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Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters

     

    Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.

    At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth’s crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe. Life on Earth faces a warm future – and a fiery one.

    “Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).

    “Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL’s Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September. Some of the key evidence to be presented at the conference will come from studies of past volcanic activity. These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University’s earth sciences department.

    “The last ice age came to an end between 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and the ice sheets that once covered central Europe shrank dramatically,” added Pyle. “The impact on the continent’s geology can by measured by the jump in volcanic activity that occurred at this time.”

    In the Eiffel region of western Germany a huge eruption created a vast caldera, or basin-shaped crater, 12,900 years ago, for example. This has since flooded to form the Laacher See, near Koblenz. Scientists are now studying volcanic regions in Chile and Alaska – where glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking rapidly as the planet heats up – in an effort to anticipate the eruptions that might be set off.

    Last week scientists from Northern Arizona University reported in the journal Science that temperatures in the Arctic were now higher than at any time in the past 2,000 years. Ice sheets are disappearing at a dramatic rate – and these could have other, unexpected impacts on the planet’s geology.

    According to Professor Mark Maslin of UCL, one is likely to be the release of the planet’s methane hydrate deposits. These ice-like deposits are found on the seabed and in the permafrost regions of Siberia and the far north.

    “These permafrost deposits are now melting and releasing their methane,” said Maslin. “You can see the methane bubbling out of lakes in Siberia. And that is a concern, for the impact of methane in the atmosphere is considerable. It is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.”

    A build-up of permafrost methane in the atmosphere would produce a further jump in global warming and accelerate the process of climate change. Even more worrying, however, is the impact of rising sea temperatures on the far greater reserves of methane hydrates that are found on the sea floor.

    It was not just the warming of the sea that was the problem, added Maslin. As the ice around Greenland and Antarctica melted, sediments would pour off land masses and cliffs would crumble, triggering underwater landslides that would break open more hydrate reserves on the sea-bed. Again there would be a jump in global warming. “These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years,” he said.

    There is also a danger of earthquakes, triggered by disintegrating glaciers, causing tsunamis off Chile, New Zealand and Newfoundland in Canada, Nasa scientist Tony Song will tell the conference. The last on this list could even send a tsunami across the Atlantic, one that might reach British shores.

    The conference will also hear from other experts of the risk posed by melting ice in mountain regions, which would pose significant dangers to local people and tourists. The Alps, in particular, face a worryingly uncertain future, said Jasper Knight of Exeter University. “Rock walls resting against glaciers will become unstable as the ice disappears and so set off avalanches. In addition, increasing meltwaters will trigger more floods and mud flows.”

    For the Alps this is a serious problem. Tourism is growing there, while the region’s population is rising. Managing and protecting these people was now an issue that needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency, Knight said.

    “Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes. It is a wake-up call to Terra Firma,” McGuire said.

  • Effects and dangers of methane gases

    Dr Chris Jardine, author of a major report on methane emissions in 2005, argues that we are wasting precious time by not acting on methane:

    ‘We have been dithering around with Copenhagen and not achieving very much and while that is happening CO2 emissions are going up. You could actually do a whole load on methane emissions and get them down really quickly,’ he says.

    Reducing methane

    Already small efforts are being made to reduce emissions from human sources.

    • In the UK, waste practices are being tightened up to reduce emissions from landfill and research is underway at places like the University of Aberystwyth into changing the diet of cows and sheep to reduce agriculture’s contribution.
    • In terms of rice cultivation, emissions can be cut through hydrological management (reducing the water levels in flooded paddies half way through the growing season before re-flooding again).
    • The gas emitted by mining activity can be captured and Russia for one is known to have significantly cut methane levels throughout the 1990s by fixing leaks and improving its gas pipeline infrastructure.

    But, as with carbon emissions, we appear to have got to a point where further reductions in human sources of methane require harder choices. Do we want to move to a vegetarian diet? Would we accept rice genetically engineered not to produce methane?

    Natural emissions

    The bigger problem with methane is that a large proportion of emissions is not from anthropogenic sources. What’s more, these natural emissions could potentially dwarf the impact of all other greenhouse gas emissions.

    The main natural source at the moment is wetlands, accounting for 30 per cent of all methane emissions and caused by bacteria breaking down organic matter in the absence of oxygen.

    This process could produce more methane if air temperatures rise.

        

    Wetlands

    Dr Vincent Gauci is leading a three-year project to link up on-going UK research under the banner of MethaneNet and has been researching how wetland emissions could be partially negated through the use of pollutants like sulphur.

