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.Â The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity.Â

Cliimate snapshot reveals things are heating up

”CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology will continue to provide observations and research so Australia’s responses are underpinned by clear empirical data,” the report says.

Other findings reveal the past decade was the nation’s warmest on record, sea levels rose between 1.5 millimetre and 3 millimetres a year in the south and east and between 7 millimetres and 10 millimetres in the north between 1993 and 2009, and sea surface temperatures have risen 0.4 degrees since 1960.

The release of the report comes as many Australian scientists expressed concern over attacks on the science underpinning man-made global warming, fearing it is damaging the reputation of science as a whole.

The former Australian of the Year and long-time climate campaigner Tim Flannery last month urged climate scientist to talk to the ”confused Australian public” and answer their questions about the science.

The director of the Bureau of Meteorology, Greg Ayres, told the Herald the purpose of the climate snapshot was to remind the public that the bureau had been collecting objective and observable climate information for a century.

”I would like to invite the Australian public to use … the information generated in the national interest to reach an opinion on climate change because it is objective information,” Dr Ayers said.

He said the trends in temperatures back up the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showing human processes, such as burning fossil fuels, was the primary cause of global warming.

The panel’s findings have been criticised recently because of errors found in its landmark fourth assessment report, including an unsubstantiated claim the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The UN has invited the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues to conduct an independent review of the work of the intergovernmental panel, which will report in August.

The CSIRO’s chief executive, Megan Clark, said yesterday that while society would have a debate about the science underpinning climate change – much like previous debates about the link between smoking and lung cancer – the CSIRO’s role was to release ”unemotional” scientific data.

The release of the report comes as the federal government prepares to refocus its message on climate change after its failure to pass its emissions trading scheme in Parliament last year.

The government is now expected to focus on the social and environmental consequences of unmitigated climate change.

The Minister for Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong, is also understood to have held meetings with Australian climate scientists to hone the government’s message on climate science before the election

Oil cartel fears losing control over supply as Iraqi output hits 20-yeat high

The relatively peaceful conduct of the Iraqi election and the signing of a clutch of contracts with foreign multinational companies, including BP, Shell and ExxonMobil, raises the prospect of a surge in Iraqi oil output over the next few years.

OPEC is expected to agree to maintain its official output at existing levels, but behind the scenes there is concern. Iraq has been suspended from the operation of OPEC quotas since 2003 amid war and civil and political chaos, but the cartel now needs to bring its wayward child back into the fold.

“There is only one issue, but it’s a tsunami: Iraq,” Leo Drollas, of the Centre for Global Energy Studies, said. With enough investment, the country has the potential to double or even triple its production. “If (Iraq) enjoys a period of stability, it could have a major destabilising effect on OPEC and the oil price.”

A continuing rise in Iraqi output, just when the IEA is predicting nil growth in demand from Western oil consumers, would not be welcomed by OPEC members.

The cartel believes that high oil prices are here to stay and many members, including the hawkish nations of Iran and Venezuela, need the present price of $US70 to $US80 per barrel to bolster flagging economies and social-support systems.

Antarctica once had a tropilal climate, scientists say

Antarctica once had tropical climate, scientists say

ABC March 12, 2010, 3:06 pm

ABC News © Enlarge photo

An international team of scientists who have arrived back in Hobart from Antarctica say they have evidence the icy continent once had a tropical climate.

The team studied ice and mud cores from the Antarctic sea floor.

The crew of the integrated ocean drilling program drilled more than 3,000 cores showing a geological history going back 54 million years.

Co-leader of the expedition Dr Carlota Escutia says the team’s findings will allow scientists to understand more about the dramatic changes in the earth’s climate and improve future predictions.

“We have this particular bonus that we went so deep and so old that we actually reached into this, let’s say sub-tropical Antarctica,” he said.

“We thought it was there but to actually have it in your hand, it’s spectacular. It’s really mindblowing.”

“All these kind of things will be looked at and they will be put together to create this history of how the ice sheet behaved, how the sea ice behaved when we had such temperatures, such CO2s, back in time.”

Only a carbon tax and nuclear power can save us.

But the actions require a change to business-as-usual. Change is opposed by those profiting from our fossil-fuel addiction. Change will happen only with courageous political leadership.

Leaders must draw attention to the moral imperative. We cannot pretend that we do not understand the consequences for our children and grandchildren. We cannot leave them with a situation spiralling out of their control. We must set a new course.

Yet what course is proposed? Hokey cap-and-trade with offsets, aka an emissions trading scheme. Scheme is the right word, a scheme to continue business-as-usual behind a fig leaf.

The Kyoto Protocol was a cap-and-trade approach. Global emissions shot up faster than ever after its adoption. It is impossible to cap all emissions as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy.

There is zero chance India and China will accept a cap. And why should they? Their emissions, on a per capita basis, are 10 times less than those of Australia or the US.

