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. 

  • Schellnhuber: developed countries are ‘carbon insolvent’

     

    It sounds a lot. But European countries today emit about 11 tonnes annually for each inhabitant. It would be more if we counted the embedded emissions in goods we buy from China and elsewhere. Using Schellnhuber’s rough numbers, Europeans will exhaust their allowance within ten years if emissions do not fall.

    Put another way, to meet the target Europe’s countries need to reduce per person emissions by about half a tonne a year every year for the next twenty years. Achieving this would require a near 5% cut next year, rising to 10% a year by 2020 and 20% annual reduction by 2025. As Stern has pointed out (Stern Review, p. 231) the only time even a 5% emissions reduction has ever been achieved over a large country for several years was the 1989 to 1998 period in the former Soviet Union, when emissions fell 5.2% per year.

    The 110 tonnes figure for the maximum permitted emissions per person omits consideration of the probable 40% increase in world population by 2050. This would cut the figure to 85 tonnes or so – less than eight years of current European per capita emissions. It also assumes that all world citizens have an equal right to a certain volume of emissions even though the developed world has been responsible for more than 80% of the increase in CO2 in the last century. Schellnhuber points out that if we allocated emissions rights in inverse proportion to historical CO2 output the developed countries would already be ‘carbon insolvent’.

    He concludes by saying that the richest one sixth of the world should pay $100 a year per person to help reduce the future emissions of low income countries. In effect, we would be paying poor states to hold their cumulative emissions per head below 110 tonnes so that we can overshoot our allowance. Compensating the least polluting countries for the almost certain failure of the developed world to keep within our quota must surely be the broad outline of any Copenhagen scheme that will be acceptable to the global south?

    • From Carbon Commentary, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • Yukio Hatoyama sets tougher greenhouse targets

    “Our nation will strongly call on major countries around the world to set aggressive goals,” added Hatoyama, 62, who last week suggested that Japan would seek a greater voice in international diplomacy.

    Japan would present its target at international talks in Copenhagen in December aimed at agreeing a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

    Japan is the world’s number two economy and the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which are blamed for raising global temperatures, melting the earth’s ice caps and glaciers, and changing weather patterns.

    “What we need in international negotiations is that politicians in the world assume responsibility in order to firmly prevent climate change and protect peace and stability at global levels,” Mr Hatoyama said.

    The head of the Democratic Party of Japan made clear that Japan would ask other major emitters also to set tough targets, saying that “climate change cannot be stopped if only our country sets a reduction target”.

    “A highly ambitious accord with participation by all major countries is a prerequisite to our country’s promise to the international community,” he said.

    Without mentioning China or India by name, Mr Hatoyama said: “We think developing countries are also required to make an effort to reduce greenhouse gases, as a global effort is needed on the issue of climate change.”

    “Developed countries should provide financial and technical support for developing countries that are trying to reduce greenhouse gases.”

    In June, Mr Aso announced a far lower greenhouse gas reduction target, equivalent to eight per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, earning his government criticism from environmental groups.

    Mr Hatoyama said: “I hope that a power shift in Japan will lead to a big change in climate change measures and mark the beginning of a big contribution to the future of our society in international negotiations.”

  • Where to now on the CPRS

     

    We all agree (even the Government) that the CPRS is not good enough to seriously deal with the climate crisis, but the voices saying that it is “better than nothing” are growing louder. And, disturbingly, there seems to be a feeling almost of resignation growing in parts of the rest of the movement – a feeling that this is going to happen and we might as well not try to stop it. But for all those who argue that it should (or might as well) be “passed now and improved later”, I have one critical question:

    How?

    We cannot sit back now and assume that, if the CPRS passes in its current form, we’ll simply be able to improve it further down the track. If we agree it is not good enough, we must lay the groundwork now to improve it later. We need a strategy, not just a vague hope.

    As part of the effort to find a way forward – the best path for us, as a movement, to ensure that we get strong, ambitious, science-based climate policy – here are the options as I see them for what may conceivably happen in the Senate in the coming months:

    • The CPRS fails again because all non-Labor Senators oppose it, leading to a possible early election;
    • The CPRS becomes law with the Government working closely with the Greens to make it environmentally effective and economically efficient, securing Senate support through bringing to bear their moral authority with a bill that matches the scale of the challenge;
    • The CPRS becomes law with the Government browning it down even further with the Liberal Party, and the Greens supporting it because it is better than nothing;
    • The CPRS becomes law with the Government browning it down even further with the Liberal Party, but opposed by the Nationals and Greens for different reasons.

    Let’s take these one by one, looking at the implications for any campaign to achieve ambitious action.