    In particular, he has looked at how natural and artificial wetlands (rice paddies) respond to sulphur pollution in acid rain.

    The sulphur in the rainfall stimulates non-methane producing microbes to outcompete the methane producing microbes (as shown in the diagram below). This effect has been found to reduce methane emissions from wetlands by as much as 40 per cent.

    However, he admits his findings might not provide a solution to the methane problem.

    ‘If the sulphur does reduce methane emissions what does that say about our continued efforts to clear up sulphur emissions from the atmosphere? Will less sulphur in the air mean more methane emissions?’ he asks.

    Another solution that has been suggested, draining the wetlands, is quickly dismissed by Dr Gauci and other methane experts.

    ‘The minute you drain wetlands you emit CO2 so that is not an option even if it was acceptable in terms of the biodiversity loss,’ says Dr Gauci.

    Professor Paul Palmer, who has recently produced research on tracking methane emissions and is also part of the Methane Network, adds that as soon as wetlands become dried out they also become susceptible to fire that results in large amounts of CO2 and CH4 being released to the atmosphere.

    Biomass

    Biomass in general is another source about whose contribution scientists remain unclear. Current modelling measurements in the atmosphere do not match up with those taken from the ground and biomass is thought to be the missing contributor.

    One speculative theory is that trees could be funnelling methane out of the soil and into the air, although it remains as yet untested.

    Permafrost

    However the uncertainities about biomass and wetlands pale into relative insignificance when it comes to the vast methane reservoirs locked up in Arctic tundra – methane that scientists are convinced was a factor in previous de-glaciations.

    The methane exists in a highly compressed form known as methane hydrates, molecules in which water and methane are bonded under high pressure or low temperature. In the case of the Arctic it is frozen, at least at present.

    ‘At what point does that start to get released,’ asks Dr Jardine, ‘because that is one of the catastrophic feedback loops of releases bringing more warming and so on. I don’t think anyone has got to the bottom of that.’

    Prof Palmer has focused most of his research on wetlands but says the Arctic is where more research is needed.

    ‘This is the particular region of the world where climate models generally agree that we will see high surface warming in the future. Once permafrost melts you will create thaw lakes and the right conditions to produce methane,’ he says.

    Geoengineering

    Ideas to try and influence the climate on a large scale, ‘geoengineering’ have included spraying aerosols into the Arctic stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cut the warming effect. Prof Palmer says such ideas are fraught with unforeseeable problems.

    ‘By pumping aerosols into the atmosphere you’re effectively perturbing a non-linear system. Without a clear idea of the climatic and humanitarian consequences of such a geoengineering approach this is just irresponsible science.’

    Rather than contemplating geoengineering solutions, Dr Jardine says we should be looking at what we are doing today to reduce methane emissions and prevent the methane hydrates being released.

    ‘There is a lot more we could do today on cutting agricultural emissions and on sharing the technology on cleaning up methane emissions from mining with rapidly industrialising countries like India and China,’ says Dr Jardine.

    Useful links
    Methane UK report
    The Methane Network

  • World’s top firms cause $2.2 Trillion of environmental damage, report estimates;.

     

    Later this year, another huge UN study – dubbed the “Stern for nature” after the influential report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern – will attempt to put a price on such global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage.

    Ahead of changes which would have a profound effect – not just on companies’ profits but also their customers and pension funds and other investors – the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment initiative and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly ordered a report into the activities of the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world, which includes household names from the UK’s FTSE 100 and other major stockmarkets.

    The study, conducted by London-based consultancy Trucost and due to be published this summer, found the estimated combined damage was worth US$2.2 trillion (£1.4tn) in 2008 – a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year.

    The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies’ combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits, though some businesses would be much harder hit than others.

    “What we’re talking about is a completely new paradigm,” said Richard Mattison, Trucost’s chief operating officer and leader of the report team. “Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them.”

    The biggest single impact on the $2.2tn estimate, accounting for more than half of the total, was emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. Other major “costs” were local air pollution such as particulates, and the damage caused by the over-use and pollution of freshwater.

    The true figure is likely to be even higher because the $2.2tn does not include damage caused by household and government consumption of goods and services, such as energy used to power appliances or waste; the “social impacts” such as the migration of people driven out of affected areas, or the long-term effects of any damage other than that from climate change. The final report will also include a higher total estimate which includes those long-term effects of problems such as toxic waste.

