This is just TWO days worth of stores on climate change
Apart from the certifiably insane and the genuinely evil there is little real climate change denial. What we have now is denial of abrupt climate change.
Share this with your skeptical friend.
The
world’s climate change watchdog may be underestimating global
warming
The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic. Recent research suggests that part of the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting a slow collapse in an unstoppable way. Alarmed scientists say that means even more sea level rise than they figured. (AP Photo/NASA)
30
October, 2014
On
Nov. 2, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
will release its
"Synthesis Report," the final stage in a yearlong document
dump that, collectively, presents the current expert consensus about
climate change and its consequences. This synthesis report (which has
already been leaked and reported
on --
like it always is) pulls together the conclusions of three prior
reports of the IPCC's 5th
Assessment Report,
and will "provide the roadmap by which policymakers will
hopefully find their way to a global agreement to finally reverse
course on climate change," according to the IPCC chairman
Rajendra Pachauri.
There's
just one problem. According to a number of scientific critics, the
scientific consensus represented by the IPCC is a very conservative
consensus. IPCC's reports, they say, often underestimate the
severity of global warming, in a way that may actually confuse
policymakers (or worse). The IPCC, one scientific group charged
last year,
has a tendency to "err on the side of least drama." And
now, in a new
study just
out in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society,
another group of researchers echoes that point. In scientific
parlance, they charge that the IPCC is focused on avoiding what are
called "type
1" errors --
claiming something is happening when it really is not (a "false
positive") -- rather than on avoiding "type
2" errors --
not claiming something is happening when it really is (a "false
negative").
The
consequence is that we do not always hear directly from the IPCC
about how bad things could be.
"Our
motivation was really experiencing the IPCC process, and seeing the
various ways in which the process, and sort of this seeking
consensus, can lead to downplaying the full ranges of future
scenarios," comments Bill Anderegg, a Princeton researcher and
lead author of the new paper. Anderegg contributed his expertise on
ecosystems and climate change in North America in Working
Group II of
the latest IPCC report.
To
show why these researchers think the IPCC is conservative -- and
emphatically not alarmist
-- you need only consider what the leaked Synthesis Report (which, of
course, is still subject to revision) says about the subject of sea
level rise. Next to rising temperatures, rising seas are perhaps the
most obvious outcome of global warming (because hot air melts ice and
expands ocean water). They are also one of the most severe -- and an
incredibly big deal if you live in Florida, or North Carolina, or
Bangladesh, or the Maldives, or anywhere else with a beach or coast.
Knowing just how much sea level could rise, and how fast, is thus
vital to help cities and countries plan for how to adapt to a
changing world.
By
the year 2100, the leaked draft report claims, sea level rise
"will likely be
in the ranges of 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6 and of 0.45 to 0.82 m for
RCP8.5 (medium
confidence),"
which is quite similar to what earlier documents from this round of
the IPCC's work have said. To translate: For two different scenarios
for future greenhouse gas emissions -- one a low end scenario, one a
high end one -- there is a 66 percent probability that sea level rise
will fall into these two corresponding ranges. And the high end of
the range, in the high end emissions scenario, is .82 meters of sea
level rise, or 2.69 feet.
Alas,
it turns out that these numbers are misleading
in several ways --
and may very well be too low. First, .82 meters is not actually
the amount of sea level rise that is expected at the year 2100. If
you sift carefully enough through the IPCC’s various reports, you
will learn that it is rather themean increase expected
between the years 2081-2100, or during the last two decades of this
century, when compared with the mean sea level between 1986 and 2005.
The actual
high end number for
2100 is .98 meters, or 3.22 feet – an amount that “would threaten
the survival of coastal cities and entire island
nations,” writes climate
expert Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam University.
But it
gets more complicated still -- that's not really the high end number
either! Note above that IPCC only gives the range for sea level rise
that it considers "likely." What that means, according to
Princeton's Anderegg, is that "these ranges are only the middle
2/3 of the probability distribution." In other words, he says,
"there is a 17 percent chance it could be lower than that, and a
17 percent chance it could be higher than that." You'd have to
be pretty attuned to figure that out, though.
