EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • Global body needed to direct green technology, G77 says

     

    Developing nations argue that the costs should be paid by the rich nations, and that a new global body is required, perhaps working as part of the UN, to direct the world’s low-carbon transformation in sectors as diverse as power, transport and heavy industry.

    “We know that, to limit global temperature rises to below 2C, we’ll need a step change in global innovation and technology transfer,” said Shane Tomlinson of environment consultants E3G. “In the period to 2020, it’s vital we avoid high carbon lock-in. The infrastructure decisions that developing countries are taking today, such as new power stations, are going to determine their emissions pathways for 20-30 years.”

    In the short term, that means rolling out proven technologies such as onshore and offshore wind power, solar photovoltaics and energy efficiency measures. A recent analysis by the Climate Group found that, to meet the emissions targets already agreed by nations, 9.3bn tonnes of CO2 must be prevented from entering the atmosphere by 2020. But these will not be enough for the deep cuts – 80% or more on 1990 levels – that many rich countries will have to deliver by 2050, if the world is to limit warming to the 2C that scientists agree is the safe limit. By then, according to the International Energy Agency, 17 technologies will have to be developed and rolled out to deliver a reduction of 42bn tonnes of CO2. Most of that technology – ranging from carbon capture and storage, solar power and zero-emission vehicles – will need to be deployed in emerging economies.

    At Copenhagen, the first decision on technology will be to decide if a new co-ordinating body should have powers to command the clean tech roll out. “The G77 [group of developing nations] and China have proposed a new central executive, political body,” said Tomlinson. It would be part of the existing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which administers the Kyoto protocol.

    However, Europe and the US want only an advisory committee – their main concern is that a strong political body may end up channelling funds into state enterprises rather than keeping a level playing field for all businesses. Developing countries say an advisory body would have little power to drive the dramatic changes needed.

    The polarised debate has led some to compare the sharing of IP in green technology to arguments over whether pharmaceutical companies should give up patents for expensively developed HIV or malaria drugs in those nations blighted by the illnesses. Alia al-Dalli, deputy resident representative in Morocco for the United Nations Development Programme, said that without local education programmes, the only winners from Copenhagen will be multinational technology companies. “Capacity-development is very important – people need to be educated and aware. You’ve got to be able to produce technologies by the south for the south, in the south,” she said. “It will not merely be technology transfer.”

    Ambuj Sagar, a professor of policy studies at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, said: “The best step would be if we stopped using the term technology transfer and started using something like innovation co-operation to signify that this is not a simple issue. It is not a hand-off from producers of technology to users of technology. We need co-operation instead of a simple reliance on markets to tackle what is an immense challenge.”

  • Global warming could create 150 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050

     

     

    President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, who presented testimony to the EJF, said people in his country did not want to “trade a paradise for a climate refugee camp”. He warned rich countries taking part in UN climate talks this week in Barcelona “not to be stupid” in negotiating a climate treaty in Copenhagen this December.

     

     

    Nasheed urged governments to find ways to keep temperature rises caused by warming under 2C. “We won’t be around for anything after 2C,” he said. “We are just 1.5m over sea level and anything over that, any rise in sea level – anything even near that – would wipe off the Maldives. People are having to move their homes because of erosion. We’ve already this year had problems with two islands and we are having to move them to other islands. We have a right to live.”

     

    Last month, the president held a cabinet meeting underwater to draw attention to the plight of his country.

     

     

     

     

    The EJF claimed 500 million to 600 million people – nearly 10% of the world’s population – are at risk from displacement by climate change. Around 26 million have already had to move, a figure that the EJF predicts could grow to 150 million by 2050. “The majority of these people are likely to be internally displaced, migrating only within a short radius from their homes. Relatively few will migrate internationally to permanently resettle in other countries,” said the report’s authors.

     

     

    In the longer term, the report said, changes to weather patterns will lead to various problems, including desertification and sea-level rises that threaten to inundate low-lying areas and small island developing states. An expert at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris recently said global warming could create “ghost states” with citizens living in “virtual states” due to land lost to rising seas.

