the right tools for the job, lest we (again!) agree to targets we fail to meet.
De Boer compared setting targets first to being asked to swim across the Atlantic without knowing whether you’d have a team, be allowed breaks, use rescue equipment etc. Basically, you’d hardly sign up for the task without knowing the details beforehand.
This approach, however, would be a flip on the order in which the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, which set targets first and then looked at how to achieve them. And that’s bound to ruffle feathers.
Among all the political wrangling and finger pointing, there has been some light hearted relief takes on the Bali talks, such as the giant thermometer erected by Greenpeace outside the conference venue and the Fossil of the Day Awards announced each evening by the Climate Action Network. The prize is in recognition of the efforts of countries that block progress at the conference.
Yet again, Saudi Arabia won first prize today for complaining that the protocol has an unfair focus on CO2 (and then called for prioritisation of CCS, which is concentrated on CO2). And secondly, for saying that article A "should not attach an economic element to the noble cause of fighting climate change"--when for years, they have been trying to undermine the fight against climate change specifically by campaigning by alleging adverse economic effects!
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
The second day of the UN conference on climate change has seen some diverse opinions emerge on what the immediate priorities should be for a 'Bali roadmap'.
Environmentalists claimed today that a group of obstructionist nations, including Saudi Arabia, Canada, the US and Japan, was forming against binding emissions targets.
Steven Guilbeault of Environmental NGO Equiterre cited Canada’s “abandonment of it’s targets under the Kyoto Protocol” and Japan’s statement today that it is time to move away from a Kyoto approach to addressing climate change as reasons for their inclusion.
“Canada and Japan are saying nothing about legally binding emission reductions after 2012," said Guilbeault.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Yvo De Boer said that although Saudi Arabia had expressed concern about whether the time is right to enter formal negotiations, no other nation has openly backed this stance in Bali. Though that’s not to say that others don’t agree.
Describing the mood today in Bali as “mixed”, however, De Boer said that there was a clear divergence of opinion between industrialised and developing nations on where the focus should now lie. Whereas developed nations are honing in on the long term goals for addressing climate change, many developing nations are concerned that this will diverge attention from the need to address immediate priorities, such as establishing a sufficient fund for adapting to climate change and transferring technologies from developed countries, objectives which have not been realised under the Kyoto Protocol.
A open ‘special group’ was established today to address these issues and others that will shape the Bali roadmap, including whether the negotiations up until 2009 will include targets and measurable objectives, or will comprise a looser period of informal dialogue that could faciltate buy-in from major emitters such as the US, China and India.
One thing is clear: as of yet, there is no consensus on what shape the roadmap will take; for now the son of Kyoto is still gestating.
For direct live webcasts of the conference, visit the UNFCCC website.
Olive Heffernan
Bali, Indonesia-
The long-awaited United Nations Conference on Climate Change kicked off this morning on the idyllic island of Bali, where some 10,000 delegates from 187 nations will spend the next two weeks discussing how to reach an international agreement on climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
International governments are now feeling the pressure for urgent action on climate change as the world watches in hope of a Bali breakthrough. At the opening address of the conference, Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s environment minister and newly appointed president of the thirteenth session of the conference of parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP13) said “We now have a better understanding of the complexity of the climate problem. What we need is political will. I hope that Bali can deliver the breakthrough the world is waiting for”.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, described the mood as “very upbeat and encouraging”. He highlighted Pakistan’s statement on behalf of the G77 member states and China indicating their willingness to engage in international dialogue on climate change.
Up until now, failure of two of the world’s largest industrialised nations, the US and Australia, to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been seen by many as a major obstacle to its success. And buy-in from both nations is believed to be crucial to agreeing a workable ‘son of Kyoto’.
One day into the talks…and half of that goal has already been achieved. Newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who defeated conservative leader John Howard nine days ago, today pledged to ratify Kyoto just hours after being sworn in. Rudd also announced his intention to attend the talks in Bali next week.
De Boer described the response from delegates to the news as “an emotional and spontaneous reaction to a very significant decision on the part of the Australian government” . He said that “the long applause reflected people’s appreciation for Australia to engage even more strongly internationally on climate change”.
But achieving the other half is likely to prove much more difficult. The shift in Australia’s stance will undoubtedly leave the US feeling out in the cold in Bali, but not enough to pressurise the Bush administration to change its stance on ratifying Kyoto.
Responding to the announcement, Harlan Watson, US Senior Climate Negotiator and Special Representative, said today in Bali that it was “up to each individual nation how to move forward” and that the US “respected the decisions of other nations and likewise expected them to respect their decision”.
Watson wouldn’t comment on what the US may be willing to agree to, but said that that it “wants a regime that is both environmentally friendly and economically viable” and that any agreement must “include all major emitters and developed and developing nations”.
Judging from various statements made at the plenary session this morning, it seems that many expect the Bali conference to lead to a very general rather than detailed roadmap on how to proceed on climate change over the next two years. While this may be the only way to get the US on board, it hardly seems like the urgent international response that it being called for. While the EU is very strongly in favour of binding international commitments that can be monitored, President Bush has made it clear that he favours a voluntary approach to cutting greenhouse gases.
