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  • Nitrous oxide concerns cloud future of biofuels

     

    The road transport industry is also keen to increase the use of biofuels, and an EU directive last year requires 10% of all road transport fuel to come from plants by 2020. Theoretically the fuels are carbon-neutral: when burned they only release the carbon dioxide they absorbed while the plants were growing.

    Campaigners argue biofuels are not as sustainable as they seem and say more biofuels would mean the destruction of virgin forests – and the release of their stored carbon – to create agricultural land.

    Heinz Ossenbrink, of the EC’s Institute of Energy (IoE), said research carried out by EU-funded scientists increasingly pointed to a long-term problem for large-scale biofuels use, namely the emissions of nitrous oxide. This is about 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and is released through use of fertilisers to grow biofuel crops. “Some of the older studies don’t take that into account,” he said. “We have now come to less positive values for biofuels.”

    The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does consider the production of nitrous oxide when deciding on the sustainibility of particular biofuels, but errors in its calculations are known to be large.”That’s because there’s such a huge local variation – [emissions] could double from one end of the field to the other and hundreds of times between the fields in the same country and thousands of times around the world,” said Robert Edwards, of the renewable energies unit at the IoE.

  • A 480 Pound train ticket to Copenhagen makes it hard to care about the climate

     

    There are two issues here: the expense of the train journey and the cheapness of the flight. In combination they force most people to do the wrong thing, even when they want to do the right one. You have to be either very determined or stark raving mad (you can draw your own conclusions) to take the train, not the plane.

    Continental trains are mostly very good, and quite a bit cheaper than the UK’s, but they are still twice as expensive as they ought to be. If EU governments are as serious as they claim to be about tackling climate change, they would be cancelling their budgets for upgrading roads and putting the money into subsidising train journeys instead. According to UK government figures, a passenger’s journey by car produces seven times as much carbon dioxide as the same journey by train.

    But as well as making train travel easier, governments should also be making flying harder. The only measure which is likely to work is a restriction on the number of available landing slots. This would put an overall cap on aviation emissions. It would also mean that flights became more expensive.

    This is portrayed by people who don’t want any action taken to prevent climate breakdown as an attack on the poor, but the reality is very different. According to the comprehensive analysis conducted by Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, 46% of people in “higher managerial or professional” occupations fly at least three times a year, while 74% of the long-term unemployed don’t fly at all. Sixty-four per cent of all flights from the five busiest UK airports were made by people whose income in 2004 was £28,750 or more. That’s well above the average income for that year. In global terms it places the majority of passengers in a very small elite.

    Cheap flights allow executives, second home owners and those who can afford to take several foreign holidays a year (often the same people) to pursue their extravagant lifestyles at very little cost to themselves, but at a great cost to the rest of the world.

    The market alone won’t sort this out. The new report by the Committee on Climate Change points out that even with a carbon price of £200 per tonne, flights would grow by 115% between now and 2050, blowing many of the savings the government makes in other sectors. Only a cap on landing slots will do. Otherwise even the environmentalists gathering to discuss this problem will continue to be encouraged to contribute to it.

    monbiot.com

  • World’s largest ice sheet melting faster than expected

     

    The measurements suggest the polar continent could soon contribute more to global sea level rises than Greenland, which is shedding more than 250bn tonnes of ice a year, adding 0.7mm to annual sea level rises.

    Satellite data from the whole of Antarctica show the region is now losing around 190bn tonnes of ice a year. Uncertainties in the measurements mean the true ice loss could be between 113bn and 267bn tonnes.

    “If the current trend continues or gets worse, Antarctica could become the largest contributor to sea level rises in the world. It could start to lose more ice than Greenland within a few years,” said Jianli Chen, of the University of Texas at Austin.

    Chen’s team used data from the Nasa mission to see how Earth’s gravitational pull varied month to month between April 2002 and January 2009. Measurements taken over the south pole reflect changes in the mass of the Antarctic ice sheets.

    The survey confirmed the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting rapidly with the loss of around 132bn tonnes of ice a year, but revealed unexpected melting in the larger East Antarctic ice sheet.

    The scientists used a computer model to take account of ongoing movements in the Earth’s surface caused by the retreat of glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Uncertainties in the model gave the scientists only a broad estimate of ice loss in the East Antarctic ice sheet of between 5bn and 109bn tonnes a year.

    Chen said that warmer ocean waters may have triggered the melting by seeping under the ice sheet and making it slide more easily over the rock it rests on.

    Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, Chen’s team reports that Wilkes Land on the East Antarctic ice sheet was stable until 2006, but has since begun to lose ice. Another region on the ice sheet, Enderby Land, was thickening until 2006, but has since started to melt. “We’re seeing these kinds of climate change effects all around the world now,” Chen said.

  • Climate change? Well, we’ll be dead by then

     

    Suggesting that personal behaviour change will have a big role to play, when we know that telling people to do the right thing is a weak way to change behaviour, is an incomplete story: you need policy changes to make better behaviour easier, and we all understand that fresh fruit on sale at schools is more effective than telling children not to eat sweets.

    This is exacerbated because climate science is difficult. We could discuss everything you needed to know about MMR and autism in an hour. Climate change will take two days of your life, for a relatively superficial understanding: if you’re interested, I’d recommend the IPCC website.

    On top of that, we don’t trust governments on science, because we know they distort it. We see that a minister will sack Professor David Nutt, if the evidence on the relative harms of drugs is not to the government’s taste. We see the government brandish laughable reports to justify DNA retention by the police with flawed figures, suspicious missing data, and bogus arguments.

    We know that evidence-based policy is window dressing, so now, when they want us to believe them on climate science, we doubt.

    Then, of course, the media privilege foolish contrarian views because they have novelty value, and also because “established” views get confused with “establishment” views, and anyone who comes along to have a pop at those gets David v Goliath swagger.

    But the key to all of this is the recurring mischief of criticisms mounted against climate change. I am very happy to affirm that I am not a giant expert on climate change: I know a bit, and I know that there’s not yet been a giant global conspiracy involving almost every scientist in the world (although I’d welcome examples).

    More than all that, I can spot the same rhetorical themes re-emerging in climate change foolishness that you see in aids denialism, homeopathy, and anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists.

    Among all these, reigning supreme, is the “zombie argument”: arguments which survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down. “Homeopathy worked for me,” and the rest.

     

    Zombie arguments survive, immortal and resistant to all refutation, because they do not live or die by the normal standards of mortal arguments. There’s a huge list of them at realclimate.org, with refutations. There are huge lists of them everywhere. It makes no difference.

    “CO2 isn’t an important greenhouse gas”, “Global warming is down to the sun”, “what about the cooling in the 1940s?” says your party bore. “Well,” you reply, “since the last time you raised this, I checked, and there were loads of sulphites in the air in the 1940s to block out the sun, made from the slightly different kind of industrial pollution we had then, and the odd volcano, so that’s been answered already, ages ago.”

    And they knew that. And you know they knew you could find out, but they went ahead anyway and wasted your time, and worse than that, you both know they’re going to do it again, to some other poor sap. And that is rude.

  • China rejects draft climate deal

     

    Under the draft agreement, rapidly industrialising countries such as China, India and Brazil would still be considered developing nations but would have to commit to abatement measures and would not receive the same compensation as poor nations.

    “China believes priority should be given to making clear and specific arrangements for reduction, adaptation, technology transfer and financial support,” Mr Zhang told The Weekend Australian in an exclusive interview yesterday as Chinese delegates in Denmark cited the outrage of developing nations against the secret arrangement.

    “To be frank, now the negotiations at the meeting are moving slowly and we believe the main reason for that is the developed nations and that they have retreated on their position regarding key issues such as mitigation, funding and technological transfer,” Mr Zhang said.

    The Chinese position is providing no room to raise its carbon emissions target and to accept any binding agreement. It is demanding new technology regardless of patents, and rejects the view that it should be labelled a developed nation. The draft proposal, which involved the Danish leader and Mr Rudd as a “friend of the chair of the conference”, “was not the overwhelming view of developed countries and was also a personal view not representing the view of his country”, Mr Zhang said. “The so-called draft has been widely criticised by the developing camp through the group of 77, which truly demonstrates this draft was made by a very small number of countries in isolation, and there are a lot of problems to be addressed,” he said.

    Mr Zhang, speaking at the embassy in Canberra, said the European Union nations had promised to cut emissions by 30 per cent but were now saying this relied on what the developing nations committed to. He said a number of European nations had failed to meet their obligations under Kyoto, some by up to 30 per cent.

    “In the meantime they have tried hard to impose unreasonable requirements on developing countries. But developed countries should take the lead in undertaking reduction targets and honouring their commitments to provide funding and technology support to developing countries.

    “While they fail to deliver on all of these they are trying to put more pressure on the developing nations and shift the focus of the priority of the Copenhagen conference,” he said.

    Mr Zhang said China was taking its own action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and was taking Copenhagen seriously, with more than 200 Chinese delegates at the summit.