And
just when you think you're finally figuring out how bad sea level
rise could be by 2100, yet another problem pops up. There are many
ways of determining an acceptable range for expected sea level
rise, and the IPCC relies on one of them -- so-called "process-based
models,"
which draw on physical equations that govern our understanding of the
thermal expansion of the ocean, the melting of ice sheets, and other
related factors. But that's not the only way of estimating future sea
level rise.
Another
way involves getting a group of the top experts together and trying
to determine what they think. One such "expert elicitation" came
out in late 2013,
surveying 90 experts who all publish a lot of research on the topic
of sea level rise. And when you do it this way, these experts give a
"median likely range" of .7 to 1.2 meters of sea level rise
by 2100 in a "high warming" scenario. So here, the
high end would be 3.93 feet. (But of course, by the very definition
of the process just described, many experts would say even higher
than that.)
So
by now, you should be getting a sense of how conservative the IPCC
is. Indeed, here's a figure from the new paper in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society,
showing the different ranges for sea level rise in 2100 that have
been issued by the IPCC since its inception -- including its
extremely controversial lowballing of
sea level rise in the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 -- and
comparing those with the aforementioned expert elicitation, to the
far right:
Figure
comparing the IPCC's five estimates for the range of sea level rise,
and one recent expert assessment (EE). IPCC assessments are the First
Assessment Report in 1991 (FAR), the Second Assessment in 1996 (SAR),
the Third Assessment in 2001 (TAR), the Fourth Assessment in 2007
(AR4), and the Fifth Assessment in 2013-2014 (AR5). Credit: William
R.L. Anderegg et al, "Awareness of both Type 1 and 2 errors in
climate science and assessment," Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society, 2014. ©American Meteorological Society. Used
with permission.
And
unfortunately, we still probably haven't discussed what the
true worstcase
scenario is for sea level rise.
There's
yet another problem with the IPCC process -- it only considers
scientific papers that were published before a particular cutoff
date,
which in this case, was March 15, 2013. But in May 2014, long after
that cutoff date, ablockbuster
study came
out suggesting that global warming has already irrevocably
destabilized the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which
contains some
10 feet worth of sea level rise.
That is not to say that all of that ice will fall into the ocean
immediately and raise sea level, but rather to say that its
disintegration, over time, is inevitable. How fast will it happen?
That's the big unknown -- but obviously, it is unwise to
underestimate an ice sheet, when the consequences around the world
would be so devastating.
The
lead author of that research, the University of
California-Irvine's Eric
Rignot,
stressed in an interview that there is no scientific consensus yet
about the validity of his alarming results. But adds that in his own
opinion, the IPCC's estimate for sea level rise is "very
conservative."
"We’ve
been looking at these glaciers for 20 years, and what I see is
defying all these models," adds Rignot.
So
in summary, by 2100, sea level rise could be plenty worse
than the IPCC suggests -- and realizing this might lead policymakers
around the world to view global warming very differently. So then why
are its scientific assessments like this? There are surely many
reasons, but the authors of the new Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society paper
suggest one of them is how much the IPCC has been blasted --
especially over past errors, such as an incorrect
prediction that
the Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035. Because of such flubs,
the IPCC has been repeatedly attacked by outside critics -- one
of whose favorite epithets is calling the panel "alarmist."
Ironically,
perhaps precisely because of all that criticism, it isn't.
Study
Says Curbing Population Growth Won’t Help Address Climate Change
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
31
October, 2014
If
you’re looking to reduce the pressure humanity is putting on the
climate and global ecosystem, curbing population growth can’t help
you much.
That’s
the conclusion of new research published
by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which modeled
various approaches to slowing population growth — from the
reasonable to the monstrous to the completely catastrophic — to see
how they’d play out. These included benign
attempts to empower women around the world with greater access to
contraception, economic development, family planning, and so forth;
draconian legal measures to limit people around the world to one
child per family; hundreds of millions of people dying due to food
shortages; and several billion dying thanks to some form of global
catastrophe.
