Category: Climate chaos

 

The paper predicts the world reaching a level of emissions 20 years earlier than that predicted by the groundbreaking Stern Review by British economist Nicholas Stern.

It says the global effort to cut greenhouse gases will need to be much larger to avoid the projected scenario.

“Larger and earlier cuts in developed country emissions will be required than previously thought, and major deviations from baselines will be required in developing countries by 2020,” the paper says.

“It is hard to see how the required cuts could be achieved without all major developing, as well as developed, countries adopting economy-wide policies to reduce emissions.”

Prof Garnaut, an economist who heads the Government’s Garnaut Review, is preparing the research with three other Australian academics for the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

The Garnaut Review’s interim report, released in February, described a dire outlook for global warming and recommended developed nations pursue emissions cuts of 70-90 per cent by 2050.

In the “platinum age” – a term coined by Prof Garnaut for the current period of exceptionally fast economic growth led by China and India – fossil-fuel emissions are spiralling.

“CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning increased by only one per cent a year on average in the 1990s, but grew by three per cent a year from 2000 to 2005,” the draft paper says.

“Since 2000, non-OECD emissions have been growing almost six times as fast as OECD emissions, accounting for 85 per cent of the growth in emissions.”

Under platinum age projections, the academics say China will be responsible for 37 per cent of global emissions by 2030.

The projections suggest emissions will grow by 2.5 per cent a year in the 2005-2030 period to a level of 83 billion tonnes, almost double their current level.

The authors say in light of this scenario, developed countries would have to make emissions cuts by 2020 at or above the top end of the range being discussed in global talks.

Major developing countries would also have to commit themselves to demanding and binding targets instead of undertaking voluntary efforts, a key sticking point in post-Kyoto talks.

“Without all major emitters binding themselves to economy-wide targets or policies, given rapid emissions growth, the prospects for the global climate change mitigation effort are bleak.”

Climate change economist Nicholas Stern has urged that the world move to equal per capita emissions by 2050, a move that would require developed countries as a whole to cut their emissions by about 80%.

Stern makes the call in a paper co-written with director of the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations Laurence Tubiana for a progressive governance summit hosted by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

“From the point of view of equity the numbers are stark,” Stern says.

“The currently rich countries are responsible for around 70% of the existing stock [of global greenhouse gases], and are continuing to contribute substantially more to stock increases than developing countries. The United States, Canada and Australia each emit over 20 tonnes of CO2e (i.e. from all GHGs) per capita, Europe and Japan over 10 tonnes, China more than 5 tonnes, India around 2 tonnes, and most of sub-Saharan Africa much less than 1 tonne.”

Stern says reforming the Clean Development Mechanism must be a key element of building an equitable, efficient and effective global climate deal.

The current Clean Development Mechanism is “slow, cumbersome and very ‘micro’”, he says.
“Trading on the scale required to reach the type of targets discussed requires a much simpler, ‘wholesale’ system.”

“Wholesale measures can include technological benchmarks such as employing carbon capture and storage (currently excluded from CDM), or sectoral benchmarks such as getting below a certain amount of CO₂ per tonne of cement. Programmatic CDM would allow whole programs of investment – for example in urban transport – to qualify.”

Other “key elements” of an effective and fair global deal nominated by Stern are:

• defining a global target for 2050, with intermediate targets to keep countries on track and provide certainty to the private sector;
• building a genuinely global carbon market, by linking regional schemes;
• establishing sectoral agreements to provide for partial commitments in emerging countries and address concerns over trade competition and ‘carbon leakage’ (“ideally … through common participation in carbon pricing schemes”);
• funding the development, demonstration and transfer of low-carbon technology;
• financing reduced emissions from deforestation (“for $10 billion to $15 billion per year, a program could be constructed that could stop up to half of deforestation – the cost of abatement can be roughly estimated at around $5 per tonne of CO₂“); and
• funding adaptation, particularly given climate change’s disproportionate impact on the poorest and most vulnerable.

“For progressive leaders engaged in reforming world politics along the lines of justice and social and economic inclusion, climate change offers powerful leverage,” Stern and Tubiana write.

“Climate change is par excellence an inspiring cause for internationalism: it involves not only states but requires the solidarity and perception of a common destiny by all the world’s citizens.”

The paper cites the 2007 Australian federal election as an example of a government being “thrown out of office” due to a perceived lack of action on climate change.

