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  • Seven takeaways for Warsaw climate talks from new IEA report

    Seven takeaways for Warsaw climate talks from new IEA report

    By on 14 November 2013
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    The Equation

    There’s a distinct lack of optimism here at the Warsaw climate meeting. A recent report from UNEP shows that we are falling far short of the emissions reductions necessary to limit the global temperature increase to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC working group 1 report points out the grave implications of our rising carbon emissions. But, like the previous reports, IEA’s World Energy Outlook released Monday shows that, despite the grim emissions trends, we do still have choices: yes, we can cut our emissions sharply and, yes, that means making serious policy decisions now.

    Seven Takeaways from the IEA report

    Here are seven important takeaways from the IEA report relevant for the climate negotiations:

    1. What happens in the energy sector is crucial to our climate future. The sector is responsible for two-thirds of global warming emissions currently, and without significant policy action annual energy-related CO2 emissions will rise by 20% to 37.2 gigatonnes (Gt) by 2035, meaning that we would be headed for a long-term average temperature increase of 3.6 °C.
    2. Policy decisions that countries make right now can make a tremendous difference in how much more carbon we emit. This includes support for renewable energy and energy efficiency and removal of subsidies to fossil fuel producers.
    3. The energy sector is in tremendous flux globally with a lot of new capacity (mainly in China and India) and replacement capacity (mainly as old power plants are retired in the U.S. and Europe) being added. This creates an opportunity to make low carbon choices; taking full advantage of that opportunity is critical to meeting climate goals.
    4. Natural gas use will likely expand globally under a business as usual scenario. (But, as a recent UCS report points out, an overreliance on natural gas comes with significant climate risks.)
    5. The IEA says that under a business as usual scenario, renewable energy will grow significantly, from 20% of electricity generation in 2011 to 31% in 2035, approaching coal as a leading source of power. But this would still mean growing emissions from the power sector (an increase of between 13 to 15 Gt in that timeframe), leaving its share constant at about 40% of global emissions. NREL’s recent 80% by 2050 renewable energy report and the IPCC special report on renewable energy shows we can be much more aggressive in cost-effective renewables deployment both in the U.S. and globally.
    6. The power sector has several affordable low-carbon alternatives available already, including wind and solar energy, and electricity demand is growing rapidly. Therefore policies that encourage renewable electricity and energy efficiency are particularly vital to bending the emissions curve globally.
    7. Globally, nearly 1.3 billion people still lack access to electricity and 2.6 billion still depend on traditional biomass for energy (with grave health and pollution consequences). Global climate talks have to address this fundamental inequity, even as they negotiate a pathway to lower global emissions.

    Opportunities for the U.S.

    Here in the U.S. we have an incredible opportunity to make deep cuts in our power sector emissions. Uneconomic coal-fired power plants are being retired at record levels and renewable energy costs are declining sharply every year. There’s no doubt we can capitalize on this momentum through strong policies, including power plant carbon standards, renewable electricity standards and soon, one hopes, through a national price on carbon. Putting a strong target for emissions reductions on the table shouldn’t be a stretch for the U.S. And that would have a very significant effect on raising the level of ambition of a global climate agreement.

    A chance to snatch opportunity in the face of despair

    “Setting expectations” is a game everyone seems to play at the UNFCCC climate talks. No one wants to seem naïve about what’s possible here at Warsaw. After all, we are in the coal capital of Europe at a conference backed by fossil-heavy corporate sponsors. And bizarrely the Polish government has chosen to have the International Coal and Climate Summit simultaneously in Warsaw during the UNFCCC meeting. (Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up!)

    But yesterday we all had a moment of heart-wrenching clarity. As Yeb Saño, the lead negotiator from the Philippines, so powerfully reminded us: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not in Warsaw ,Where?

  • Will Australia cause a slip on the climate change stepping stones in Warsaw?

    Will Australia cause a slip on the climate change stepping stones in Warsaw?