The
result? Only the truly ugly and unrealistic scenarios — a
rapidly-enforced global one-child policy or the mass die-off of
several billion people — altered population trajectories by 2100
enough to have a real impact on carbon emissions and resource use. In
short, the morally defensible option for slowing down fertility (plus
some of the indefensible ones) just didn’t do much good, still
leaving the human population around 10 billion by 2100.
“No
matter what levers you pull, we have such a huge demographic
momentum, there’s no way we can rein in the human population fast
enough to address sustainability issues in the next century,” Corey
Bradshaw, the director of ecological modeling at the Environment
Institute at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and one of the
paper’s co-authors, told the
Washington Post. “The population has this natural resistance to
catastrophe.”
That
will likely come as a surprise to some corners of the environmental
movement,where there’s an undeniable fixation on
the destructive consequences of population growth. And
Bradshaw told the
Washington Post’s Chris Mooney that whenever he gives talks about
endangered wildlife around the world, “someone will stand up and
say, ‘You’ve neglected the elephant in the room — human
population size is the principal problem.’”
The
total ecological footprint of the world’s four economic regions, as
measured in global hectares (Gha).
CREDIT:
GLOBAL FOOTPRINT NETWORK, 2011
But
to give that view its due, most of the data
we havesuggests
population growth from 1961 to 2008 was a
major driver of the
pressurehumanity
is putting on the Earth’s biocapacity. And as Mooney notes, between
6.5 and 14 percent of all the human beings who have ever lived are
alive right now according to some estimates.
But
interestingly enough, Mooney also points
out that
the editor of Bradshaw’s paper was Stanford University’s Paul
Ehrlich, whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” largely introduced
concerns over humanity’s numbers into the burgeoning environmental
movement.
At
any rate, what happened before and what we can do going forward are
two different things. Population growth trends for the rest of the
21st Century are “virtually locked-in” as Bradshaw put it.
And the
ways we
can make at least some dent in global population growth — economic
development of poor countries, more education and gender
egalitarianism for women, greater voluntary access to contraception —
are all things we should be doing regardless.
Which
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Common estimates generally
say humanity will peak at around 10 billion by 2100, then naturally
plateau or even begin falling after that — or perhaps even
peak sooner,
around 2050 at 8 billion. Other estimates, however,suggest we
could go considerably higher; to 12 billion by 2100.
And
the human
beings most
threatened by the consequences of this are the global poor. “The
greatest threats to ecosystems — as measured by regional
projections within the 35 global Biodiversity Hotspots — indicate
that Africa and South Asia will experience the greatest human
pressures on future ecosystems,” according to
the study. Those are the same areas of the world where the global
poor are
the most vulnerable to
the extreme weather, resource disruptions, and other challenges that
will come with climate change.
That
leaves systemic
changes to
societies’ resource use, its forms of energy, its economic
structures and its social organization as the crucial moves that can
lead to a sustainable civilization. As Ryan Cooper argued at
The Week, carbon emissions per person vary
wildlyeven
within advanced countries — 5.6 metric tons in France, 11 metric
tons in Norway, 5 metric tons in Switzerland, and a whopping 17.6
metric tons in the United States — and the energy use per person
even for someone who’s homeless in America is
twice the
global average. (For well-off Americans, it’s ten times the size.)
When it comes to land use, the density of our communities and living
arrangements make a far greater differencethan
our sheer numbers. All of which suggests there are enormous
structural changes we could undertake to reduce our emissions even as
our populations keep growing.
Stormy
or sweltering, Australia’s spring arrives with a vengeance
Season of contrasts: while Melburnians were deluged this week, Sydneysiders spent last weekend sunbathing. AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy
1
November, 2014
Spring
in southern and eastern Australia is a bit like an annual game of
weather tug-of-war, with summer and winter pulling at each end of the
rope. While Melbourne has been lashed
by stormy weather this
week, other parts of the country have had their first taste of summer
heat.