Critics of programs such as the federal Energy Efficiency Opportunities program and Victoria’s EREP scheme are really just asking to be “left alone” to pursue their “own narrow interests”, says energy efficiency expert Alan Pears.

Pears also outlined a strategy to allow the government to act more quickly on energy efficient appliances and criticised energy market rules for hampering the deployment of cogeneration.

No perfect solution

Critics such as ExxonMobil who claim government energy efficiency schemes are simply crude interventions in business processes “are really asking to be allowed to be left alone acting in their own narrow interests as a global business, rather than acting in Asutralia’s or the environment’s,” Pears told CE Daily.

Pears, adjunct professor at Melbourne’s RMIT University and co-director of consultancy Sustainable Solutions, said emissions trading and carbon taxes could also be described as crude interventions.

“There is no perfect intervention,” he said.

If companies were fully on top of energy efficiency they would have comprehensive energy management and monitoring systems in place, he said.

“Many of them do not.”

Pears said energy efficiency programs need to be retained and accompanied by government measures to help risks of lost production associated with implementing innovative technologies.

“For many businesses, because energy is 1% to 3% of costs, to innovate to save energy leaves them open to much larger risks if something goes wrong.”

Industry needs support to test new equipment to minimise these risks, he said.

‘Overhaul needed of appliance energy efficiency regime’

Pears said current government efforts to ensure appliances sold in Australia are energy efficient are woefully inadequate.

It takes “several years” for it to dawn that products such as digital televisions or set-top boxes are a problem, and then several more years before Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) are implemented, he said.

By that time a whole generation of energy-inefficient products are in Australian homes, he said.

Pears called for a system along the lines of safety approvals procedures which would require those wanting to import or manufacture appliances for sale in Australia to provide a statement indicating what they have done to ensure the appliance is energy efficient.

If international benchmarks exist for the product, the statement could reference these.

If there are no standards, the importer or manufacturer could set out how they have attempted to make the appliance efficient and provide data on matters such as its standby power consumption.

This would provide feedback to the companies that energy efficiency is a key concern and would also provide the government with useful data on appliance energy consumption, Pears said.

Cogeneration setback

Pears added that the deployment of cogeneration in Australia, which produces useful power and heat and consequently far lower emissions of greenhouse gases than conventional generation, had been massively stymied by existing energy market rules.

“If you don’t have the right mix of heat and electricity requirements to match what an on-site cogeneration plant could generate you have to start selling across the boundary,” Pears said.

“And as soon as you do, you start to hit problems” under current energy market rules, he said.

“I think energy market structures are one of the biggest barriers to energy efficiency and emissions reduction that we have,” Pears said.

Pears also called for an overhaul of the first homebuyers scheme to favour purchasers of energy efficient, smaller homes.

Trading not yet ‘well-proven’

In a submission to the Garnaut Review, not yet on the review website, Pears cautions that emissions trading is not yet “well-proven” as a policy response to climate change.

“On this basis, it should not be treated as a replacement for a comprehensive range of policy tools, but as one element of a suite of responses. As we learn more over time, we will gain confidence and competence and its actual role will become clearer. A premature shift away from existing policy tools and measures is a very high risk strategy.”

“Closure of existing [energy efficiency] programs bsed on the hope or belief that emissions trading will replace them would involve a serious loss of momentum in response,” Pears says in the submission.

The submission says businesses are “typically far from optimal in their use of energy and resources”, partly because of information barriers “within and between organisations”.

Federal climate change department chief Martin Parkinson yesterday named three areas which he thought would require ‘complementary measures’ in addition to emissions trading.

And, as the Wilkins review of existing climate programs calls for public submissions, Parkinson said he hopes state governments will undertake similar assessments of what programs should stay and go.

Energy efficiency an ‘obvious’ candidate

Energy efficiency measures and support for research and development are two “obvious” areas where emissions trading alone will not achieve what is required, federal Department of Climate Change chief Martin Parkinson told yesterday’s Climate Action Network Australia conference in Sydney.

Parkinson added that energy transmission networks were another potential candidate for so-called “complementary measures”.

“What is complementary to the emissions trading scheme?,” Parkinson put to the conference.

“It has to be policies that go to the heart of delivering solutions that the price mechanism alone isn’t fixing because there are other public policy or externality problems.”

Parkinson said energy efficiency was an obvious candidate, “but I think we need to be careful about just how much we think energy efficiency is not subject to some resolution through price”.

So too is research and development, Parkinson said. “Clearly it is just a given in economics that a price signal alone won’t drive enough research and development. Now then there is a real question is energy somehow an even more extreme version of this phenomenon or is it just the same as everything else?”

Parkinson said a third possible area, “which is I think a little bit more open to debate but I sort of tend to lean towards … is around the issue of some network externalities, it goes to things like transmission lines and the like”.

Avoiding perverse consequences from a renewables target

A renewable energy target and feed-in tariffs are “clearly … going to be an important contributor to the long-term emissions reductions required by the Australian economy,” Parkinson added.

“The question is how best to encourage the scale-up in use of renewable technologies, without any perverse consequences or perverse incentives.”

“It will be important to recognise that the more work that the renewable energy target does the less work the trading scheme does. If the emissions trading scheme is doing less work, the permit price of the emissions trading scheme will be lower.”

“That will mean there will be less incentive to seek out search out lowest cost abatement in Australia. So there is some quite complex interactions between the renewable energy target and the emissions trading scheme.”

Wilkins calls for submissions

Parkinson’s comments on complementary measures come just a few days after the review of climate programs headed by Roger Wilkins issued a call for public submissions.

“Australia has a significant investment in programs that are designed to address climate change issues both domestically and internationally,” Wilkins said in a Department of Finance and Deregulation statement issued last week.

“Now is an opportune time to review this activity in light of the proposed introduction of an emissions trading scheme and adopt a more strategic, principled and disciplined approach,” Wilkins said.

Submissions close May 20 and should go to reviews@finance.gov.au.

Meanwhile, Parkinson told the CANA conference the government hoped to see “similar reviews undertaken at the state level as we go forward”.

Taking Australia ‘to the front of the pack’

Parkinson said the government’s aim in designing the emissions trading scheme is “to propel Australia towards the front of the pack”.

Parkinson said the department was working on the assumption that petrol and other fuels would be included in the scheme, “and I think that is a real breakthrough”.

The form of measures to deal with concerns raised by groups such as the Brotherhood of St Laurence about the effects of policy measures on the poorest is still an open question, but “the development of them is not”, Parkinson added.

Ways to address the equity implications “are central” to the thinking on scheme design, he said.

Stopping coal exports not the answer’

Parkinson defended Australia’s black coal export industry, saying it would make no difference if Australia ceased coal exports.

“I see quite a lot of commentary that seems to imply that … Australia should stop exporting coal,” he said.

“There are 70 countries in the world that have commercially viable coal deposits. The vast bulk of the developing countries are [particularly] concerned about energy security. Even if Australia were to stop exporting coal tomorrow we still need to find a solution to the clean coal problem. Because they are going to use it no matter what we do.”

“So I think a key part of our challenge is to be how can we help find a solution to the coal issue and how can we then disseminate that in a way that gets the countries that are concerned about energy security concerned about the cost of energy that can actually get them to adopt the clean coal solutions.”

“It has also the advantage for us that if we do that we can sell as a package the coal and the way to make sure it doesn’t pollute.”

“I think this is a challenge for you as a group as to how you want to position yourselves in this debate.”

Parkinson added that Australia’s efforts to adapt to continued climate change were “really underdone” and referred delegates to a speech he gave earlier this month to the Planning Institute of Australia.

“I do think that adaptation is the elephant in the room. It’s mitigation that gets people’s attention, but it’s adaptation which we are really going to have to address.”

In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. “This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now,” says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.

The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become “a source of methane passing into the atmosphere.” The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet’s atmosphere would increase twelvefold. “The result would be catastrophic global warming,” say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.

Shakhova and her colleagues gathered evidence for the loss of rigor in the frozen sea floor in a measuring campaign during the Siberian summer. The seawater proved to be “highly oversaturated with solute methane,” reports Shakhova. In the air over the sea, greenhouse-gas content was measured in some places at five times normal values. “In helicopter flights over the delta of the Lena River, higher methane concentrations have been measured at altitudes as high as 1,800 meters,” she says.

The methane climate bomb is also ticking on land: A few years ago researchers noticed higher concentrations of methane in northern Siberia. The Siberian permafrost is known as one of the tipping points for the earth’s climate, since the potent greenhouse gas develops wherever microorganisms decompose the huge masses of organic material from warmer eras that has been frozen here for thousands of years.

“A Wake-Up Call for Science”

Data from offshore drilling in the region, studied by experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), also suggest that the situation has grown critical. AWI’s results show that permafrost in the flat shelf is perilously close to thawing. Three to 12 kilometers from the coast, the temperature of sea sediment was -1 to -1.5 degrees Celsius, just below freezing. Permafrost on land, though, was as cold as -12.4 degrees Celsius. “That’s a drastic difference and the best proof of a critical thermal status of the submarine permafrost,” said Shakhova.

Paul Overduin, a geophysicist at AWI, agreed. “She’s right,” he said. “Changes are far more likely to occur on the sea shelf than on land.”

Climate change could give an additional push to these trends. “If the Arctic Sea ice continues to recede and the shelf becomes ice-free for extended periods, then the water in these flat areas will get much warmer,” said Overduin. That could lead to a situation in which the temperature of the sea sediment rises above freezing, which would thaw the permafrost.

“We don’t have any data on that — those are just suspicions,” the Canadian scientist said. Natalia Shakhova also passed on the question of whether to expect a gradual gas emission or an abrupt burst of large quantities of methane. “No one can say right now whether that will take years, decades or hundreds of years,” she said. But one cannot rule out sudden methane emissions. They could happen at “any time.”

One thing is clear, though: The thawing of the Arctic sea floor will create “new potential sources for methane … which no one had reckoned with until now,” said Laurence Smith, a professor for geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. Smith is researching North Pole frost zones and expects that a thawing of the permafrost will “supply fuel for methane engines.”

The first methane rocket thruster was tested by the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2007, and methane from manure has been collected as “biogas” to heat and power homes (more…) in experimental German towns.

In any case, the team taking part in the Siberian study installed a number of probes in the Laptev Sea, a central part of the broad Siberian shelf sea. These probes are measuring the temperature on the upper edge of the submarine permafrost. Overduin wants to pull up the probes in August. Then, for the first time, scientists will have access to a full year’s worth of data on the conditions of the sea floor.

For her part, Shakhova thinks researchers should be doing a lot more. She says too little is known about the fragile shelf sediment and the methane it stores, which could be explosive for the environment. “Actually,” she says, “this is a wake-up call for science.”

Some scientists have suggested that an increased number of similar events could spur a collapse of much of Greenland’s islandwide ice sheet, leading to sudden rises in sea level. But new analyses hint that the overall effects of an increase in such subglacial lubrication, while possibly substantial, would not be catastrophic. All ice on Greenland eventually flows to the sea, with that in glaciers and fast-moving ice streams outpacing the languid flow of most parts of the ice sheet.

The lake that suddenly disappeared in 2006, one of many such melt ponds that form atop Greenland’s ice sheet each summer, began accumulating in early July of that year, says Sarah B. Das, a glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. By the morning of July 29, the lake covered 5.6 square kilometers and was in some places more than 12 meters deep.

At that time, instruments show, the lake level began to drop slowly but steadily, about 1.5 centimeters each hour for the next 16 hours. Then, literally, the bottom dropped out: Over about 84 minutes, the lake drained completely, losing on average about 8,700 cubic meters of water each second, she and her colleagues report online and in a paper to be published in Science.

That water quickly accumulated at the base of the underlying ice sheet, forming a subglacial lake that drained away during the following 24 hours. During that brief period, the seaward flow rate of the overlying ice sheet approximately tripled, then dropped back to its normal speed of 25 centimeters per day.

Analyses of space-based radar images of western Greenland suggest that the flow speed of the ice sheet increases, on average, between 50 and 100 percent during the summer — a phenomenon probably linked to increased amounts of meltwater reaching bedrock, says Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He and Das collaborated on the new report and, along with another group of researchers, also analyzed satellite observations of the region that were gathered from September 2004 to August 2007. That report, too, will appear in an upcoming issue of Science.

In regions of Greenland where large glaciers dump ice into the sea, the effect of summer meltwater seems to be less pronounced, says Joughin, perhaps because the flow of subglacial water out of the glaciers is already brisk.

“For huge ice streams, the effect isn’t terribly significant,” says Waleed Abdalati, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Nevertheless, he notes, the new findings have widespread implications for the Greenland ice sheet as a whole and