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  • Coalition pushes for Population debate.

     

    There was a need for a debate about population growth and the impact it was likely to have on Australia’s carbon footprint, declining housing affordability, traffic congestion, and “overcrowded concrete jungles”.

    “I detect there is a hunger in the electorate for a debate about this issue,” he later told Fairfax Radio Network, adding he had been deluged with emails and letters since first raising the issue.

    The opposition agrees, but has stopped short of supporting Mr Thomson’s call for a population cap of 26 million.

    Nor will it support the MP’s suggestion for a reduction in the skilled migrant intake to 25,000 a year.

    “We’re very happy to have a population policy debate,” opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said.

    “But we have to make sure that when we’re running a migration program we’re ensuring that we’re bringing people into the country who can really make a contribution.”

    When asked to nominate an upper limit to Australia’s population, Mr Morrison said: “At the moment I don’t think we know the answer to that question”.

    The carrying capacity of the nation’s infrastructure and the ability of the environment to sustain a bigger population was not known, he said.

    Mr Thomson also wants overseas students to return to their country of origin for at least two years before they can apply for permanent residency in Australia.

    He repeated his call for the abolition of the baby bonus and limits on family tax benefits for a third and subsequent children.

  • 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.

    Related Coverage

    “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.

  • Alaskan senator seeks to block EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases

     

    “We cannot turn a blind eye to the EPA’s efforts to impose back-door climate regulations,” Lisa Murkowski told the Senate in prepared remarks. Murkowski’s motion of disapproval, though unlikely to become law, is widely seen as a barometer for the chances of getting a climate change bill through the Senate this year.

    In an ominous sign for supporters of a climate law, she had the support of three Democratic Senators, further underscoring the unease in Obama’s own party in enacting legislation to tackle global warming.

    Delivering new laws to tackle global warming was not just a key pledge of Obama’s, but is being closely watched around the world as global climate change negotiations struggle to recover from the disappointment of the UN summit in Copenhagen. An environment official in the European Union said: “It’s clearly a setback.”

    Murkowski’s move, brought under the Congressional Review Act, would remove the Obama administration‘s “Plan B” for dealing with climate change, resorting to the EPA to curb greenhouse gas emissions if Congress fails to act.

    The motion of disapproval, called the “nuclear option” by environmentalists, would also ban the administration from drafting any new regulation that would be substantially the same. That would make it even more difficult for any US government to regulate power plants and other big emitters.

    Environmentalists say the proposal is unlikely to pass, but ensuring its defeat could require a new round of partisan warfare that could be damaging for Democrats and Obama’s agenda.

    In her speech, Murkowski argued that giving the EPA the authority to act on global warming would cost jobs and hurt the economy: “Under the guise of protecting the environment, it’s set to unleash a wave of damaging new regulations that will wash over and further submerge our struggling economy.”

    She said she supported efforts to get a climate change law, but said: “This command-and-control approach is our worst option for reducing the emissions.”

    Murkowski has tried to cast herself as a moderate Republican who would be prepared to act on climate change. But she has voted against such legislation in the past, and has been criticised this week by environmentalists for her links to the energy industry.

    According to the Centre for Responsive Politics, Murkowski, from the oil-rich state of Alaska, has received $244,000 (£151,205) in campaign funds from oil and gas companies since 2005, and consulted two energy industry lobbyists before launching today’s proposal.

    Even before the upset in Massachusetts, Democrats in the industrial heartland and from oil and coal states were wary – or in some cases flatly opposed – to action on climate change.

    Murkowski was joined today by Mary Landrieu, a Democratic Senator from Louisiana who has repeatedly expressed concern for her state’s oil refining business; Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas; and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Murkowski also claimed support from governors of her home state of Alaska, Mississippi and West Virginia as well as business organisations. Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, has also expressed support for Murkowski.

    But there has also been a strong push back against Murkowski from environmental organisations and other business groups. A coalition of 80 companies from Virgin America to eBay wrote to Obama today urging action on climate change.

    The Alaskan’s resolution would overturn the EPA’s finding last month that greenhouse gas emissions were a public health threat. The so-called endangerment finding compelled the agency under the Clean Air Act to introduce regulations for the pollutant.

    Murkowski’s strategy hinges on using the Congressional Review Act, a law used for the first time in the early days of the George Bush era to throw out new ergonomic standards for workplaces passed under Bill Clinton. The measure would require only 51 votes for passage and the Senator is confident of signing up all 40 Republicans as well as some Democrats.

    The White House, the EPA, and even the Democratic leadership in Congress have all said they would prefer to have climate change legislation from Congress rather than resorting to the agency’s regulatory powers. But the prospect of EPA regulation had been seen as an important nudge to get the Senate to act.

    The House of Representatives passed a climate change bill last June, but progress in the Senate has stalled. An effort led by Democrat John Kerry to craft a bill that could pull in Republican support has yet to produce a draft proposal.

    The move by Murkowski brought a furious response from Democratic leaders and a coalition of environmental, business and religious organisations. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat said blocking the EPA was a radical move that would expose Americans to public health risks from global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists said it was an assault on science, and California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrote a letter asking his fellow Republicans to let the EPA do its work.

  • 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.