General news – Page 567

Category: General news

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

Wator vapour caused one-third of global warming in 1990s, study shows

The experts say their research does not undermine the scientific consensus that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity drive global warming, but they call for “closer examination” of the way climate computer models consider water vapour.

The new research comes at a difficult time for climate scientists, who have been forced to defend their predictions in the face of an embarrassing mistake in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which included false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035. There has also been heavy criticism over the way climate scientists at the University of East Anglia apparently tried to prevent the release of data requested under Freedom of Information laws.

The new research, led by Susan Solomon, at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who co-chaired the 2007 IPCC report on the science of global warming, is published today in the journal Science, one of the most respected in the world.

Solomon said the new finding does not challenge the conclusion that human activity drives climate change. “Not to my mind it doesn’t,” she said. “It shows that we shouldn’t over-interpret the results from a few years one way or another.”

She would not comment on the mistake in the IPCC report – which was published in a separate section on likely impacts – or on calls for Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, to step down.

“What I will say, is that this [new study] shows there are climate scientists round the world who are trying very hard to understand and to explain to people openly and honestly what has happened over the last decade.”

The new study analysed water vapour in the stratosphere, about 10 miles up, where it acts as a potent greenhouse gas and traps heat at the Earth’s surface.

Satellite measurements were used to show that water vapour levels in the stratosphere have dropped about 10% since 2000. When the scientists fed this change into a climate model, they found it could have reduced, by about 25% over the last decade, the amount of warming expected to be caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

They conclude: “The decline in stratospheric water vapour after 2000 should be expected to have significantly contributed to the flattening of the global warming trend in the last decade.”

Solomon said: “We call this the 10, 10, 10 problem. A 10% drop in water vapour, 10 miles up has had an effect on global warming over the last 10 years.” Until now, scientists have struggled to explain the temperature slowdown in the years since 2000, a problem climate sceptics have exploited.

The scientists also looked at the earlier period, from 1980 to 2000, though cautioned this was based on observations of the atmosphere made by a single weather balloon. They found likely increases in water vapour in the stratosphere, enough to enhance the rate of global warming by about 30% above what would have been expected.

“These findings show that stratospheric water vapour represents an important driver of decadal global surface climate change,” the scientists say. They say it should lead to a “closer examination of the representation of stratospheric water vapour changes in climate models”.

Solomon said it was not clear why the water vapour levels had swung up and down, but suggested it could be down to changes in sea surface temperature, which drives convection currents and can move air around in the high atmosphere.

She said it was not clear if the water vapour decrease after 2000 reflects a natural shift, or if it was a consequence of a warming world. If the latter is true, then more warming could see greater decreases in water vapour, acting as a negative feedback to apply the brakes on future temperature rise.

The game has changed and so should the PM

He could also alleviate the subterranean angst in his own ranks among Labor MPs who are feeling the heat on an ETS in electorates concerned about jobs, and head off industry-funded advertising campaigns that have already had an impact in some areas.

Yet Rudd, like Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, can’t bring himself to face political reality and dump a dud, at least until there are signs of real international progress that doesn’t make Australia look like it’s tilting at windmills (or coal-fired generators) without effect and at great cost.

Rudd’s attachment looks dangerously like an ideological commitment to a scheme that is opposed from both ends of the political spectrum and unlikely to find any validating action from the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases.

In part, this reluctance to show any hint of a policy shift is a product of Labor’s successful three-year campaign to equate action on climate change with an ETS, and, specifically, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. This will be defiantly put to parliament next week by Wong without any real hope of passing the Senate.

Of course, Rudd’s not going to abandon his overall position on climate change or his commitment to market-based solutions to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by putting a price on carbon. But he doesn’t have to keep an emissions trading scheme front and centre of his political campaign.

If he doesn’t take stock of the domestic and international political conditions and adjust accordingly, he runs the risk of appearing to be as ideologically driven and politically blind to the dangers as John Howard was to the obvious dangers of the Work Choices industrial relations changes.

The facts have changed dramatically since the 2007 election campaign, when the central point of difference between the Coalition and the ALP was the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Rudd ratified the Kyoto agreement, with little practical effect other than slightly lifting Australia’s carbon emissions reduction target, which we are still on track to meet without an ETS.