     

    The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts sea-level rise in the range of 18-59cm during the 21st century. Nearly one-third of coastal countries have more than 10% of their national land within 5 metres of sea level. Countries liable to lose all or a significant part of their land in the next 50 years, said the EJF report, include Tuvalu, Fiji, the Solomon islands, the Marshall islands, the Maldives and some of the Lesser Antilles.

     

    Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Chad and Rwanda, could see large movements of people. Bangladesh has had 70 climate-related natural disasters in the past 10 years.

     

     

    “Climate change impacts on homes and infrastructure, food and water and human health. It will bring about a forced migration on an unprecedented scale,” said the EJF director, Steve Trent. “We must take immediate steps to reduce our impact on global climate, and we must also recognise the need to protect those already suffering along with those most at risk.”

     

    He called for a new international agreement to address the scale and human cost of climate change. “The formal legal definition of refugees needs to be extended to include those affected by climate change and also internally displaced persons,” he said.

  • Crumbling icesheets could add 5m to sea levels

     

    In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predicted sea levels would rise 18 to 59cm by 2100, but this estimate did not factor in the potential impact of crumbling icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

    Today many of the same scientist say that even if heat-trapping CO2 emissions are curtailed, the ocean watermark is more likely to go up by nearly a metre, enough to render several small island nations unlivable and damage fertile deltas, home to hundreds of millions.

    Related Coverage

    More than 190 nations gather in Copenhagen next month to hammer out a global climate deal to curb greenhouse gases and help poor countries cope with its consequences.

    University of Texas professor Jianli Chen and colleagues analysed nearly seven years of data on ocean-icesheet interaction in Antarctica.

    Covering the period up January 2009, the data was collected by the twin GRACE satellites, which detect mass flows in the ocean and polar regions by measuring changes in Earth’s gravity field.

    Consistent with earlier findings based on different methods, they found that West Antarctica dumped, on average, about 132 billion tonnes of ice into the sea each year, give or take 26 billion tonnes.

    They also found for the first time that East Antarctica – on the Eastern Hemisphere side of the continent – was likewise losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at a rate of about 57 billion tonnes annually.

    The margin for error, they cautioned, is almost as large as the estimate, meaning ice loss could be a little as a few billion tonnes or more than 100.

    Up to now, scientists had thought that East Antarctica was in “balance”, meaning that it accumulated as much mass and it gave off, perhaps a bit more.

    “Acceleration of ice loss in recent years over the entire continent is thus indicated,” the authors conclude.

    “Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea level rise.”

    Another study published last week in the journal Nature reported an upwardly-revised figure for Antarctic temperatures during prior “interglacials”, warm periods such as our own that have occurred roughly every 100,000 years.

    During the last interglacial which peaked about 128,000 years ago, called the Eemian Period, temperatures in the region were probably 6C higher than today, which is about three degrees above previous estimates, the study said.

    The findings suggest that the region may be more sensitive than scientists thought to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that were roughly equivalent to present day levels.

    During the Eemian, sea levels were five to seven metres higher than today.

  • Global temperatures could rise 6C by end of century, say scientists.

     

    Scientists said that CO2 emissions have risen by 29% in the past decade alone and called for urgent action by leaders at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen to agree drastic emissions cuts in order to avoid dangerous climate change.

    The news will give greater urgency to the diplomatic manoeuvring before the Copenhagen summit. President Obama and President Hu of China attempted to breathe new life into the negotiations today by announcing that they intended to set targets for easing greenhouse gas emissions next month. Obama said that he and Hu would continue to press for a deal that would “rally the world”.

    The new study is the most comprehensive analysis to date of how economic changes and shifts in the way people have used the land in the past five decades have affected the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    “The global trends we are on with CO2 emissions from fossil fuels suggest that we’re heading towards 6C of global warming,” said Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia who led the study with colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey.

    “This is very different to the trend we need to be on to limit global climate change to 2C [the level required to avoid dangerous climate change].” That would require CO2 emissions from all sources to peak between 2015 and 2020 and that the global per capita emissions be decreased to 1 tonne of CO2 by 2050. Currently the average US citizen emits 19.9 tonnes per year and UK citizens emit 9.3 tonnes.