    United Nations climate talks aim to make ground on a new global deal as Australia’s rhetoric turns negative
    Stepping stones across a river after heavy rain<br />

    Stepping stones across a river after heavy rain Photograph: Steve Bentley/Alamy

    The United Nations climate change negotiations taking place in Warsaw have been trivially described as a “stepping stone” towards the next big global deal to cut emissions which, some hope, will be greeted with a giant rubber stamp in Paris in 2015.

    But stepping stones can be slippery buggers – a careless stride, a bad choice of footwear or a shove from a mischievous co-traveller and you’re in the rushing rapids either to sink without trace or to desperately grab for the nearest immoveable object.

    And so it is with the Warsaw talks. Unless the stepping stones are carefully negotiated then the risk of Paris turning into some kind of “Copenhagen II: Failure Strikes Back” will look increasingly likely.

    But as Australia joins the 190-plus other countries navigating the climate stepping stones, it’s hard to know whether the Aussies are wearing rubber thongs (those are flip-flops to foreigners) or appropriately stout walking boots. Australia may even be readying its elbows to nudge a few people off balance.

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott has decided his government will not be sending any ministers to Poland’s capital, leaving the job of negotiating instead to a diplomat – the experienced Justin Lee, the country’s climate change ambassador.

    Many have seen the decision as a reflection of the Abbott Government’s antipathy towards genuine climate change action. Reports suggest that Abbott has also ruled out Australian support  to financially compensate poorer countries for the climate change impacts.

    Question marks on climate policy

    Back in Canberra, the future for domestic climate change and renewable energy policy has got more question marks over it than the Riddler’s wardrobe collection.

    The chief reason for Australia’s politician-free delegation, is that Mr Abbott’s cabinet, including his Environment Minister Greg Hunt, are busy trying to push through laws to repeal the country’s carbon price legislation and replace it with a “direct action plan”.

    Instead of charging the polluters such as coal-fired power generators a market-set price for their emissions and then spending that money on tax cuts and clean energy funding, “direct action” will spend $3.2 billion from taxpayer funds on projects that will help lower emissions.

    The Abbott Government says it is confident the policy will deliver its promised cut of five per cent on Australia’s emissions by 2020 (from the 2000 baseline), but two studies have suggested a few billion more would need to be spent.  Mr Abbott says no more money will be spent, which means the emissions promise will slide.

    Climate Action Tracker – a team of scientists and analysts who monitor the impacts of policies on emissions and global warming – reported yesterday from Warsaw that the Abbott Government’s plans would see Australia’s emissions rise by 12 per cent by 2020.

    This, the report said, was “consistent with a global pathway heading to temperature rises of 3.5 – 4C”. The report doesn’t count Australia’s greatest contribution to the climate problem – all the coal and gas which it drills, mines and exports – but then neither does the government.

    As I discussed on Planet Oz a few days ago, just two recently approved coal mines in Queensland will emit 3.7 billion tonnes of CO2-e over their proposed 30-year life spans – the equivalent of six years worth of the United Kingdom’s greenhouse gas footprint.

    Since being elected in September, the Abbott Government has also defunded its independent Climate Commission (which has re-emerged as the not-for-profit Climate Council), scrubbed the climate change department and slashed about $700 million from an agency to fund renewable energy research, development and deployment.

    Mr Abbott has also backed away from more ambitious targets in the future “in the absence of very serious like binding commitments from other countries” which, in reality, is practically the same position taken by the previous government.

    In signing the Copenhagen Accord, Australia also stands with 140 other countries in agreeing that global warming should be kept below 2C, even though current pledges make achieving this goal unlikely.

    Last December, Australia announced it had signed up for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol where the five per cent cut sits alongside pledges from the rest of the world.  This second stage started in January and will end in 2020, and commits Australia to cutting emissions to 99.5 per cent from their levels in 1990 (consistent with a five per cent cut with a baseline set at 2000).

