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. 

  • Emissions rising faster than ever

    By David Fogarty – Reuters

    SINGAPORE, Sept 25 – Global carbon emissions rose rapidly in 2007, an annual study says, with developing nations such as China and India now producing more than half of mankind’s output of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming.

    The Global Carbon Project said in its report carbon dioxide emissions from mankind are growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the 1990s, despite efforts by a number of nations to rein in emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

    Emissions from burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to the increase, the authors said in their “Global Carbon Project (2008) Carbon budget and trends 2007” report (http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbontrends/index_new.htm).

    India would soon overtake Russia to become the world’s third largest CO2 emitter, it says.

    “What we are talking about now for the first time is that the absolute value of all emissions going into the atmosphere every year are bigger coming from less developing countries than the developed world,” said the project’s Australia-based executive director Pep Canadell.

    “The other thing we confirm is that China is indeed now the top emitter,” he told Reuters, adding that China alone accounted for 60 percent of all growth in emissions. The United States was the second largest emitter.

    The project is supported by the International Council for Science, the umbrella body for all national academies of science.

    “DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES”

    The rapid rise in emissions meant the world could warm faster than previously predicted, said professor Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

    He said CO2 concentrations could hit 450 ppm by 2030 instead of 2040 as currently predicted. They are just above 380 ppm at present.

    “But whatever the specific date, 450 ppm CO2 commits us to 2 degrees Celsius global warming and all the disastrous consequences this sets in train.”

    The Global Carbon Project started in 2001 and examines changes in the earth’s total carbon cycle involving man-made and natural emissions and how carbon is absorbed through sinks, such as oceans and forests.

    Canadell says the project analyses data from CO2 samples taken around the globe and national emissions figures sent to the United Nations.

    He called the rapid rise in emissions between 2000 and 2007 and accumulation of the gas unprecedented, and pointed out that it occurred during a decade of intense international efforts to fight climate change.

    At present, the Kyoto Protocol, the main global treaty to tackle global warming, binds only 37 rich nations to emissions curbs from 2008.

    But Kyoto’s first phase ends in 2012 and the pact doesn’t commit developing nations to emissions caps. The United Nations is leading talks to expand Kyoto from 2013 and find a magic formula that brings on board all nations to commit to curbs on emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

    “WAKE-UP CALL”

    According to the report, atmospheric CO2 concentration rose to 383 parts per million in 2007, or 37 percent above the level at the start of the industrial revolution, and is the highest level during the past 650,000 years.

    It said the annual mean growth rate of atmospheric CO2 was 2.2 ppm per year in 2007, up from 1.8 ppm in 2006.

    “This latest information on rising carbon dioxide emissions is a big wake-up call to industry, business and politicians,” said professor Matthew England, joint director of the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre.

    Canadell said the credit crisis would most likely trim emissions growth.

    “There is no doubt that the economic downturn will have an influence. But unless the big players, China, India, Russia and Japan, suffer as much as the United States is suffering, we’ll see a small decline only.”

    For further details in the report, see www.globalcarbonproject.com

  • Natives trees to thrive under climate change

    BEN CUBBY in The Land
     
    As the world warms, Australian trees will grow faster and larger and become more water-efficient, research suggests.

    Giant, climate-controlled tents that simulate the carbon dioxide-heavy conditions expected in the second half of the 21st century have been erected over gum trees by University of Western Sydney researchers.

    Air inside the tents is carefully regulated to raise the carbon dioxide content to over 600 parts per million – above the predicted “tipping point” for highly damaging climate change.

    The results suggest the hardy eucalypts will survive and maybe even prosper, even as surrounding ecosystems collapse.

    “The trees are basically taking up more carbon and using up to 25pc less water,” said Professor David Tissue, a lead researcher.

    “Hopefully this could have important implications for the use of plantation timber, and the way carbon sequestration is accounted.”

    Professor Tissue and his colleagues decided to use Sydney blue gum saplings for the trial near Richmond because the trees are commonly used in plantation forests and as carbon offsets.

    Some blue gums are being raised in carbon-rich atmospheres beneath their transparent plastic tents, while others are being starved of water to simulate drought conditions.

    Those given extra carbon have been shown to create more wood and lose less water by closing pores on their leaves.

    But Australian native trees are not the solution to climate change, said Dr Bert Drake of the Smithsonian Institute, who has maintained the world’s longest-running carbon sequestration experiment in the US since 1987.

    “The largest factor determining the uptake of carbon dioxide is still the availability of water, and that is a major issue from Australia,” said Dr Drake, who is in Sydney to discuss carbon sinks at a Whitlam Institute forum tonight.

    “None of the data suggests that plants can absorb enough of the carbon dioxide to compensate for the amount we are putting into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.”

    If the amount of carbon dioxide being put in the atmosphere by human activity does not decline sharply over the next four decades, by the second half of the century the global average is expected to reach the levels being simulated in the UWS experiment.

    A senior CSIRO plant industry scientist, Dr Roger Gifford, said some regions would receive higher rainfall as others dried out.

    But any advantages for plants were likely to be short-term.

  • Gigantic break up in Arctic imminent

    The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn’t worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists.

    “As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north — and Petermann is as far north as you can get — it certainly adds to the concern,” said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado.

    The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming?

    “It certainly is a major event,” said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. “It’s a signal but we don’t know what it means.”

    It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don’t like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.

    University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: “The crack is not alarming… I would say it is normal.”

    However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what’s ahead.

