Officers from the Department have been at the site since last night.
Blood samples from the birds are being analysed at the WA Chemistry Centre.
The Department says it is monitoring some of the remaining live birds from the area to work out what caused the deaths.
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a convenor of the symposium, likened the urgency for action on climate change to the threat of thermonuclear weapons during the Cold War.
“We are facing a crisis as deep as the arms race of the 1950s and 1960s and the Cold War notion of mutually assured destruction,” he said. “Today we have mutually assured increases in greenhouse gases.”
He said the memorandum echoed a manifesto signed in 1955 when Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and nine other intellectuals called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict.
“Global climate change represents a threat of similar proportions and should be addressed in a similar manner,” the memorandum said.
The extent of the climate threat is also highlighted today by a report that suggests global warming is already killing an estimated 300,000 people per year – equivalent to the loss of life that resulted from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The report from the World Humanitarian Forum, an independent organisation led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, claims that 90 per cent of those deaths are related to gradual environmental degradation resulting from the warming climate – principally malnutrition, diarrhoea and malaria. The remaining 10 per cent are linked with weather-related disasters.
The study, due to be presented by Mr Annan, was reviewed by distinguished experts in the field, including Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.
It projects that by 2030, the number of annual deaths directly resulting from the warming global climate will rise to 500,000.
The St James’s Palace memorandum was agreed after three days of discussions attended by 60 leading scientists, policymakers and intellectuals. Participants included Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary and Nobel physics laureate, Wole Solinka, the Nigerian literature laureate, and Wangari Maathai, the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The symposium was organised by the Potsdam Institute and the University of Cambridge Program for Sustainability Leadership, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales.
The memorandum called for an emergency package of financial support for tropical forest nations, as the loss of forests is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions.
“The St James’s Palace memorandum calls for a global deal on climate change that matches the scale and urgency of the human, ecological and economic crises facing the world today,” the final document says.
“It urges governments at all levels, as well as the scientific community, to join with business and civil society to seize hold of this historic opportunity to transform our carbon-intensive economies into sustainable and equitable systems. We must recognise the fierce urgency of now.”
“Other scientists say the sea could rise metres in the next century. The director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at
the Australian national University, Professor Will Steffen, told the inquiry there was huge uncertainty among scientists about the rate
of sea level rise and ‘the science … has progressed significantly since the publication of the IPCC (report) last year’. The observed
rate of sea-level rise is tracking at or near the upper limits of the envelope of IPCC projections. With no further changes in the rate of
sea level rise, this would suggest that sea levels in 2100 would be 0.75m to one metre above the 2000 levels. However, there was
further uncertainty over the loss of polar ice sheets, particularly Greenland, which was melting rapidly. The concern is that a
threshold may soon be passed beyond which we’ll be committed to losing most or all of the Greenland ice sheet. This would lead to
6.0m of sea level rise (with enormous implications for Australia), although the time frame required to lose this amount of ice is
highly uncertain, ranging from a century to a millennium or more.”
“Insurance Australia Group actuary Tony Coleman said preliminary estimates of the value of property, homes, businesses and public
infrastructure vulnerable to sea inundation ranged from $50 billion to $150 billion. The figure depends upon the extent of sea-level
rise assumed and the effectiveness or otherwise of potential mitigation measures.”
Professor Will Steffen, Australian National University Article : West Australian (Page 18), 17 Oct 2008
He is also one of the most outspoken of mainstream climate scientists, regularly and publicly clashing with his political masters in recent years.
But in his April testimony to the US Congress Hansen this time criticised the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) . Its newly published advice on predicted rises in sea levels, Hansen argued, was far from adequate.
If the NASA scientist’s calculations are correct, we face a problem far more serious than previously suggested. Hansen is convinced that if we continue to burn fossil fuels relentlessly there is no question coastal nations worldwide will experience unprecedented flooding.
Ice-cap row
Hansen’s dispute with the IPCC centres on what he suggests is an overly cautious approach to factoring in the speed at which the ice caps are melting.
