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. 

  • BP’s spill of oil in troubled waters

     

    Dr David Dixon

    Caythorpe, Lincolnshire

     

    • In arguing there can be no undersea oil clouds associated with the spill because “oil has a specific gravity that’s about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface” (BP clashes with scientists, 1 June), Tony Hayward, BP‘s chief executive, displays an alarming ignorance of the properties of his product. True, seawater has a specific gravity of about 1.03g/cubic cm whereas that of crude oil is about 0.8g/cubic cm (less than but not half that of water). But significant fractions of crude oil consist of asphaltenes and other complex substances with specific gravities around 1.4g/cubic cm, ie greater than seawater. These heavier fractions will almost certainly separate and so be retained at depth.

    Emeritus professor John Ebdon

    University of Sheffield

     

    • The BP spill has become an embarrassment, possibly damaging the British business community as a whole. I’m outraged that BP claims to be doing all it can, when, as a specialist company in natural cotton absorbents that not only absorb spillages of hydrocarbon, but also allow in-situ bioremediation when contamination reaches the shores, I know they are not. We approached BP four years ago. Our efforts and any attempts to follow up proved to be a waste of time, as we encountered only arrogance and lip service. We believe that BP is using polypropylene booms in the Gulf: polypropylene is an oil derivative. There are miles of cellulose booms available: why is BP ignoring the more natural approach? Worse: our HQ and manufacturing plant is located three hours’ drive from the contaminated areas.

    Antonella Cane

    Director, Wild Berry Environment

     

    • Gordon Brown agonised over what it meant to be British. Now, British Petroleum and British Airways have shown unambiguously what British stands for.

    Robert Wootton

    Llanbadarn Fawr, Dyfed

  • Viscount Monkton, another fallen idol of climate denial

     

     

    It involves slow, painstaking work, following the sources, checking the claims against the science. But the result in all cases has been the same: a devastating debunking of both the claims and the methods of the people investigated.

     

    Now another fallen idol of climate change denial must be added to the list: Viscount Monckton’s assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.

     

    Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it. He investigates a single lecture Monckton delivered in October last year. He was struck by the amazing claims that Monckton made: that climate science is catalogue of lies and conspiracies. If they were true, it would be a matter of the utmost seriousness: human-caused climate change would, as Monckton is fond of saying, be the greatest fraud in scientific history. If they were untrue, it was important to show why.

     

    As Abraham explains at the beginning of his investigation, his scientific credentials didn’t mean that he was automatically right, any more than Monckton’s lack of scientific credentials meant that he was automatically wrong. Every claim Monckton made would be judged on its merits. Where Monckton gave references, Abraham would follow them up, seeking to discover whether he had accurately represented the papers he cited, or whether the authors of those papers agreed with his interpretation. Where he did not give references, Abraham would see whether Monckton’s claims were consistent with published scientific data.

     

    One of the difficulties with tasks like this is that it takes only a minute to make a claim, but can take hours, even days, to investigate it. So if people are making lots of claims, exposing them requires a great deal of work. Judging by the outcome of all the investigations I’ve mentioned, the gurus of climate change denial appear to expect that no one will have the time and energy to question them.

     

    The results of Abraham’s investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation, as he explains in the article he has written for the Guardian. Some of Monckton’s assertions are breath-taking in their brazen disregard of facts. He has gravely misrepresented papers and authors he refers to, in some cases he appears to have created data, graphs and trends out of thin air: at least that was how it appeared to Abraham when Monckton gave no references and his graphs and figures starkly contradicted the published science.

     

    The lecture, like all those Monckton gives, looked and sounded like science: lots of charts and graphs, plenty of numbers and citations, all delivered with an air of authority and finality. Abraham’s hard grind demonstrates that it was a long concatenation of nonsense.

     

    Monckton has already been exposed for falsely claiming that he is a member of the House of Lords (the UK’s upper legislative body). Now that his claims about the science have been exposed to such withering scrutiny, it’s hard to see how he can bounce back in the eyes of anyone other than his ardent disciples. But among them, I doubt that this exposure will make a jot of difference.

