Globalwarming awareness2007 - » 2007 » January

Filed under: Global Warming, Climate Control — globalwarming awareness2007 @ 12:27 pm

The following Article has been taken from BBC News Online’s environment correspondent Alex Kirby

For the full story please go to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1440280.stm

Only the professional optimists are predicting complete success for this week’s resumed climate talks, which get under way on Monday in the German city of Bonn.

The realists speak of wide differences still to be overcome, but hope to salvage something.

The pessimists expect the end of the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate treaty, and a descent into environmental anarchy.

The one point all agree on is that time to turn talk into action is short.

This week’s talks are intended to succeed where last November’s conference in The Hague so spectacularly failed.

Acrimony and failure

Called to finalise the rules for measuring and cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases, which many scientists now believe are causing the atmosphere to warm, the talks in The Hague fell apart acrimoniously.

Key issues

Role of carbon “sinks” Funds for developing countries Buying and selling emission rights Ensuring compliance with Kyoto Protocol

The European Union was at loggerheads with the US and its allies.

The grounds for their disagreement are now history. The US has a new president, and George W Bush refuses to ratify Kyoto at all, though he says he does take climate change seriously.

Once the protocol’s rules are agreed - if they ever are - it will enter into force when it has been ratified by 55% of signatories, responsible for 55% of the developed world’s greenhouse emissions in 1990.

Arithmetic

And here comes Bonn’s brutally simple arithmetic.

The US rejection of Kyoto triggered mass protests

With the US, responsible for 36% of those emissions, now out of the picture, the only way to get Kyoto ratified is to ensure that the EU, eastern Europe, Russia and Japan do ratify it.

Of the four, Japan is the unknown.

Traditionally its diplomacy is closely aligned with Washington’s. But it has hinted that it might support Kyoto despite the US. It is trying to exact concessions from the other signatories.

Japan has already been told it can rely more than the rest on carbon “sinks” like forests and vegetation to meet its emission reduction targets.

The EU, and many environmental campaigners, do not like sinks. They fear they will allow countries to go on polluting almost as normal, relying on nature to absorb their emissions.

And several scientists say sinks may do much less than believed to solve the problem.

If Japan refuses to ratify it, Kyoto will become a dead letter, though it could always sign up later.

Wide-ranging agenda

The realists say the conference president, the Dutch Environment Minister, Jan Pronk, is ambitious in hoping for a cut-and-dried deal at the end of the ministerial session, which takes place from 19-22 July.

The US emits more greenhouse gases than any other country

Certainly there is a huge amount of ground to be covered this week.

A UN Environment Programme briefing notes: “Positions remain far apart on a number of issues.” There are four key areas, with the role of carbon sinks probably the trickiest.

Another is funding for developing countries, for technology transfer and to help them to cope with the impacts of climate change. Mr Pronk has suggested $1bn a year for this.

A third problem area includes the system for buying and selling emission rights - “carbon trading” - and how far developed countries can pay to reduce emissions in the developing world and then offset the results against their own targets.

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Filed under: Climate Science, Climate modelling, IPCC — globalwarming awareness2007 @ 12:13 am

Halldór Björnsson, William Connolley and Gavin Schmidt

Late last year, the UK Treasury’s Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change was released to rapturous reception from all sides of the UK political spectrum (i.e. left and right). Since then it has been subject to significant criticism and debate (for a good listing see Rabbett Run). Much of that discussion has revolved around the economic (and ethical) issues associated with ‘discounting’ (how you weight welfare in the future against welfare today) - particularly Nordhaus’s review. We are not qualified to address those issues, and so have not previously commented.

However, as exemplified by interviews on a recent Radio 4 program (including with our own William Connolley), some questions have involved the science that underlies the economics. We will try and address those.

Unlike an earlier report by the House of Lords, Stern spends no time quibbling, and essentially takes the science from the IPCC report, though somewhat updated by more recent work. Most of the science is flipped through fairly quickly within chapter one, and casual readers familiar with the IPCC report will find little to surprise them with sections including statements such as “An overwhelming body of scientific evidence indicates that the Earth’s climate is rapidly changing, predominantly as a result of increases in greenhouse gases caused by human activities” etc. However, the scientific possibilities in Stern are weighted slightly differently than in the IPCC reports since, as he states, “policymakers need to take into account the risks of greater dangers, as well as central expectations, because the consequences if these risks were to materialise would be very serious” (Stern reply to Byatt et al).

There are three strands to the science in Stern: the climate sensitivity, future emissions of greenhouse gases and the impacts of any particular level of change (scaled to the global mean temperature anomaly for convenience).

The climate sensitivity (as discussed here previously) was given a likely range of 1.5 - 4.5 C in IPCC TAR, and with a range of 2 - 5 C in the models used in that report. However, the probability of higher values plays a significant role in the report. Specifically, Meinshausen (2006) that there is “between a 2% and 20% chance that climate sensitivity is greater than 5C” but in the key message section of chapter 1 this is distilled as: “Several new studies suggest up to a 20% chance that warming could be greater than 5C”. This is true, but the report neglects to mention other new studies (Annan and Hargreaves; Hegerl et al) that suggest a negligible probability of CS greater than 5 C.