In the IPCC’s 2001 report it predicted a sea level rise of about 0.7 metres from all causes by 2100. But the new IPCC report excludes melting ice sheets so gives lower estimates.
” Greenland and west Antarctica are home to the most vulnerable ice-sheets. If either sheet melted entirely it would raise sea levels by seven to eight metres.”
Hansen has himself taken a brave stab at estimating this most important and very uncertain component, suggesting that under typical “business as usual” scenarios the more likely figure by 2100 is several metres.
There is little argument over the volumes of ice and water involved. Scientists are confident they have fairly accurately calculated the amount of water now locked up in the great ice-caps of Greenland and Antarctica.
Greenland and west Antarctica are home to the most vulnerable ice-sheets. If either sheet melted entirely it would raise sea levels by seven to eight metres.
According to the IPCC, a global temperature increase of more than about 2°C would see Greenland’s ice-sheet eventually melt completely. And its projections show this degree of temperature change is now very likely by the end of the century.
But while there is no doubt about the final outcome, the uncertainty for the IPCC is over how fast Greenland’s ice-sheet will melt. The rates of all the melting processes are still very uncertain, nor are they properly represented by conventional models for predicting melting rates (see Extras: the science below).
” With the scientific community divided, such an uncertain forecast will leave policy makers struggling to plan ahead.”
Given this uncertainty, the IPCC in its report declined to make any quantitative estimates of sea level rises that might result, even within wide error bounds. What it did give was estimates of the smaller but much better understood effects of thermal expansion as the oceans warm, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6m by 2100.
This, Hansen thinks, was a serious error. He argues there is a major risk that sea levels will rise by several metres this century so a cursory look at the IPPC’s safe prediction of less than 1m gives an altogether false sense of security.
Faced with a major controversy, and real and serious uncertainty, the official watchdog has failed to bark, and Hansen is trying to fill the vacuum it has left. With the scientific community divided, such an uncertain forecast will leave policy makers struggling to plan ahead.
Stern warning
Previous considerations of risks associated with rising sea levels, including the Stern Report, have tended to stick with the conventional “maybe a metre per century”.
Nevertheless all agree it is a serious problem that will either cause massive damage or incur massive costs in adaptations needed to prevent damage – or both.
The rise in sea levels since 1900 has been modest at about 0.2m, mainly due to the relatively small effects of thermal expansion and melting mountain glaciers. But the now rapid melting of large ice-sheets is causing increased concern.
A separate issue for areas a few metres above sea level is flooding caused by heavy rainfall, but in low lying areas such as Bangladesh this combined with rising sea levels is making the overall effect much worse.
There is serious doubt that we can afford to protect the world’s major coastal cities – London, New York, Mumbai and Shanghai – against sea-level rise of several metres.
According to Hansen, large areas of Florida, East Anglia and the Netherlands, as well as many oceanic islands and most of Bangladesh, could be inundated within the lifetime of children now being born.
Speaking exclusively to ClimateChangeCorp.com, Hansen said: “Energy departments the world round don’t get it yet. We should not be building any new coal-fired power plants that do not capture and store the CO2.”
If we are to retain any hope of keeping sea levels relatively steady, he argues, those power plants will need to be bulldozed over the next few decades.
Damage limitation
If there is a real risk that this problem may now be several times worse than previously thought, it strengthens the case made by Stern that mitigation – reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions – represents an excellent investment, even if the cost of doing so is far from trivial.
In Hansen’s view, allowing the atmospheric CO2 level to rise even to 450 parts per million (ppm), corresponding to a global warming of about 2°C, may be to go too far.
Atmospheric CO2 is currently about 380ppm, already far above the pre-industrial level of 280ppm, and rising at almost 2ppm per year.
This gives us at most just a few decades to take drastic action. Within 50 years, but preferably sooner, we would have to cut global CO2 emissions by, at the least, a factor of four; in plain terms, by 75%.
The targets set under the Kyoto protocol are just a very small step in the right direction. The UK target for a 60% cut by 2050 seems broadly consistent with what is needed. But it overlooks a rapid rise in emissions elsewhere, and especially in China, which means the developed world will have to make even deeper cuts.
