Climate Feedback

It’s Wednesday in Lindau and I’ve spent a chunk of the past 24 hours recording sections of the film about climate change that we’re making here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Heffernan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Heffernan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Lindau09: Scientists in society" »

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

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 26, 2009
Categories: Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 26, 2009
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 24, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 19, 2009
Categories: Climate prediction, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "A place at the table? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 04, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, UN climate talks, Bonn, June 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 03, 2009
Categories: Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN climate talks, Bonn, June 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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?" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 20, 2009
Categories: International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 19, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate change represents the biggest health threat of the twenty-first century, according to a new report published 16 May in The Lancet. Olive Heffernan talks to lead investigator Anthony Costello, director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London.

How did this study come about?

Just over a year ago, The Lancet challenged us to do this study. Back then, climate change was not one of my top priorities. I would have said that dealing with malnutrition and HIV and having a better health service were more important issues in health. But I’ve changed my perspective now, partly because I’m beginning to notice the effect that rising temperatures are having in certain parts of the globe.

What climate-related health issues can we expect this century?

In a very broad sense, there will be changing patterns of infection. Insect-borne diseases like dengue fever, tick-borne encephalitis and malaria will spread. We’re already seeing blue tongue virus in livestock moving up from southern Europe, for example. But I don’t think that infectious disease will be the major health effect of climate change, unless new viruses emerge, which is a great unknown.

Heat is a silent killer. Certainly as average temperatures rise we’re going to get many more heat waves and people outside of their coping range. When you get above a certain temperature level, the question is how well can people adapt.

But the biggest health effect that will emerge in the next 20 years will be related to food and water security. There could be quite serious shortages and large rises in food prices, which will penalize the poorest. Currently malnutrition is quite a significant factor in about 60 per cent of childhood deaths. This can result in low birth weight and predisposition to infectious diseases, such as measles, tuberculosis and pneumonia.

What can health professionals do?

Firstly, we have to add the voice of the health community to the argument to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We must campaign urgently on emissions and reforestation. Climate change is going to affect the health of our children and grandchildren, and getting that message across does focus minds. Secondly, we need a framework for tackling this problem.

What exactly would that framework involve?

We need more information. I was shocked to find that there are no health impact assessments on the impacts of climate change in Africa. Not one. The World Health Organization has the tools to do this, but there are very few resources. So we need to start by having country-level health impact assessments for climate change. There’s a deficit of data on climate impacts in Africa, but the situation isn’t much better in Asia. Beyond that, we need to get down to localities. It’s quite important to do participatory work with communities on their risks, and we’re interested in launching an initiative to get people to collect their own data.

Continue reading "Q&A: Anthony Costello " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 19, 2009
Categories: In the News, Olive Heffernan, Research, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 09, 2009
Categories: Economics, Olive Heffernan, Reviews, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

“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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 09, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 08, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 08, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 30, 2009
Categories: Economics, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 24, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 20, 2009
Categories: In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 13, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Copenhagen: Why the media matters " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 13, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Ackerman’s response to Bauman" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Economics, Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 05, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, GHG emissions, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "NASA’s next challenge " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 03, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Climate Science, Features, GHG emissions, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 24, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Features, GHG emissions, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"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.

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 06, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Could we count on air capture?" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 04, 2009
Categories: Economics, Journal Club, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

“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.

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 30, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "The truth about thermoelectrics " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 26, 2009
Categories: Features, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“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'.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 23, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: Evidence that Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years [updated]" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 21, 2009
Categories: AGU, Cryosphere, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 16, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 15, 2009
Categories: Climate Policy, Economics, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

View image

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 13, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Extreme Events, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 07, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Palaeoclimate, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 23, 2008
Categories: Climate Science, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 19, 2008
Categories: Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 18, 2008
Categories: AGU, Climate Science, Climate prediction, GHG emissions, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: Peak fuel reserves " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 17, 2008
Categories: AGU, Climate prediction, Energy, GHG emissions, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: On the home front" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 17, 2008
Categories: AGU, Adaptation, Climate prediction, Extreme Events, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 16, 2008
Categories: AGU, Communicating Climate Change, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: conference kicks off " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 16, 2008
Categories: AGU, Climate prediction, Features, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate, Research | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 10, 2008
Categories: AGU, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 10, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Poznan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Pole positions" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 02, 2008
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Poznan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "There’s life in the cold sink yet " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 02, 2008
Categories: Climate Science, Features, In the News, Ocean science, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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….