    In the extremely unlikely event that we face an early election on climate change and the CPRS, the implication for us all is clear: we need to be ready to run a powerful campaign calling for the strongest possible action from the next Parliament. We need to make it abundantly clear that there is an appetite in the Australian community for meaningful government action on the climate crisis, and that the community will not accept the CPRS or anything worse. If we fail to deliver a mandate for strong action and a rebuke to the CPRS, we cannot believe that we will see anything stronger than the CPRS actually implemented.

    On the second option, if you don’t believe that the Government has no intention of working with the Greens to green up the scheme (and I can tell you from personal experience that they don’t have any such intention), you will at least acknowledge that the Government has no political reason to do so in the absence of a strong public campaign calling for them to do so. It is just imaginable that, if such a campaign were to build this month and grow to a crescendo by November, the pressure on the Government would be such that they would at least consider their options in the Senate. With silence and division in the climate movement, it is absolutely guaranteed that they will not do so.

    Taking the third and fourth options together, it seems pretty clear to me that, once the CPRS passes, the heat will very swiftly go out of climate debate in Australia. Mainstream opinion will be that something is being done. It will be incredibly difficult for us to bring the issue back to the boil in time to deliver a safe climate.

    If the Greens, and the climate movement more broadly, fall silent now, or, worse, support the CPRS now as ‘better than nothing’, I believe that it will be simply impossible to rescue the situation and strengthen Australia’s climate response in the little time we have left. We will have allowed the Government to frame the CPRS as action on climate change, the best that can be achieved at this time, and we will have given away the only thing we have: the fact that we are right.

    However, if we campaign hard against the CPRS now, highlight its flaws and promote a positive alternative, it may just be possible to continue and build on the frame that this is a polluters’ paradise that must be swiftly replaced with something meaningful. The stronger our opposition now, the more clearly articulated our alternative, the more likely it becomes that we can succeed down the track.

    The clear lesson from this analysis is that we must strengthen our resolve and work now to build the strongest possible campaign for ambitious climate action. Now is the time to provide a counterweight to the continued and accelerating rent-seeking of the polluters. We need to throw everything we have at this – from details critiques and analyses to NDAs and other protests, from continuing letters to editors and calls to talkback to doorknocking campaigns.

    We can debate for months (as we have already) whether the CPRS is better than nothing or worse than useless, but one thing is clear: if the CPRS passes and is not rapidly strengthened, it will legislatively ensure that Australia’s emissions cannot and will not start heading downwards until 2013.

    I am convinced that, if we reject that bill to lock in failure, we will be able to achieve faster emissions cuts sooner than the CPRS could ever deliver.

  • Global warming has made Arctic summers hottest for 2.000 years

     

    The Arctic began to cool several thousand years ago as changes in the planet’s orbit increased the distance between the sun and the Earth and reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high northern latitudes during the summer.

    But despite the Earth being farther from the sun during the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice, the Arctic summer is now 1.2C warmer than it was in 1900.

    Writing in the US journal Science, an international team of researchers describe how thousands of years of natural cooling in the Arctic were followed by a rise in temperatures from 1900 which accelerated briskly after 1950.

    The warming of the Arctic is more alarming in view of the natural cooling cycle, which by itself would have seen temperatures 1.4C cooler than they are today, scientists said.

    “The accumulation of greenhouse gases is interrupting the natural cycle towards overall cooling,” said Professor Darrell Kaufman, a climate scientist at Northern Arizona University and lead author of the study.

    “There’s no doubt it will lead to melting glacier ice, which will impact on coastal regions around the world. Warming in the region will also cause more permafrost thawing, which will release methane gas into the atmosphere,” he added.

    Scientists fear that warming could release billions of tonnes of methane from frozen soils in the Arctic, driving global temperatures even higher.

    On a tour of the Arctic this week, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon urged nations to support a comprehensive accord to limit greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the organisation’s climate summit in Copenhagen in December. The accord has been drawn up as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

    The latest study comes months after scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that within the next 30 years Arctic sea ice is likely to vanish completely during the summer for the first time.

    Kaufman and his colleagues reconstructed a decade-by-decade record of the Arctic climate over the past 2,000 years by analysing lake sediments, ice cores and tree rings. Computer simulations of changes in seasonal sunlight levels caused by the Earth’s elliptical orbit and the shifting tilt of its axis verified the long-term cooling trend.

    The scientists showed that summer temperatures in the Arctic fell by an average of 0.2C every thousand years, but that this cooling was swamped by human-induced warming in the 20th century.

    “This study provides a clear example of how increased greenhouse gases are now changing our climate, ending at least 2,000 years of Arctic cooling,” said Caspar Ammann, a climate scientist and co-author of the report at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

    The Arctic began cooling around 8,000 years ago as natural variations in the Earth’s orbit and angle of tilt reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high latitudes. Today, the planet is one million kilometres farther away from the sun during the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice than it was in 1BC. This natural cooling effect will continue for 4,000 more years.