The failure of the UN’s Copenhagen climate change conference to forge any sort of agreement out of discussions in which Rudd and Wong were central characters also demonstrates that claims ratification of the Kyoto Protocol would give Australia a world voice and put us “at the table” amounted to little.

The Liberal Party’s change of leadership and change of heart over supporting a modified ETS completely changed the expectations and possibility of a carbon emissions scheme because the Abbott-led Coalition and the Senate independents believed the CPRS went too far in its objectives and the Greens felt it didn’t go nearly far enough.

The bill failed in such a manner that the double-dissolution election trigger it delivered was useless even if the government wanted to go to an early election.

In between times the Copenhagen failure has demonstrated three things: that the world’s biggest carbon emitters, China, the US and India, were not going to agree to any binding or verifiable reduction targets; that the developing world is demanding compensation from the developed world; and that the global emphasis, as demonstrated by US President Barack Obama in his State of the Union speech yesterday, is shifting away from emissions trading to clean energy, such as nuclear power, and technological development.

As for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the Greens were quite right to claim yesterday that Wong wouldn’t guarantee that the proposed CPRS would cut carbon emissions, because she couldn’t.

Not only has carbon emissions trading failed to realistically cut emissions in Europe or assist most European Union nations in meeting their Kyoto targets, but the only target Wong was able to adopt this week was an unconditional cut of 5 per cent by 2020.

That’s less than a third of the minimum reduction target the government’s climate change adviser Ross Garnaut has advocated, and it’s less than a fifth of the minimum the Greens want. It happens to be the same target Abbott committed to last year, standing under a tree outside his parliamentary office. It’s also a target Coalition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt says can be easily achieved without resorting to a costly ETS.

As for “business certainty” – the mantra that it’s better for business to know what costs it will face and what demands will be placed on it by providing a firm target and price for carbon per tonne – Wong was unable to provide that in adopting the Copenhagen Accord. When asked about business certainty, Wong said on Thursday: “What we’re saying is: in the absence of those conditions [overseas commitments], the target is 5 per cent.

“And if those conditions are met, then obviously we’ll be altering the target consistent with the conditions we previously put out.” And that decision, or not, will be taken some time, perhaps, in 2011.

Rudd really wanted to lead the world on climate change, he wanted to found an ETS and he wanted to do it before Christmas last year so that it could be up and running by 2011.

He’s been frustrated by political opposition, international intransigence and economic reality.

Rudd should regroup, refashion his political campaign for an election year and move on to the broader issues of health, tax reform and economic management. Such a step has been made harder by his own rhetoric and political gamesmanship but the facts and political atmosphere have changed, and so should he.

Challenging times for climate science

Such predictions, I wrote, “challenge some of global warming orthodoxy’s most cherished beliefs”, including the assertion that the north pole will be ice-free in summer by 2013. Latif told me that this is most unlikely to be realised. His work may not undermine the science of manmade warming, but it does challenge standard media representations of its imminent consequences.

David Rose

Oxford

• The flawed prediction that Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear by 2035 (Report, 21 January), after the leaked emails from UEA, will be further ammunition to the deniers. But they mustn’t get too excited. This is not a lapse in climate science but a failure to implement the rigorous procedures that ensure that only substantiated evidence is published. The IPCC must recover from its embarrassment, get a grip and redouble its efforts to show that the evidence for human-induced climate change is real.

Nick Reeves

Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management

• If Jackie Ashley (Comment, 25 January) were interested in the Conservative record on green issues she would reflect that without my party’s leadership during this parliament Britain would not have had a Climate Change Act, we would have no feed-in tariffs for microgeneration, no smart meters, and no ban on unabated coal plants. In each case the government was forced to reverse its position to fall in with Conservative policy. It has yet to do so on building a third runway at Heathrow, providing energy efficiency improvements for every home, cutting government energy use by 10% during 2010 and approving carbon capture and storage demonstrations. There is not a single instance of this government being more progressive than the Conservative party on green issues.

Greg Clark MP

Shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change

United nations caught out again on climate change

Kevin Rudd last November linked weather extremes to the debate over the government’s emissions trading scheme.

“We will feel the effects of climate change fastest and hardest, and therefore we must act this week, and the government will be doing everything possible to make sure that can occur,” the Prime Minister said at the time.

British Climate Change Minister Ed Miliband has suggested floods – such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 – could be linked to global warming.

