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. 

  • Methane leakage runs up a $50bn bill

     

    The EPA estimates that 3 trillion cubic feet of the invisible gas unintentionally escape into the atmosphere each year from patchy gas and oil wells, pipelines, and tanks. This accidental loss alone is equivalent to about half of the global warming power of all U.S. coal power plants emissions. That is the same climate impact of a quarter billion cars.

    Roger Peilke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, does an admirable job of estimating the commercial value cost of leaking methane at $24 billion. But there is more to the story—the cost to society of this methane leakage adds up to a much higher number.

    Methane, like CO2, carries a social cost which must be accounted for—each ton emitted into the atmosphere exacts a toll. Weather variability will threaten crops; rising sea levels will submerge coastal lands; insurance premiums will rise as more homes are at risk of flooding and fires. As global warming worsens, these costs will become sharper, causing economic pain across the globe. Though no one benefits from leaking methane, we all pay for its effect on our climate.

    Recently, the Department of Energy used a conservative estimate, $19, to price out the cost to society of a ton of CO2 emissions. Knowing that, and the fact that methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide, we can do some simple multiplication and determine that the social cost of leaky methane hovers around $29 billion annually. This is in addition to Professor Peilke’s commercial value lost, bringing the grand total to over $50 billion.

    The irony here is—no one benefits from these leaks. Companies certainly don’t profit from the lost revenue. So if no one benefits, and we will be charged $50 billion for the privilege, why not enforce monitoring and sealing of these leaks?

    As the Times noted, next year Japan will release data from the Gosat satellite which will most likely show hot spots of methane gas pouring into the skies from the worst offenders: Russia, the United States, Ukraine, and Mexico. We’ll be confronted with the images of our total emissions of this global warming gas, and it’s probably not a pretty picture. Leaky methane is only part of the overall problem, but the cost-benefit analysis on fixing it is a no-brainer.

    There is also a larger lesson to be learned here: our actions have consequences, and some cost more money than others. If we really want to spew methane into the atmosphere in a wasteful and unnecessary way, we must be prepared to pay the price—in this case, over $50 billion. And if we want to continue to rely on dirty coal power plants to generate our electricity, we must be prepared to pay that bill as well—one that is at least $120 billion per year (not even including climate change costs). And if we refuse to invest in controls on our heat-trapping emissions, then we should realize we are likely making a bad bet, one that could wreak havoc on American and global economies.

  • Science Museum unveils climate change map showing impact of 4C rise

     

    The map shows the impact of an average 4C rise in global temperature, which John Beddington, the government’s chief scientist, said would be “disastrous”. A study by the Met Office last month said that such a 4C rise could come as soon as 2060 without urgent and serious action to reduce emissions.

    The map was launched to coincide with the London Science Museum’s new Prove it climate change exhibition by David Miliband, foreign secretary and his brother Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary. It comes in advance of key political talks on climate change in December in Copenhagen, where British officials will push for a new global deal to curb emissions.

    The Miliband brothers said a new deal needed to be strong enough to limit global temperature rise to 2C, although many involved in the negotiations privately believe this to be impossible. A joint press release from the government and the Met Office released to promote the map says the government is aiming for an agreement that limits climate change “as far as possible to 2C”.

    The map’s release marks a significant shift in political discourse on climate change, with many politicians until recently unwilling to discuss the possibility of a failure to hit the 2C target.

    David Miliband warned today that the Copenhagen talks were “the most complicated international negotiations ever attempted”. He predicted that unless climate change was slowed there would be “high pressure” on water and food shortages.

    In their second joint press conference on international efforts to secure a fresh climate change deal in Copenhagen – now 45 days away – Ed and David Miliband stressed the danger posed by a political failure at the talks. “We cannot cope with a 4C world. This map clearly illustrates the scale of the challenge facing us today … To tackle the problem of climate change, all of us, foreign ministries, environment ministries, treasuries, departments of defence, and all parts of government and societies, must work together to keep global temperatures to 2C,” he said.

    Ed Miliband said: “Britain’s scientists have helped to illustrate the catastrophic effects that will result if the world fails to limit the global temperature rise to 2C. With less than 50 days left before agreement must be reached, the UK is going all out the persuade the world of its need to raise its ambitions so we get a deal that protects us from a 4C world.”

    The map, produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre, is based on temperatures between 2060 and 2100 if current rates of climate change are not slowed. It shows that the rise will not evenly be spread across the globe, with temperature rises much larger than 4C in high latitudes such as the Arctic. Because the sea warms more slowly, average land temperature will increase by 5.5C, which scientists said would shrink agricultural yields for all major cereal crops on all major regions of production.