    This is a target which a review from the country’s Climate Change Authority, tasked by the previous government to advise on targets, described as “not credible”. The CCA will soon be abolished. Yet even this “not credible” target looks credible compared to the remarkable target Australia managed to squeeze from the first incarnation of the Kyoto Protocol.

    Back in 1997, Australia’s delegation pulled what they saw as a masterstroke during post-midnight negotiations on the final day in Japan. Australia insisted on the inclusion of what later became known as the “Australia clause” – a clause which allowed countries with high emissions from land clearing to include those in their greenhouse gas accounts for the year 1990.

    This was significant because 1990 was the baseline year for calculating emissions targets. The Australian delegation knew that the country’s emissions from land clearing dropped dramatically post-1990. This meant that reaching the agreed target of “cutting” emissions by 108% by 2008 to 2012 was, in effect, effortless.

    Shadow environment minister at the time, Duncan Kerr, reportedly compared the “challenge” for Australia as being like a “three inch putt” in golf.

    Warsaw’s key aims

    But back to Warsaw (where I’ll be next week), where the main objective will be to set negotiations rolling towards a new agreement to be signed in 2015 and to take effect in 2020 when Kyoto runs out.

    Countries won’t be asked to lay down targets in Poland (this could come at a meeting of world leaders called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for next year) but negotiators will look to develop a methodology that can be used to decide a fair way to calculate future cuts for individual countries.

    Alongside this, negotiators will also be looking to progress on a negotiating track known as “loss and damage” where developing countries (in particular small island states and countries such as the typhoon-ravaged Philippines) are compensated for climate change impacts.

    If recent reports are to be believed, poorer countries around the world will get little sympathy from Australia, one of the world’s biggest coal exporters and where per capita emissions are among the highest on the planet.

    Rhetoric sours on climate

    In a report in The Australian newspaper, the Abbott Government is said to have already decided that it will not contribute money to any “wealth transfer” proposals being discussed in Warsaw.

    Mr Abbott has described such measures as “socialism masquerading as environmentalism“. As for carbon markets, Mr Abbott says they area “a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.”

    Mr Abbott also denies a quarter of a century of science showing the link between global warming and the increased risk of bushfire in Australia, as does his environment minister Greg Hunt.

    When Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said there was a clear link between climate change and bush fires, Mr Abbott said she was “talking through her hat“.

    I’m sure that In Warsaw, this negative rhetoric is going down like a thong-wearing Australian crossing a wet algae-covered stepping stone in a cyclone.

  • World Scorns Australian Government For Abandoning Climate Agenda And Cutting Funds For Renewables

    The Untold Story Of The Dangerous New Experiment Coal Companies Want To Bring To America

    The Untold Story Of The Dangerous New Experiment Coal Companies Want To Bring To America

    TransCanada Has Already Had To Fix 125 Dents And Sags In Southern Keystone Pipeline

    TransCanada Has Already Had To Fix 125 Dents And Sags In Southern Keystone Pipeline

    National Geographic Maps Our Coastline After We Melt All Earth's Ice

    National Geographic Maps Our Coastline After We Melt All Earth’s Ice

    World Scorns Australian Government For Abandoning Climate Agenda And Cutting Funds For Renewables

    By Ari Phillips on November 13, 2013 at 2:40 pm

    Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.CREDIT: Associated Press

    In Australia, temperatures are on track for the hottest year on record. But observing the government’s recent actions and rhetoric on climate change gives another impression entirely.

    Tony Abbott, the staunchly conservative Prime Minister, had an anti-climate agenda throughout his campaign over the summer. Since being elected in early September he has shown every indicator of following through with vows to scrap the country’s hard-won carbon emissions scheme. Then last week he seemingly shunned the UN climate talks, COP19 in Warsaw, by opting not to send a senior elected member of his government — a move that appears purely domestically motivated with little regard for the dire need of international cooperation in confronting climate change.

