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. 

  • WWF justifies pollution rewards

    WWF did not take the decision to support the Australian Government’s new Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme lightly. Our decision to support the announced changes including a 25% was taken because our key objective is to get an effective international agreement at the UN Climate Change Meeting in Copenhagen.
    This will require developed countries as a group to reduce emissions between 25% and 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.
    At present the UK, EU, Norway and Australia are the only developed countries which have adopted targets in this range and only Norway and Australia are members of the “Umbrella Group” – a loose group of non-EU developed countries (generally including Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, New
    Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the US) – which are key blocks to an effective agreement.
    Breaking the lack of big emission reduction targets by members of the Umbrella Group was a key objective of WWF. I believe that this has been achieved by Australia by announcing a large target relatively to their present-day emissions.
    Another issue that has arisen is the “comparability of effort” (i.e. the relative effort of different countries). There is no formula for measuring comparability of effort (one of the key problems in the negotiations) but some of those being discussed include emission cuts from Kyoto targets, relative economic impact in 2020 and per capita emissions in 2020.
    Using these forms of measurement, Australia’s 25% compares well with those of the climate champions (namely the EU). For example, the Australian Government’s economic modeling indicates that a 14% cut by Australia would have a greater economic impact than a 41% cut on the
    EU or 6% cut on the USA.
    I am not suggesting that Australia should measure its effort by the standards of others but merely pointing out that a 25% will represent a real contribution to clean development. Indeed the key role that Australia can really play in the international response to climate change is to show that a very polluting economy can make a relatively rapid transition and affordable transition to a clean one.
    The other great advantage of the Government’s announcement is that it succinctly states a national view of the key elements of an effective international agreement. This includes a goal of 450 ppm greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or less; an agreed (credible) global emission reduction trajectory; a 25% or greater cut for developed countries; a 20% or greater derivation from Business As Usual (BAU) for major developing countries with nomination of a peaking date.
    This has not been done with the same precision by any countries outside the UK/EU and so it (hopefully) represents a significant step forward in the process of developing an international agreement in Copenhagen.
    Irrespective of your decision to discontinue supporting WWF, thank you so much for your support in the past, it really is appreciated.

  • China and US held secret talks on climate change deal

     

    “My sense is that we are now working towards something in the fall,” said Bill Chandler, director of the energy and climate programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the driving force behind the talks. “It will be serious. It will be substantive, and it will happen.”

    The secret missions suggest that advisers to Obama came to power firmly focused on getting a US-China understanding in the run-up to the crucial UN meeting in Copenhagen this December, which is aimed at sealing a global deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions. In her first policy address the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she wanted to recast the broad US-China relationship around the central issue of climate change. She also stopped in Beijing on her first foreign tour.

    The dialogue also challenges the conventional wisdom that George Bush’s decision to pull America out of the Kyoto climate change treaty had led to paralysis in the administration on global warming, and that China was unwilling to contemplate emissions cuts at a time of rapid economic growth.

    “There are these two countries that the world blames for doing nothing, and they have a better story to tell,” said Terry Tamminen, who took part in the talks and is an environmental adviser to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The nations are the top two polluters on Earth.

    The first communications, in the autumn of 2007, were initiated by the Chinese. Xie Zhenhua, the vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s central economic planning body, made the first move by expressing interest in a co-operative effort on carbon capture and storage and other technologies with the US.

    The first face-to-face meeting, held over two days at a luxury hotel at the Great Wall of China in July 2008, got off to a tentative start with Xie falling back on China’s stated policy positions. “It was sort of like pushing a tape recorder,” said Chandler, “[but after a short while] he just cut it off and said we need to get beyond this.”

    The two sides began discussing ways to break through the impasse, including the possibility that China would agree to voluntary – but verifiable – reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. China has rejected the possibility of cuts as it sees that as a risk to its continued economic growth, deemed essential to lift millions out of poverty and advance national status.

    Taiya Smith, an adviser on China to Bush’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, who was at the first of the two sessions, said: “The thing that came out of it that was priceless was the recognition on both sides that what China was doing to [reduce] the effects of climate change were not very well known,” she said. “After these discussions was a real public campaign by the Chinese government to try to make people aware of what they were doing. We started to see the Chinese take a different tone which was that ‘we are active and engaged in trying to solve the problem’.”