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 28, 2008
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Will the US be ready in Copenhagen? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 28, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Olive Heffernan, Politics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen, UN Conference on Climate Change, Poznan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 17, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 17, 2008
Categories: Climate Science, Cryosphere, Features, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 05, 2008
Categories: Business, Climate Policy, Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 16, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that remarkable headway has been made into understanding the physical science of climate change, there’s a feeling among climate experts – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and among funding agencies of the need to shift the focus of climate research from identifying the cause to assessing the impacts, whether hurricanes, oceanic dead zones or forest fires.

A case in point is the new study just launched by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the US to examine how climate change will influence hurricane activity in the coming decades.

In an excellent news feature in Science magazine, Eli Kintisch takes up the issue by looking at how the $1.8 billion available for the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is likely to be reoriented towards climate impacts research under a new administration.

But evaluating climate impacts will require more than a shift in CCSP’s vision. As Kintisch points out, the research budget available to CCSP has declined from $1.9 billion in 1994, whereas climate research advocates estimate approximately $4.5 billion will be needed by 2014 to sustain the needs of both academic and federal climate scientists. The widening gap between escalating costs and narrowing research budgets is placing a strain on basic earth monitoring and means that fewer scientists are tackling increasingly complex issues, such as the impacts of aerosols, writes Kintisch.

Continue reading "Impacts research – the next frontier" »

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

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”.

Continue reading "Pocket IPCC" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 09, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 03, 2008
Categories: Energy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "A challenging political climate" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 03, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Could tipping happen any time soon? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 26, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Climate Science, Features, GHG emissions, Journal Club, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Heffernan

Image: Ice Texts, 2004-2005, David Buckland

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 18, 2008
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Last week NASA climatologist Jim Hansen came to London to testify on behalf of activists who defaced the Kingnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which we recently blogged about here on Climate Feedback. Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen in a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered. You can read the full story over on Nature News.

Olive Heffernan

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

As residents of New Orleans prepare to return home and breathe a sigh of relief that Hurricane Gustav was less damaging than feared, new research published today in Nature [subscription] suggests that the strongest tropical cyclones will pick up speed in the coming decades.

Weighing in on the long-running and at times very stormy debate over whether and how warmer seas will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes is a team led by climatologist James Elsner of Florida State University.

Using a 25-year archive of satellite data, Elsner and colleagues derive wind speeds for tropical cyclones over the globe. They find that the maximum wind speeds reached by the strongest tropical cyclones increased from 1981-2006 in most ocean basins, with the greatest changes in the North Atlantic and Northern Indian Oceans.

There was no trend in the intensity of cyclones occuring over the South Pacific, however, and the upward trend observed over a couple of ocean regions was not statistically significant. The researchers also found no increase in either the frequency or average intensity of tropical cyclones over the globe.

The approach taken by Elsner and colleagues – looking at whether the most severe cyclones will hit a higher speed limit during their lifetime – is both novel and socially relevant, simply because the most severe storms do the most damage if they make landfall. Once tropical cyclones reach speeds of over 74mph, they are officially classified as hurricanes.

The real bone of contention within the scientific community has been whether hurricanes will become more intense and more frequent as a result of human-induced climate change. Elsner and colleagues steer well clear of linking the trend to global warming though - they can’t attribute cause as their study doesn’t investigate other factors such as cyclone origin and duration, proximity to land, El Niño conditions and solar activity.

Continue reading "As Gustav subsides, new study says strongest cyclones will pick up speed" »

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

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 29, 2008
Categories: Biodiversity and Ecology, Climate Policy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 21, 2008
Categories: Features, Olive Heffernan, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Protests at the climate camp in Kingsnorth, Kent, the site of a proposed new coal fired power plant, reached a climax this weekend, as reported by various news sources. Demonstrators, who promised to reach the site by air, land and sea, reached about 3,000 in number during the course of the week, but – met by some 1,500 police officers - failed to halt business at the site’s existing plant.

There was an excellent article in Saturday’s Guardian on how the outcome of Kingnorth will have implications for similar plants under development worldwide. In total, approx 100 similar plants are in the planning stage – more than half of these are in China, with the others split between the UK, Germany and the US – and governments are watching closely to see what decision is taken in the UK.

The main question is whether the UK government, which has argued for tough international regulations on climate change, will allow the power plant to go ahead without carbon capture and storage (CCS). UK energy minister Malcolm Wicks argues that new coal fired power plants such as the one being proposed in Kent are needed to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS technology, which remains unproven. This may be true, but if demonstrating CCS really is the priority, then why is it that there is no obligation for the owners of Kingsnorth to use CCS, should it be proven?

Continue reading "Debate on coal heats up as climate protests reach climax" »

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

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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 29, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Features, In the News, Notes from the Field, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 09, 2008
Categories: Features, G8 Summit 2008, In the News, Major Economies Meeting, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 08, 2008
Categories: Features, G8 Summit 2008, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

Toyako, Japan-

I finally arrived at the G8 summit this morning after somewhat of an arduous journey. Not that I didn’t think it would be a schlep to Hokkaido from London, but I hadn’t quite bargained on the detour that was in store.