But some believe that whatever the US says in Bali will be largely irrelevant, given the forthcoming presidential elections next November.
More delegates are expected to arrive in Bali next week, when any agreements will be finalised, including former US vice –president and Nobel laureate Al Gore and Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the meantime, I’ll be keeping you updated with daily posts direct from the talks in Bali here on Climate Feedback.
Olive Heffernan
Nature Reports Climate Change rolls out its podcast today, with editor Olive Heffernan interviewing the experts behind our key stories. In this first episode:
- Tim Lenton has more to say about his Commentary on tipping points for dangerous climate change
- IPCC scientists Stefan Rahmstorf, Michael Oppenheimer and Gavin Schmidt opine on where the IPCC should turn now, having released its Fourth Assessment synthesis report last week
- journalist Emma Marris explains how mountain-dwelling species are being killed off by the 'escalator effect'
- speculation on the 'son of Kyoto' to be conceived at next month's UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, from Eliot Morley of Globe International, Nick Mabey of e3g and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Starting next week, Climate Feedback will have Olive Heffernan blogging from the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, so tune in to find out whether the delegates are standing united against climate change threats or mired in debate over which policies are fair to whom -- or both. And keep an eye out (or an RSS feed subscribed) for next month's podcast, which will feature interviews and discussion direct from the floor of the UN conference.
Anna Barnett
There’s an interesting post on the BBC’s ‘The Editors’ blog today on how the BBC, as a media organisation, should deal with communicating climate change and, in particular, how it should represent “climate sceptics”.
The publicly funded corporation came under fire in September when it cancelled plans to air a Comic-relief style show aimed at raising public awareness of global warming amid concerns that it would breach the corporation's guidelines on impartiality.
The blog post by Steve Herrmann briefly describes the efforts of Richard Black, the BBC’s online environment correspondent, to better understand what “climate sceptics” think and the arguments they use to try to debunk anthropogenic global warming.
It includes a more detailed piece written by Black and Roger Harrabin, BBC News’ environmental analyst, for their in-house magazine Ariel, outlining their views on what the BBC must do to “get it right on climate”.
Black and Harrabin write:
Given the weight of opinion building up around the IPCC it makes sense for us to focus our coverage on the consensus that climate change is happening, is serious, but is manageable if tackled urgently.We do not need consistently to ‘balance’ the reports of the IPCC. When we broadcast outlying views we should make sure we do not over represent them and we should keep a rough balance of views from either side of the IPCC. If we do not, we will distort the issue and risk misleading or confusing our audience.
We must also be more savvy about the way we treat outlying views – and we should make it clear to our audience when an interviewee holds a minority position.
They also say that vociferous views expressed on blogs etc need to be interpreted with caution...it's worth a read.
Olive Heffernan
Olive Heffernan
In this week’s Nature, Jeff Tollefson reports on the claims that a White House science advisor edited a congressional testimony by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the public health impacts of climate change.
First reported last week by the Associated Press, the story has since been picked up by Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post, in The Boston Globe and in The Wall Street Journal (which takes a different line, reporting that the CDC director says that the testimony wasn’t diluted).
Although White House spokesperson Dana Perino initially denied claims that Julie Gerberding’s testimony had been watered down, it eventually became clear that it had been chopped from 12 to six pages.
Bush’s chief science advisor, John Marburger, said the edits were made in order to align the testimony with the findings of the reports released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But concerned scientists and Democrats believe that the White House was suppressing science at odds with its policy positions.
According to Eilperin “White House officials eliminated several successive pages of Gerberding’s testimony” including a statement that the “CDC considers climate change a serious public concern”.
Tollefson reports in Nature that the missing material "focused on a range of potential public- health impacts related to climate change. These included the effects of heat waves, air pollution, extreme weather and infectious diseases.”
Read the whole story in Nature here.
Olive Heffernan
In Correspondence in this week's Nature, John Shepherd from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and colleagues challenge the scheme proposed by James Lovelock and Chris Rapley to help the planet cure itself from the disease of global warming.
For those of you who missed it, a couple of weeks ago, Lovelock and Rapley put forward a geo-engineering solution to climate change in Nature, which involves the installation of large vertical pipes in the ocean that would pump nutrient-rich water from depth to the surface. This, they said, would enhance the growth of algae in the upper ocean, which in turn would transport more carbon to the deep sea.
Now, Shepherd and colleagues claim that the proposed scheme is based on false assumptions. They say the scheme would not lead to enhanced storage of carbon in the deep ocean below 1,000m and in deep ocean sediments, which is necessary for effective long term removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Instead, they maintain the scheme could actually worsen global warming by bringing high levels of particulate carbon back to the surface, where it could be released to the atmosphere. The authors also argue that such large scale engineering solutions could harm fragile ecosystems.
Peter Williams from the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University raised some of these same issues on the blog here last week, and also challenged the feasibility of the scheme from an engineering perspective.