Last
week, much of New South Wales, and this week, large areas of southern
Queensland, have been experiencing record or near-record hot
conditions, and preliminary data suggests that October 25 was
Australia’s warmest
October day on record.
Spring
can be unpredictable, in Australia as in many other parts of the
world. From Perth, down to Hobart and up to Sydney, the warm weather
teases, but typically, it doesn’t last for long – maybe a week or
two if we’re lucky, before we realise it’s still too cold for
evening backyard cricket.
Then
the winds pick up, a change blasts through, and winter seemingly
returns – sometimes in spectacular fashion, as Melburnians will
this week attest.
Atmospheric
tumult
For
the atmosphere, spring is a time of tumultuous change. As we move
from winter to spring, the Sun travels from being directly overhead
in the Northern Hemisphere, across the Equator and south towards the
Tropic of Capricorn (which passes close to Rockhampton, Queensland).
As it does, it provides an increasing amount of energy as
the sunlight
strikes the Earth’s surface with more intensity.
This
extra energy causes the atmosphere and the land to heat up and
weather patterns to migrate. The cold fronts and low-pressure systems
that dominate southern Australia during winter are pushed south and
are slowly replaced by semi-permanent areas of high pressure. This
high pressure is part of a climatic feature known the sub-tropical
ridge,
which helps to generate the fine, sunny weather that is predominant
during a southern Australian summer.
But
these changes do not necessarily happen as a smooth transition, and
on many occasions during spring, the weather systems most common in
winter like to remind the southern states that cold, wet conditions
haven’t yet been banished for the year. This can make spring
weather in southern and eastern Australia typically variable, and
sometimes extreme.
Under
some circumstances, the re-emergence of winter weather systems can
combine with extra atmospheric ingredients, like additional heat or
moisture, that are ultimately the result of the extra energy provided
by the Sun’s southward journey.
If
these ingredients are just right, the combination will go off with a
bang, resulting in storms like those experienced across southeastern
Australia over the past few weeks. Lightning storms, wild winds,
heavy rain, large hail and the occasional tornado can be the result.
Through eastern and southern Australia, thunderstorms are most
typical from mid-spring
to mid-summer.
During
spring, extreme weather is not just limited to the occurrence of more
thunderstorms in southern and eastern Australia. Very windy cool
changes and wet
cyclonic stormscan
also pass through the southern states. Meanwhile, further north,
places like Sydney and Brisbane start to feel summer-like heat,
including the occasional heatwave (which you can track using this
website).
Unseasonable
weather?
Although
the recent stormy weather has seemed, at times, wild and unseasonal,
it is largely to be expected in southern and eastern Australia at
this time of year.
Even
a few isolated days of heat during a single spring is quite typical.
However, although the occasional bout of heat is not unusual, there
have been noticeable and consistent changes in the behaviour of hot
temperatures, and heatwaves, during spring in more recent years.
Five
separate studies published last month in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society found
that the record heat of recent years should not be considered normal.
In fact, far from being typical, all studies found evidence of the
“handprint”
of human-induced climate change on the unusual conditions of 2013.
Notably,
this research found that the likelihood of experiencing the record
hot spring of 2013 in Australia was 30 times greater with the
influence of human-induced climate change than without. The record
hot year of 2013 was 2,000 times more likely as a result of climate
change.
Spring
is normally a season of variable weather. So when considered in
isolation, the recent heatwaves are not necessarily atypical for this
time of year. Yet they add to the ever-increasing number of heatwaves
that the evidence tells us are now occurring more often, often
producing record-breaking temperatures. And that is certainly not
normal.
"NATO
and the United States should change their policy because the time
when they dictate their conditions to the world has passed,"
Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Dushanbe, capital of the Central
Asian republic of Tajikistan
Hey,
U.N.: Climate change and population are related
30
October, 2014
On
Sept. 22 and 23, the United Nations will host separate daylong
conferences on two issues of incalculable importance to the future of
humanity: population andclimate
change.