    During the second trip to China by the Americans, Xie suggested a memorandum of understanding between the two countries on joint action on climate change.

    Chandler said he and Holdren drew up a three-point memo which envisaged:

    •Using existing technologies to produce a 20% cut in carbon emissions by 2010.

    • Co-operating on new technology including carbon capture and storage and fuel efficiency for cars.

    • The US and China signing up to a global climate change deal in Copenhagen.

    “We sent it to Xie and he said he agreed,” said Chandler.

    The ties were further cemented when Gao Guangsheng, the leading climate official, attended Schwarzenegger’s global meeting on climate in November last year. Obama, who had been elected president two weeks earlier, addressed the gathering by video.

    By the time Xie visited the US in March, the state department’s new climate change envoy, Todd Stern, and his deputy, Jonathan Pershing, were also involved in the dialogue. But the trip by Xie did not produce the hoped-for agreement. Both Stern and Holdren declined to comment when asked by the Guardian.

    Those involved agree it was premature to expect the Obama administration to enter into a formal agreement so soon in its tenure. Additional members of the US team included Terry Tamminen; Jim Green, adviser to Joe Biden, now the vice-president who then headed the Senate foreign relations committee; Mark Helmke, adviser to Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the committee; and Frank Loy, a former state department negotiator on climate. Both Green and Loy have been nominated to jobs in the Obama administration.

    Chandler and Smith believe the effort will pay off in a more comprehensive deal between the two governments.  “Xie came to visit the US when the administration was still trying to figure out its standing on climate issues and it was without very much staff,” said Smith. “I don’t see this as a dead issue at all. I think it’s something you would consider still in process.”

     

  • Science alone will not save us

     

    But there is concern that a government desire to protect science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects by ringfencing funding could, in the long term, affect the ability of these teams to conduct research.

    For Professor Paul Wellings, chairman-elect of the 1994 group of smaller research-intensive universities, it is a question of getting together what he calls a “dream team”, comprising not just scientists, but researchers from the social sciences and humanities, to deal with the nightmare scenario recently conjured by the government’s chief scientist, John Beddington, in which the world is gripped by a “perfect storm” of war, starvation and mass migration.

    Coming up with answers

    For Wellings, it is not enough simply to rely on science and technology to come up with the answers we need. Looking at individuals’ behaviour and getting them to change that is, he argues, as important as new technology.

    While not opposed to ringfencing per se, he argues for a more nuanced approach, with support maintained for social sciences and humanities. The 1994 group estimates that the ringfencing of funding for Stem subjects during the 2008 research assessment exercise (RAE)cost its institutions 20p in the pound per researcher.

    “If we were asked as institutions to help solve major global challenges, and asked what is the ‘dream team’ that we would want to field for doing that,” says Wellings, “as soon as you start to put that together, there are engineers, technocrats and very often people in the humanities and the social sciences.”

    At the sharp end of what he is talking about are people such as Sarah Curtis, a geographer heading a group of Durham University academics working with engineers from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University on a project to discover how storms, floods and heatwaves caused by climate change might affect the elderly and how infrastructure can be tailored to cope.

    “Multidisciplinary work helps engineers and scientists, as well as the professional carers, tackle extreme weather events in the future and keep services running,” Curtis says. “They also need to understand from the people receiving those services what’s important to them and that’s where the social science perspective comes in – really being able to interpret events and problems from different social perspectives.

    “The social science perspective isn’t just about individual behaviour, but helps us to think about the way that people work and interact together. I would argue that what’s important to people and how they tackle problems is not just down to individual characteristics but also to the social circumstances they’re in.”

    She is concerned about an over-reliance on Stem subjects to provide solutions to climate change. “This isn’t just about sharing academic knowledge, but also the public debate as well, because in all honesty I don’t think that natural scientists have all the answers to the problems we’re facing over climate change and neither do I think that social scientists have the solutions. So we are going to have to negotiate across these different points of view if we are going to move forward.”