Cross posting from on Nature's news blog The Great Beyond, Daniel Cressey reports:
Schools in the UK should be allowed to show Al Gore 's climate change movie, but only if they give balancing information to pupils, a High Court judge has ruled. The case was brought to court by school governor Stewart Dimmock, who objected to government plans to send copies of An Inconvenient Truth to schools across the country. The judge, Sir Michael Burton, ruled there were nine scientific inaccuracies in the film, which he said had moments of “alarmism and exaggeration” (Guardian, BBC, AFP, Independent).Errors included claiming that polar bears were drowning as they had to swim further and further to find ice and that sea levels would rise 20 feet as a result of melting Greenland ice in the near future. The Times runs down the nine. Some parts of the blogosphere are reporting eleven errors, taking them from Dimmock’s early statement.
Dimmock, a member of the minor political group the New Party, called the judgement a resounding victory (press release). But he added: “However, as a parent, I find it perplexing that, despite agreeing that that the film was riddled with errors and exaggerations, the Court failed to issue an outright ban on its use in the classroom. Perhaps the Government will now do the honourable thing and bin it.”
This does not seem likely. Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan is on record as saying that the “central argument” of An Inconvenient Truth is supported by the scientific community (BBC). “Nothing in the judge's comments today detract from that.”
Plans to distribute the film to schools in America ran into different problems last year: Keith Vranes had the story.
Image: NASA
Over on Real Climate, they featured a pre-launch review of the film back in May 2006, which described it as "inspiring" and "decidedly non-partisan in its outlook", but also highlighted some of the few scientific inaccuracies. They came to the same conclusion as Brennan, however...for the large part, Gore gets the science right and the "small errors don't detract from Gore's main point", which is ultimately that the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming is now overwhelming.
Olive Heffernan
Update: we've updated the original post at The Great Beyond -- Oliver
Olive Heffernan
In a Correspondence in this week's Nature , James Lovelock and Chris Rapley propose a way of stimulating the Earth to cure itself from the disease of global warming.
Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis and his co-author Chris Rapley, newly appointed director of the Science Museum in London, argue that drastic action is needed to help heal the planet, as they believe it is "doubtful that any of the well-intentioned technical or social schemes for carbon dieting will restore the status quo".
They turn to the ocean for solutions. Their proposed scheme involves placing vertical pipes some 200 meters long in the sea to pump nutrient-rich water from depth to the surface, thus enhancing the growth of algae in the upper ocean. The algae, which are key in transporting carbon dioxide to the deep sea and producing dimethyl sulphide involved in the formation of sunlight-reflecting clouds, should help to prevent further warming.
Although fertilizing the ocean with iron as a way of stimulating algal growth is being considered, the use of pipes to use the ocean’s existing nutrients as fertilizer is certainly novel.
Lovelock and Rapley admit that the scheme may fail or impact the ocean in negative ways, such as through further acidification (which is recognized a significant threat to marine life and water quality) but they argue that the stakes are so high now that we can’t afford not to try such a solution.
Read the news story by Quirin Schiermeier on the proposed scheme here.
Olive Heffernan
This week on Nature Reports Climate Change, Amanda Leigh Haag looks at how climate change is increasingly becoming an issue of national security, raising the alarm on issues of border control and immigration policy globally.
The feature details how regions likely to bear the brunt of climate impacts are already beginning to look to neighbouring states for potential resettlement deals, while less vulnerable nations are considering the likely spillover of large-scale migration from areas impacted by severe drought or flooding.
This raises some interesting issues, such as whether adaptation should focus on protecting the rights of people to live in their home, rather than offering relocation programmes, and whether these scenarios are inevitable without drastic measures to prevent further warming….but more on that shortly.
Olive Heffernan
Having been off the airwaves for a while, I’m back with some further musings on climate change surveys, which (unwittingly) seems to be becoming a bit of a pet topic of mine.
Today saw the launch of ‘Future Friendly’, a partnership between four British NGOs, the Energy SavingTrust, Global Cool, Waste Watch and Waterwise and multinational consumer goods giant Protocol and Gamble aimed at helping and inspiring people to live more sustainable lives.
While the initiative, launched this morning in London, sounds laudable, it smells strongly of corporate greenwash.
The idea is that, by using products displaying the Future Friendly logo, shoppers will save energy, water or reduce waste. In tandem with the launch of the ‘Future Friendly’ brand logo, which will appear on certified products as of next week, the partnership announced the results of a survey on citizen’s attitudes towards sustainability and a ‘Future Friendly’ award, given to individuals who are heroes in encouraging sustainability on a local level.
The products that have thus far received the green stamp of approval include Ariel, Lenor, Fairy Liquid, Fairy Active Bursts and Flash, all, interestingly, manufactured by Proctor and Gamble. The criteria on which their green credentials are based seem a little dubious; for instance, Ariel is “asking the nation” to turn the dial down to 30 degrees to save up to 40% of the energy used per load, while Flash All Purpose Cleaner “enables you to do your cleaning with cold water”. So, it seems their sustainability criteria all rely on things that consumers have to do themselves while using the products, rather than the products themselves having ‘greener’ ingredients or packaging or being manufactured in some more efficient way.
Then comes the survey on consumers’ attitudes to sustainable living . Conducted by think tank The Future Laboratory, the results are based on a multiple choice questionnaire issued to 1,000 people in 12 UK counties this autumn. The main finding is that ‘green is the new norm’ and that environmental issues are galvanizing 'a new breed of citizen’ in the UK committed to living a sustainable lifestyle. It’s great to have individuals feeling friendly about the environment and about its future, but as is the case with so many of these surveys, the questions tend to polarize opinion and naturally frame opinion within the context of predefined questions. In relation to climate change, for example, 41% of respondents said individual action was the only way forward in solving the problem. I’d like to know what the alternatives were, but strangely there wasn’t a question relating to climate in the questionnaire, so that one remains a mystery.