    By studying 50 years of data on carbon emissions and combining with estimates of human carbon emissions and other sources such as volcanoes, the team was able to estimate how much CO2 is being absorbed naturally by forests, oceans and soil. The team conclude in the journal Nature Geoscience that those natural sinks are becoming less efficient, absorbing 55% of the carbon now, compared with 60% half a century ago. The drop in the amount absorbed is equivalent to 405m tonnes of carbon or around 60 times the annual output of Drax coal-fired power station, which is the largest in the UK.

    “Based on our knowledge of recent trends in CO2 emissions and the time it takes to change energy infrastructure around the world and on the response of the sinks to climate change and variability, the Copenhagen conference is our last chance to stabilise climate at 2C above preindustrial levels in a smooth and organised way,” said Le Quéré. “If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, we will be on a path to 5C or 6C.”

    Le Quéré’s work, part of the Global Carbon Project, showed that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels increased at an average of 3.4% a year between 2000 and 2008 compared with 1% a year in the 1990s. Despite the global economic downturn, emissions still increased by 2% in 2008. The vast majority of the recent increase has come from China and India, though a quarter of their emissions are a direct result of trade with the west. In recent years, the global use of coal has also surpassed oil.

    Based on projected changes in GDP, the scientists said that emissions for 2009 were expected to fall to 2007 levels, before increasing again in 2010.

    But Le Quéré’s conclusion on the decline of the world’s carbon sinks is not universally accepted. Wolfgang Knorr of the University of Bristol recently published a study in Geophysical Research Letters, using similar data to Le Quéré, where he argued that the natural carbon sinks had not noticeably changed. “Our apparently conflicting results demonstrate what doing cutting-edge science is really like and just how difficult it is to accurately quantify such data,” said Knorr.

    The amount of CO2 that natural carbon sinks can absorb varies from year to year depending on climactic and other natural conditions, and this means that overall trends can be difficult to detect. Le Quéré said her team’s analysis had been able to remove more of the noise in the data that is associated with the natural annual variability of CO2 levels due to, for example, El Niño or volcanic eruptions. “Our methods are different – Knorr uses annual data, we use monthly data and I think we can remove more of the variability.”

    Jo House of the University of Bristol, who worked on the Nature Geoscience paper, said: “It is difficult to accurately estimate sources and sinks of CO2, particularly in emissions from land use change where data on the area and nature of deforestation is poor, and in modelled estimates of the land sink which is strongly affected by inter-annual climate variability. While the science has advanced rapidly, there are still gaps in our understanding.”

    The scientists agreed, however, that an improved understanding of land and ocean CO2 sinks was crucial, since it has a major influence in determining the link between human CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gas. In turn, this has implications for CO2 targets set by governments at climate negotiations.

    • The headline to this article was amended on Wednesday 18 November 2009 to make clear that the study said global temperatures could rise 6C by end of century, not that they will do so.

  • Green terchnologies in peril as rich nations dither on climate deal

     

    Achim Steiner, the head of the UN environment programme, said: “Far more worrying [than formally ratifying a treaty] is that every month we delay we send a ambiguous signal into the world economy, the markets, investors and R&D.” The markets had not yet had that strong signal, said economist Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. “That’s what we can give in Copenhagen with a strong political agreement. If we get nothing then it would be very damaging to confidence.” He told the Guardian: “Could we make a huge step forward in Copenhagen? Yes. Will we certainly do it? No.”

    All participants have accepted that it is impossible to seal a legally binding climate treaty at next month’s summit. The question now is whether leaders will be able to set firm “politically binding” targets for carbon emission reductions and the funding that rich nations need to provide for poorer nations to cope with global warming and develop green technologies.

    “Delinking GDP from emissions is premised on the fact that developed countries will assist developing countries,” said Steiner. He said the funding figures on the negotiating table were “exploratory” and “not transfomative and on a magnitude that would send a major signal to the market” on clean technologies. The EU has adopted Gordon Brown’s figure of $100bn (£60bn) a year by 2020, but Stern said: “This is right at the bottom end of enough and will not be credible unless there is $50bn by 2015.”

    The danger of uncertainty over clean technology investments was an immediate problem, according to Steiner: “Many countries have to make decisions right now where they are going to invest in, say, coal-fired power stations or renewable energy sources which have a premium up front, and these decisions are being influenced certainly by uncertainty on a price on carbon.”