    Delegates felt similarly about Abbott’s decision, and when Australia further revealed that it would not be putting any new finance commitments towards action on climate mitigation and adaptation programs in third world and developing countries, the country was duly awarded the conference’s very first Fossil of the Day award. The award signifies Australia’s seeming lack of understanding and sense of purpose around the climate talks. The decision was especially salient in the wake of the current tragedy unfolding in the Philippines after the devastating and record-breaking Super Typhoon Haiyan and emotional plea for action on climate change from Philippine representative Naderev “Yeb” Saño at the COP19.

    This week Abbott continued his anti-climate crusade back home by abandoning Australia’s long-held emissions reduction target, taking further steps toward repealing the carbon emissions trading scheme, and even slashing funding for renewable energy.

    Speaking on Wednesday evening, after introducing eight bills that attempt to dismantle the carbon emissions scheme, Abbott confirmed that his government had no intention of reducing Australia’s emissions by more than five percent below 2000 levels by 2020.

    “We accept that climate change happens, that mankind, humanity, makes a contribution to it and it’s important that we take strong and effective action against it,” Abbott said. “This government has made no commitments to go further than that [five percent] and we certainly want to get emissions down as far as we reasonably can. But we are certainly in no way looking to make further binding commitments in the absence of very serious like-binding commitments in other countries and there’s no evidence of that.”

    A recent report by the Climate Change Authority — the independent advisory body set up by the former Labor government — found that the Abbott-led Coalition’s own agreed conditions for a tougher emissions target have been met and that the five percent target will leave Australia facing a near-impossible emissions reduction task after 2020.

    In response to Abbott’s recent moves, John Connor, CEO at the Climate Institute in Australia, said “Other countries aren’t waiting for binding international commitments to reduce pollution and invest in low carbon technologies — they are moving forward on their own accord. Australia has made international commitments to act in light with action of other countries. But our current action, and even five percent reductions, is inadequate when compared to countries like the US and China.”

    Along with emissions reductions targets, renewable energy funding is also getting cut. The details of the Abbott government’s carbon tax repeal legislation revealed that funding for Australia’s AU$3 billion renewable energy agency will be cut by AU$435 million, a nearly 15 percent reduction.

    The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), from which the cuts will come, was set up to fund renewable energy projects and research. According to RenewEconomy, while the funding for this year is maintained, the funding for the next two years is barely one fifth of what is was originally meant to be.

    The Clean Energy Council believes that deprivation of funds will hurt both the development of key technologies such as large-scale solar as well as emerging technologies such as solar thermal, marine energy, geothermal, and energy storage.

    “The proposed changes to ARENA’s funding would mean that many renewable energy companies will consider moving off-shore where support for renewable energy innovation is both stronger and more stable,” deputy CEO Kane Thornton said in a statement.

    The Abbott government favors a “direct action” plan over the current carbon emissions scheme, or carbon tax. Direct action includes an incentive fund to pay companies to increase energy efficiency along with other measures such as planting trees.

    John Grimes, Chief Executive of the Australian Solar Council, told Solar Novus Today that he thinks the work that ARENA does is an excellent example of Direct Action.

    “The solar industry takes the government at its word when it says it is committed to tackling climate change and supporting the renewable energy industry in Australia but so far we have only seen one half of the equation — the cuts. Where are the government’s positive policies for direct action on climate change?” Grimes said.

    While most countries observe the Australian government’s recent anti-climate agenda and posturing both domestically and internationally with dismay, the Canadian government, led by Conservative PM Stephen Harper, applauded Abbott’s move to axe the carbon tax.

    Like Abbott, Harper has secured power by catering to fossil-fuel interests and resisting any action the could potentially harm industry growth by limiting emissions in an effort to confront climate change.

    “Canada applauds the decision by Prime Minister Abbott to introduce legislation to repeal Australia’s carbon tax,” Paul Calandra, Parliamentary Secretary to Harper, said in a statement. “The Australian Prime Minister’s decision will be noticed around the world and sends an important message.”

  • Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated by Half

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    Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated by Half

    Filed under:

    — stefan @ 13 November 2013

    A new study by British and Canadian researchers shows that the global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated. The reason is the data gaps in the weather station network, especially in the Arctic. If you fill these data gaps using satellite measurements, the warming trend is more than doubled in the widely used HadCRUT4 data, and the much-discussed “warming pause” has virtually disappeared.

    Obtaining the globally averaged temperature from weather station data has a well-known problem: there are some gaps in the data, especially in the polar regions and in parts of Africa. As long as the regions not covered warm up like the rest of the world, that does not change the global temperature curve.

    But errors in global temperature trends arise if these areas evolve differently from the global mean. That’s been the case over the last 15 years in the Arctic, which has warmed exceptionally fast, as shown by satellite and reanalysis data and by the massive sea ice loss there. This problem was analysed for the first time by Rasmus in 2008 at RealClimate, and it was later confirmed by other authors in the scientific literature.

    The “Arctic hole” is the main reason for the difference between the NASA GISS data and the other two data sets of near-surface temperature, HadCRUT and NOAA. I have always preferred the GISS data because NASA fills the data gaps by interpolation from the edges, which is certainly better than not filling them at all.

    A new gap filler

    Now Kevin Cowtan (University of York) and Robert Way (University of Ottawa) have developed a new method to fill the data gaps using satellite data.

    It sounds obvious and simple, but it’s not. Firstly, the satellites cannot measure the near-surface temperatures but only those overhead at a certain altitude range in the troposphere. And secondly, there are a few question marks about the long-term stability of these measurements (temporal drift).

    Cowtan and Way circumvent both problems by using an established geostatistical interpolation method called kriging – but they do not apply it to the temperature data itself (which would be similar to what GISS does), but to the difference between satellite and ground data. So they produce a hybrid temperature field. This consists of the surface data where they exist. But in the data gaps, it consists of satellite data that have been converted to near-surface temperatures, where the difference between the two is determined by a kriging interpolation from the edges. As this is redone for each new month, a possible drift of the satellite data is no longer an issue.

    Prerequisite for success is, of course, that this difference is sufficiently smooth, i.e. has no strong small-scale structure. This can be tested on artificially generated data gaps, in places where one knows the actual surface temperature values but holds them back ​​in the calculation. Cowtan and Way perform extensive validation tests, which demonstrate that their hybrid method provides significantly better results than a normal interpolation on the surface data as done by GISS.

    The surprising result

    Cowtan and Way apply their method to the HadCRUT4 data, which are state-of-the-art except for their treatment of data gaps. For 1997-2012 these data show a relatively small warming trend of only 0.05 °C per decade – which has often been misleadingly called a “warming pause”. The new IPCC report writes:

    Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).

    But after filling the data gaps this trend is 0.12 °C per decade and thus exactly equal to the long-term trend mentioned by the IPCC.

    Cowtan

    The corrected data (bold lines) are shown in the graph compared to the uncorrected ones (thin lines). The temperatures of the last three years have become a little warmer, the year 1998 a little cooler.

    The trend of 0.12 °C is at first surprising, because one would have perhaps expected that the trend after gap filling has a value close to the GISS data, i.e. 0.08 °C per decade. Cowtan and Way also investigated that difference. It is due to the fact that NASA has not yet implemented an improvement of sea surface temperature data which was introduced last year in the HadCRUT data (that was the transition from the HadSST2 the HadSST3 data – the details can be found e.g. here and here). The authors explain this in more detail in their extensive background material. Applying the correction of ocean temperatures to the NASA data, their trend becomes 0.10 °C per decade, very close to the new optimal reconstruction.

    Conclusion

    The authors write in their introduction:

    While short term trends are generally treated with a suitable level of caution by specialists in the field, they feature significantly in the public discourse on climate change.