Having said all of that, I think we should commend anything that encourages the public to lead more sustainable lives as do the ‘Future friendly’ awards. Developed by the partnership, they grant £10,000 to each of four winners to help fund their efforts to encourage sustainable living. But we should also bear in mind that to live sustainable lives, we’d have to each reduce our emissions by around 90%, something that requires a lot more than using fairy liquid…
Olive Heffernan
Olive Heffernan
Apparently, an all white computer screen, such as an empty Word page, or the Google page, uses 74 watts to display, whereas a black screen consumes only 59 watts. So claimed Mark Ontkush in a post on the ecoIron blog in January. Doing a few back of the envelope calculations based on numbers of users per day and wattage for different coloured screen from EnergyStar, Ontkush figured that the energy saving would be 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google had a black screen.
And so, with the help of Heap Media, Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle.
The Wall Street Journal did some of their own calculations, which challenge the energy-saving claims of Blackle. In a blog post from May, they point out that the "savings are most likely to accrue from older CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors, rather than the more modern, energy-efficient LCD (liquid crystal display) screens that dominate the market (representing three quarters of all monitors world-wide as of last year, by some estimates)." They did some tests using Blackle, Google and the New York Times on a CTD and LCD monitor and found the difference "so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter".
Since then, it's been blogged about here, here and here. Anyhow, check it out - it's certainly novel, whether or not it's especially efficient.
Olive Heffernan
News Editor
Nature Reports Climate Change
Olive Heffernan
Much like the rest of Britain, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s ever going to stop raining. And despite feeling slightly miffed at an appalling excuse for a summer, I realise I'm lucky to be based in slightly soggy London, given that large areas of the country are currently besieged by some of the worst flooding in recent British history.
Calling it a ‘21st century catastrophe’, Michael McCarthy at the Independent writes that “Britain is suffering from a wholly new type of civil emergency: a disaster caused by 21st-century weather,” which has left more than a third of a million people without drinking water, nearly 50,000 people without power, thousands more people homeless and caused more than £2bn worth of damage so far.
Britain is not alone in experiencing extremely heavy rainfall. As reported on MSNBC, “parts of China had the heaviest rainfall since records began, killing more than 700 so far this year. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced by flash floods in southern Pakistan.”
While these single events cannot be attributed to climate change, many are questioning if the flash flooding is a sign of what is in store for the future. And scientists have some of the answers.
In a paper coming out in Nature this Thursday, Francis Zwiers of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Toronto and colleagues present the first evidence that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have altered rainfall patterns in the 20th Century. In the region between 40 and 70 degrees North, covering northern Europe, Russia and parts of North America, rainfall increased by 62 millimetres per century between 1925 and 1999. Zwiers and colleagues say that 50-85% of this increase can be attributed to human activity. For further discussion and comments on the paper, there’s a news story by my colleague Daniel Cressy on News@Nature. And it’s also been picked up by the BBC.
And a recent paper published in Science in June suggests that global warming may result in even more rainfall worldwide than is currently evident in climate model simulations. Frank J. Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, California and co-workers compared global satellite data from 1987 to 2006 and found that rainfall increased at the same rate as atmospheric water vapour per degree Celsius of surface warming. Climate models had projected a dampened response of rainfall to global warming owing to a decrease in surface winds, but Wentz and colleagues found that surface winds have in fact become stronger, leading to heavier rainfall (more on this in Nature Reports Climate Change soon).
Coming back to Britain… the situation is likely to worsen over the next 24 hours. Eight severe warnings have been issued covering the rivers Thames, Severn and Ouse, in particular for towns such as Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Oxford, Abingdon, Reading and Bedford. Fifty other flood warnings are in place across England and Wales.
To see the areas generally most at risk of flooding in England and Wales, visit the Environment Agency’s flood map online, where you view flood risk by postcode. For an up to date interactive on the current situation, the Guardian has quite a snazzy interactive highlighting areas most at risk.
Olive Heffernan
News Editor
Nature Reports Climate Change
Olive Heffernan
I've been asked to chair a debate on climate change in Malta in November. The debate, taking place at the Pacem in Maribus XXXII conference on 5-8 November, is being hosted by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology and is aimed at engaging your marine professionals in climate issues.
So, the debate will be looking at some of the issues surrounding climate change of particular relevance to this community, such as the respective role of engineers and scientists in mitigating and adapating to climate change, the role of the shipping industry in contributing to and in mitigating climate change, and the role of individual action versus government leaders in effecting change.
I'd welcome any comments and suggestions and of course if you're interested in joining us or know of others who would be, check out the programme at the link above or register for the debate.
Olive Heffernan
HSBC announced the results of their international survey on public attitudes to climate change in London this morning.