    Wellings, a population ecologist, says there is a pool of expertise within the 1994 group, with its strength in social science and humanities. He would like to see it drawn upon when it comes to tackling environmental issues. “If we don’t get a grip on climate change we are going to see the world’s largest diaspora, when a huge area of sub-Saharan Africa will be forced into absolute water shortage. At that point 300 million people could walk off the land and towards Europe. There are a family of issues that, if we get them badly wrong, will produce a perfect storm within about 40 to 50 years around some of those big picture issues.

    “So who are the people who understand the culture of these areas and the management of diaspora? By and large, it’s not scientists but social scientists and humanities people.”

    He points to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a member of the 1994 group. “I don’t know what the future of geopolitics is, but I do know that in the future we are going to have to turn to people such as those at Soas, who are experts in languages and anthropology from that part of the world. It will be an inevitable response that we will need a world-class centre of excellence of the sort that we already have there.”

    In the meantime, Wellings, who is also vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, fears there will be less money for academics to engage in speculative research in social sciences and humanities.

    “You can have a pretty shrewd guess there will be substantially less money going back into those departments than there was before,” he says. “And so over the next 18 months you will see a sharp diminution in research activity. Some of that will be a reduction in the number of projects that are being run and some of it will be in the support to postgraduates.

    “Less money will cause colleagues to be more entrepreneurial and in the short run they will be more market-facing, or recruit more international students, but it won’t maintain research capacity and that is the thing that will be eroded. The intellectual need for there to be multidisciplinary research will not go away and that will put tremendous pressure on universities to ensure that the financial resources are there.”

    Wellings, who sits on the board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, is calling for more transparency when it comes to the new funding mechanism that will replace the RAE, the Research Excellence Framework – in particular, in the funding of Stem subjects relative to social sciences and humanities. “In the future, there will have to be transparency about what the likelihood is of resource in each area,” he says.

    A wider research base

    Diane Berry, Reading University’s pro vice-chancellor for research, echoes this argument. “It is clearly important to protect funding for Stem subjects and medicine. However, we cannot afford to conceive our science base too narrowly – we must protect our wider research base.

    “This is because addressing current and future global challenges depends on the successful interplay of all subjects. Furthermore, the boundaries between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities are becoming increasingly fluid as research at the frontiers of knowledge becomes increasingly inter- and multidisciplinary.”

    David Delpy, the chief executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, says: “Obviously, there needs to be a balance between arts and science funding. Both are important. However, there remains a shortage in physical sciences and engineering graduates. We agree that when it comes to priority areas such as climate change a cross-disciplinary approach is vital if we are to be successful.” Delpy points to the Research Council UK’s Living With Environmental Change programme as an example of how the seven research councils are working together “to try and solve major problems that face society”.

    “Increasingly,” says Berry, “success in markets, which many people might assume to be dominated by technological advances, depends just as much on factors such as design, economics, branding and consumer understanding.

    “Similarly, effectively tackling some of the most significant health and environmental challenges will depend just as much on changing people’s behaviour as on advances in medicine, physics, or chemistry.”

  • Leaders of 40 largest cities meet to tackle climate change

    The issue of how cities “find a way to continue to thrive and prosper while reducing greenhouse gas emissions is one of the central questions in the whole struggle,” Clinton told a press conference.

    He said his initiative focuses on creating “communities that can both provide a greater quality of life and generate more clean energy than they use”.

    Half the world’s population lived in cities last year, and that figure is expected to grow to 70 per cent by 2050, said Clinton, citing UN statistics.

    They occupy just 2 per cent of the world’s land mass yet are responsible for more than two-thirds of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

    Mayor David Miller of Toronto, who chairs this year’s summit, said he was confident it could find balanced ways to combat climate change.

    “We will be able to demonstrate not only how you can fight greenhouse gas emissions but how you can also build green sustainable neighbourhoods, create green jobs and contribute back to the fight against climate change,” Miller said.

    Seoul Mayor Oh Se-Hoon said the South Korean capital would develop a pilot residential and industrial district that would use 20 per cent less energy than the national average and cut carbon emissions by more than 40 per cent.

    Oh said new technologies and renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic, solar and geothermal energy would be used to fulfil the commitment.