Ethical arguments support the adoption of a “contraction and convergence” policy. This would see total global emissions progressively reduced, with per capita emissions in different countries gradually equalised over time to less than 0.4 tonnes for every person.
In this scenario, Europe could expect to have to aim for a 90% cut by 2100, and the USA for a 95% cut over the same time. Even China and India will have to halt their rising emissions, eventually reducing them albeit by smaller amounts to achieve stabilisation. To say the least, these are seriously challenging goals.
Is this de-carbonisation of the global economy achievable? No one can foresee the technology of 100 or even 50 years into the future so the short answer is: we don’t know. But businesses can make a start.
Economic incentive
In a now world-wide market economy, putting a serious price on carbon emissions would provide a clear and significant incentive for the development and use of all types of renewable and low-carbon energy sources.
It would also encourage methods for capturing and storing CO2 generated by continued use of fossil fuels, while they last.
This could be done by levelling a carbon tax or, less directly, through cap and trade schemes such as the European emissions trading scheme.
But as teething troubles with the emissions trading scheme have shown, these schemes rely heavily on getting the level of emissions limits right. Most businesses would probably prefer stable and predictable prices for carbon emissions, which a carbon tax can provide. Traders who profit from market fluctuations might have other ideas.
There is however no doubt that a new form of indirect taxation through a carbon tax would prove unpopular and regressive. So it would make sense to make it a revenue-neutral replacement for another existing unpopular and regressive indirect tax, such as sales taxes or, in Europe, VAT.
Recent statements by Britain’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, suggest that within Europe this may no longer be an impossible goal.
For more intractable sectors of the economy, direct regulation of emissions may be needed. This would apply notably to transport and especially aviation, which currently has no alternative to fossil fuels.
And while hydrogen may be the fuel of the future, regrettably its generation is now largely done through use of fossil fuels. If hydrogen is to play a role in solving transport problems, we desperately need a low carbon (solar or possibly nuclear) way to produce it, along with better and lighter ways to store it.
Business imperative
We need to make the shift from a position where global emissions are increasing at about 2% per year to one where they decrease at about 2% per year, and within a few decades at most.
The change will require major economic incentives and a much more effective global emissions limitation scheme. Even if we develop the right clean technologies, the financial incentives will be needed to help implement them.
For businesses this means planning ahead for a future where energy costs will be much higher, especially where derived from fossil fuels. This is the inevitable, and intended, consequence of both any carbon-trading scheme, and a carbon tax.
Businesses and the financial community are already thinking hard how to turn this threat into an opportunity. PriceWaterhouseCoopers notably looked into the effect of carbon regulations on businesses in its recent report “Saving the planet: can tax and regulation help?”.
We also need to look with grave misgiving at all existing infrastructure and new investments located within a few metres of sea level.
And above all, we need to be ready for change, for surprises, and for more extreme events. It’s likely to be a bumpy ride.
…
Extras: the science
Until recently, the growth and decline of ice-sheets was believed to be a very slow process, stretching over thousands of years. An ice-sheet can only grow as fast as snow accumulates, generally at less than 1m per year when it is compacted into ice, so an ice-sheet several thousand metres thick must take thousands of years to build up.
Ice-sheets then get smaller and lose mass, mainly in two ways. The first is melting, at both the surface and the base when the temperature is greater than 0°C. The base is often relatively warmer than the surface, because of geothermal heating from the interior of the Earth.
Secondly, the sheets lose mass by disintegrating at the edges, calving icebergs into the sea, often after the ice has first flowed offshore to create massive floating ice-shelves.
Ice lost this way is replaced by more ice flowing from the interior, via glaciers and ice-streams. In the past, glaciologists have generally considered this a slow process.
Their computer models have reflected this view so the whole process of melting and calving, and the resulting rise in sea level, has been predicted to take thousands rather than hundreds of years.
However, the last few years have brought some surprises. First, we have seen that floating ice-shelves can disintegrate quite suddenly, over just a few weeks. The collapse of the Larsen B ice-shelf off the Antarctic peninsula in 2002 is a classic example.