    This is all too true. A media analysis has shown that at least in the U.S., about half of all reports about the new IPCC report mention the issue of a “warming pause”, even though it plays a very minor role in the conclusions of the IPCC. Often the tenor was that the alleged “pause” raises some doubts about global warming and the warnings of the IPCC. We knew about the study of Cowtan & Way for a long time, and in the face of such media reporting it is sometimes not easy for researchers to keep such information to themselves. But I respect the attitude of the authors to only go public with their results once they’ve been published in the scientific literature. This is a good principle that I have followed with my own work as well.

    The public debate about the alleged “warming pause” was misguided from the outset, because far too much was read into a cherry-picked short-term trend. Now this debate has become completely baseless, because the trend of the last 15 or 16 years is nothing unusual – even despite the record El Niño year at the beginning of the period. It is still a quarter less than the warming trend since 1980, which is 0.16 °C per decade. But that’s not surprising when one starts with an extreme El Niño and ends with persistent La Niña conditions, and is also running through a particularly deep and prolonged solar minimum in the second half. As we often said, all this is within the usual variability around the long-term global warming trend and no cause for excited over interpretation.

  • Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows

    Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows

    A new study fills in the gaps missed by the Met Office, and finds the warming ‘pause’ is barely a speed bump
    Arctic iceberg

    The Met Office and Hadley Center don’t include Arctic temperatures, where global warming is happening fastest. Photograph: Jenny E Ross/Corbis

    A new paper published in The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society fills in the gaps in the UK Met Office HadCRUT4 surface temperature data set, and finds that the global surface warming since 1997 has happened more than twice as fast as the HadCRUT4 estimate. This short video abstract summarizes the study’s approach and results.

    The study, authored by Kevin Cowtan from the University of York and Robert Way from the University of Ottawa (who both also contribute to the climate science website Skeptical Science), notes that the Met Office data set only covers about 84 percent of the Earth’s surface. There are large gaps in its coverage, mainly in the Arctic, Antarctica, and Africa, where temperature monitoring stations are relatively scarce. These are shown in white in the Met Office figure below. Note the rapid warming trend (red) in the Arctic in the Cowtan & Way version, missing from the Met Office data set.

    Met Office vs. Cowtan & Way (2013) surface temperature coverage and trends Met Office vs. Cowtan & Way (2013) surface temperature coverage and trendsNASA’s GISTEMP surface temperature record tries to address the coverage gap by extrapolating temperatures in unmeasured regions based on the nearest measurements. However, the NASA data fails to include corrections for a change in the way sea surface temperatures are measured – a challenging problem that has so far only been addressed by the Met Office.

    The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project used a similar approach as NASA, but with a statistical method known as “kriging” to fill in the gaps by interpolating and extrapolating with existing measurements. However, BEST only applied this method to temperatures over land, not oceans.

    Dr. Cowtan is an interdisciplinary computational scientist who recognized some potential solutions to this temperature coverage gap problem.

    “Like many scientists, I’m an obsessive problem solver. Sometimes you see a problem and think ‘That’s mine, I can make a contribution here’”

    In their paper, Cowtan & Way apply a kriging approach to fill in the gaps between surface measurements, but they do so for both land and oceans. In a second approach, they also take advantage of the near-global coverage of satellite observations, combining the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) satellite temperature measurements with the available surface data to fill in the gaps with a ‘hybrid’ temperature data set. They found that the kriging method works best to estimate temperatures over the oceans, while the hybrid method works best over land and most importantly sea ice, which accounts for much of the unobserved region.

    Both of their new surface temperature data sets show significantly more warming over the past 16 years than HadCRUT4. This is mainly due to HadCRUT4 missing accelerated Arctic warming, especially since 1997.

    Cowtan & Way investigate the claim of a global surface warming ‘pause’ over the past 16 years by examining the trends from 1997 through 2012. While HadCRUT4 only estimates the surface warming trend at 0.046°C per decade during that time, and NASA puts it at 0.080°C per decade, the new kriging and hybrid data sets estimate the trend during this time at 0.11 and 0.12°C per decade, respectively.