    London Mayor Boris Johnson said the British capital was committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2025, and pointed to retrofitting – the installation of lagging – in large numbers of public buildings as key.

  • Study Halves Prediction of Rising Seas

     

    They also uniformly called for renewed investment in satellites measuring ice and field missions that could within a few years substantially clarify the risk.

    There is strong consensus that warming waters around Antarctica, and Greenland in the Arctic, will result in centuries of rising seas. But glaciologists and oceanographers still say uncertainty prevails on the vital question of how fast coasts will retreat in a warming world in the next century or two.

    The new study combined computer modeling with measurements of the ice and the underlying bedrock, both direct and by satellite.

    It did not assess the pace or the likelihood of a rise in seas. The goal was to examine as precisely as possible how much ice could flow into the sea if warming seawater penetrated between the West Antarctic ice sheet and the bedrock beneath.

    For decades West Antarctic ice has been identified as particularly vulnerable to melting because, although piled more than one mile above sea level in many places, it also rests on bedrock a half mile to a mile beneath sea level in others. That topography means that warm water could progressively melt spots where ice is stuck to the rock, allowing it to flow more freely.

    Erik I. Ivins, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described the new paper as “good solid science,” but added that the sea-level estimates could not be verified without renewed investment in satellite missions and other initiatives that were currently lagging.

    A particularly valuable satellite program called Grace, which measures subtle variations in gravity related to the mass of ice and rock, “has perhaps a couple of years remaining before its orbit deteriorates,” Dr. Ivins said. “The sad truth is that we in NASA are watching our Earth-observing systems fall by the wayside as they age — without the sufficient resources to see them adequately replaced.”

    Robert Bindschadler, a specialist in polar ice at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said the study provided only a low estimate of Antarctica’s possible long-term contribution to rising seas because it did not deal with other mechanisms that could add water to the ocean.

    The prime question, he said, remains what will happen in the next 100 years or so, and other recent work implies that a lot of ice can be shed within that time.

    “Even in Bamber’s world,” he said, referring to the study’s lead author, “there is more than enough ice to cause serious harm to the world’s coastlines.”

  • The NHS must wake up to climate change

     

     

    We know that as temperatures rise, extreme climatic events will cause heatwaves, floods, and unusually strong storms. People in Britain will die. The incidence of infections, cataracts, and skin cancers will rise. More people will be admitted to hospital.

     

    But the greatest impacts will be on the poorest peoples in the world today. Africa will endure yet another crisis to add to its existing predicaments of poverty, disease, and economic collapse. The warming of the planet will trigger new epidemics of infectious diseases. Food yields will fall and millions of people will suffer starvation. 250 million more people in Africa will face water poverty by 2020. Poor housing and slums will be especially vulnerable to extreme climatic events. The millions of people who migrate away from places of climatic stress will create new tensions, precipitating violence and war.

     

    Climate change seems too big, too complex, too unpredictable, too global, and too distant. It’s tempting to give up when confronted by this prospect of human catastrophe. There is much that we don’t know about what climate change might do. We are frightened by this terrifying uncertainty. We need new technologies to pull us back from the edge of disaster. We need new ways to solve the stubborn problem of global poverty. We need ways to get the public and politicians to take climate change more seriously. Climate change should be a major priority for our political parties in the 2010 general election.

     

    Despite reasons for despair, our commission remains optimistic. We can do something, and the health community, in particular, can do a great deal to lead a movement to protect billions of people from the health effects of climate change. We did it once before. It took 20 years – from the 1940s to the 1960s – to assemble the science to prove that smoking damaged human health. It took another 40 years to translate that science into a ban on smoking in public places. We have reached the point where we can be confident of the cataclysmic effects of climate change on health. But we don’t have the luxury of 40 years to change public policy. Every decade of delay will push up the peak temperature of the earth to increasingly unsustainable levels.

     

    The NHS is Britain’s largest employer. If those who work in it now back a radical agenda to change our lifestyle to low-carbon living we will make a big and valuable contribution to saving our fragile human species. Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. But health is possibly the best means to mobilise political action to face down that threat. Because without health there is no life for us or our children.