    Previous research has shown that temperatures over the past century rose nearly three times as fast in the Arctic as elsewhere in the northern hemisphere. This is due to an effect called Arctic amplification, whereby highly reflective sea ice and snow melt to reveal darker land and sea water, which absorb sunlight and warm up more quickly.

     

  • India will be key player at Copenhagen conference, says Miliband

     

    In an interview with the Guardian, Miliband and development secretary Douglas Alexander said India would not have to reduce emissions by 2020 – the year when the European Union has offered to cut by a third its greenhouse gas output – given that Delhi was “not doing things on a ‘business as usual basis’”.

    “India has very stretching targets on solar energy, on renewable energy … it has big ambitions on energy efficiency … I think India wants to be a deal maker not a deal breaker in Copenhagen,” said Miliband.

    Ed Miliband: ‘India had very stretching targets on energy’ Link to this audio

    India already generates 8% of its power from renewables – more than the UK. It says it aims to have 20,000MW of solar energy in place by 2020 and make fuel efficiency standards mandatory for cars from 2011 as part of a package to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint.

    After Clinton’s visit, Delhi accused the United States of applying pressure on India to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. The United States wants big developing countries such as India and China, whose emissions are quickly rising as their economies grow, to agree to rein them in before Washington commits to any global deal.

    Today the Indian government released a series of studies showing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise – citing a range between 2.8 and 5.0 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person in 2031. The government estimates India’s current per-capita emissions at 1.2 tonnes – significantly below the current global average of 4 tonnes.

    “Even two decades from now, India’s per-capita greenhouse gas emissions will be below the global average of 25 years earlier,” said the Indian minister.

    Although Miliband welcomed the report, the British minister said the negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen centred on when “emissions in different countries peak past 2020”.

    Miliband highlighted July’s L’Aquila agreement – where the world’s richest nations reached a symbolic deal with India, China and other major polluters on the need to limit global warming to within 2 degrees centigrade to prevent catastrophic climate change.

    Despite this pledge Miliband stopped short of calling of emission reduction targets for big, emerging economies such as India after 2020. “That is one of the questions we have got to resolve… we want to work with India”.

    Another key area of difference revolves around carbon capture and storage technologies that Britain has promoted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Indian officials have complained about the cost of such plants, which aim to capture carbon dioxide created by industry and pump them deep underground.

    However Miliband pointed to India’s rising reliance on coal as a source of power as a reason why the Asian nation might embrace the technology. “India seems to be most interested in solar technology. Let me be honest with you there is no solution to the problem of climate change that does not solve the problem of coal.”

    Campaigners said British ministers’ softly-softly approach showed the west had “come a long way”. “I think they are beginning to understand the ground realities in India. You have to talk to each other not at each other,” said Sunita Narain of Delhi’s Centre for Science and the Environment.

    However Narain said that there was still some way to go. She said industrial nations must curb their own pollution and provide funding and technology to help developing nations before the latter are asked to set limits that could crimp their economic expansion.

    Douglas Alexander, Britain’s development secretary, pointed out that Gordon Brown had proposed $100bn (£62bn) a year for a global green fund that could “unlock new sources of financing”.

  • Goggle-eyed protestors swim against carbon trading tide

     

     

    The activists said they wanted to highlight the problems of rising sea levels as a result of climate change.

     

    “We thought that DECC’s staff and Ed Miliband might appreciate some goggles and floats because if they continue with their destructive policies they will need them,” said Jane Roberts, one of the protestors. “It really is sink or survive for the future of humanity now.

     

    “Climate change is being caused by the same economic and political system that has caused the economic meltdown. Rather than getting serious about tackling climate change, DECC is simply seeking to preserve these failed systems with false solutions, such as carbon trading.”

     

    The protestors have a particular gripe with carbon trading, which puts a price on polluting with carbon dioxide and is one of the mechanisms proposed by international governments as a way to regulate carbon emissions.

     

    Hassan Beg, a climate camp activist, also criticised government plans to ensure future UK coal power stations are built with technology to capture and store 20-25% of their carbon emissions. “Considering DECC’s vested interest in the coal industry, it is no coincidence that they are promoting unproven carbon capture and storage technology to justify E.ON building a new dirty coal-power station at Kingsnorth and a new generation of open-cast coal mines,” said Beg. “One can’t help wondering whether the Vestas wind turbine factory would have been given the financial assistance necessary to stay open if it had been coal.”

     

    A DECC spokesperson said: “We all value our freedoms to speak out, gather together and demonstrate. This action has not disrupted the department’s work to fight climate change and safeguard the nation’s energy security. We are the first country in the world to set out a comprehensive plan to cut our emissions – by at least a third by 2020. Our action here will help us push for an ambitious global deal at Copenhagen to tackle global warming.”