US President Barack Obama said last year: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

Last month British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament that the financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by

climate change are those that have done least harm”.

The IPCC has now been forced to reassess its report linking extreme weather to climate change.

The UN body’s about-face comes less than a week after it was forced to retract claims that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. The claim was sourced to an environmental group’s report of an interview in New Scientist magazine.

The Indian glaciologist who made the quote said a week ago the claim was “speculation” and had not been used in a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

It also comes as the British parliament launches an inquiry into leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit that raised questions about the legitimacy of some data published by the IPCC about global warming.

The latest controversy goes back to the IPCC’s benchmark 2007 report on climate change, which warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”. It suggested part of the increase was because of global warming.

However, the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, by the time the climate body issued its report. When the paper was published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.”

The IPCC failed to issue a clarification before the Copenhagen climate summit last month. Two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts, but were ignored.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chairman of the IPCC, said the UN body was now “reassessing the evidence” and it would publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings.

The opposition used the latest revelations to savage Mr Rudd over his handling of climate change. Tony Abbott pointed to Mr Rudd’s reluctance to mention climate change in the series of speeches he had delivered around the nation in the lead-up to Australia Day.

“This is yet another case of the Prime Minister raising expectations and not acting on them,” the Opposition Leader said. “The challenge for the Prime Minister is to say now whether he really will reintroduce the ETS given the failure of Copenhagen.”

Opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt backed the British parliamentary inquiry into the so-called Climategate emails, established on Friday. “The key to community consensus on climate change is confidence in the science,” he said.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong last week endorsed the IPCC report that contained the glacier claim. “It has been intensely scrutinised with very few errors being identified, and none that challenge the central conclusions of the report,” she said. “The Fourth Assessment Report represents the international consensus on climate change science. All reports of the IPCC are subjected to extensive expert and government review.”

The paper at the centre of the latest questions was written in 2006 by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a London consultancy, who became a contributing author on the IPCC report on climate change impacts.

He wanted to find out if the eight year-on-year increase in losses caused by weather-related disasters since the 1960s was larger than could be explained by the impact of social changes such as growth in population. Such an increase, coinciding with rising temperatures, would suggest global warming was to blame.

In the research, Mr Muir-Wood looked at a range of hazards, including tropical cyclones, floods and hurricanes. He found from 1950 to 2005 there was no increase in the impact of disasters once growth was accounted for. For 1970 to 2005 he found a 2 per cent annual increase that “corresponded with a period of rising global temperatures”, but said almost all of it was because of strong hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. Despite such caveats, the IPCC report cited only the 1970-2005 results.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, who commissioned Mr Muir-Wood’s paper, has told the IPCC that citing one section in preference to the rest was wrong.

“The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost because of climate change is completely misleading,” Mr Muir-Wood said.

The Sunday TImes

Additional reporting: Christian Kerr

THE NEW ECONOMICS OF CARBON OFFSETS

On the way here, our group — led by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS) — walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin, and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects native to the area.

These trees are our partners in respiration, inhaling carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and storing the carbon in their trunks and leaves. That simple process makes them one of Earth’s most potent bulwarks against climate change (aka a “carbon sink”); but when they are cut and burned, all that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Already, some 32 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed each year, an amount of land equivalent in size to the state of Mississippi; deforestation, according to the United Nations, is responsible for roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

What will it cost to keep those trees standing? And who’s going to pay for it? The challenge of assigning precise values to an increasingly rare commodity — wild trees — and indeed the question of whether they are a commodity at all, is one of the most hotly contested in the climate world.

It was an unusual deal that landed tree No. 129 at the centre of the debate.

Between 2000 and 2002, the US-based Nature Conservancy struck an alliance with three of the planet’s leading carbon emitters: General Motors, Chevron, and American Electric Power. Together the corporations gave the environmental group $18 million to purchase 50,000 acres of Brazilian Atlantic forest, much of which had been degraded by grazing. Three reserves were created: Serra do Itaqui, financed with $5 million from AEP; Morro da Mina, paid for with $3 million from Chevron; and Cachoeira, underwritten by $10 million from GM. (GM’s role in the project survived the company’s bankruptcy, which means that No. 129 is now partially owned by American taxpayers.)