    A 4C world would also have a major impact on water availability, with supplies limited to an extra billion people by 2080. It could also be very bad news for the Amazon, with some computer models predicting severe drying and subsequent die-back. One of the biggest, more subtle, effects could be on the way the world’s oceans and ecosystems absorb carbon. About half of our carbon emissions are currently soaked up in this way, which helps put the brake on global warming. In a 4C world, scientists say the amount of emissions re-absorbed in this way could shrink to just 30%.

  • Europe lags behind with a sleight of hand on emissions targets

     

     

    You would imagine a tougher target for 2050 would require more action sooner but it appears our politicians are happy to kick that problem into the long grass for future politicians to wrestle with, with the increasing impact of climate change they have so thoughtfully bequeathed them. The deal also continues to ignore the fact that we should be debating a target for 2015. If a system like Kyoto is to continue then this would be the next milestone in the emissions timeline.

     

    Far from being in the lead, the EU, like most countries, is a laggard when it comes to responding effectively to the threat of climate change – but it is very good at presentation. Our targets use a 1990 baseline. Nothing wrong with that, except it is a very convenient date for countries that benefitted from the huge collapse in Soviet economies in the 1990s, which of course now includes Europe.

     

    The combination of this unearned reduction with a handful of one-off reductions in industrial gases in a few countries delivered Europe its Kyoto target ahead of schedule and we are set to achieve a 10% reduction by the end of this decade – helped along by the current recession. The 30% target is therefore only a 20% target measured from current levels. Again this may sound reasonably challenging. But this also masks the reality that Europe will allow itself to buy in emissions credits from overseas for up to half of this target. Meaning Europe’s own emissions need be reduced by only 10% over a decade.

     

    The European Union has, over a number of years, claimed to be leading the world in reducing emissions. It has introduced a range of policies to try to curb emissions but these have been slow to start and dedicated climate and energy policies have delivered few savings to date. This is evident not only from the emissions record so far of the EU but also from the continued unbroken link between emissions and economic growth or decline.

     

    Investment in energy infrastructure also appears not to have deviated significantly from “business as usual”, with many more coal-fired power stations being proposed in Europe. Cap and trade regulation has been implemented on 50% of emissions, however, they have been set too leniently, leading to large surpluses in emissions permits and low prices.

     

    More investment is now being made into renewable electricity but this is still too insignificant on its own to achieve a significant reduction in all energy-related emissions. The harder tasks of reducing emissions from coal-fired power stations and industrial plants and de-carbonising our transport and heating systems has yet to begin in earnest. As a result, emissions in recent years, the effect of the recent recession aside, have been more or less static.

     

    Only tougher targets will provide the impetus for serious policy change and investment on the ground. There are many reasons why Europe can and must step up to the mark in Copenhagen. Sandbag, the climate NGO that I run, will be launching a briefing paper in Brussels next week explaining why Europe’s targets are nowhere near as tough as they think they are and calling for a recalibration and higher ambition.

     

    The current politics of Europe are not easy and there are some countries who are arguing against even the current levels of ambition. But rather than trying to cling on to the vestiges of leadership using clever accounting, Europe should be honest about what the numbers mean and accept that it can and must go further.

     

    The sleight of hand has not gone unnoticed by other countries and if Europe continues to fail to pull its weight it will be impossible to win the support of developing countries who rightly point out we have a massive historic responsibility to lead the way.

     

    • Bryony Worthington is the founder of Sandbag, a not-for-profit website that allows its members to buy up carbon emissions trading permits

  • Ravaged by drought, Madagascar feels the full effect of climate change

     

    The animals did go away, but so did the luck of Anjamahavelo, a cluster of wooden houses. Southern Madagascar has had three years of crop failure in five years, resulting in chronic hunger for tens of thousands of families and soaring rates of malnutrition, stunted growth and death among children.

    Three forces are combining with deadly effect on the Indian Ocean island, which is incalculably rich in wildlife but impoverished in basic infrastructure. Climate change is widely blamed for playing havoc with the seasons and destroying agricultural harvests. This is exacerbated by local deforestation, which has altered the microclimate and reduced rainfall.

    Finally, a bloody political coup earlier this year paralysed essential services and led to the crippling suspension of several foreign aid programmes. The UN says that nearly half of households in the south have severe food shortages.

    To feed her five children in Anjamahavelo, Tinalisy – her only name – works as a prostitute at the end of each month, when the local men, mostly in the police, have been paid. The unmarried 27-year-old has slept with men for sex since she was 17. “If the men don’t want to marry, that is not really a problem. We have to survive.”

    Tinalisy says her 20-month-old daughter, Vany Lentine, suffers a fever each evening. “We eat once or twice a day – always cassava. I’m worried but what I can do? There is no money. People here are unhappy because their children do not eat. There is nothing to be happy about.”

    Other villagers say that the fierce competition for dwindling resources has led to lawlessness and violence. Valiotaky, 56, the village chief, supplies an explanation for the drought. “When we plant trees we don’t have rain and nothing grows,” he said. “I think God is angry. Young people don’t respect the traditions.”

    Perversely, people in the south are so starved of water that they crave the increasingly fierce cyclones that pound the north three times a year. Two separate dry seasons have progressively expanded until they meet to form one long hot season, hitting crops such as maize, manioc and sweet potato.

    Tovoheryzo Raobijaona, director of a food insecurity early warning system in nearby Ambovombe, said: “Before, people spoke about the cycle of drought every 10 years. Now it’s every five years, or every three years. After a bad year like 2009, people need two to three years to get back to standard.”

    Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, said that in the past six months 8,632 children had been treated for severe acute malnutrition in three southern regions – more than double the expected number. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warns that 150,000 children could be affected this year.

    There are reports of people resorting to eating lemurs and turtles, even though these are culturally taboo. They have also resumed cutting down trees for firewood or to make space for rice fields, inadvertently adding to the drought problem by reducing the capacity of forests to capture water that will evaporate into clouds and become rain.

    The added impact of global climate change is difficult to quantify. The World Bank says that only one thing is certain: in the past half century Madagascar has seen a 10% increase in temperature and 10% decrease in rainfall. Experts say it is not a question of whether this trend will continue, but by how much.

    Silvia Caruso, deputy country director of the WFP, said: “Environmental degradation and climate change are building on each other. The results are dramatic in Madagascar.”

    This has been compounded by political instability. In March Andry Rajoelina, a city mayor, businessman and former DJ, seized power from president Marc Ravalomanana after clashes that left dozens dead. The fallout has been political deadlock, economic downturn, job losses, price inflation, collapsing public services, a flight of investors and international sanctions on a country that relies on foreign aid for half its budget.

    Caruso added: “The coup has paralysed services that we need to work with in the provinces. It has made the response to drought more complex. We had to fill the gaps at regional level.”

    Bruno Maes, Unicef’s representative for Madagascar, described the coup as “a disaster for children”, adding: “Madagascar was on the road to take-off. They understood it was time to make reforms in health and education, so that all children can have access. Now all this is frozen. Nothing is moving.”

    Unicef has provided medicine and training to all regional health clinics for acute malnutrition cases, supported food distribution and worked to improve sanitation. The WFP has begun programmes to provide school meals to 215,000 children, help 8,000 households mitigate against environmental change and supply supplementary feeding to around 70,000 children under two and pregnant and lactating women.

    Maes said Unicef was also negotiating with the World Bank to directly administer money earmarked for teachers’ salaries. “Children’s rights should be addressed in any situation – whatever the crisis.”

    Case-study: ‘Lack of food is eating us up’

    Zanasoa Relais Anjado, 38, has 11 children. Her husband, a former plantation worker, is unemployed. They live in Anjado village in southern Madagascar.

    “Lack of food is eating us up every day. We often go through very hard moments – in the most difficult we ate only tamarinds [fruit] mixed with ashes. We were hungry and tired and had to beg for something to eat. We were like famine victims … I have 11 children and I don’t know how to feed them. Sometimes we have one meal a day, sometimes two. One of my children was sick. He managed to survive and recover, but I know people in the community who are still very weak. The river is 5km from here and we walk for hours to get there … With rainwater we would cook food and diversify agriculture. We’d plant cabbages, green leaves, corn and beans. What we planted so far dried and failed … It will be really difficult and we will suffer. That is why I am asking the government for help, directly and immediately. Without it, we risk dying here. I don’t care about the political situation in the country. The only thing that concerns me is that I’m eating.”

  • US coal stands in the way of Copenhagen

     

    A year after the 1992 treaty, President Bill Clinton tried to pass an energy tax that would have helped the US to begin reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. The proposal not only failed, but also triggered a political backlash. When the Kyoto protocol was adopted in 1997, Clinton did not even send it to the US Senate for ratification, knowing that it would be rejected. President George Bush repudiated the Kyoto protocol in 2001 and did essentially nothing on climate change during his presidency.

    There are several reasons for US inaction – including ideology and scientific ignorance – but a lot comes down to one word: coal. No fewer than 25 states produce coal, which not only generates income, jobs and tax revenue, but also provides a disproportionately large share of their energy.

