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  • 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.

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    “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    However, the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, by the time the climate body issued its report.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

  • Opposition seeks migration rethink

    Opposition seeks migration rethink

    STEPHANIE PEATLING

    January 24, 2010

     

    AUSTRALIA should consider whether immigration levels can continue to remain at existing levels as part of a comprehensive population policy to determine how many people the country can support, the federal Opposition says.

    Infrastructure, housing and environmental sustainability should be considered when setting the numbers of people allowed to immigrate each year, immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said.

    ”Population policy is a legitimate debate we have to have and it should be free from any suggestion that it’s related to race,” Mr Morrison said.

    Population policy was a ”void” that needed to be filled, he said. ”It’s getting to the point where we can’t afford not to [have one]. We can’t just keep going as is.”

    Treasury modelling released last year forecast that the population would increase by more than half to 35 million by the middle of the century.

    The increases will come from migration, more women reaching child-bearing age and higher fertility rates.

     

    Prime Minister Kevin Rudd welcomed the modelling, saying he was in favour of a ”big Australia”. But it prompted criticism from Labor backbencher Kelvin Thomson, who has asked whether Australia can support such a large number of people. Mr Thomson has called for dramatic cuts to immigration levels.

    Mr Morrison said he did not believe Australia should ”shut the door” to immigrants but ”given that immigration accounts for almost 60 per cent of population growth, we can do something about it”.

    He acknowledged population was a difficult issue because it was often railroaded into a debate about racism. ”I don’t want to see it frustrated by people either bringing that element to the debate or trying to stop that debate by attributing that motive to people,” Mr Morrison said. ”The debate is so tough because it’s so easy for people to bring that element into it.”

    Mr Morrison’s comments follow a speech given by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on Friday night in which he said Australians were worried about the rise in the number of boat people, the ability of migrants to obey the law and the strain arrivals put on the nation’s resources.

    Mr Morrison called on state and local governments to take a greater role in planning for the numbers of people living in their areas. ”The Federal Government has to take responsibility for (immigration numbers) but state and local governments need to be more part of how that decision is made because they’re the ones who have to live with it,” he said.

    Concerns about roads, housing, the strain on the health system and environmental sustainability all needed to be considered as part of a population policy, he said.

  • History of the electric vehicle

    Electricity is one of the oldest automobile propulsion methods still in use today. The invention of the electric vehicle is attributed to various people, including the Hungarian inventor of the electric motor, Ányos Jedlik, Vermont blacksmith Thomas Davenport, Professor Sibrandus Stratingh of Groningen, the Netherlands, and Scotsmen Robert Davidson and Robert Anderson. The invention of improved battery technology, including efforts by Gaston Plante in France in 1865, as well as his fellow countryman Camille Faure in 1881, paved the way for electric cars to flourish in Europe. France and the United Kingdom were the first nations to support the widespread development of electric vehicles, while the lack of natural fossil resources in Switzerland resulted in the rapid electrification of its railway network to reduce its dependence on foreign energy. English inventor Thomas Parker, who was responsible for innovations such as electrifying the London Underground, overhead tramways in Liverpool and Birmingham, and the smokeless fuel coalite, claimed to have perfected a working electric car as early as 1884. Before the pre-eminence of internal combustion engines, electric automobiles also held many speed and distance records. Among the most notable of these records was the breaking of the 100 km/h (62 mph) speed barrier, by Camille Jenatzy on April 29, 1899 in his ‘rocket-shaped’ vehicle Jamais Contente, which reached a top speed of 105.88 km/h (65.79 mph). Before the 1920s, electric automobiles were competing with petroleum-fueled cars for urban use of a quality service car.[2]

    German electric car, 1904, with the chauffeur on top

    It was not until 1895 that Americans began to devote attention to electric vehicles, after A.L. Ryker introduced the first electric tricycles to the US, many innovations followed, and interest in motor vehicles increased greatly in the late 1890s and early 1900s. In 1897, electric vehicles found their first commercial application as a fleet of electrical New York City taxis, built by the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company of Philadelphia, was established. Electric cars were produced in the US by Anthony Electric, Baker, Columbia, Anderson, Edison [disambiguation needed], Studebaker, Riker, and others during the early 20th century. In 1917, the first gasoline-electric hybrid car was released by the Woods Motor Vehicle Company of Chicago. The hybrid was a commercial failure, proving to be too slow for its price, and too difficult to service.

    1912 Detroit Electric advertisement

    Despite their relatively slow speed, electric vehicles had a number of advantages over their early-1900s competitors. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. Changing gears on gasoline cars was the most difficult part of driving, and electric vehicles did not require gear changes. Electric cars found popularity among well-heeled customers who used them as city cars, where their limited range proved to be even less of a disadvantage. The cars were also preferred because they did not require a manual effort to start, as did gasoline cars which featured a hand crank to start the engine. Electric cars were often marketed as suitable vehicles for women drivers due to this ease of operation.