Having handed over the logistics completely to our trusted travel agent, I sort of hoped I’d end up in the right place. On taking off from Tokyo, though, I decided to plan my journey from the airport (somewhat late, maybe, I know!) and realised I was headed for a remote outpost nearer to Russia than the location of the G8 Summit. Though still in Hokkaido, Wakkanai is a small fishing port known for spotting harp seals and drying kelp; it’s about as far north as you can go in Japan, some 60km from Russia, and a good eight hours overland from my intended destination.

Luckily for me, an Italian reporter and a Nigerian sherpa had found themselves in the same predicament, and so we shared the long trip back, which was fun, if a bit like something from an Aki Kaurismaki film.

It certainly seems that the organisers of this year’s summit went of their way to host it in a remote location where the customary protests that accompany the event could be kept at a distance. Few protestors reached the resort of Toyako itself, where world leaders arrived yesterday, but more than 1,000 marched in Sapporo (the city I should have flown in to!) over the weekend.

The media are for the most part more than an hour away from the actual event in mountain lodges, and security measures for photo opportunities are super tight. Today has largely been taken up with formalities such as meetings between individual heads of states, photo shoots and fine dining experiences (whilst discussing world food shortages, no doubt).

But talks should get down to details tomorrow…

Olive Heffernan

Image: Train station at Wakkanai, Hokkaido

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

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 02, 2008
Categories: Features, In the News, Major Economies Meeting, Notes from the Field, Olive Heffernan, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 24, 2008
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

“People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced”, concludes the latest poll on public opinion of global warming by social marketing group Ipsos Mori.

Despite the deluge of media reports in the last year documenting the scientific consensus on climate change and the startling rapidity at which impacts are being seen around the world - most notably perhaps the ever-decreasing Arctic sea ice - 60% of the British Public is uncertain that climate change is caused by humans, and many others believe that scientists are overstating the problem.

Writing in Sunday’s Observer, Juliette Jowit provides the following explanation:

There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.

While it’s reassuring to know that the public questions the status quo, if Jowitt is correct, what’s frustrating is the ability of blatantly misrepresentative arguments to sway public opinion.

The Great Global Warming Swindle resulted in a record 250 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom (including the first ever peer reviewed complaint), but that’s still a fraction of the 2.5 million viewers. Like many of those who saw the Channel 4 documentary, readers of Lawson’s offering on climate change ‘An Appeal to Reason’ are probably unaware it has been scientifically discredited in almost every review, including one on Nature Reports Climate Change by Sir John Houghton, Honorary Scientist at the UK’s Hadley Centre.

As Sir Houghton writes:

Promised as a "rare breath of intellectual rigour" and a "hard headed examination of the realities" of climate change, this offering is neither cool nor rational….and is largely one of misleading messages.

Lawson’s fundamental misunderstanding of basic scientific concepts is first displayed in his interpretation of the temperature records for the first part of this century, with which he attempts to discredit the science of climate change, and the work of many thousands of researchers who’ve dedicated entire careers to the problem. More recently, he repeats this in an amusing attack on the recent Nature paper by NASA’s Cynthia Rosenzweig.

Writing as a guest over on Susan Hills’ blog, Lawson’s piece starts off with a failure to grasp the term 'meta-analysis' – he clearly thinks that this is merely a lumping together of existing data. On the contrary, Rosenzweig and colleagues have used a powerful scientific tool to analyze changes in early 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - no mean feat - and in doing so, have shown that warming is aready having a worldwide impacts.

As Houghton rightly points out, Lawson is in need of climate science 101. But then, it seems, he's not alone - at least on that count.

Olive Heffernan

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

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 surface

They 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.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 13, 2008
Categories: Biodiversity and Ecology, Biosphere feedbacks, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Deforestation, GHG emissions, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Uncertainty | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 06, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 29, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Features, In the News, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 27, 2008
Categories: Atmospheric Science, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Features, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 19, 2008
Categories: Climate Science, Extreme Events, Features, Hurricanes, In the News, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 15, 2008
Categories: Attribution, Biodiversity and Ecology, Climate Science, Features, In the News, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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 " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 14, 2008
Categories: Climate Science, Climate prediction, Features, In the News, Journal Club, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Heffernan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I submit my paper to Nature or Nature Geoscience?

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

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

When will Nature Geoscience have an impact factor?

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

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

Continue reading "EGU: Meeting the scientists " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 16, 2008
Categories: EGU 2008, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Heffernan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pielke Sr. writes:

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

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

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

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

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

AAAS, Boston -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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