The survey found a gulf between public opinion on climate change in developed and developing nations, with people in developing economies showing greater concern, commitment and optimism in solving global warming compared with respondents in developed countries. The results challenge the myth of committed developed world countries leading on climate change with reluctant developing nations trailing behind, said Jon Williams, Head of Group Sustainable Development at HSBC, speaking at the event.
Conducted in 9 countries (UK, France, Germany, USA, Mexico, Brazil, China, Hong Kong and India) during April 2007, the internet survey asked 1000 participants in each nation to rank their level of agreement on four statements on a 1-7 scale (with 1 representing strong disagreement and 7 representing strong agreement) as follows:
“Climate change and how we respond to it are among the biggest issues I worry about today”.
“The people and organisations who should be doing something about climate change are doing what is needed”.
“I am personally making a significant effort to help reduce climate change through how I live my life today”.
“I believe we can stop climate change”.
Europeans, it seems, are a bunch of ‘sceptical pessimists’, with the lowest scores overall. While we are reasonably concerned about climate change, we have little confidence, optimism or commitment in solving it. Only 6% of UK respondents agreed with the statement “I believe we can stop climate change” compared with 18% in the US and 45% in India.
UK respondents also showed a surprising lack of belief that they are making a significant effort to reduce their personal carbon footprint, in contrast to 44% of those interviewed in China, 47% in both Brazil and India and 23% in the US. And why would we? It seems, according to the survey, we’re not really that concerned about climate change, being far more freaked out by terrorism. On levels of concern, UK citizens (22%) and Germans (26%) scored lowest.
In contrast, Mexico, Brazil and India make up the ‘committed concerned’, with approx 60% worried about climate change. Almost half are certain they are making the necessary changes to avert a climate catastrophe. Some of the findings are somewhat less surprising – US citizens are ‘sceptical optimists’ – more confident and optimistic than their cynical European counterparts that we will solve the global warming problem. China and Hong Kong, the ‘committed confident’, show the greatest belief that the people and organisations responsible are already doing what they should be doing to tackle the problem.
Continue reading "Developing nations lead on concern for combating climate change, shows survey " »
Olive Heffernan
In the latest issue of Nature Reports Climate Change, there’s an interesting Commentary by a group of atmospheric scientists who argue that, in assessing the skill of climate models by their ability to reproduce warming over the 20th Century, the latest IPCC Working Group I report may give a false sense of the climate models’ predictive capability.
In ‘Quantifying Climate Change – Too Rosy a Picture?’, Stephen Schwartz of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York; Robert Charlson of the University of Washington, Seattle and Henning Rodhe of Stockholm University, Sweden say that, as it stands, the narrow range of modelled warming misrepresents the certainty with which past temperature changes can be reproduced.
The temperature changes over the 20th Century summarized in the IPCC report represent results from 58 runs with 14 climate models. Although the models fared well at simulating past temperature changes (see Figure 2 for the comparison between simulated and observed warming), Schwarz and co-authors point out the uncertainty range is only half what it would be if uncertainties in the factors driving simulated climate change were accounted for – e.g, cooling by aerosols.
Richard Kerr has an interesting news piece on this Commentary in the July 6 issue of Science entitled ‘Another global warming icon comes under attack’. Kerr’s take on it is that, unlike climate skeptics taking cheap potshots at their choice picks of climate science, the Commentary by Schwarz and co-authors represents a group of mainstream atmospheric scientists challenging an emerging icon of global warming, with climate scientists giving some ground.
Co-author Charlson points out clearly in the Science news piece that “it is not a question of whether the Earth is warming or will continue to warm” under human influence. Rather, Schwarz and co-authors maintain that it is important to give an accurate picture of the range of sensitivities of current models, so that we have a better gauge of what the future might hold.
Kerr reports that IPCC authors say the group has a point, but that their latest WGI report, if read thoroughly, does reflect the uncertainties highlighted in the NRCC Commentary. We will have a response from IPCC authors on the Commentary soon, and will update you when we do....
Olive Heffernan
This weekend saw the biggest global media event of all time…and by far the largest climate awareness event in history. Al Gore’s concerts for a climate in crisis were watched by an estimated 2 billion viewers (at the events, on TV and an unprecedented number online) and took place over 24-hours on seven continents (thanks in part to the somewhat lesser known band Nunatak taking a break from field work!)
With bands blaring from Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hamburg, London, Johannesburg, New York, Rio de Janeiro and the Antarctic, the aim of Live Earth was to urge people to make a personal commitment to combating climate change by taking a ‘seven point pledge’.
There were also frequent calls asking people to lobby government for change in legislation, but the specifics of this goal were somewhat vaguer. The level of awareness raising at the heart of Satuirday's concerts is urgently needed, as evidenced in the results of recent polls, one of which apparently shows that a majority of Britons and are more concerned by dog poop than global warming and believe that scientists are still questioning climate change (although see John Sauven’s alternative analysis in the Guardian). Another recent survey suggests that half of teenagers are just not that interested and even fewer feel personally empowered to change.
The event and its participants have received no end of criticism for their carbon-intensive ways. One comment on BBC’s Newsnight blog provided the anology “You wouldn’t hold a hog-roast to promote vegetarianism”.
