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. 

  • Litigation inspires government to act on climate change

    “International negotiations are not advancing, hence presenting litigation is an attractive path despite some drawbacks,” Justice Preston said.

    Litigation was “unlikely to have a great overall effect on climate change” but “environmental groups and affected individuals and groups have taken up the challenge”.

    Issues related to climate change had been litigated “more or less successfully” since 1994, Justice Preston said.

    “It is only in recent years that climate change as a phenomenon has been more widely accepted by the courts, although there are still cases where the science of climate change is challenged.

    “Taking climate change into account when deciding upon the merits of a development proposal is another new development.”

    He cited five decisions last year alone, four involving the NSW minister for planning, on matters such as alleged failure to consider coastal hazards, including sea-level rise.

    “More commonly, the statute does not expressly state the matters relating to climate change and it is necessary to ascertain, from the subject matter, scope and purpose of the statute, whether the statute impliedly requires consideration of matters relating to climate change.”

    Misrepresentation as to the environmental credentials of goods and services could be addressed via tort law or the Trade Practices Act, he said.

    The chief judge noted the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had been active in scrutinising such claims and had taken action against household goods manufacturer De Longhi, tyre company Goodyear and car maker Saab.

    De Longhi amended its advertising while Goodyear undertook to offer partial refunds to those who relied on unsubstantiated environmental claims.

    The commission took General Motors to court over advertising that claimed “every Saab is green” and that people should “switch to carbon-neutral motoring”.

    Breaches of the Trade Practices Act were alleged but an agreement was reached for GM to train its marketing staff and plant 12,580 trees.

    Justice Preston said that “constitutions or statutes might provide for certain rights, such as a right to life, or right to a healthy environment”.

    He also made a prediction: “There has not yet been litigation focused on greenhouse gas emission or climate change, although there is the potential” as governments were likely to use legislation to tackle climate change.

    He said there was value even in unsuccessful litigation because “matters that are important to communities are being brought to the attention of governments, and hence act as a catalyst for executive action”.

  • UK commits to 80% reduction

    He accepted the recommendations of the government-appointed Climate Change Committee, chaired by Lord Turner, which said last week that the UK ought to commit to an 80% reduction from 1990 levels for all greenhouse gases and covering all sectors.

    He also pledged to amend the energy bill to create “feed-in tariffs”, allowing small-scale energy producers – such as homes with wind turbines or solar panels – to sell electricity at a guaranteed price.

    And he issued a warning to energy companies to act “in a satisfactory way” to reduce charges for customers with pre-payment meters and those not connected to the gas main.

    He said the government expects “rapid action or explanation to remedy any abuses” and warned if the firms do not act then ministers would consult on legislation to prevent “unfair pricing”.

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    John Vidal on Britain’s new climate change pledge
    Link to this audio

    Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace’s chief scientist, said: “This is a hugely encouraging first move from the new climate change secretary. In a decade in power Labour has never adopted a target so ambitious, far-reaching and internationally significant as this.

    “To meet it will require determined action from Gordon Brown and every one of his successors for the next four decades. Hard choices will be made that will touch every Briton, but it can and must be done.”

    He added: “Ed Miliband obviously understands the urgency of the threat we face from climate change. He is absolutely right to say Britain should set an example to the rest of the world in tackling this issue, and we will support him wholeheartedly if the decisions he takes in the coming weeks and months genuinely reflect this ambition.”

    Ruth Davis, the head of climate change at the RSPB, said: “This is one of the most far-sighted and far-reaching climate change initiative any government could take and is testament to the efforts of campaigners.”

    Andy Atkins, Friends of the Earth’s executive director, said: “Miliband’s admission that pollution from international aviation and shipping will be dealt with outside the bill is a sign that these industries are being picked out for special treatment yet again. “The Committee on Climate Change made it clear that we have to reduce all carbon emissions by 80%. We cannot leave the cuts in aviation and shipping emissions to chance.” Greg Clark, the shadow climate change secretary, also welcomed the announcements. He said: “The choice between aggressive and ambitious action on carbon reduction and a successful, powerful economy is, in fact, not a choice at all – they are one and the same.”

    Miliband, making his first statement to the Commons as head of the newly created department, said: “In tough economic times, some people ask whether we should retreat from our climate-change objectives.

    “In our view it would be quite wrong to row back and those who say we should misunderstand the relationship between the economic and environmental tasks we face.”

    The 2006 Stern report showed that the costs of doing nothing “are greater than the costs of acting”, he said.

    The climate change bill would be amended to set the higher target, which “will be binding in law”.

    Miliband said: “However, we all know that signing up to an 80% target in 2050 when most of us will not be around is the easy part. The hard part is meeting it and meeting the milestones that will show we’re on track.”