    These results indicate that the slowed warming of average global surface temperature is not as significant as previously believed. Surface warming has slowed somewhat, in large part due to more overall global warming being transferred to the oceans over the past decade. However, these sorts of temporary surface warming slowdowns (and speed-ups) occur on a regular basis due to short-term natural influences.

    The results of this study also have bearing on some recent research. For example, correcting for the recent cool bias indicates that global surface temperatures are not as far from the average of climate model projections as we previously thought, and certainly fall within the range of individual climate model temperature simulations. Recent studies that concluded the global climate is a bit less sensitive to the increased greenhouse effect than previously believed may also have somewhat underestimated the actual climate sensitivity.

    This is of course just one study, as Dr. Cowtan is quick to note.

    “No difficult scientific problem is ever solved in a single paper. I don’t expect our paper to be the last word on this, but I hope we have advanced the discussion.”

    The perceived recent slowdown of global surface temperatures remains an interesting scientific question. It appears to be due to some combination of internal factors (more global warming going into the oceans), external factors (relatively low solar activity and high volcanic activity), and an underestimate of the actual global surface warming.

    How much each factor is contributing is being investigated by extensive scientific research, but the Cowtan & Way paper suggests the latter explanation is a significant contributor. The temporary slowing of global surface warming appears to be smaller than we currently believe.

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  • Last week, Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines — and left a path of destruction and tragedy in its wake. More than 10,000 people are feared dead.

    Bill McKibben – 350.org <350@350.org>
    10:02 AM (21 minutes ago)
    to me

    Friends,

    Last week, Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines — and left a path of destruction and tragedy in its wake. More than 10,000 people are feared dead.

    Lines of communication are in still in chaos, but we managed to get in touch with Zeph, our amazing 350 Southeast Asia Coordinator in the Philippines. Here’s what she just emailed to our team:

    “This lends urgency to our work. I think we need to be twice as strong as Typhoon Haiyan.”

    If we need to be twice as strong, let’s do two things immediately:

    1) Raise some money for direct relief to those in need.

    These are our brothers and sisters in this movement. Below this email are some pictures from 350 actions across the islands over the years. This storm is a blow to a place already reeling from the effects of climate change. Metro Manila has seen repeated flooding from milder storms; there’s been a severe outbreak of dengue fever this year in the Philippines.

    Among the pictures below you’ll see a group of volunteer 350 activists from Tacloban, one of the cities most ravaged by Haiyan. We don’t know the fate of all of our friends there, but we do know they need serious help now — so please do send what you can through direct relief organizations by clicking here.

    2) Raise our voices.

    Governments are meeting in Warsaw the next two weeks for the annual UN climate negotiations. This ritual has dragged on for years without conclusion, largely because the great powers have done so little. On days like these, their inaction amounts to mockery. So we’ve setup a page where you can add your name to a petition that our staff will hand-deliver to negotiators at the UN climate summit. In short, we need to let world leaders know that their inaction is wrecking the world, and the time is long past for mere talk — we need action, and we need it now.

    Last Monday at the UN climate summit, Mr. Yeb Sano, the lead negotiator of the Philippines, urged his fellow negotiators to take a bold stance. During the opening session of the summit, he committed to fast throughout the two weeks of the talks until countries make real commitments around climate finance and reducing emissions.

    Sano said, “let Poland, let Warsaw, be remembered as the place where we truly cared to stop this madness. Can humanity rise to this occasion? I still believe we can.”

    I still believe we can too. Please sign on and donate whatever you can to the relief effort.

    Many thanks,

    Bill McKibben for 350.org

    P.S. Typhoon Haiyan is a stark reminder of why the movement for bold climate action more important than ever — so please do get involved in the National Day of Climate Action this Sunday in Australia.

    More Info and Links

    Pictures of 350 Actions in The Philippines

    (If you can’t see the images below, make sure to click “Turn on Images” in your email program. Here are some instructions if you’re not sure how. Or, just click here to view the images in your web browser.)

    Philippines 350 Actions

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