    Trucost did not want to comment before the final report on which sectors incurred the highest “costs” of environmental damage, but they are likely to include power companies and heavy energy users like aluminium producers because of the greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels. Heavy water users like food, drink and clothing companies are also likely to feature high up on the list.

    Sukhdev said the heads of the major companies at this year’s annual economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, were increasingly concerned about the impact on their business if they were stopped or forced to pay for the damage.

    “It can make the difference between profit and loss,” Sukhdev told the annual Earthwatch Oxford lecture last week. “That sense of foreboding is there with many, many [chief executives], and that potential is a good thing because it leads to solutions.”

    The aim of the study is to encourage and help investors lobby companies to reduce their environmental impact before concerned governments act to restrict them through taxes or regulations, said Mattison.

    “It’s going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies’ profit margins,” Mattison told the Guardian. “Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle. We should be seeking ways to fix the system, rather than waiting for the economy to adapt. Continued inefficient use of natural resources will cause significant impacts on [national economies] overall, and a massive problem for governments to fix.”

    Another major concern is the risk that companies simply run out of resources they need to operate, said Andrea Moffat, of the US-based investor lobby group Ceres, whose members include more than 80 funds with assets worth more than US$8tn. An example was the estimated loss of 20,000 jobs and $1bn last year for agricultural companies because of water shortages in California, said Moffat.

  • Reality of Mexico’s green battle

    Reality of Mexico’s green battle

    Felipe Calderón’s fight against climate change should start at home, where pristine natural landscapes are hard to find

    Mexican President Felipe Calderón made international headlines recently with his comments regarding climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he called upon developing and developed countries alike to act multilaterally rather than continue endlessly debating over how to tackle the problem.

    Calderón expressed the need for “building bridges” instead of walking away, once again, from a forum with resolutions on paper that fail to materialise as actual policies – much less realities.

    Calderón’s position regarding climate change is coherent with his administration’s current strategy touting Mexico as one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, as well as the venue of the UN framework convention on climate change this autumn. (By the way, the meeting is set to take place in the environmental disaster area that is Cancún, a project that converted an island into an artificial beach packed with human parking lots back in 1974).

    But before allowing Calderón to crown himself International Advocate of Environmental Concerns, let’s do a reality check. If as he says, climate change is a problem that “we are all obliged to attend to”, he should start at home, where the “economic costs associated with trying to tackle climate change” are not the only concern.

    While megadiverse Mexico is home to approximately 10% of the planet’s species, soon, all that fauna will have no place to live. This is because according to Greenpeace, Mexico takes fifth place in world deforestation – which is also, incidentally, a key factor in climate change.

    But beyond any quick consultation of environmental websites, I can state from personal experience that a reform of Mexico’s national park system is urgently needed.

    Over this past year, I have been invited to visit natural reserves in the states of Tamaulipas, Quintana Roo, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Hidalgo, and Campeche by nature photographer Antonio Vizcaíno (who co-authored the award-winning Wildlands Philanthropy: The Great American Tradition) and his team at the local NGO América Natural. Vizcaíno recently published another book of photographs titled, somewhat ironically, En Busca del Bosque Mexicano (In Search of Mexican Forests). And shooting his current project, Mexican landscapes, has been even more of a challenge given that pristine natural landscapes are becoming increasingly hard to find.

    Vizcaíno, who has spent the past 20 years exploring not only Mexico, but the entire western hemisphere, has witnessed the destruction first-hand. And he feels that the most pressing problem Calderón and his team face is land ownership.

    This is because there are no true natural parks or reserves in Mexico, if we define these as lands that are mostly or entirely off limits in terms of human impact. On the map, these areas abound. But in reality, they are conserved solely through the good will of local property owners, often coalitions of indigenous peoples granted parcels under the ejido system that began in the 1930s by President Lázaro Cárdenas. There have been many efforts, both grassroots and top-down, to encourage ecotourism in these reserves and thus preserve them from other activities which involve deforestation, such as agriculture, with varying degrees of success.

    But there are no guarantees, and even forests considered pristine, such as El Cielo in Tamaulipas, are criss-crossed by fences and grazing cattle, while beautiful lagoons and waterfalls in Chiapas are teeming with informal markets, litter, and locals hawking their services as “guides.” Only at one reserve (El Chico, Hidalgo, created in 1898 as México’s first National Park) did I see uniformed rangers. In many other places where tourism is permitted, makeshift toll booths are set up at every property line, and entrance fees must be paid at several points along the way. Hotels encroach on what is officially reserve territory, gobbling up lush mangroves at places like Sian Ka’an in Tulúm. This, despite the fact that the president himself approved legislation in 2007 expressly forbidding any development whatsoever within coastal mangrove forests.