Fair point, but if you want to get people to listen to a call for change, punctuating it with Kasabian, Keane and the Red Hot Chili Peppers is definitely not a bad approach. Yes, the participants lead especially carbon intensive lifestyles (though the Chili's have at least been offsetting for years)…but surely that's part and parcel of the point the event is making….rock concerts happen, people drive SUVs, we have unsustainable lives...and that needs to change.
Whether Live Earth as an event can instigate that change is another question. Without a doubt, the concerts have caught the attention of the public and the media across the globe. As one of 60,000 at the Wembley gig, though, I couldn’t help notice how the enthusiastic roars from the crowd contrasted starkly with the sluggish retorts to calls for action.
While most of the acts chose songs vaguely fitting for the event, such as Duran Duran’s ‘Planet Earth’ and Snow Patrol’s ‘Open your eyes’, it seemed as though the rendition of that revolutionary rock anthem ‘Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be…” by David Gray and Damien Rice (though fantastic) summed up the indifferent feeling from the audience most aptly. As they say ‘recognition is the first step to recovery’. It’s going to take a lot more than a rock concert to change human behaviour, but the mainstream recognition of the problem signified by Live Earth suggests we are at least heading in the right direction.
Olive Heffernan
News Editor
Nature Reports Climate Change
Posted by Olive Heffernan
While I usually find the FT an excellent source of comment and discussion on climate change, I was somewhat bemused by last week’s Comment from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who writes that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem” and urges society to “resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term 'scientific consensus', which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority”.
Though clearly no climate expert, Klaus feels sufficiently component to write on the topic of global warming “as someone who lived under communism for most of his life”. He says “I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism”.
From a man who regards Michael Crichton and Richard Lindzen as voices of reason come denunciations of "Al Gore’s so-called documentary film", "Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report" and the IPCC’s and G8 Summit’s "ambitions to do something about the weather". (For a direct response to both Crichton’s and Lindzen’s climate denialist arguments, listen to the recent debate with climate scientists Gavin Schmidt and Richard Somerville, among others).
Klaus fails to even attempt to challenge any specifics of the scientific literature on climate change, but instead writes climate science off as ‘propoganda’, making his Comment absurd.
“One exceptionally warm winter is enough…for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather”, he writes. Actually, the latest IPCC report on the physical science basis of climate change, which represents the work of thousands of researchers, compiled by hundreds of climate experts, found that “eleven of the last twelve years rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature”.
He then goes on to claim it is "proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment". But with higher per-capita income, the demand for ecosystem services grows. This places more pressure on the environment, often with detrimental effects. For more on this, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provides a comprehensive discussion of the relationship between wealth and the environment.
As Felix Salmon points out on the Market Movers blog, much of Klaus’ Comment is rather woolly in meaning, with statements such as ‘small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures’ being so general as to be meaningless.
The FT invites readers to challenge Klaus by posting questions to ask@ft.com before this Thursday, June 21, when answers to a select few will appear online from 1pm BST – although the Q&A session is situated in the somewhat misleading category ‘ask the expert’! Personally, I find it disappointing that they are only allowing questions rather than comments, and select ones at that.
Olive Heffernan
The latest news from the G8 Summit meetings in Heiligendamm, Germany is that leaders of G8 nations have agreed to a ‘compromise deal’ to tackle climate change. According to the BBC, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that
'nations have agreed that CO2 emissions must first be stopped and then followed by substantial reductions.’
Although Merkel pushed for a mandatory 50% slash in carbon emissions by mid century, no specific emissions reductions targets have been agreed. Leaders have purportedly said they will negotiate the successor to the Kyoto Protocol within a UN framework. If true, this in itself would be an achievement, as the US recently announced its refusal to participate in global post-2012 negotiations scheduled for the end of the year. Without a consensus on mandatory global emissions reductions, however, today’s compromise deal may be worth little. The need for effective emissions caps is simply the first of numerous contentious issues to be hammered out in determining a global post-Kyoto pact, as reported by Amanda Leigh Haag on Nature Reports: Climate Change, launched today.
Launching in the midst of the G8 climate talks, the site has kicked off with a strong focus on climate policy, emissions reductions, carbon storage and offsetting, as well as covering climate science in research highlights, news and views and in the Journal Club. In our main feature, Amanda takes an in-depth looks at how the Kyoto Protocol has fared thus far – its major triumphs and downfalls. Perhaps the most prominent disappointments have been the failure of some nations to meet what seemed to be modest emissions reduction targets at the outset, and the backtracking of the US on their commitments in 2001. As well as bringing the US back on board, key issues beyond 2012 will include persuading countries such China, India and Brazil to take bold steps to reduce emissions in the next phase, assisting developing nations to adapt to climate change, and avoiding further deforestation, to name but a few.
While some believe that a global extension of the European Trading Scheme is what is needed for mandatory and aggressive reduction of emissions, others are not convinced. In a Commentary, also published today on Nature Reports: Climate Change, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, argues against ‘an unwieldy global emissions permit system that would be virtually impossible to negotiate and even harder to police’. Yet, despite the considerable global efforts needed to reduce emissions, avoiding dangerous climate change is both practically and economically achievable, says Sachs, if we use a targeted approach aimed at specific sectors.