Though the two meetings will take place just one day apart, neither
is likely to refer to the other. And that will be a missed
opportunity, because scientific research increasingly affirms that
the two issues are linked in many ways.
The
population gathering in the General Assembly on Sept. 22 will mark
the 20th anniversary of the landmark International Conference on
Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994. The next day’s
summit has been convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for
government and business leaders to brainstorm ideas for addressing
climate change.
The
coincidence of these meetings occurring a day apart offers a
teachable moment for the global decision-makers gathering in New
York. Actions to promote the well-being of women might produce
mutually reinforcing benefits in both areas.
Population,
the lives and status of women, and climate change are rarely linked
at the United Nations — or in any other intergovernmental
conversations, for that matter. Intuitively, it’s easy to
understand that the growth of world population from 1 billion people
at the start of the Industrial Revolution to 7.3 billion today has
something to do with the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
But
most of the climate change the world is currently experiencing stems
from decades of carbon-intense development by the world’s wealthier
countries. These countries’ populations are growing much more
slowly (and in a few cases not at all), compared to those of poorer
countries with low greenhouse-gas emissions. So what’s population
got to do with climate change today?
That’s
a question researchers are beginning to answer. Published science
presents growing evidence for climate-population linkage that is
complex, far more nuanced than the conventional “rich-versus-poor”
debate, and worth working to understand.
The Family
Planning and Environmental Sustainability Assessment,
a project of the Worldwatch Institute, is assembling an international
group of researchers to help evaluate recent scientific evidence on
how family planning might contribute to environmental sustainability
— and long-term human well-being. Our objective is to widen and
diversify the scientific discussion, while helping to clarify
population-environment linkages for better public and policy-maker
understanding.
We
are in the early days of this work, but already some conclusions are
emerging that are germane to this week’s two U.N. meetings. One is
that the body of international research on climate and population is
reasonably extensive, and it is growing. Much of this literature is
published in peer-reviewed journals, not only in the United States
and Europe but in developing countries. Researchers take the linkage
seriously and explore multiple aspects of it. The output goes well
beyond how population growth might affect emissions. Some papers
explore how human density, distribution, and numbers influence
adaptation to climate change and contribute to interactions between
climate and such critical issues as future food security and
freshwater availability.
In
just the last five years, scientific reports (such
as this peer-reviewed
paper andthis think-tank
report) have suggested that feasible differences in future population
growth could make for significant differences in future emission
rates. Economic development is anticipated to increase per-capita
emissions even in currently low-emitting countries — as
demonstrated by the experience of India and China. That makes
near-term population growth rates significant for long-term emission
trends.
On
a more positive note, one recent think-tank study suggests
that recent reductions in fertility in Brazil, China, and some other
countries help explain why global deforestation has slowed — and
thus contributes a lower share of global greenhouse gas emissions
today than in the past.
And
recognition of such links is not restricted to researchers. Many
governments of least-developed countries themselves recognize
population size or density as impediments to climate-change
adaptation, as noted by these two peer-reviewedstudies.
A case
study in
Ghana concluded that gender also matters to adaptation. (Samuel
Codjoe, coauthor of this post, is also a coauthor of the Ghana
study.) As women gain power in their societies — for example,
through education and the capacity to decide for themselves whether
and when to have children — they may be able to enhance the
resilience of those societies in the face of a rapidly changing
climate.
Though
our project has much work ahead to assess the scientific evidence on
this linkage, what we have seen so far at least suggests that the
United Nations and other world bodies would do well to open both
minds and conference venues to the question of how population and
climate might influence each other.
Population
growth and global warming are both likely to continue for many
decades. Yet both trends can be slowed through programs that improve
reproductive and sexual health while helping women make their own
choices about childbearing. It makes sense to see how the trends
relate, and to what extent improved reproductive health and family
planning access might carry mutual and synergistic benefits in both
the population and climate arenas.
—–
Robert
Engelman, former president of the Worldwatch Institute, now directs
the Institute’s Family Planning and Environmental Sustainability
Assessment. Samuel Codjoe is director of the Regional Institute for
Population Studies at the University of Ghana, and a collaborating
researcher in the assessment.