    It’s rather like climate change according to Calderón: natural reserves here in Mexico look very different on paper than they do in reality.

  • UN to advise on climate change funding.

     

    Ban said the composition of the panel would be announced shortly and revealed that he planned to ask Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg to join.

    The secretary-general, who was linked by videoconference with Brown and Meles, said he expected the panel to deliver a preliminary report at the May-June meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which provides a planetary arena for tackling climate change.

    “Finance for adaptation and mitigation and transfer of technology are of central significance for developing countries in general and the poor and vulnerable countries in particular,” the Ethiopian premier said from Addis Ababa.

    Meles said while the funding provisions of the Copenhagen accord fell below the expectations of many in the developing world, “they have nevertheless been welcomed by most of our leaders as exemplified by the endorsement of the accord by the recently concluded summit of the African Union.”

    “This time around the promises made have to be kept because the alternative is irresponsible management of the climate, followed by catastrophic changes,” he warned.

    He voiced optimism that the work of the panel would make it possible for poor nations to join the developed world in Mexico for a final and binding treaty on climate change “with the confidence that promises made on finance will be kept”.

    Mexico is to host the next UN-sponsored climate summit from November 29 to December 10 in the beach resort of Cancun.

    “We must put in place the transparency for measurement, reporting and verification and we must take forward the cooperation on technology and we must deepen international agreement through a detailed set of rules and government arrangements under the United Nations to be finalised in Cancun later this year,” Brown said.

    Meanwhile, Oxfam International warned that Ban’s high-level panel “cannot be another talking shop” and must make concrete recommendations on how the $US100 billion ($A112.3 billion) should be raised.

    “The $US100 billion has to start flowing soon. Poor countries desperately need this money to cope with a changing climate and reduce their emissions, and rich countries need to show that they can be trusted to deliver on their promises of climate action,” Oxfam adviser Robert Bailey, said in a statement. “Trust must be rebuilt if a global climate deal is to be achieved.”

    In December, a 194-nation UN-led summit in Copenhagen pledged to limit global warming to 2C, along with billions of dollars in financing. It gave countries until January 31 to sign on.

    A 2007 report by a UN panel of scientists said human-caused climate change was unequivocally a fact and it would threaten droughts, floods and other severe weather along with the survival of entire species if unchecked.

  • Crisis of climate change confidence

     

    Just months before, in September 2001, the IPCC under Watson had delivered its groundbreaking Third Assessment Report, which confirmed that the earth was warming and found there was, ”new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities”.

    The finding, supported by the US National Academy of Sciences, provoked a severe backlash from critics of climate change science and figures in the oil and coal industry. Watson, a former science adviser to President Bill Clinton, was viewed by science sceptics and some in industry with deep suspicion.

    A memo obtained under freedom of information by a US environment group revealed that Exxon’s lobbyist, Randy Randol, wrote to a key Bush official within weeks of the president’s inauguration in 2001 asking, ”Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the US?” By early 2002 the Bush administration was backing a new candidate for the IPCC chair, an Indian engineer, Dr Rajendra Pauchari.

    ”You may not have seen this latest piece of politicisation from the Bushies,” the former head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Tom Wigley, wrote in a email to his old colleagues Phil Jones and Mike Hulme in April that year.

    That year Jones would come under scrutiny by climate sceptics in the US over data he had used for some critical research to support his finding on rising temperatures in cities.

    Jones noted the concerns over the IPPC chairman. But his colleague, Hulme, in a prescient response, argued, ”Why should not an Indian scientist chair IPCC? One could argue the [climate change] issue is more important for the south than the north …

    ”If the issue is that Exxon have lobbied and pressured Bush, then OK, this is regrettable but to be honest is anyone really surprised? All these decision about IPCC chairs and co-chairs are deeply political … ”

    Pauchari was elected chairman by a majority of countries and Watson was defeated. In 2007, under Pauchari, the IPPC handed down its next series of reports, not only confirming the 2001 findings on global warming but strengthening them.

    ”Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level,” the first of the 2007 reports stated bluntly.

    More significantly, the new report found that most of the increase in warming since the mid 20th century is, ”very likely” due to a human-caused increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. After Pauchari accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPPC, the Indian engineer once favoured by the Bush White House became the object of attack by global warming sceptics.