SPVS was brought in to manage the reserves, which together form one contiguous forest known as the Guaraqueçaba Environmental Protection Area. You’ll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the Nature Conservancy’s website as an example of corporate partnerships that make “an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity”. What you won’t see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.

At tree No. 129, de Britez takes out a tape measure and unspools it around the trunk. We’re at one of the 190 carbon dioxide measuring stations — each a group of trees with numbered plaques — scattered around the Guaraqueçaba forest. Documenting the bulk of the reserve’s trees is an ongoing enterprise, like tracking tagged whales.

“We measure the biomass of these trees and their carbon sequestration,” de Britez says as a ranger picks up the other end of the tape measure and writes down No. 129’s stats. It’s three feet in diameter and about 45 feet tall. He estimates the carbon it contains at 95 kilograms — just under one-tenth of a tonne. At $10 a tonne — the upper end of the range at which carbon offsets trade in the US — No. 129 is worth about $1. Scale up to the two to three tons of carbon per acre that de Britez estimates across the 50,000-acre reserve, and the potential payoff, in addition to the public relations value, comes into focus.

The trees in the Cachoeira reserve could never offset even a fraction of GM’s total carbon footprint — a single Hummer (which the company started producing the same year it signed on to the Guaraqueçaba project) would require about 50 trees to offset. But the Nature Conservancy and its partners aimed to use the Brazilian reserves as a test case for preserving forests via corporate carbon credits. “The investors wanted to be pioneers in the carbon-sink field,” de Britez explains. “They had in mind to start working on this before other companies.”

All three companies, as it happens, had aggressively lobbied the Clinton administration against signing the 1997 Kyoto climate accord and stayed mum when President Bush withdrew from it. But they hedged their bets, figuring that the Brazilian forests could be turned into offsets to sell in places (like Europe) where Kyoto’s emission limits did apply, or could be held in reserve in case the US ever established its own limits.

By the time the companies were ready to begin preparing their credits for sale, however, the UN had refused to allow “avoided deforestation” projects — those that buy forestland and then promise not to cut the trees — as an offset for industries seeking to buy their way out of emission limits. Credits generated from projects like Guaraqueçaba were excluded from the international carbon market launched by Kyoto, a market that now accounts for more than $126 billion in offset transactions. The offsets could be sold, however, in the United States, where the $700 million domestic carbon offset market is unregulated (and where prices are generally half those of Kyoto-regulated offsets).

Manyu Chang, a forest scientist who is the coordinator for climate policy for the state of Paraná, explained the problem with avoided-deforestation credits to me at her office in the state capital of Curitiba.

For starters, she said, trees — living beings, after all — are far less predictable than, say, windmills. They are subject to the vagaries of fires and disease, both of which are increasing due to climate change. Each species absorbs carbon at different rates depending on factors like the altitude, soil, and weather. Then there’s the problem of “leakage” — when deforestation simply shifts from protected zones to unprotected ones, creating no overall emissions reduction. And finally, the UN did not want to open the door to a perverse sort of extortion: a country could threaten to open its lands to logging unless it was paid to not do so.

More fundamentally, Chang notes, when companies create reserves on already forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is limited: “Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?” José Miguez, one of Brazil’s top climate officials, told me that during the Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern industries to pollute more. “The forest is there,” he said. “You can’t guarantee it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate change.”

The supply of forests for offsetting pollution in developed countries is, potentially, almost infinite. There are an estimated 90 billion tons of carbon in Brazil’s forests alone, and billions of tons more are sequestered in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and other nations with substantial tropical forests, which are considered the most vulnerable to deforestation. The world has a major stake in keeping all that carbon where it is. The question that remains after a weak outcome at Copenhagen is whether the fate of the forests — and their people — will rest on the ability of industries to pay for preserving distant trees rather than reducing emissions closer to home.

This is the first in a two-part series: tomorrow Mark will look at how carbon offset schemes are affecting the lives and livelihood of those who call the world’s forests home. This article was first published in Mother Jones magazine and released in collaboration with Frontline/World, the public television investigative series. Watch a video version of the story here.

iCING OVER THE FACTS

The error, apparently based on a misreading of the year 2350 as 2035 in a decade-old research study, was in fact fairly well known among glaciologists. The story had been ”discovered” and publicly discussed at least four times in the three years before The Sunday Times published its exclusive, including a long piece by the BBC last December.