Posted by Olive Heffernan
Solutions to climate change could come in extremely small sizes, according to a report released last week by the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). “Environmentally Beneficial Nanotechnologies: Barriers and Opportunities” explores the application of nanoscience in five key areas that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, namely: insulation, photovoltaics, electricity storage, engine efficiency and the hydrogen economy.
Nanotechnology is a hugely exciting, if relatively young, branch of science with seemingly limitless possibilities. What scientists are discovering is that everyday materials, at very small sizes of one or several nanometers (a nanometer is equivalent to one billionth of a metre), can behave in completely out of ordinary and rather strange ways. This knowledge is resulting in an explosion of nanotechnology-enabled products entering the market, with the number expected to grow dramatically from $30 billion in 2005 to $2.6 trillion by 2014.
The report suggests that applying nanotechnology in these five key areas could contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 2 % in the short term and up to 20 % by 2050 with similar reductions in air pollution.
In the short term, nanotechnology has the potential to improve fuel efficiency and eliminate CO2 emissions from transport, concludes the report. Adding nanoparticles as a fuel additive to diesel engines could reduce emissions by 2.1 million tones with little infrastructural change. Nanomaterials could improve the efficiency of fuels cells, and their incorporation into batteries and supercapacitators could reduce the charge time for electric cars. In the longer term, the report says that nanotechnology could play a key role in developing renewable hydrogen production. A hydrogen economy is estimated to be 40 years away from potential universal deployment, but nanotech developments could be crucial to achieving efficient hydrogen storage, which is thought to be the largest barrier to wide scale use.
Nanotech innovations could also provide a solution to reducing cost and increasing efficiency of solar cells. The report says this is unlikely to result in significant GHG emission reduction in the UK, where there is relatively little sun, but could be of significance to reducing global emissions. Jonathan Kohler at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, however, believes that photovoltaics can have a significant output even in British climatic conditions. If the cost was reduced through advances in nanotechnology, we could see the large scale application of photovoltaics in the UK in the next twenty years, he says. A nanotech application with clear benefits for a country like the UK where 50% of energy demand is domestic would be the development of effective insulation for solid walled buildings.
As a branch of science in its infancy, significant peer-reviewed research in this area is yet to come – as a result the latest IPCC WGIII report on mitigating climate change doesn’t consider nanotech solutions to climate change. Aside from the funding and research required to develop these concepts, there are specific concerns that need to be addressed such as the potential toxicity of newly developed materials and the need to allay public fears that the materials could behave both strangely…and unpredictably.
This area of science looks set to offer some interesting green applications in the future. To keep on track of the latest research developments in nanotechnology, check out Nature Nanotechnology.
Coming up for two weeks in, a few words about this blog and its somewhat chequered early career.
Our intention was, and remains, to provide readers with pointers to interesting climate news and informal summaries of the state of play on various topics. We wanted, and still want, to offer a wide range of views, and to move beyond the natural sciences into the social sciences and the political world as and when necessary. To this end we supplemented the various staff members at Nature, Nature Reports Climate Change and the nascent Nature Geoscience who can blog on this site with invited contributors, thinking of those who had responded to our invitations as our early “core contributors”.
Along with our own initial posts, we then kicked off with a pair of posts from two of our invited contributors. In their separate ways, both posts were seen to be more controversial than other content here and, taken together, gave an impression that the blog would have a particular slant. This was not our intention, which is to offer a wide range of interesting, if controversial, views and in doing so, to represent a diversity of expert opinions over time. News travels fast in the blogosphere, however, and our somewhat unclear beginnings did not go unnoticed. As a result we found that some researchers who had previously offered themselves as willing bloggers no longer wished to make that offer, leading us, as William noted, to revise our “core contributors” list to “recent contributors”, just listing those who had posted on the site to date.
This change also reflects our intention to broaden our blogging base; in addition to our regular bloggers, those many contributors we initially invited remain welcome to post, as do others. We will be encouraging our contributors to write about things seen elsewhere rather than to focus solely on their own research, though their particular fields of expertise will of course continue to show through.
Although we had considered it, we will not be taking “right to reply” posts in response to the initial post on the hockey stick, though the comments threads remain open. We feel this has been discussed widely elsewhere and that continuing to post on it will not serve our readers well. For those who are interested in the most recent official statement on the topic, we suggest reading the IPCC Working Group I report. In the future, we may, however, structure debates between proponents of opposing views on certain issues. In the case of a contributor posting on a specific piece of work by another author, we will notify that author of the posting and invite a response.
We strongly encourage readers to comment, though comments will be moderated – personal or offensive material will not be posted.
We remain open to suggestions from you all about how to make the blog a useful addition to one of the world’s most pressing conversations. We look forward to many fruitful discussions on climate change in our journals and others, in the news, and in the world at large.
Olive Heffernan
Olive Heffernan
Warnings that switching to biofuels as a ‘clean’ energy source could threaten food security and increase deforestation have become increasingly stark this week.
A UN report, released last Monday concluded that, despite offering considerable benefits such as clean energy for millions and the creation of wealth and jobs in poorer countries, biofuel production also has the ability to cause real destruction.