     

    Such is the strength of their belief, that if Monckton were to claim that he is in fact the risen Christ, some of them would still go along with it. Given his past pronouncements, it’s probably only a matter of time, so we should soon be able to test this proposition. Even if he somehow managed to alienate his followers, they would simply move on to the next charlatan, as climate change denial groupies have done many times already.

     

    The problem is that people like Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole act as an echo-chamber for each other’s discredited beliefs. However nutty their views are, they will be affirmed by other members of the closed circle. Speaking and listening only to each other, as we saw at the Heartland Institute conference last month, their claims become ever weirder and more extreme as they isolate themselves from reality. In circumstances like this, it doesn’t matter how comprehensively they are discredited, they will merely dig their holes even deeper.

     

    monbiot.com

  • Nasa analysis showing record global warming undermines the sceptics

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    The Met Office said its own analysis of temperature records suggested that the global temperature remained just below the 12-month record achieved in 1998. However, Vicky Pope, head of climate advice, said it was possible that Nasa was correct because the Met Office had underestimated recent warming detected in the Arctic.

    There are very few weather stations in the Arctic and the Met Office, unlike Nasa, does not extrapolate where there are no actual temperature readings.

    Ms Pope said that other information, including that from satellites, indicated that the Arctic was warming more rapidly than other parts of the world. She said this evidence supported Nasa’s results but neither it nor the Met Office had taken it into account in their assessments of global temperatures.

    “Nasa may be correct that we have just seen a new 12-month record in global average temperature. The Met Office continues to predict that 2010 is more likely than not to be the warmest calendar year on record, beating the 1998 record.”

    She added that Met Office analysis showed that the four months to the end of April were probably the third warmest for that time of year.

    Nasa and the Met Office both interpret information from 6,300 monitoring stations around the world and their results are used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compile its advice to governments.

  • Leak finally plugged but Obama faces his own Gulf crisis

     

    “We will lose more coastline from this catastrophe than from all four hurricanes – Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike,” Mr Nungesser said.

    A Democrat senator, Bill Nelson, whose home state of Florida could yet be hit by the  slick, said if BP’s latest attempt to plug the leak failed, Mr Obama would need to seize personal control of the effort immediately.

    A Louisiana resident, James Carville, appealed to the President. ‘‘Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put someone in charge of this thing and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.”

    The White House insists the administration has been doing all it can, having dispatched more than 20,000 personnel to help with containment, while drafting 1300 vessels to assist with dredging and skimming.

    Mr Obama, who will visit the Gulf for a second time today, has made great play in demanding that BP put things right and compensate all those hit by the spill, while foreshadowing  tough new drilling regulations.

    But some political strategists believe that the Deepwater Horizon blowout looms as Mr Obama’s “Katrina”, a reference to how an inadequate response to the 2005 hurricane tainted the administration of George Bush.

    The administration  backed the so-called ‘‘top kill’’ procedure in which underwater robots have been forcing a mix of drilling mud and cement deep into the well, more than 1.6 kilometres below the surface. Several hours after the effort began  on Wednesday afternoon, BP officials said the signs were hopeful.

    “What you’ve been observing coming out of the top of that riser is most likely mud,” BP’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, told reporters in Houston.

    “The way we know we’ve been successful is it stops flowing.”

    Documents have revealed that the volume of leaking oil was likely to have been far greater than the company’s public estimate of 5000 barrels a day.

    BP’s own documents put an upper estimate of more than 14,000 barrels a day.

  • EU carbon trading scheme failing to cut pollution, campaigners warn

     

    The EU ETS is facing a number of problems which may leave it redundant. To prevent this from happening and rescue the EU ETS Sandbag have highlighted four fundamental problems with the current system that must be addresses to salvage the scheme.

    Problem 1: Inappropriate targets

    The traded sector, which accounts for just under half of the greenhouse gasses in the European economy, currently aim to cut emissions 21% against 2005 levels by 2020 as part of a wider programme to achieve economy reductions of 20% against 1990 levels by 2020. With a drop in emissions of 11.6% in 2009 across the EU, the target of 20% suddenly does not look to difficult. Ambitious targets are critical in tackling climate change as well as giving Europe a head start in the global green economy which is estimated to be worth some $2.3trillion by 2020.

    Sandbag recommends the EU move to the proposed 30% midterm emissions target reduction which would reflect in a 34% target for the traded sector. This would save an estimated 1.4bn tonnes of CO2.

    Problem 2: Sectoral ovrallocation

    The ETS is currently oversupplied by 233 million allowances, however, this net position disguises asymmetries in the effort required by different sectors under the cap. Where the power sector carries most of the burden, heavy industry and a significant number of manufacturing plants are currently failing to shoulder any of the load. 70% of participants in the scheme were given more allowances than needed to cover their emissions (have a look for yourself using our new and improved emissions map of the EU). Successful lobbying by industry has meant they have been able to secure generous allocation which does not reflect their actual emissions.

    Sandbag recommends deriving Phase III caps from historical emissions rather than from Phase II allocations which are distorted by overallocations. Sandbag has calculated the Phase III cap against recent historical emissions, drawing a baseline from generous estimate of average 2005-2009 emissions delivers a Phase III budget some 2.3 billion smaller than the current proposal

    Problem 3: Carbon lock-in

    Emissions have dropped across Europe, however, this has almost exclusively been the result of recession rather than shrewd policy. Perversely though, the current design of the ETS prevents us from capturing any environmental benefit of this downturn. Rather this carbon saving is allowed – under the ETS Directive – to be banked and saved for a rainy day. This means that the 233 million tonnes of spare permits left over from 2009 will be used to allow future emissions to take place, emissions it seems are now predetermined.

    Sandbag recommends that a strategic carbon reserve be established, which would hold back a quantity of permits in case of a sudden drop in demand. A reserve could protect the scheme from excessive surplus in the event of a repeat recession, with an annual share of the reserve released into the market after each year which passes without incident. A reserve would also allow the scheme to respond more quickly to new scientific assessments of climate risk.

    Problem 4: Unused offsets and New Entrants reserve

    A further 1.4 billion credits are likely to be introduced into the scheme, this figure is made up of unused permits from the New Entrants Reserve which are likely to be released into the market at the end of Phase II, as well as some 830 million unused Phase II offset credits and a further 375 million offsets are expected to be available in Phase III. Together with the Phase II surplus, a 1.5 billion permit carryover could allow emissions to grow unabated until 2017.

    Sandbag recommends an EU wide agreement to control the quantity and quality of offsets, this is to prevent offsets entering the EU which have originated from projects with no or limited sustainable development benefits for the host country. It is also recommended that unused NER permits are cancelled; France, Ireland and Malta have already declared their intention to cancel unused NER permits at the end of Phase II. An EU agreement to cancel unused NER permits would prevent an estimates 192 million permits becoming available in Phase III.

    The ETS is vulnerable to being rendered irrelevant if the system is unable to adapt to the dynamic system of which it operates. Tightening the cap remains of paramount importance, for saving carbon, spurring green investment and helping Europe to move toward a green economy in a more cost effective way.

  • EU crisis may hit carbon targets

     

    Until now Europe has agreed only to cut emissions by 20% from 1990 levels. However, the commission believes this is not enough. It argues in a paper to be given to the 27 EU member states on Wednesday that “an EU target of 20% by 2020 is not enough to put emissions on to the right path” to reach the goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to 2C.

    It estimates that the total cost of such a move would be some €81 billion (£70 billion) — just €11 billion more than originally predicted.

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    However, experts are insisting that the EU shelve the plans because of last week’s market turbulence caused by concerns over the euro and Europe’s growing debt crisis. Senior market sources are concerned that further pressure on Europe’s industrial giants to reduce emissions could send markets plummeting.

    “The commission was hoping to issue a paper on the costs of a 30% reduction target. The events of the past few days may now put those on hold,” said one source.