Another big surprise was the subsequent discovery that ice-streams – the “rivers” of ice that flow relatively fast within glaciers – that fed the ice-shelf had accelerated dramatically after the shelf disappeared.
The buttressing effect of the ice-shelf, holding back the glaciers and ice streams, seems too be much greater than glaciologists had thought.
The third surprise was recent measurements of both gravity and surface elevation from satellites showing that both Greenland and west Antarctica are losing mass much faster than expected.
In both cases it seems “warm” ice, near its melting point, is responsible. This ice is relatively wet, and melt-water is known to create a slurry that lubricates the flow of glaciers over the rock beneath, allowing them to flow much faster.
And it now seems water also percolates into “warm” ice much more than was expected, sometimes flowing right through glaciers in “moulins” to lubricate their beds, and even through ice-shelves, causing them to fracture.
West Antarctica, it appears, is less prone to melt than Greenland’s ice-sheet. But, worryingly, it is grounded on land below sea level so it may also be vulnerable to melting by sea-water, from below.
The even larger east Antarctic ice-sheet is thought to be more secure but the big question is: how much melting will occur, and how fast?”
Accordingly, the NASA Office of Inspector General conducted an administrative investigation to examine reports of alleged “political interference,” predominantly by senior NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs officials, with the work of NASA scientists pertaining to climate change–to include whether NASA inappropriately prevented one of its scientists, Dr. James E. Hansen, from speaking to the media in December 2005.
Our investigation found that during the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public through those particular media over which the Office of Public Affairs had control (i.e., news releases and media access). We also concluded that the climate change editorial decisions were localized within the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs; we found no credible evidence suggesting that senior NASA or Administration officials directed the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs to minimize information relating to climate change. To the contrary, we found that once NASA leadership within the Office of the Administrator were made aware of the scope of the conflict between the Office of Public Affairs and scientists working on climate change, they aggressively implemented new policies with a view toward improved processes in editorial decision-making relating to scientific public affairs matters.
Further, it is our conclusion that the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs’ actions were inconsistent with the mandate and intent of NASA’s controlling legislation–the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 19581 (Space Act) and NASA’s implementing regulations–insomuch as they prevented “the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination” of information concerning NASA’s activities and results. While we could not substantiate that Administration officials employed outside NASA approved or disapproved or edited specific news releases, we do, however, find by a preponderance of the evidence2 that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career Public Affairs Officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior Public Affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases. Although the scientific information alleged to be “suppressed” appeared to be otherwise available through a variety of Agency forums, we cannot reconcile that the Space Act would permit any purposeful obfuscation of scientific research by the Agency in any news dissemination forum as “appropriate” under the Act.
The supporting evidence detailed in this report reveals that climate change scientists and the majority of career Public Affairs Officers strongly believe that the alleged actions taken by senior NASA Headquarters Public Affairs officials intended to systemically portray NASA in a light most favorable to Administration policies at the expense of reporting unfiltered research results. Senior NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs officials (political appointees3) deny such actions, claiming that many of the proposed news releases were poorly written or too technical in nature for meaningful broad public dissemination.
With respect to NASA’s climate change research activities, we found no evidence indicating that NASA blocked or interfered with the actual research activities of its climate change scientists. In contrast to our findings associated with the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs, we found that NASA systematically distributed its technical climate change research throughout the scientific community and otherwise made it available through a variety of specialized forums, such as scientific journals, professional conferences, and public appearances by NASA scientists. Further, our recent audit of NASA’s formal process for releasing scientific and technical data resulting from research conducted by its employees and contractors found no evidence that the process was used as a means to inappropriately suppress the release of scientific or technical data at the four NASA Field Centers reviewed.4 Of the 287 authors surveyed at those Field Centers, none indicated that they had experienced or knew of someone who had experienced actual or perceived suppression of their research by NASA management.5 In short, the defects we found are associated with the manner of operation of the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs and are largely due to the actions of a few key senior employees of that office.