The report warned that increasing production of liquid biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, could increase the price of agricultural commodities with negative economic and social impacts, especially for the world’s poor who spend a large proportion of income on food. It also raised the issue that, where forests are cleared to make way for energy crops, GHG emissions may actually be higher overall from biofuels than from fossil fuels. The report states:
Unless new policies are enacted to protect threatened lands, secure socially acceptable land use, and steer bioenergy development in a sustainable direction overall, the environment and social damage could in some cases outweigh the benefits
Today, BBC News reports on new study by the UK based Co-op Insurance Society that reiterates some of these concerns. The CIS report warns of the potentially severe environmental impacts of increased biofuel production. According to the BBC, the study found that as much as nine per cent of the world's agricultural land could be needed to replace just 10% of the world's transport fuels. The land needed for energy crops could encroach on what little land is available for food in countries threatened by famine.
Though not the first time these concerns have been raised, the reports, in particular the UN study, represent significant efforts to investigate the pros and cons of bioenergy production. For previous discussions of these issues, see George Monbiot’s series of articles on the ills of biofuels, in particular his recent piece in The Guardian in which he argues that we need a five year freeze on biofuels if we are to save the planet
The recent boom in the bioenergy sector looks set to continue. Worldwide biofuel production fdoubled in the last five years and will double again in the next four years, says the UN report. The latest IPCC Working Group III SPM, projects that biofuel use for transport will grow to 3% of total transport energy by 2030. Growth could reach up to 5-10% of total transport energy, depending on future oil and carbon prices, improvements in car efficiency and technological advances.
In the meantime, the EU and the UK have set a target of 10% of all car fuel to come from biodiesels by 2010. At the start of the year, the EC made proposals for a new EU-wide energy policy, which includes a binding target of 10% of biofuels in petrol and diesel in all member states. The public consultation on how this could be achieved – and sustainably – is open until June 4.
Welcome to Climate Feedback, a new blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming.
Launching in May, Nature Reports: Climate Change is a new online resource from Nature, dedicated to in-depth reporting on global change. In light of the need for greater understanding of and access to information on climate change, the new website will vastly extend Nature’s reporting on this issue of incalculable importance.
As its accompanying blog, Climate Feedback aims to encouarge less formal debate and commentary on climate science featured in our journals and others, in the news, and in the world at large. The blog will host the climate-related musings of editors of Nature and Nature Reports: Climate Change, as well as of a select group of climate scientists and policy experts. For details of our regular contributors, go to ‘Contributors’ on the blog home page. We will also host postings from other contributors outside of the core group from time to time. As Nature’s first exclusive climate blog, Climate Feedback will join the list of existing Nature blogs, which cover a diversity of subjects from neuroscience to science news.
Why the need for another climate blog?
Despite a twenty fold in increase in coverage of global warming over almost two decades in the UK (and a five fold increase in the US over the same period) (see papers by Max Boykoff) , climate change remains a low priority for the mainstream media. More importantly, climate change issues remain poorly understood among even the well-informed public. Mainstream coverage of climate change often leaves readers out in the cold when it comes to separating the known from the unknown, fact from opinion and even fact from fiction. And while the contribution of human activity to climate change is well-established, the extent and timescale of future changes and how to minimise and deal with these changes remain topics of huge debate.
Here at Nature, we have launched Climate Feedback with the aim of providing a forum for authoritative discussion on climate issues, hosting a balance of voices and a diversity of well-informed opinions. We will discuss the broader issues surrounding climate change, as well as cutting-edge climate science. Our goal is to provide a respected and trustworthy source of discussion and debate for a wide audience, from climate scientists to the scientific public.
Why ‘Climate Feedback’?
We have called our blog Climate Feedback as a tribute to the inherently complex feeedback mechanisms in the climate system that can diminish or amplify the effect of initial greenhouse warming, and which remain one of the least well understood components of climate change. Feedback occurs when one processes triggers another that then has a positive or negative influence on the first. Similarly, we hope that postings on this blog will generate feedback to which we can respond, generating dynamic discussions on climate issues.
What will we host on the blog?
-Discussion of the weekly content of Nature Reports: Climate Change and of our monthly podcasts
-Comment and analysis on climate science in our journals, other journals and in the news
-Musings from us on meetings and conferences we are attending
-Details of upcoming events, books, interesting sites, articles etc.
-Notes from climate scientists in the field ….updating us with their in situ observations
-And much more, of course!
We will be posting to the blog frequently, so do check in regularly to see what’s new. Please join in our discussions by leaving comments. If you want to contact us, email climatefeedback at nature dot com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Olive Heffernan is News Editor on Nature Reports: Climate Change. Following a BA in Zoology at Trinity College Dublin and a PhD in Fisheries Ecology at University College Dublin, Olive moved to the UK as a postdoctoral scientist to continue her work on Northeast Atlantic cod stocks. Her long-standing interest in the broader issues surrounding science made her jump ship in 2004 from research to science journalism. She has since been awarded a fellowship and prize for reporting on ocean sciences. Olive was editor of The Marine Scientist magazine and Associate Editor of the Journal of Offshore Technology, reporting on oceanography, climate, marine technology and renewable energies, before joining Nature Reports: Climate Change in 2007.
For the latest comment, analysis, news and features, go to Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature’s online resource dedicated to in-depth coverage of climate science and the implications for policy, the economy and society.
Subscribe to this blog's feeds:
