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. 

  • Why global warming isn’t taking a break

     

    (2) It is highly questionable whether this “pause” is even real. It does show up to some extent (no cooling, but reduced 10-year warming trend) in the Hadley Center data, but it does not show in the GISS data, see Figure 1. There, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 ºC per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 ºC per decade – just as predicted by IPCC as response to anthropogenic forcing.

    Why do these two surface temperature data sets differ over recent years? We analysed this a while ago here, and the reason is the “hole in the Arctic” in the Hadley data, just where recent warming has been greatest.

    If we want to relate global temperature to global forcings like greenhouse gases, we’d better not have a “hole” in our data set. That’s because global temperature follows a simple planetary heat budget, determined by the balance of what comes in and what goes out. But if data coverage is not really global, the heat budget is not closed. One would have to account for the heat flow across the boundary of the “hole”, i.e. in and out of the Arctic, and the whole thing becomes ill-determined (because we don’t know how much that is). Hence the GISS data are clearly more useful in this respect, and the supposed pause in warming turns out to be just an artifact of the “Arctic hole” in the Hadley data – we don’t even need to refer to natural variability to explain it.

    Imagine you want to check whether the balance in your accounts is consistent with your income and spendings – and you find your bank accounts contain less money than you expected, so there is a puzzling shortfall. But then you realise you forgot one of your bank accounts when doing the sums – and voila, that is where the missing money is, so there is no shortfall after all. That missing bank account in the Hadley data is the Arctic – and we’ve shown that this is where the “missing warming” actually is, which is why there is no shortfall in the GISS data, and it is pointless to look for explanations for a warming pause.

    It is noteworthy in this context that despite the record low in the brightness of the sun over the past three years (it’s been at its faintest since beginning of satellite measurements in the 1970s), a number of warming records have been broken during this time. March 2008 saw the warmest global land temperature of any March ever recorded in the past 130 years. June and August 2009 saw the warmest land and ocean temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere ever recorded for those months. The global ocean surface temperatures in 2009 broke all previous records for three consecutive months: June, July and August. The years 2007, 2008 and 2009 had the lowest summer Arctic sea ice cover ever recorded, and in 2008 for the first time in living memory the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage were simultaneously ice-free. This feat was repeated in 2009. Every single year of this century (2001-2008) has been warmer than all years of the 20th Century except 1998 (which sticks out well above the trend line due to a strong El Niño event).

    The bottom line is: the observed warming over the last decade is 100% consistent with the expected anthropogenic warming trend of 0.2 ºC per decade, superimposed with short-term natural variability. It is no different in this respect from the two decades before. And with an El Niño developing in the Pacific right now, we wouldn’t be surprised if more temperature records were to be broken over the coming year or so.

    • This article was shared by our content partner RealClimate, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • US threatens to derail climate talks by refusing to include Kyoto targets

     

     

    In a further development, the EU sided strongly with the US in seeking a new agreement, but said that it hoped the best elements of Kyoto could be kept. China and many developing countries immediately hit back stating that the protocol, the world’s only legally binding commitment to get countries to reduce emissions, was “not negotiable”.

     

    With only a few days of formal UN negotiations remaining before the crunch Copenhagen meeting in December, and the world’s two largest emitters refusing to give ground, a third way may now have to be found to secure a climate change agreement. Last night it emerged that lawyers for the EU are in talks with the US delegation urgently seeking a way out of the impasse that now threatens a strong climate deal.

     

    In a day of high international rhetoric, chief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing said the US had moved significantly in the last year. “There has been a startling change in the US position. There is now engagement. We have had a 10-fold increase finance from the US. We have put $80bn into a green economic stimulus package. One year ago there was no commitment to a global agreement.”

     

    But he forcefully outlined America’s opposition to the Kyoto protocol. “We are not going to be in the Kyoto protocol. We are not going to be part of an agreement that we cannot meet. We say a new agreement has to [be signed] by all countries. Things have changed since Kyoto. Where countries were in 1990 and today is very different. We cannot be stuck with an agreement 20 years old. We want action from all countries.”

     

    Yu Qingtai, China’s special representative on climate talks, said rich countries should not desert the Kyoto agreement, which all industrialised countries except the US signed up to and was ratified in 2002 after many years of negotiations. It contains no requirement for developing countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as both their current and historical emissions are low in most cases. However, China, with its surging economy and rapidly expanding population is now the world’s biggest polluter.

     

    “The Kyoto protocol is not negotiable. We want [it] to be strengthened. We don’t want to kill Kyoto. We really want a revival, a strengthening of the treaty. That can only be done by Annex I [industrialised] countries having a target of 40% cuts by 2020,” said Yu.

     

    “We have an agreement. If you take that away [you remove] the basis of negotiations. There are specific provisions for parties [like the US] who are not signed up to the Kyoto protocol.”

     

    China was backed strongly by the G77 group of 130 countries and the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), made up of Caribbean and Pacific countries which expect to be made uninhabitable in the next few generations if a strong climate agreement is not secured.

     

    “We face an emergency. We want commitments. We did not create the problem. Any mechanism currently in use is one we want to maintain. National actions are important but they are no substitutes for an international framework,” said Dessima Williams, a Grenadian spokeswoman for Aosis.

     

    The EU, today sided openly with the US for the first time. “We look at the Kyoto protocol, but since it came into force we have seen emissions increase. It has not decreased emissions. It’s not enough and we need more,” said spokesman Karl Falkenberg.

     

    “We are very unlikely to see the US join Kyoto, but we are working with the US to find a legal framework to allow the US to participate and which will allow large emitters [such as China] to participate.”

     

    The difference between the sides is now considered to threaten the success of the talks. In essence, the US is insisting on a completely new agreement, with all countries signed up and all countries free to choose and set their own targets and timetable. Most other countries want to keep the existing agreement as a basis for negotiations, to ensure that rich countries are held by international law to agreed cuts. China in particular wants cuts calculated on a per capita basis.

     

    Diplomats last night suggested that the only way out could be for the US to be asked to sign a separate agreement acceptable to developing countries, which would see it cutting emissions at a comparable speed to other countries.

     

    The G77 countries are meeting to consider their oppositions. One diplomat said: “They are very angry. People have talked of walking out.”

     

    However, lawyers said it would be difficult to terminate the Kyoto protocol because all parties have to formally agree by consensus to end it. In addition, if no further commitment periods after 2012 are established for rich countries, it would be a breach of their own legal agreements.

  • Face to faith

     

    Green fixes seek to reconcile economy with ecology. But the harsh truth is that many don’t add up when ripped from their contexts of honest-to-God simplicity and forced to serve industrial frenzy.

    Take the proposed high-speed UK railway line for shifting domestic travel away from air. Consultants now say it would take 60 years to repay its own carbon footprint, and cost more than the defence budget. But here I am, standing at Euston, shortly to give the final talk. Earlier speakers had brilliantly analysed the dilemmas – for if the science is right what really can we do to stop global warming hitting tipping points where nature takes over?

    And in my mind this weirdo sculpture is starting to hiss and spit. It’s becoming more than just a surreal locomotive, for the top is like a high-rise cityscape, and it caps an island rising sharply from the sea. The towering cliffs are disconcertingly concave, as if the city is built from resources scooped from out of its own foundations. And I know it’s crazy, but I’m feeling like Paolozzi’s Piscator is coming alive inside me. Because that’s what prophetic art does: cuts through “this thick night of darkness”, as early Quakers put it; breaks loose the shell and frees the kernel, to let the spirit seed afresh. We Quakers call it “quaking”.

    I cross back over Euston Road to rejoin the conference. Folks tell me that the terrible invincibility of it all is “doing their heads in”. The economy pounds on under life support while climate change creeps in – too slow to adequately stir most voters, but scooping out life’s very foundations.

    And in the depths of my being there’s this crazy rhythm starting up. I almost want to dance! I quell it. It’s then that I notice one of the delegates, a little old Quaker woman. She’s sitting in the courtyard sun. Eyes shut, she makes no effort to hide the tears that runnel down her wrinkled face, lips moving visibly in praying for the world.

    My sombre restraint cracks. A mighty lever pulls, and I feel the built-up head of superheated steam surge to the pistons of Piscator. Forcing down the brakes a moment longer, I climb to my place at the podium. Then my elbows start shuffling, alternately to and fro. And I whisper through the mike in rhythm: “Chuff, chuff, chuff.”

    And in a ridiculous, shuffling dance I take off down the podium steps, gathering momentum through the astonished hall of 400 delegates, going, “Chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff, whooo-hooooo, chuff, chuff, chuff” until bang. I slam into the double doors, a crumpled heap. Slowly I return back to the mike, regaining decorum.

    And so, this is how it is in today’s world. The slow train crash in outer life is a spiritual crisis within. The same locomotive that drove the credit crunch also drives climate change.

    But politics, economics and technology on their own are not enough. We must also tackle the roots of consumerism, consumption in excess of sufficiency – the idolatrous addiction that masks our inner emptiness and poisons deeper transformation. And so we must rekindle community, put love back into public life, and thereby rescue hope from the caverns of despair. We must call back the soul.

    Alastair McIntosh is a Quaker and the author of Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition

  • Soot clouds pose threat to Himalayan glaciers.

     

    The results, to be announced this month in Kashmir, show for the first time that clouds of soot – made up of tiny particles of “black carbon” emitted from old diesel engines and from cooking with wood, crop waste or cow dung – are “unequivocally having an impact on glacial melting” in the Himalayas.

    Scientists say that, while the threat of carbon dioxide to global warming has been accepted, soot from developing countries is a largely unappreciated cause of rising temperatures. Once the black carbon lands on glaciers, it absorbs sunlight that would otherwise be reflected by the snow, leading to melting. “This is a huge problem which we are ignoring,” said Professor Syed Hasnain of the Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) in Delhi. “We are finding concentrations of black carbon in the Himalayas in what are supposed to be pristine, untouched environments.”

    The institute has set up two sensors in the Himalayas, one on the Kholai glacier that sits on the mountain range’s western flank in Kashmir and the other flowing through the eastern reaches in Sikkim. Glaciers in this region feed most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of substantial melting is severe flooding downstream.

    Hasnain says India and China produce about a third of the world’s black carbon, and both countries have been slow to act. “India is the worst. At least in China the state has moved to measure the problem. In Delhi no government agency has put any sensors on the ground. [Teri] is doing it by ourselves.”

    In August this year Yao Tandong, director of China’s Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, projected “a 43% decrease in glacial area by 2070”, adding that “more and more scientists have come to recognise the impact of black carbon in glacial melting”.

    Black carbon’s role has only recently been recognised – it was not mentioned as a factor in the UN’s major 2007 report on climate change –but this month the UN environment programme called for cuts in black carbon output. In November it will publish a report stating that 50% of the emissions causing global warming are from non-CO2 pollutants.

    Decreasing black carbon emissions should be a relatively cheap way to significantly curb global warming. Black carbon falls from the atmosphere after just a couple of weeks, and replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could quickly end the problem. Controlling traffic in the Himalayan region should help ease the harm done by emissions from diesel engines.

    Both New Delhi and Beijing, say experts, have been reluctant to come forward with plans on black carbon because they do not want attention diverted from richer nations’ responsibility to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

    At a high-level forum on energy in Washington on Thursday, India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, rejected attempts to link black carbon to the efforts to reach an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Black carbon had no place in the Copenhagen negotiations towards a global pact on global warming, he said. “Black carbon is another issue. I know there is now a desire to bring the black carbon issue into the mainstream. I am simply not in favour of it.”

  • Arctic seas turn to acids. putting vital food chain at risk

     

    “This is extremely worrying,” Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso, of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, told an international oceanography conference last week. “We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”

    Just as an acid descaler breaks apart limescale inside a kettle, so the shells that protect molluscs and other creatures will be dissolved. “This will affect the whole food chain, including the North Atlantic salmon, which feeds on molluscs,” said Gattuso, speaking at a European commission conference, Oceans of Tomorrow, in Barcelona last week. The oceanographer told delegates that the problem of ocean acidification was worse in high latitudes, in the Arctic and around Antarctica, than it was nearer the equator.

    “More carbon dioxide can dissolve in cold water than warm,” he said. “Hence the problem of acidification is worse in the Arctic than in the tropics, though we have only recently got round to studying the problem in detail.”

    About a quarter of the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by factories, power stations and cars now ends up being absorbed by the oceans. That represents more than six million tonnes of carbon a day.

    This carbon dioxide dissolves and is turned into carbonic acid, causing the oceans to become more acidic. “We knew the Arctic would be particularly badly affected when we started our studies but I did not anticipate the extent of the problem,” said Gattuso.

    His research suggests that 10% of the Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic by 2018; 50% by 2050; and 100% ocean by 2100. “Over the whole planet, there will be a threefold increase in the average acidity of the oceans, which is unprecedented during the past 20 million years. That level of acidification will cause immense damage to the ecosystem and the food chain, particularly in the Arctic,” he added.

    The tiny mollusc Limacina helicina, which is found in Arctic waters, will be particularly vulnerable, he said. The little shellfish is eaten by baleen whales, salmon, herring and various seabirds. Its disappearance would therefore have a major impact on the entire marine food chain. The deep-water coral Lophelia pertusa would also be extremely vulnerable to rising acidity. Reefs in high latitudes are constructed by only one or two types of coral – unlike tropical coral reefs which are built by a large variety of species. The loss of Lophelia pertusa would therefore devastate reefs off Norway and the coast of Scotland, removing underwater shelters that are exploited by dozens of species of fish and other creatures.

    “Scientists have proposed all sorts of geo-engineering solutions to global warming,” said Gattuso. “For instance, they have proposed spraying the upper atmosphere with aerosol particles that would reduce sunlight reaching the Earth, mitigating the warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

    “But these ideas miss the point. They will still allow carbon dioxide emissions to continue to increase – and thus the oceans to become more and more acidic. There is only one way to stop the devastation the oceans are now facing and that is to limit carbon-dioxide emissions as a matter of urgency.”

    This was backed by other speakers at the conference. Daniel Conley, of Lund University, Sweden, said that increasing acidity levels, sea-level rises and temperature changes now threatened to bring about irreversible loss of biodiversity in the sea. Christoph Heinze, of Bergen University, Norway, said his studies, part of the EU CarboOcean project, had found that carbon from the atmosphere was being transported into the oceans’ deeper waters far more rapidly than expected and was already having a corrosive effect on life forms there.

    The oceans’ vulnerability to climate change and rising carbon-dioxide levels has also been a key factor in the launching of the EU’s Tara Ocean project at Barcelona. The expedition, on the sailing ship Tara, will take three years to circumnavigate the globe, culminating in a voyage through the icy Northwest Passage in Canada, and will make continual and detailed samplings of seawater to study its life forms.

    A litre of seawater contains between 1bn and 10bn single-celled organisms called prokaryotes, between 10bn and 100bn viruses and a vast number of more complex, microscopic creatures known as zooplankton, said Chris Bowler, a marine biologist on Tara.

    “People think they are just swimming in water when they go for a dip in the sea,” he said. “In fact, they are bathing in a plankton soup.”

    That plankton soup is of crucial importance to the planet, he added. “As much carbon dioxide is absorbed by plankton as is absorbed by tropical rainforests. Its health is therefore of crucial importance to us all.”

    However, only 1% of the life forms found in the sea have been properly identified and studied, said Bowler. “The aim of the Tara project is to correct some of that ignorance and identify many more of these organisms while we still have the chance. Issues like ocean acidification, rising sea levels and global warming will not be concerns at the back of our minds. They will be a key focus for the work that we do while we are on our expedition.”

     

    The toll by 2100

     

    ■ The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast in 2007 that sea levels would rise by 20cm to 60cm by 2100 thanks to global warming caused by man-made carbon-dioxide emissions. This is now thought to be an underestimate, however, with most scientific bodies warning that sea levels could rise by a metre or even higher. Major inundations of vulnerable regions such as Bangladesh would ensue.

     

    ■ The planet will be hotter by 3C by 2100, most scientists now expect, though rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Deserts will spread and heatwaves will become more prevalent. Ice-caps will melt and cyclones are also likely to be triggered.

     

    ■ Weather patterns across the globe will become more unstable, numbers of devastating storms will increase dramatically while snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains.

  • India can’t play the victim on climate change

     

    President Obama simply cannot afford to advocate further austerity to Americans reeling under a recession, and Jairam Ramesh, India’s pugnaciously articulate environment minister, won’t be satisfied unless Obama does precisely that. As Ramesh explained to an American interviewer on Tuesday: “In the United States, emissions are lifestyle emissions. For [India], emissions are developmental emissions. You’re asking [India] to compromise on development … You change your lifestyle and then we’ll think of compromising on development.”

    India’s argument resonates throughout the developing world. From Brazil to Bangladesh, Obama’s sermon on shared responsibility strikes as an affront, akin to a burglar telling his victim to split the defence costs. The voluptuaries of the west may advocate, without a hint of remorse or irony, that billions of people in India and China and Africa renounce material comforts and advancement which developed nations take for granted; but developing nations seem to be firm in their conviction that, though climate change is a real threat, those who have contributed overwhelmingly to its causes – and continue to pollute the planet in the spirit of carpe diem – must also be the ones to devise and pay for solutions to curb it.

    But India has a habit of invoking the injustices of the past to suppress the failures of present. New Delhi repeatedly refers to the fact that, measured by per capita emissions, India ranks near the bottom of the list of worst polluters. This may be true, but it is a disingenuous argument. Per capita figures are meaningless (and unjust) because they are arrived at by apportioning the pollution that is principally produced in the urban centres, where wealth is concentrated, in equal measure to a billion individuals – an overwhelming majority of whom have been denied the dividends of pollution. India is adducing its poor as the reason for its intransigent stand. But its recent history is replete with instances of the state displacing the poor to create vacant lands for wealthy corporations – in effect socialising the costs of pollution while privatising its profits. Unlike corporations, the planet belongs to everyone. So concessions on emissions, if they can be worked out, must be linked to the equitable distribution of profits derived from pollution.

    Working to prevent climate change will not be enough. States must actively seek to establish contingency measures to deal with its consequences. Bangladesh’s land mass is literally shrinking. It is more than likely that India will have a colossal humanitarian crisis on its hands in the not too distant future, with Bangladeshis crossing the border into West Bengal on a scale that will make 1971 appear puny. India cannot turn them back, but it cannot conceivably bear the cost of their absorption alone. New Delhi should start pushing for a global fund from which it can draw later. As a country that has lost more lives to climate change than any other, India also has a duty to make its rich – the beneficiaries of its emissions, the inhabitants of its mini-Americas – pay the costs.

    Regardless of the results of the Copenhagen summit, India must stop playing the victim and take the lead in combatting climate change. It has already made impressive strides, and the government has announced a series of ambitious plans to produce renewable energy and substantially reduce India’s dependence on fossil fuels. According to the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, solar thermal power plants can fulfil India’s energy needs. Since sunlight is abundant, the “potential is unlimited”. India could electrify not only itself but all of Asia and Africa. In the process, it could help save humankind from extinction. This would be a fitting tribute to its founder, Pandit Nehru, who at the turbulent time of its founding dedicated India to the “larger cause of humanity”.