Fossil fuels are not really the cheapest energy. They are cheap because they are subsidised, because they do not pay for damage they cause to human health via air and water pollution, nor their environmental damage and horrendous consequences for posterity.

An honest effective approach to energy and climate must place a steadily rising price on carbon emissions. It can only be effective if it is a simple flat fee on all carbon fuels, collected from fossil fuel companies on the first sale, at the mine, wellhead or port of entry.

The fee will cause energy costs to rise, for fossil fuels, not all energies. The public will allow this fee to rise to the levels needed only if the money collected is given to the public. They will need the money to adapt their lifestyles and reduce their carbon footprint. The money, all of it, should be given as a monthly “green cheque” and possibly in part as an income-tax reduction. Each legal adult resident would get an equal share, easily delivered electronically to bank accounts or debit cards, with half a share for children up to two children per family.

Sure, some people may waste their green cheque on booze or babes. Such people will soon be paying more in increased energy prices than they get in their green cheque. Others will make changes to keep their added energy cost low, coming out ahead.

There will be strong economic incentive for businesses to find products that help consumers reduce fossil fuel use. Every activity that uses energy will be affected. Agricultural products from nearby fields will be favoured, for example, as opposed to food flown in from half way around the world. Changes will happen as people compare the price tags.

The rising price on carbon will spur energy efficiency, renewable energy, nuclear power, all sources that produce little or no carbon dioxide. Bellyaching howls from coal moguls must be ignored. Let them invest their money in renewable energies and nuclear power.

Australia is blessed with abundant nuclear fuel as well as coal. Nuclear power plants are the ideal base-load power for Australia; their excess power in off-peak hours can be used to desalinate water. Power stations can be sited near coastlines, where cooling water is plentiful.

But all potential energy sources must compete, with each other and with energy efficiency. If renewable energies can do the whole job economically, as some people argue, that would be great. Put a price on carbon and let all parts of the private sector compete.

Fee-and-green-cheque is simple, designed to do an honest job. Emissions trading, in contrast, is designed by big banks that expect to make billions out of the carbon market. That means out of your pocket; every dollar will come via increased energy prices to the consumer, with no green cheque to soften the blow.

I mentioned that cap-and-trade will never be accepted by developing countries. But why would China accept a carbon price? China does not want to become a fossil fuel addict, with the requirement of protecting a global supply line. It wants to clean up its atmosphere and water. It is investing as fast as its can in wind and solar energy and nuclear power.

China knows that these clean energies will boom only if they put a rising price on carbon. It seemed willing to negotiate that approach in Copenhagen, but was handed a cap-and-trade edict. Results were predictable.

What the world needs is a nation that will set an example, stop pandering to special interests, do what is necessary for the people and the rest of the life on the planet. It is a moral issue. We cannot turn our backs on our children and grandchildren. Is it possible that Australia could provide that example, that moral leadership?

James Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He is a guest of the University of Sydney and Intelligence Squared Australia and will speak at the Adelaide Convention Centre tonight.

Is Arctic methane on the move?

[Note: Edited Toyota velocities to reflect relative radiative forcings of anthropogenic CO₂ and methane. David]

For some background on methane hydrates we can refer you here. This weeks’ Science paper is by Shakhova et al, a follow on to a 2005 GRL paper. The observation in 2005 was elevated concentrations of methane in ocean waters on the Siberian shelf, presumably driven by outgassing from the sediments and driving excess methane to the atmosphere. The new paper adds observations of methane spikes in the air over the water, confirming the methane’s escape from the water column, instead of it being oxidized to CO₂ in the water, for example. The new data enable the methane flux from this region to the atmosphere to be quantified, and they find that this region rivals the methane flux from the whole rest of the ocean.

What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question.

Westbrook et al 2009, published stunning sonar images of bubble plumes rising from sediments off Spitzbergen, Norway. The bubbles are rising from a line on the sea floor that corresponds to the boundary of methane hydrate stability, a boundary that would retreat in a warming water column. A modeling study by Reagan and Moridis 2009 supports the idea that the observed bubbles could be in response to observed warming of the water column driven by anthropogenic warming.

Another recent paper, from Dlugokencky et al. 2009, describes an uptick in the methane concentration in the air in 2007, and tries to figure out where it’s coming from. The atmospheric methane concentration rose from the preanthropogenic until about the year 1993, at which point it rather abruptly plateaued. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, so it ought to plateau if the emission flux is steady, but the shape of the concentration curve suggested some sudden decrease in the emission rate, stemming from the collapse of economic activity in the former Soviet bloc, or by drying of wetlands, or any of several other proposed and unresolved explanations. (Maybe the legislature in South Dakota should pass a law that methane is driven by astrology!) A previous uptick in the methane concentration in 1998 could be explained in terms of the effect of el Nino on wetlands, but the uptick in 2007 is not so simple to explain. The concentration held steady in 2008, meaning at least that interannual variability is important in the methane cycle, and making it hard to say if the long-term average emission rate is rising in a way that would be consistent with a new carbon feedback.