    Further south in Greenland, Box’s satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland.

    That concerns Colorado’s Abdalati: “It could go back for miles and miles and there’s no real mechanism to stop it.”

  • Major corporates at risk from climate change

    Australian companies most at risk are in construction and materials, chemicals, industrial metals, mining, oil and gas production and food and drug retail, the report said.

    It does not name any of the high-risk companies. But a report from Citigroup released last month found that Australia’s 10 biggest greenhouse gas emitters were BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Bluescope Steel, Qantas, AGL, Alumina, Orica, Santos, Origin Energy and Boral.

    The ethics report said examples of high-impact sectors were cement production and coal mining. These sectors are deemed to have high levels of what economists call “carbon intensity”, generating 125 more greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production than low-impact sectors. High-impact sectors such as car manufacturers are, on average, five times as carbon intensive, while medium-impact sectors such as consumer electrical goods are three times as carbon intensive.

    The Australian data shows that few companies at risk are doing anything to tackle climate change and reduce investor risk.

    The only sector in which companies had done anything to mitigate the risk was construction and materials. But even there, it only applied to 33% of companies in that sector. The other sectors deemed to be high-risk had not taken sufficient steps to improve their position.

    The report found that almost four out of 10 (39%) of high and very high-risk companies, worth a total of $213 billion, had no or only limited response to climate change.

    It also found a significant gap between what steps companies claimed they were taking to tackle climate change, and what they were actually doing. Just under two-fifths (39%) of the high and very high-risk companies had a corporate-wide commitment to deal with global warming, but only 18% were basing their efforts on international targets, regulations or scientific research.

    And only 4% were showing they were serious by linking board or senior management remuneration to greenhouse gas emission reductions or climate change strategies.

    The data showed that 33% of companies that generated a significant impact on climate change claimed they recognised the importance of dealing with global warming. But few were putting their money where their mouths were. Only 5% had made a public commitment or disclosed a quantitative target to reduce the climate change impact of their products.

    In terms of disclosure, many companies were seeking to show the market they were coming clean on their greenhouse gas emissions. Still, there are serious doubts about whether their disclosures can be backed up.

    The research showed that 39% of Australian companies (compared with 81% of global companies) disclose absolute greenhouse gas emissions data, the total amount of emissions produced. Furthermore, 19% disclose so-called “normalised” data, which allows investors to compare greenhouse gas emissions across companies and sectors.

    But a closer look raises serious questions about the truthfulness of their claims. Only 11% of these disclosures are verified by an independent party, and only 25% of companies actually disclosed how they made those calculations.

    CAER chief executive officer Duncan Paterson said the difference between the rhetoric of companies on climate change and what they were actually doing was a big concern for investors. “There is clearly a gap,” Mr Paterson said. He said Australian companies were more exposed to climate change overall because of the size of the country’s resources sector. “These are the companies that tend to have a high climate change impact and are more exposed because of the high amount of energy that goes into the production and refining of metals.”

    The ethics report follows the release of the Federal Government’s green paper last month, which confirmed that the Government would meet extra costs passed on to low-income earners and that some of the hardest-hit industries, such as aluminium and cement, would receive a specified amount of free permits. Australia’s Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, has said that the status quo is no option.

    The Citigroup report warns that investors will have to wait until there is more detail on specific emissions caps and permit allocations. “We think the devil is in the detail in terms of actual permit distribution, and thus financial impact on individual companies,” Citigroup analyst Elaine Prior said.

  • Government urged to keep renewables target

    Mr Wilkins recently told The Australian he believed the Government should not pursue market-distorting forms of industry assistance such as the target.

    But a report for WWF by consultants Climate Risk found that, without an MRET, which requires electricity providers to obtain 20 per cent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, the Government would have no hope of meeting its target to cut greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent by its 2050 deadline, because the price signals to develop the necessary technologies would not be sent in time for those technologies to be commercially ready.

    Climate Risk director Karl Mallon said: “Without an MRET, Australia would run a very high risk of not meeting its emissions targets because industries would leave their run too late and then they would simply not be able to get up and running in time. They wouldn’t be able to get the staff, or the investment.

    “An MRET does make the emissions reduction task more expensive, but without it we can’t meet the deadline.”

    Dr Mallon said the Government also needed to enhance its MRET scheme by keeping aside some of the permits for later-developing technologies such as geothermal, rather than allowing all the permits to be issued to cheaper wind power providers in the early years, as wind power would only ever supply a proportion of Australia’s energy needs.

    Mr Hunt said the Coalition agreed with this view, but believed the renewable energy target should include so-called clean coal technologies.

    “There is strong support within the Coalition for a 20 per cent target, but inclusive of carbon capture and storage,” he said.

    The Productivity Commission said an MRET operating in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme would not encourage any additional greenhouse abatement, but would impose significant additional costs.

  • Marine climate heading south

    From the ABC 

    Marine scientists have found that Australia’s east coast climate zones have moved south by 200 kilometres over the past 60 years.

    Australian Institute of Marine Science researcher Janice Lough analysed ocean temperature records back to the 1950s, and found that tropical ocean climates have changed and that may be one of the causes of coral bleaching.

    Dr Lough says the speed of the change makes it very unlikely coral reef systems will be able to adapt and survive.

    “One of the reasons we have coral reefs is they need a certain amount of light, they need certain water temperatures, but they also need suitable substrate to form on and really there’s not that much of that shallow water substrate south of the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr Lough said.