Regarding media access, our investigation confirmed that, contrary to its established procedures, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs declined to make one of NASA’s scientists, Dr. James E. Hansen, available for a radio interview with National Public Radio in December 2005. Our investigative efforts revealed that NASA’s decision was based, in part, on concern that Dr. Hansen would not limit his responses to scientific information but would instead entertain a discussion on policy issues. NASA maintains that the decision to deny media access to Dr. Hansen was unilaterally made by a junior Schedule C political appointee in the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs. The evidence, however, reflects that this appointee acted in accord with the overall management of climate change information at that time within the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs.
Regardless of the aforementioned Space Act standards, we otherwise found that the Agency mismanaged this activity insomuch as it occurred over a sustained period of time until senior management was eventually alerted by congressional staff and the media. That senior management did not know before then was emblematic of ineffective internal management controls such as a dispute resolution mechanism between contributing scientists and public affairs officials. This is especially true in that relations between NASA’s climate change science community and the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs had somehow deteriorated into acrimony, non-transparency, and fear that science was being politicized–attributes that are wholly inconsistent with effective and efficient Government. The investigation also uncovered that one of the underlying contributing factors of these problems may have, in fact, been in the very structure of the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs, where political appointees were placed in the seemingly contradictory position of ensuring the “widest practicable” dissemination of NASA research results that were arguably inconsistent with the Administration’s policies, such as the “Vision for Space Exploration.”
That said, the core issue of how our Government in general, and NASA in particular, continues to manage the important issue of climate change information is worthy of careful consideration by both the Executive and Legislative branches of Government– and is an issue that the NASA Office of Inspector General will continue to monitor from an Agency oversight perspective.
We provided a draft of this Investigative Summary to the NASA Administrator on March 6, 2008, for the purpose of soliciting the Agency’s comments. The Agency’s comments (Appendix D) were received on April 18, 2008. Our evaluation of those comments is also provided (Appendix E).
1 The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, Pub. L. No. 85-568, 72 Stat. 426 (codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. S 2451 et. seq. [2007]).
2 Preponderance of the evidence is a standard of proof that simply requires that the matter asserted seems more likely true than not.
3 The term “political appointee” in this report refers to two categories of appointments–Schedule C and Non-Career Senior Executive Service.
4 Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, Langley Research Center, and Marshall Space Flight Center.
5 NASA Office of Inspector General, “Final Report on NASA’s Actions Needed to Ensure Scientific and Technical Information Is Adequately Reviewed at Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, Langley Research Center, and Marshall Space Flight Center” (IG-08-017, May 21, 2008).
Deforestation accounts for one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — about the same as China’s emissions, more than the emissions generated by all of the world’s cars and trucks. And the world is doing far too little to stop it. An estimated 30 million acres of rain forest disappear every year, destroying biodiversity and pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The global warming bill now working its way through the House seeks to change this destructive dynamic in two ways. It sets up a carbon trading system that is expected to raise upward of $60 billion annually through the sale of pollution allowances. Five percent of that would be set aside to help prevent deforestation, either through a special international fund or as bilateral grants to poor countries.
In addition, the bill would allow for the kinds of offsets proposed and rejected in Kyoto, Japan. For example, a power company having trouble meeting its emissions limits could satisfy some of its obligations by paying to reduce deforestation elsewhere in the world.
The economics make sense. It is a relatively inexpensive way for industrialized nations to get credit for reducing global emissions while they make the necessary investments to control their own pollution. And it is a good deal for poor countries. The World Bank estimates that an acre of rain forest converted to crops is worth $100 to $250. It’s worth far more under a system that puts a value on carbon. An average acre stores about 200 tons of carbon; assuming a low price of $10 a ton, that acre is suddenly worth $2,000.
A big effort will still be required to resist the loggers, miners, ranchers and politicians who have had their way with the rain forests for years. And any plan must include safeguards and inspection mechanisms to ensure that the allowances and offsets are being used properly.
But with the rain forests shrinking and the planet warming up, it’s crucial to get the right incentives in place — first as part of broad climate change legislation in the United States, then as part of a new global treaty that the world’s nations hope to negotiate in the fall.