    The Climate Change Committee will advise on the first 15 years of carbon budgets in December, “national limits to our total emissions within which we will have to live as a country”.

    The announcement on feed-in tariffs will be welcomed by Labour backbenchers, who staged the biggest revolt of Gordon Brown’s leadership over the issue.

    In April, 35 backbenchers rebelled on the issue during debate on the energy bill, with two more Labour MPs acting as tellers.

    Miliband said: “Having heard the debate on this issue, including from many colleagues in this house, on this side of the house and on others, I also believe that complementing the renewables obligation for large-scale projects, guaranteed prices for small-scale electricity generation – feed-in tariffs – have the potential to play an important role, as they do in other countries.”

    Last week Ofgem, the energy regulator, highlighted “unjustified” higher charges for 4 million customers without mains gas.

    The regulator also believes that many homes using pre-payment meters – often the poorest customers – are being “overcharged”.

    Miliband said: “Unfair pricing which hits the most vulnerable hardest is completely unacceptable. I made that clear to the representatives of the big six energy companies when I met them yesterday.

    “I also told them that the government expects rapid action or explanation to remedy any abuses. I will meet them again in a month to hear what they have done.”

    He added: “If the companies don’t act in a satisfactory way, and speedily, then we will consult on legislation to prevent unfair pricing differentials.”

    Miliband said the measures announced today were part of an energy and climate change policy “that is fair and sustainable, which meets our obligations to today’s and future generations”.

    Clark said there had been a “decade-long void” in the government’s policy towards energy, in which “successive ministers have looked the other way rather than address the issue of future energy needs”.

    He welcomed the acceptance of Turner’s 80% target, saying: “We have always said that we should be guided by the science on that matter.”

    But he called for the target to be kept under constant review, saying that just eight years ago 60% was considered to be the right number.

    Clark also pressed Miliband to “lead the world” on carbon capture and storage by committing to three UK-based demonstration projects and said smart metering should be introduced for microgeneration.

  • Courts fiexw US to protect polar bears

    ENVIRONMENTAL groups and the Bush administration yesterday reached a partial court settlement that requires the Department of Interior to designate critical habitat for polar bears by June 30, 2010.

    The Department of Interior in May listed the polar bear as being threatened by global warming, but did not designate any critical habitat protection.

    The Centre for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace,and the Natural Resources Defence Council filed a lawsuit in an attempt to force the Government to do more for the bear’s long-term survival under the Endangered Species Act.

    “This agreement will provide an additional layer of protection,” said Kassie Siegel of the Centre for Biological Diversity.

    Conservationists yesterday called for better protection for the oceans’ nurseries following the release on Monday of the 2008 Red List, which shows dozens of marine species are threatened with extinction.

    International conservation group WWF said the list demonstrated how critical it was to afford greater protection to the oceans’ nurseries, such as the Coral Triangle, which spans Asia and parts of the South Pacific.

    The Coral Triangle boasts 75per cent of the world’s coral species and provides spawning grounds for globally valuable species such as reef fish and tuna.

    Lida Pet Soede, head of WWF’s Coral Triangle Program, said such areas were as valuable as South America’s Amazon and must be safeguarded.

    “Coastal development, destructive fishing and overfishing, unsustainable tourism and climate change are taking a heavy toll and, if left unchecked, will cause the collapse of the world’s most remarkable coral reef ecosystem,” Dr Pet Soede said.

    “The implications of loss of habitat and natural resources in the Coral Triangle are enormous in terms of the impact on ocean life globally and on regional livelihoods.

    “This nursery of the seas supports global populations of turtles and tuna, while 180 million people depend on its coasts and coastal resources for food security.”

    The annual Red List report, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said nearly 40 per cent of the 44,838 animal and plant species covered by the index were considered threatened. About 3000 of them were classified as critically endangered, meaning they face a very high probability of extinction.

    Among those considered critically endangered are leatherback and hawksbill turtles, and three other types of turtles listed as endangered or vulnerable. All are found in the Coral Triangle.

    Researchers were so concerned about the survival chances of 188 species of mammals that they were described as critically endangered, the highest ranking before extinct.

    Among them was the Iberian lynx which, with an estimated population of 84 to 143 adults left in the wild, is among the rarest animals in the world.

    “The huge demand for live reef fish amongst wealthy consumers in China and in Chinese communities around the world is a major contributor to the overfishing of these species,” said Geoffrey Muldoon, program leader for WWF’s live reef fish work in the Coral Triangle.

  • Warmer Arctic releases methane

    Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

    In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

    They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

    Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

    The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.

    Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

    “We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night,” said Dr Gustafsson. “An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These ‘methane chimneys’ were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments].”

    At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. “This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean,” he said. “Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.

    “The conventional thought has been that the permafrost ‘lid’ on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane… The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed.”

    The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane “hotspots”, which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.

    Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia’s rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

    The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.

  • Greenhouse gases up three percent per annum

    That’s an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

    Meanwhile, forests and oceans, which suck up carbon dioxide, are doing so at lower rates than in the 20th century, scientists said. If those trends continue, it puts the world on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level.

    The pollution leader was China, followed by the United States, which past data show is the leader in emissions per person in carbon dioxide output. And while several developed countries slightly cut their CO2 output in 2007, the United States churned out more.

    Still, it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that spurred the growth of carbon dioxide pollution to a record high of 9.34 billion tons of carbon (8.47 billion metric tons). Figures released by science agencies in the United States, Great Britain and Australia show that China’s added emissions accounted for more than half of the worldwide increase. China passed the United States as the No. 1 carbon dioxide polluter in 2006.

    Emissions in the United States rose nearly 2 per cent in 2007, after declining the previous year. The U.S. produced 1.75 billion tons of carbon (1.58 billion metric tons).

    “Things are happening very, very fast,” said Corinne Le Quere, professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s scary.”

    Gregg Marland, a senior staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said he was surprised at the results because he thought world emissions would drop because of the economic downturn. That didn’t happen.

    “If we’re going to do something (about reducing emissions), it’s got to be different than what we’re doing,” he said.

    China the trendsetter

    The emissions are based on data from oil giant BP PLC, which show that China has become the major driver of world trends. China emitted 2 billion tons of carbon (1.8 billion metric tons) last year, up 7.5 per cent from the previous year.

    “We’re shipping jobs offshore from the U.S., but we’re also shipping carbon dioxide emissions with them,” Marland said. “China is making fertilizer and cement and steel and all of those are heavy energy-intensive industries.”

    Developing countries not asked to reduce greenhouse gases by the 1997 Kyoto treaty — and China and India are among them — now account for 53 percent of carbon dioxide pollution. That group of nations surpassed industrialized ones in carbon dioxide emissions in 2005, a new analysis of older figures shows.

    India is in position to beat Russia for the No. 3 carbon dioxide polluter behind the United States, Marland said. Indonesia levels are increasing rapidly.

    Denmark’s emissions dropped 8 percent. The United Kingdom and Germany reduced carbon dioxide pollution by 3 percent, while France and Australia cut it by 2 per cent.

    Nature can’t keep up with the carbon dioxide from man, Le Quere said. She said from 1955 to 2000, the forests and oceans absorbed about 57 per cent of the excess carbon dioxide, but now it’s 54 per cent.

    What is “kind of scary” is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

    Under the panel’s scenario then, temperatures would increase by somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 to 6.3 degrees Celsius) by the year 2100.

    If this trend continues for the century, “you’d have to be luckier than hell for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic,” said Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider.

  • Friends of the Earth withdraws from Forest Stewardship Council

    Friends of the Earth (FoE) is the first major international NGO to confirm they no longer support Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, which falsely suggests primary and old-growth forest logging is desirable and even sustainable, and that plantations are forests. This is a major victory for those including Ecological Internet (EI) and FSC-Watch[1] who have courageously taken on large environmental interests using FSC to greenwash ancient forest destruction.

    FoE pioneered timber certification during the 1980s and was one of FSC’s founders, but FoE International in Amsterdam has confirmed that it is now “reviewing” its membership of the organization. FoE UK announced on their website[2] they are “deeply concerned by the number of FSC certifications that are now sparking controversy and threatening the credibility of the scheme. We cannot support a scheme that fails to guarantee high environmental and social standards. As a result we can no longer recommend the FSC standard.”

    “FoE is to be commended for their courage in admitting all forest certification schemes including FSC are failing forests, climate and peoples globally. FSC plantation and ancient forest logging standards have been shown to be a fraud — business as usual forest destruction. We welcome reports that other European NGOs may follow FoE’s lead, and demand that Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace and WWF stop their stonewalling and follow suit, or face escalating disruptive protests” warns Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet’s President. “Then together as one we can work to end ancient forest logging.”

    EI has long sought protection for all the Earth’s remaining primary and old-growth forests. These efforts were stymied by large environmental bureaucracies falsely suggesting cutting carbon and species rich, centuries old trees is an environmental good. It became obvious the world’s forests could only be protected, and global ecological sustainability achieved, if groups supporting FSC were confronted. Our protest campaign launched last year, assisted by recent overwhelming ecological science showing old-growth forests continue to store and remove carbon and are essential to fighting climate change[3]