Anyway, so far it is at most a very small feedback. The Siberian Margin might rival the whole rest of the world ocean as a methane source, but the ocean source overall is much smaller than the land source. Most of the methane in the atmosphere comes from wetlands, natural and artificial associated with rice agriculture. The ocean is small potatoes, and there is enough uncertainty in the methane budget to accommodate adjustments in the sources without too much overturning of apple carts.

Could this be the first modest sprout of what will grow into a huge carbon feedback in the future? It is possible, but two things should be kept in mind. One is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane in particular. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, while CO₂ essentially accumulates in the atmosphere / ocean carbon cycle, so in the end the climate forcing from the accumulating CO₂ that methane oxidizes into may be as important as the transient concentration of methane itself. The other thing to remember is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane hydrates in particular, as opposed to the carbon stored in peats in Arctic permafrosts for example. Peats take time to degrade but hydrate also takes time to melt, limited by heat transport. They don’t generally explode instantaneously.

For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

References

Dlugokencky et al., Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH₄ burden. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780, 2009

Reagan, M. and G. Moridis, Large-scale simulation of methane hydrate dissociation along the West Spitsbergen Margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L23612, doi:10.1029/2009GL041332, 2009

Shakhova et al., Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Science 237: 1246-1250, 2010

Shakhova et al., The distribution of methane on the Siberian Arctic shelves: Implications for the marine methane cycle, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L09601, doi:10.1029/2005GL022751, 2005

Westbrook, G., et al, Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L15608, doi:10.1029/2009GL039191, 2009

China and India join Copenhagen accord

The action falls short of full “association” and highlights the gulf between the US – the strongest backer of the accord – and the other key nations on how to deliver a global deal to combat climate change.

Since Copenhagen, there has been confusion over how a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved. All observers, including the UN’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, are now clear that no such deal will be signed in 2010, with a meeting in South Africa in December 2011 now seen as the earliest date.

At the heart of the disagreement is whether a new global treaty, like the existing Kyoto protocol, must be agreed unanimously by all 192 members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and be a continuation of Kyoto, which enshrines bindings carbon cuts on industrialised nations but not on developing ones.

In a letter to de Boer, Trigg Valley, the director of the US office of global climate change, did move back from earlier suggestions that the US wanted to ditch the UN process, seen as cumbersome by some, and negotiate climate change in a smaller group like the G20 or Major Economies Forum. But he has proposed to set aside some of the existing UN texts, which had been laboriously negotiated over several years, and replace them with passages from the Copenhagen accord.

In the letter from India, Rajani Ranjan Rashmi, environment and forests minister, states baldly the unacceptability of this approach: “The accord is not a new track of negotiations or a template for outcomes.”

China‘s submissions are also unequivocal. The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, strongly backs the UN process and its consensus-based approach to reaching agreement. “It is neither viable nor acceptable to start a new negotiation process outside the [UNFCCC] and the [Kyoto] protocol”, he said.

The US now appears isolated as China, India and many other countries, firmly support the idea of continuing with the two existing UN negotiating tracks to try to achieve a consensus.

The battle of the texts was fought for much of last year with the US backed by Britain and the rest of Europe. Today, the European Commission’s first formal statement since Copenhagen offered some support for the US: “The political guidance in the Copenhagen Accord – which was not formally adopted as a UN decision – needs to be integrated into the UN negotiating texts that contain the basis of the future global climate agreement.”

But some rich country governments now accept privately that they had “crossed a red line” and failed to recognise that developing countries had not been prepared to abandon the Kyoto protocol without a new legal agreement in place to ensure developed countries reduced emissions.

“The US wants to appear to be leading the world on climate change but it is in a very, very difficult position,” said Tom Burke, founder of the consultancy E3G, citing the difficulty President Obama faces in getting a climate change bill through a reluctant senate.

In an recent interview with the Guardian, Yvo de Boer,, played down talk of radical change to the way to the UN process demands unanimous decisions, which some, including Gordon Brown, blamed for a lack of progress in climate talks. He said a major stumbling block to an agreement remained mistrust between the developing and developed countries over the finance needed to help countries adapt to the impacts of global warming.

Rich countries had offered “recycled contributions from the past” he said, while the build-up to the Copenhagen summit had focused too much on the issue of binding emission reduction targets. De Boer has announced he will step down from the UNFCCC in July. Yesterday, the South African tourism minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was nominated by President Jacob Zuma as a candidate. But other candidates, including from India and possibly Indonesia, are expected to make the private shortlist from which the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will make his choice.