    “Take a country like South Africa, which is planning on investing billions in new energy infrastructure over the next 10-15 years – you can’t put those decisions off ad nauseam,” he added. There was a “real risk” that countries, especially developing ones, would invest in existing “off-the-shelf” technologies that would lock in high carbon emissions for 20-30 years, he said. “Furthermore, a delay in investment is obviously the worst piece of news you can have in terms of getting out of a recession.”

    Stern argued that Copenhagen was the moment to begin the transition to a low-carbon sustainable economy, which would be cleaner, quieter and more secure. “We could by wise investment and policies now set the world on a course where we would see arguably the most dynamic period of technologically driven growth in economic history – probably bigger than the railways or electricity.”

    “We might see Asia leading the charge on this new technology and China is certainly seeing this as the big growth story of the next 2-3 decades.” The risks of missing the opportunity were great, Stern added: “Let’s set ourselves on a path of growth that has a real future and not just high carbon growth and a new bubble, because high carbon growth will kill itself, firstly on the high price of hydrocarbon [fuels], and secondly on the extremely hostile physical environment it creates.”

    Business-as-usual scenarios created a 50% chance of a 5C temperature rise by the next century, Stern said: “We haven’t been there for 300m years. It would redraw shores, patterns of rivers, where deserts are, most of the reasons why we live and work where we do. There would be huge migrations and conflicts that would be global, prolonged and severe.

    Stern acknowledged that electricity prices would go up by 20-30%, but said that would be “a very reasonable price to pay” for the reduction in climate risk such green energy would deliver, given appropriate price protection for poorer consumers. Figures released by UNEP in June showed that in 2008, clean technologies attracted $140bn of investment compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation. But investment has fallen significantly in 2009, with green technologies suffering disproportionately.

    Nonetheless Angus McCrone, of analysts New Energy Finance, remained upbeat on the clean technology investment picture, if not the broader one: “There are a lot of positive things going on [in relation to Copenhagen]. But whether that’s enough to deal with climate change is another question.”

  • The European emissions Trading Scheme is now a success

     

    You report: “FoE says that to date cap-and-trade carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions… [and are] unfit for purpose.” They are misinformed. Markets do not reduce emissions and were not created for that purpose. Technology, energy efficiency and behavioural changes deliver reductions. Markets incentivise and finance these by putting a cost-effective price on the carbon that is most cost-effective.

    “FoE claims that the first phase of the European emissions trading scheme between 2005 and 2007 failed. And the second phase, from 2008 to2012, is likely to fail too.” It was not the market that failed in the first phase, but the policies that governed how the market worked. The EU designed a system in which a large proportion of emissions allowances were given away, to defray costs for industry. Phase one was the test phase and, lacking precise data, they gave away too many allowances that could not be carried over into phase two. These two design elements caused the price crash in 2007.

    But the second phase was designed much more prudently. Studies note that emissions fell in year one, and analysts agree that they continue to fall. Phase two is a success. It is important to look at the markets in the longer term, just as targets are set with a 2020 goal.

    Misguidedly, FoE calls for governments to use more “reliable instruments”, such as a tax to replace a market-based scheme. Yet a tax is anything but reliable; it does not allow for visible target-setting, and it does not guarantee that emissions will be reduced. A carbon tax is simply another cost of doing business; as production and profits grow, the tax is paid while emissions rise. By contrast, an emissions cap allows for a clear environmental goal and a measurable target, and incentivises further reductions.

    You report the FoE’s fears that markets could be “hijacked by speculators and financial markets”. This fear displays a failure to understand that financial institutions participate in the market largely on behalf of businesses that do not have the capacity or expertise to do so themselves. Furthermore, there are no “complex” instruments creating “shadow finance” – carbon trading uses essentially the same simple market instruments as trading in gold, wheat and coal. They have been used over decades and during recent and historical financial cycles without causing crises.

    Yet a carbon market is only as good as the cap. The more ambitious the emissions reduction targets, the more visibly and effectively a market performs its function. Market nay-sayers would make better use of their time by increasing the political pressure to set ambitious reduction targets and recognise that markets help with the cost of achieving them. To criticise those who share their objective is to risk political inaction.