Study
faults insurance industry’s response to climate change
30
October, 2014
Extreme
weather across the country the past several years has taken a toll on
homeowners and communities, and on insurers.
After
superstorm Sandy roared across the northeastern United States two
years ago, many homeowners on Long Island — even those who escaped
the worst damage — lost their property insurance. The same thing
happened in coastal Virginia after Hurricane Katrina, which hit
hundreds of miles away along the Gulf Coast.
Today,
from Florida to Delaware, property insurance near the water is
becoming harder and harder to find.
“In
the long run, these coverage retreats transfer growing risks to
public institutions and local populations, and reduce the resiliency
of communities, which are less able to finance post-disaster
recoveries,” according to a new report from Boston-based Ceres, a
nonprofit group dedicated to sustainable business practices.
Last
year, less than a third of the $116 billion in worldwide losses from
weather-related disasters was covered by insurance, according to data
from the reinsurer Swiss Re. In 2005, the year Katrina struck New
Orleans, insurance picked up 45 percent of the bill.
Libertarians
Sue White House Over Climate Change Video
Jim Houston struggles to cross snow covered streets is in below zero temperatures Monday, Jan. 6, 2014, in Springfield, Ill. A whirlpool of frigid, dense air known as a “polar vortex” descended into much of the U.S. and plunged temperatures to record lows.
30
October, 2014
A
libertarian think tank has
sued the
White House over a video that claimed global warming might be tied to
last year’s extreme cold spell, commonly referred to as the “polar
vortex. ”
The
Competitive Enterprise Institute’s lawsuit filed Wednesday says
White House Office of Science and Technology director John Holdren
was wrong when, in the January video, he cited a “growing body of
evidence” linking the so-called “polar vortex” to climate
change. Specifically, Holdren said he believes that the United States
will see “more of this pattern of extreme cold” as global warming
gets worse. The group also says OSTP Senior Communications Advisor
Becky Fried was wrong to make the same claim in a White House blog
post published at around the same time.
CO2
emissions set to reach new 40 billion tonne record high in 2014
30
October, 2014
Carbon
dioxide emissions, the main contributor to global warming, are set to
rise again in 2014 - reaching a record high of 40 billion tonnes.
Remaining
CO2 emission ‘quota’ may be used up in one generation and more
than half of all fossil fuel reserves may need to be left
untapped.
The 2.5 per cent projected rise in
burning fossil fuels is revealed by the Global Carbon Project, which
is co-led in the UK by researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate
Change Research at the University of East Anglia and the College of
Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of
Exeter.
It comes ahead of the New York Climate Summit,
where world leaders will seek to catalyse action on climate change.
This latest annual update of the Global Carbon Budget shows that
total future CO2 emissions cannot exceed 1,200 billion tonnes – for
a likely 66 per cent chance of keeping average global warming under
2°C (since pre-industrial times).
At the current rate
of CO2 emissions, this 1,200 billion tonne CO2 ‘quota’ would be
used up in around 30 years. This means that there is just one
generation before the safeguards to a 2oC limit may be breached. The
international team of climate scientists say that to avoid this, more
than half of all fossil fuel reserves may need to be left
unexploited.
Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Director of the
Tyndall Centre at UEA, said: “The human influence on climate change
is clear. We need substantial and sustained reductions in CO2
emissions from burning fossil fuels if we are to limit global climate
change. We are nowhere near the commitments necessary to stay below
2°C of climate change, a level that will be already challenging to
manage for most countries around the world, even for rich
nations. “Politicians meeting in New York need to think very
carefully about their diminishing choices exposed by climate
science.”
The annual Global Carbon Budget, published
today, includes a projection for 2014, as well as figures for 2013 by
country and per capita. It is accompanied by a series of papers
in Nature
Climate Change, Nature Geoscience and Earth
System Science Data Discussions.