    IN recent weeks, with climate science and scientists again under siege in the media, on sceptic blogs and from critics within their own ranks, the hacked East Anglia emails are a timely reminder that the so-called science ”war” over global warming is nothing new.

    The credibility of the IPPC and some of the high-profile individuals who contribute to it have come under attack after every report. The attacks often escalate just before the crucial UN meetings of government ministers, which follow the reports that are supposed to debate how to cut global greenhouse gases. From Kyoto in 1997 to Copenhagen in 2009, climate sceptics and industry critics have targeted the science’s credibility and challenged the need to cut greenhouse gases.

    The hacked East Anglia emails were posted on sceptic websites just weeks before December’s Copenhagen climate conference. The arguments against the climate science, even though supercharged by the emails, had little immediate effect on the UN conference. But the emails’ content is affecting public opinion in Britain and most likely the US and Australia.

    They revealed the private efforts by the IPPC author and the former director of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, Jones, to blunt the sceptics’ scrutiny of some of his early temperature research and argue against FOI requests for this data. The unvarnished comments in some of the emails from Jones have damaged the reputation of the world’s leading climate research units.

    The IPPC was drawn into the crisis when a British science reporter picked up a howling error in one of the critical 2007 reports handed down under Pauchari. The error was not contained in the scientific findings of observed climate change or its advice to government, but in a 938-page report on the impacts of warming.

    That report included a reference to a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The IPPC and Pauchari compounded the error, many believe, by their slowness to issue a correction.

    But despite the crisis engulfing climate science in recent weeks, no serious scientific academy, university or government research agency around the world is disputing the IPPC’s core findings: that global average temperatures have been increasing and that human activity is very likely responsible because of the burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which is increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

    ”The hacking of the emails will have zero impact on the scientific case for climate change,” says Will Steffen, the head of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute.

    While he acknowledges that some of Jones’s temperature data was questioned in the hacked emails, Steffen points to thousands of studies across all the scientific disciplines over recent years that have supported the IPPC’s findings on global warming.

    ”There is an enormous amount of evidence from the recent warming of the planet beyond the instrumental atmospheric temperature record,” says Steffen, who authored a report on the issue last year for the Department of Climate Change.

    ”This evidence includes rising ocean temperatures, reductions in Arctic sea-ice thickness and extent, the melting of permafrost, the satellite measurements of rising atmospheric temperature, the loss of ice mass in Greenland, and more recently Antarctica, and thousands of ecological case studies on land and in the ocean showing changing times for ecological events like the flowering of plants and mating of organisms, the migration of fish, plants, birds and many others in response to the warming environment.”

    Few non-scientists realise that the IPPC does not produce its own original scientific research on global warming but draws on the work of scientists from all over the world. Critical parts of the core scientific evidence have been researched by Australian scientists and Steffen, like his colleagues, is concerned that the battering of the IPCC, and climate science in general, could undermine the key scientific institutions in Australia doing this work.

    ”An attack on the trust and credentials of Australian and global climate science is an attack on the fundamental scientific institutions. In an Australian context, what we are are talking about are the major research and observations institutions – CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the leading Australian universities. There has to be a high level of trust in these institutions on the part of the public,” he says.

    But a number of Australian scientists who spoke to the Herald are worried the crisis will undermine public confidence in climate science.

    These concerns are compounded by what many viewed as the failure of world leaders to reach agreement in Copenhagen to cut global greenhouse gases. Add to this the exceptionally cold winter in parts of Britain and North America and the net result is that the public’s clamouring for early action on climate change has been muted.

    But while Republican sceptics in Washington are Twittering that, ”It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries uncle”, climate scientists are again reminding the public not to confuse the local weather with the global climate.

    The winter in Washington might be brutal this season but the latest figures from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies show last year, globally, was the second warmest year since modern records began in 1880 and the decade beginning January 2000 was the warmest decade.

    There is much speculation in Canberra that the science crisis will favour the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott and sceptics in his party. But in the US key figures in the Obama administration are more sanguine about its long-term impact.

    This week the UN Climate Envoy, Todd Stern, at his first big public appearance since Copenhagen, was asked about the impact of ”Climategate”. Stern, who first represented the Clinton administration at Kyoto in 1997, was unfazed.

    ”The fundamental science on this issue is quite clear and mounting evidence on the ground of what is actually happening and growing sophistication of the modelling goes way beyond any particular set of data or any particular problems that occurred with respect to East Anglia or the IPCC mistakes,” Stern said.

    Marian Wilkinson is the Herald’s environment editor