    Per capita carbon emissions in US coal states tend to be much higher than the national average. Since addressing climate change is first and foremost directed at reduced emissions from coal – the most carbon-intensive of all fuels – America’s coal states are especially fearful about the economic implications of any controls (though the oil and automobile industries are not far behind).

    The US political system poses special problems as well. To ratify a treaty requires the support of 67 of the Senate’s 100 members, a nearly impossible hurdle. The Republican party, with its 40 Senate seats, is simply filled with too many ideologues – and, indeed, too many senators intent on derailing any Obama initiative – to offer enough votes to reach the 67-vote threshold. Moreover, the Democratic party includes senators from coal and oil states who are unlikely to support decisive action.

    The idea this time around is to avoid the need for 67 votes, at least at the start, by focusing on domestic legislation rather than a treaty. Under the US constitution, domestic legislation (as opposed to international treaties) requires a simple majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to be sent to the president for signature. Getting 50 votes for a climate change bill (with a tie vote broken by the vice president) is almost certain.

    But opponents of legislation can threaten to filibuster (speak for an indefinite period and thereby paralyse Senate business), which can be ended only if 60 senators support bringing the legislation to a vote. Otherwise, proposed legislation can be killed, even if it has the support of a simple majority. That will certainly be true of domestic climate change legislation. Securing 60 votes is a steep hill to climb.

    Political analysts know that the votes will depend on individual senators’ ideologies, states’ voting patterns, and states’ dependence on coal relative to other energy sources. Based on these factors, one analysis counts 50 likely Democratic yes votes and 34 Republican no votes, leaving 16 votes still in play. Ten of the swing votes are Democrats, mainly from coal states; the other six are Republicans who conceivably could vote with the president and the Democratic majority.

    Until recently, many believed that China and India would be the real holdouts in the global climate change negotiations. Yet China has announced a set of major initiatives – in solar, wind, nuclear, and carbon-capture technologies – to reduce its economy’s greenhouse gas intensity.

    India, long feared to be a spoiler, has said that it is ready to adopt a significant national action plan to move towards a trajectory of sustainable energy. The two nations have agreed to co-ordinate efforts on renewable energy and research, and the US is under growing pressure to act. With developing countries displaying their readiness to reach a global deal, could the US Senate really prove to be the world’s last great holdout?

    Obama has tools at his command to bring the US into the global mainstream on climate change. First, he is negotiating side deals with holdout senators to cushion the economic impact on coal states and to increase US investments in the research and development, and eventually adoption, of clean coal technologies.

    Second, he can command the Environmental Protection Agency to impose administrative controls on coal plants and automobile producers even if the Congress does not pass new legislation. The administrative route might turn out to be even more important than the legislative route.

    The politics of the US Senate should not obscure the larger point: America has acted irresponsibly since signing the climate treaty in 1992. It is the world’s largest and most powerful country, and the one most responsible for the climate change to this point, it has behaved without any sense of duty – to its own citizens, to the world, and to future generations.

    Even coal state senators should be ashamed. Sure, their states need some extra help, but narrow interests should not be permitted to endanger our planet’s future. It is time for the US to rejoin the global family.

    Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009

  • Copenhagen climate change talks are last chance,says Gordon Brown

     

    “If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late.”

    Brown said that, according to estimates from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, an extra 1.8bn people – a quarter of the world’s population – could be short of water by 2080 as a result of climate change.

    And the threat was not confined to people in the developing world, Brown said.

    “The extraordinary summer heatwave of 2003 in Europe resulted in over 35,000 extra deaths. On current trends, such an event could become quite routine in Britain in just a few decades’ time,” he said.

    “And within the lifetime of our children and grandchildren the intense temperatures of 2003 could become the average temperature experienced throughout much of Europe. In Britain we face the prospect of more frequent droughts and a rising wave of floods.”

    Brown said that he thought a deal at Copenhagen was possible. But negotiators were “not getting to agreement quickly enough”, Brown went on, which was why he was appealing for leaders to get involved personally.

    “We cannot compromise with the earth, we cannot compromise with the catastrophe of unchecked climate change, so we must compromise with one another,” he said.

    “I urge my fellow leaders to work together to reach agreement amongst us, recognising both our common and our differentiated responsibilities – and the dire consequences of failure.”

    Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, yesterday highlighted signs of movement, pointing out that last month India said it was ready to set itself non-binding targets for cutting carbon emissions, while China said it would curb the growth of its emissions by a “notable margin” by 2020, although it did not specify further.

    The US special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, said developing economies must boost their efforts to curb emissions, warning it was “certainly possible” that no deal would be agreed in Copenhagen. “What we need to have happen is for China and India and Brazil and South Africa and others to be willing to take what they’re doing, boost it up some, and then be willing to put it into an international agreement,” he said.