That the error was uncovered by the correct application of the peer-review process, and the consensus view among the experts was shown to be right, made little difference to the media coverage, which focused on the flaws in the IPCC. Amid the uproar, the panel issued a statement on Wednesday conceding that: ”In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”

So, if a dumb mistake like this can slip through, what other errors are lurking in the 3000 pages of the Nobel Prize-winning document?

The only way to check is to comb through the archive of reviewers’ comments. It makes for weird and wonderful reading. The offending passage lies nestled among earnest discussion of the flowering times of Japanese apricot trees and the potential for a grass-skiing industry in Asia.

The review process for the IPCC’s published work is extensive. Authors develop draft chapters on a particular topic and send them out for checking by a wide variety of other scientists. Reviewers examine the chapters line by line and their comments are chronologically recorded and preserved for public scrutiny like a fossil record of a very long and wandering debate.

Contrary to the view of many climate sceptics, the review process is transparent and open to a wide range of scientists, and some non-scientists. Climate sceptics are, if anything, over-represented in the fact-checking process. Among the hundreds of independent ”expert reviewers” is the Australian meteorologist William Kininmonth, a sceptic who has been fighting the idea of man-made climate change for many years.

Another reviewer is the prominent British sceptic Christopher Walter Monckton, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who arrives in Australia on Monday on a lecture tour with the support of business and mining industry figures, with the purpose of undermining public support for carbon emissions cuts.

Monckton, incidentally, still claims to have won a Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the IPCC report, though the Nobel Committee has no record of this.

But if there were a real prize awarded for sceptic diligence, it would surely go to Vincent Gray, a chemist associated with the New Zealand Coal Research Association. Gray logged almost 1900 comments and complaints on the latest report alone, largely on matters of grammar and presentation.

Despite the exquisite pedantry of some of the reviewers, the flawed reference to the imminent retreat of Himalayan glaciers that appeared on page 493 of the working group report was picked up during the review process by several scientists with expertise that touched on the field.

It is worth looking in a little more detail at the reviewers’ discussion because it hints at the reason for the mistake. Dr David Saltz, a desert researcher at Ben Gurion University in Israel, noticed the discrepancy between a claim that Himalayan glaciers could shrink in size from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres in the next three decades, and a later sentence saying that they could disappear. ”100,000? You just said it will disappear,” he wrote. ”Missed to clarify this one,” was the author’s terse reply.

Another reviewer, the water and climate change specialist Dr Hayley Fowler, of Newcastle University in Britain, logged a lengthy objection beginning ”I am not sure that this is true” and citing more recent research. ”Was unable to get hold of the suggested references will consider in the final version,” was the author’s response.

Associate Professor Poh Poh Wong, of the National University of Singapore, asked that examples of retreating glaciers from around the world be included if the claim that ”Himalayan glaciers are indeed receding faster” was to stand. None of the reviewers could be contacted by the Herald to discuss their doubts, but it is clear that red flags were raised over the Himalayan glacier question when the document was being reviewed in August 2006. The review comments make it clear inclusion of the passage in the working group report was an editing error that the authors were given every excuse to delete.

In fact, doubts had already been raised about the claim, first made in 1999 in New Scientist magazine, that the Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035. Given that the Himalayas contain trillions of tonnes of compressed ice, it could take almost until 2035 to melt it at room temperature, let alone the freezing conditions at altitude, as several eminent glaciologists have pointed out over the past three years.

It was revisited and dismissed by a report prepared for the Indian Government, and released in charged circumstances late last year, as the nation came under pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The report concluded that, while measurements showed most glaciers had been in retreat for several decades, there was not enough data to draw a conclusive opinion on the cause. This report has since been attacked and contradicted in part by the work of other glaciologists.

The mistaken Himalayan claim did not make the cut in the IPCC’s synthesis report, or the ”summary for policymakers” document which was presented to governments in 2007 as a basis for deciding how to cope with climate change. It was also contradicted by glacier research elsewhere in the IPCC’s report, which has not been challenged during the review process or subsequently. That establishes, by verifiable observations made by dozens of agencies and hundreds of research teams, that the ice is indeed melting.

”The general picture is one of widespread retreat, notably in Alaska, Franz-Josef Land, Asia, the Alps, Indonesia and Africa, and tropical and subtropical regions of South America,” the synthesis report says.

Nevertheless, the IPCC announced this week that it would again review its editing procedure.