Uncertainty about future warming is not just the uncertainty about sensitivity, but also about the future greenhouse gas levels (GHG). There is a wide range of scenarios and estimates of future GHG levels that are used in the IPCC reports. The scenario used by the Review is the A2 one, but in this scenario GHG in the latter part of the 21st century is higher than in say, the A1b scenario. The point here is not that A2 is less sound than the A1b scenario, but simply that the Review chooses to work with one of the “high emission” scenarios. Additionally, the report also acknowledges the highly uncertain (but not clearly quantifiable) the possibilities of positive feedbacks in natural CO2 and CH4 emissions.

For impacts of climate change the story is similar: many of the impacts mentioned possible but their likelihood is debatable. For example, the weakening of the THC under 1 degree of warming, a risk of collapse for 3 degrees, risk of irreversible melting of the Greenland Ice sheet at 2 degrees warming, sea level changes of 5 - 12 meters over several centuries, - these eventualities are debatable, and should certainly be viewed as the “adverse tail” of possible impacts.

In conclusion: Stern gets the climate science largely right, though he strays on the high side of various estimates and picks the high side to talk about in the summary. This high-end bias lends the Review open to charges of “alarmism”. The report does make the fair point that the damages and their cost grows disproportionally with increasing temperature change and so, given that asymmetry, policymakers are correct in taking note of them. However, it looks like the major criticism of his work will be directed (in other fora) at the economics.

NB. Rather predictably, some of the usual contrarian suspects have also attacked the science in Stern. It is, however, a measure of their fundamental lack of seriousness that when there really are important uncertainties (i.e. the likelihood that climate sensitivity is higher than generally thought), they ignore them in favour of making the same repetitive uninteresting and incorrect claims they always make.

*Meinshausen, M. (2006): ‘What does a 2C target mean for greenhouse gas concentrations? A brief analysis based on multi-gas emission pathways and several climate sensitivity uncertainty estimates’, Avoiding dangerous climate change, in H.J. Schellnhuber et al. (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.265 280.

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Filed under: Global Warming — globalwarming awareness2007 @ 12:00 am

The BBC reports that the state premier of Queensland has warned citizens they will soon be drinking water containing recycled sewage as the widespread drought in Australia continues:

Premier Peter Beattie said he had scrapped a planned referendum on the issue, because there was no longer a choice.

He also warned that other states in Australia might eventually have to do the same as Queensland.

The country is currently suffering from a severe drought - the worst on record.

Last week Prime Minister John Howard declared water security to be the biggest challenge currently facing Australia, and he announced a A$10bn ($7bn) package to tackle the problem.

Mr Beattie said that falling water levels had left his state administration with no option but to introduce recycled water in south-eastern Queensland, starting from next year.

“We’re not getting rain; we’ve got no choice,” he told ABC radio.

“These are ugly decisions, but you either drink water or you die. There’s no choice. It’s liquid gold, it’s a matter of life and death,” he said.

The practice of drinking recycled water - which is already used in other countries such as the US, UK and Singapore, does not have widespread support in Australia.

Mr Howard supported Mr Beattie’s comments, telling a Sydney radio station: “I’ve advocated recycling for a long time… I am very strongly in favour of recycling, and Mr Beattie is right.”

But Mike Rann, the premier of South Australia, and Morris Iemma, the premier of New South Wales, rejected the Queensland plan - with Mr Rann ruling out using recycled sewage for anything but irrigation.

Malcolm Turnbull, the new environment and water resources minister, asked other states to be more open-minded on the issue.

“Don’t rule out desalination because it is expensive, or recycling because it sounds yucky, or building a dam,” Mr Turnbull told Australian media.

“Put everything on the table, assess all the economic, environmental and financial costs and then make a decision.”

Albeit possessed of a great deal of stunning ecological diversity, Australia is essentially a desert continent, with a large portion of available freshwater derived from the overtaxed Murray-Darling Basin. El Niño currents, caused by excessive warmth in the Pacific, are responsible for periodic droughts which have been a major source of angst for Aussie farmers for decades. Elevated temperatures tied to global warming have increased the severity of the El Niño phenomenon at the source as well as its effects on Australia’s climate.

According to CNN, Australia’s weather bureau said earlier this month that the country was suffering the effects of accelerated climate change. Expansive brushfires fueled by dessicated forests and shrubland appear to have persevered through a period of unseasonably heavy rains moving across the Outback. In all, about 4,600 square miles of forest have been destroyed by brushfires over the last few months.

The citizens of southeastern Australia, the country’s most heavily populated region, have been enduring the worst drought in at least a generation. Suicide rates among Australian farmers have soared in recent years, and PM John Howard recently decreed the water problem to be Australia’s most threatening national crisis. While conservation programs and infrastructural development in situ are key to addressing the threat, the drought in Australia should serve as a clarion call to both consumers and policymakers in the United States and in other nations whose contributions to the problem of global warming currently far outstrip those of the rest of the world’s economies.

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