    Thomas Edison and an electric car in 1913 (courtesy of the National Museum of American History)

    Acceptance of electric cars was initially hampered by a lack of power infrastructure, but by 1912, many homes were wired for electricity, enabling a surge in the popularity of the cars. At the turn of the century, 40 percent of American automobiles were powered by steam, 38 percent by electricity, and 22 percent by gasoline. 33,842 electric cars were registered in the United States, and America became the country where electric cars had gained the most acceptance. Sales of electric cars peaked in 1912.

  • 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.

  • Glowing walls could kill off the light bulb

     

    The Carbon Trust has awarded a £454,000 grant to Lomox, a Welsh company that is developing the organic light-emitting diode technology. The trust said it would be two and a half times more efficient than energysaving bulbs and could make a big contribution to meeting Britain’s target of cutting carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020. Indoor lighting accounts for a sixth of total electricity use.

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    The chemical coating, which can be applied in the form of specially treated wallpaper or simply painted straight on to walls, can also be used for flat-screen televisions, computers and mobile phone displays.

    As the system uses only between three and five volts, it can be powered by solar panels or batteries. Lomox, which will use the grant to prove the durability of the technology, believes it could be used in the first instance to illuminate road signs or barriers where there is no mains electricity.

    Ken Lacey, the chief executive of Lomox, said that the first products would go on sale in 2012. “The light is a very natural, sunlight-type of lighting with the full colour range. It gives you all kinds of potential for how you do lighting,” he said.

    Although organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have been available for several years, Mr Lacey said that concerns over cost and durability had prevented further development. He said that Lomox had developed a much cheaper process and discovered a combination of chemicals that were not vulnerable to the oxidation that shortened the operating life span of other types of organic LEDs.

    Mr Lacey said the technology could be used to make flexible screens that could be rolled up after use, or carried into a presentation, for example.

    Mark Williamson, director of innovations at the Carbon Trust, said: “Lighting is a major producer of carbon emissions. This technology has the potential to produce ultra-efficient lighting for a wide range of applications, tapping into a huge global market.

    “It’s a great example of the innovation that makes the UK a hotbed of clean technology development.”

  • Qatar to use biofuels? What about the country’s energy consumption?

     

    Qataris have the highest carbon footprint on the planet. The country’s per-capita emissions from burning fossil fuels are way ahead of any other nation, and almost three times those of everybody’s poster bad boy, the US. This is all the more extraordinary since Qatar’s electricity is mostly generated from burning natural gas, which has half the emissions of coal.

    Those emissions have also risen almost fourfold since 1990. But, thanks to the vagaries of the Kyoto Protocol, the country is not penalised for this. Qatar is by some measures the second richest country in the world, but for the purposes of climate law, it is classified as a developing nation. And so it has no emissions targets.

    How come Qatar’s emissions are so high? The main reason is its soaring use of energy. By the end of next year Qatar will have six times the electricity-generating capacity it had as recently as 1995. One outlet for all this power is industry, based round its huge natural gas reserves. Just this week, the national gas company announced a deal with ExxonMobil for a new $6bn (£3.69bn) petrochemicals plant.

    A lot of Qatar’s gas is exported as liquefied natural gas – the country is the world’s largest producer of the stuff. It’s a fairly clean fuel at our end, but takes a lot of energy to liquefy in Qatar. So to that extent Qatar is taking a hit to allow Europe and North America to cut their emissions – handy for helping us meet the Kyoto Protocol, but not much good for the planet.

    The Qatari government recently used this argument to downplay its emissions. In its recent Human Development Report, it called them “relatively modest”.

    But that is not the real story. Those Qatari emissions are so extraordinarily high for another reason. Qataris just don’t seem to care.

    Sure, there is the biofuels initiative from the state airline. Sure, a year ago Qatar held a conference to discuss how to cut its emissions without damaging the economy.

    But if its rulers were serious about cutting emissions they might charge for their energy supplies. Yes, you read that right. Qatari households get their electricity free. So why would they cut down on how much they burn?

    Oh, and they get their water free as well. And in Qatar, even more than most places in the Middle East, water is liquid electricity. Almost every drop coming out of the taps is produced from desalinating seawater. This is extremely expensive in energy – and therefore expensive in carbon emissions.

    But because the water is free, Qataris waste it like, well, water. Despite being a desert state with virtually no rainfall, the country has among the highest per-capita water uses in the world. Use averages around 400 litres per head per day. According to Hassan Al-Mohannadi, a geographer at the University of Qatar, people in “big, often palatial houses” consume up to 35,000 litres per day.

    Even here, they have a way of blaming foreigners. According to Hassan Al-Mohannadi, one reason water use is so high is that “the large number of foreign domestic servants, who come from water-rich countries, are not educated in water conservation”.

    Water consumption continues to rise, so Qatar is building more desalination plants. If Qatar was serious about cutting its carbon footprint it would do something about water demand. At the least, it might charge for the stuff.

    Will Qatar’s emissions carry on up? Looks Likely. Electricity demand is currently rising by about 7% a year. That is not as fast as the national economy, which is growing by 11% annually – the fastest boom on the planet.

    But stopping this out-of-control carbon-emitting juggernaut will take more than an Airbus full of biofuels.