    He said China had committed to reduce carbon emissions “to cut per unit GDP energy consumption by 40 to 45 per cent and these targets represent the maximum targets China can achieve”, despite calls from developed nations for the target to be lifted.

    The Chinese government also rejected any proposals to change China’s designation as a developing nation when it came to financial aid for climate change, either now or even by 2050.

    Mr Zhang said while many people saw the cities of Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen, they were not representative of the rest of China, which, according to the UN, still had 150 million people living below the poverty line who had to face harsh winters.

    “I can tell you that the per capita GDP in China now is barely over $US2000 ($2183),” he said.

    “For China to achieve development there should be a reasonable level of rising energy consumption and a reasonable level of emissions for China and we believe climate change should be tackled in a way that does not hamper development.”

    But the ambassador said the proposed $US10bn a year for developing countries to fight climate change should not be seen as “financial aid” but as “emissions redress or redemption” for the “luxury emissions” the West had enjoyed.

    “We have a right to development,” he said.

  • Climate change puts us all in the same boat. One hole will sink us

     

     

    But despite the mounting evidence of negative impacts, reaching a deal will not be easy. It will require extraordinary political courage – both to cut the deal and to communicate its necessity to the public.

     

    A mindset shift is required. Distrust and competition persist between regions and nations, manifest in a “no, you must show your cards first” attitude that has dogged the negotiations leading up to Copenhagen. This has to be overcome.

     

    A deal that is not based on the best scientific evidence will be nothing better than a line in the sand as the tide comes in. But short-term considerations, including from special interest groups and electoral demands, are working against long-term solutions.

     

    Success in reaching a deal will require leaders to think for future generations, and for citizens other than their own. It will require them to think about inclusive and comprehensive arrangements, not just a patched up compilation of national or regional interests.

     

    A deal that stops at rhetoric and does not actually meet the needs of the poorest and most climate vulnerable countries simply will not work. The climate cannot be “fixed” in one continent and not another. Climate change does not respect national borders. We are all in the same boat; a hole at one end will sink us all.

     

    For it to work, climate justice must be at the heart of the agreement. An unfair deal will come unstuck. Industrialised countries such as the United States must naturally take the lead in reducing emissions and supporting others to follow suit, but developing countries like India or China also have an increasing responsibility to do so as their economies continue to grow.

     

    Tragically, it is the poorest and least responsible who are having to bear the brunt of the climate challenge as rising temperatures exacerbate poverty, hunger and vulnerability to disease for billions of people. They need both immediate help to strengthen their climate resilience as well as long-term support to enable them to adapt to changing weather patterns, reduce deforestation, and pursue low-emissions, clean energy growth strategies.

     

    The deal must include a package of commitments in line with the science and the imperative of reducing global emissions by 50-85% relative to 2000 levels by 2050.

     

    This requires a schedule for richer countries to move to 25-40% emission cuts by 2020 from 1990 baselines; clear measures for emerging economies to cut emissions intensity; and clarity about both immediate and longer term finance and technical support for developing countries, notably the poorest and most vulnerable among them.

     

    Will we get there? The targets that have been proposed for emission reductions by many industrialised countries such as the EU, Japan and Norway are encouraging, as are those being made by the big emerging economies including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Korea.

     

    Recent announcements by the US on emission targets represent a significant shift and provide a basis for scaling up commitments in the coming years. So does the recognition by emerging economies that they also have a role in supporting the most vulnerable countries.

     

    Welcome too are the proposals for financial support to LDCs and small island states made at the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad, as well as proposals by the Netherlands, France, and the UK, among others.

     

    But much greater specificity on finance is needed. Existing official development assistance (ODA) commitments to help the poorest countries meet the Millennium Development Goals need to be met. And significant additional finance that is separate from and additional to ODA needs to be mobilised to support them meet the incremental costs generated by climate change.

     

    A deal that is not clear on the finance will be both unacceptable to developing countries, and unworkable. Finding the additional resources and communicating its necessity will not be easy, particularly in the current economic climate, but it must be done.

     

    A successful deal could incentivise not only good stewardship of forests and more sustainable land use, but also massive investment into low-carbon growth and a healthier planet, including in sectors such as energy generation, construction and transportation.

     

    And it could usher in an era of qualitatively new international co-operation based on common but differentiated responsibilities – not just for managing climate change, but for human development, social justice and global security.

     

    Ultimately, at stake is whether our leaders can work to help us save ourselves from … well, from ourselves. The legacy of today’s politicians will be determined in the weeks to come.

     

    • Kofi Annan was UN secretary-general from 1997 to 2006. He now chairs the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Africa Progress Panel and is president of the Global Humanitarian Forum

     

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