Lead
author of the Nature
Geoscience paper,
Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, from the University of Exeter said: “The
time for a quiet evolution in our attitudes towards climate change is
now over. Delaying action is not an option - we need to act together,
and act quickly, if we are to stand a chance of avoiding climate
change not long into the future, but within many of our own
lifetimes.
“We have already used two-thirds of the
total amount of carbon we can burn, in order to keep warming below
the crucial 2˚C level. If we carry on at the current rate we will
reach our limit in as little as 30 years’ time - and that is
without any continued growth in emission levels. The implication of
no immediate action is worryingly clear – either we take a
collective responsibility to make a difference, and soon, or it will
be too late.”
Key
facts and figures:
CO2
emissions from burning fossil fuel are projected to rise by 2.5 per
cent in 2014 - 65 per cent above 1990 levels, the reference year for
the Kyoto Protocol - China, the USA, the EU and India are the
largest emitters – together accounting for 58 per cent of
emissions.
China’s
CO2 emissions grew by 4.2 per cent in 2013, the USA’s grew by 2.9
per cent, and India’s emissions grew by 5.1 per cent.
The
EU has decreased its emissions by 1.8 per cent, though it continues
to export a third of its emissions to China and other producers
through imported goods and services.
China’s
CO2 emissions per person overtook emissions in the EU for the first
time in 2013. China’s emissions are now larger than the US and EU
combined. 16 per cent of China’s emissions are for goods and
services which are exported elsewhere.
Emissions
in the UK decreased by 2.6 per cent in 2013 caused by a decline in
the use of coal and gas. However the UK exports a third of its
emissions by consuming goods and services which are produced
elsewhere.
CO2
emissions are caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, as well as
by cement production and deforestation. Deforestation accounts for 8
per cent of CO2 emissions.
Historical
and future CO2 emissions must remain below a total 3,200 billion
tonnes to be in with a 66 per cent chance of keeping climate change
below 2°C. But two thirds (2,000 billion tonnes) of this quota have
already been used.
If
global emissions continue at their current rate, the remaining 1,200
billion tonnes will be used up in around 30 years – one
generation.
Global
emissions must reduce by more than 5 per cent each year over several
decades to keep climate change below 2°C.
This
emission quota implies that over half of proven fossil reserves
might have to remain unused in the ground, unless new technologies
to store carbon in the ground are developed and deployed in large
quantities.
The
‘Global Carbon Budget 2014’, led by UEA Tyndall Centre director
Prof Le Quéré is made available in the journal Earth
System Science Data Discussions on
September 21, 2014.
It is accompanied by a Nature
Geoscience paper
‘Persistent growth of CO2 emissions and implications for reaching
climate targets’, led by Prof Friedlingstein from the University of
Exeter. Meanwhile ‘Sharing a quota on cumulative carbon emissions’
led by Dr Michael Raupach director of the Climate Change Institute at
the Australian National University, and a comment article ‘Betting
on negative emissions’, led by Dr Sabine Fuss, at the Mercator
Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Germany,
are published inNature
Climate Change.
For
more information see the Global Carbon Atlas, which allows users to
explore, visualise and interpret data of global, regional and
national emissions, visit www.globalcarbonatlas.org.
This
media release is part of the Global Carbon Budget 2014 of the Global
Carbon Project, based on four analyses published on 21 September
2014, 6:00 pm UK time.
-
-
Raupach
et al. (2014) Sharing a quota on cumulative carbon emissions. Nature
Climate Change http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nclimate2384
Fuss
et al. (2014) Betting on Negative Emissions. Nature Climate Change
(commentary)
-
-
After
embargo papers are free for one month for registered users
at www.nature.com
Social
media:
Warmest
UK Halloween on record
This
year's Halloween has been the warmest on record in the UK, BBC
weather has said
The sun rises above a graveyard in Normanton, West Yorkshire on the UK's warmest recorded Halloween
31
October, 2014
A
temperature of 23.6C (74.3F) was recorded in Gravesend, Kent and Kew
Gardens, Greater London, surpassing the previous record of 20.0C.
Other
parts of the south of England and the north coasts of Wales and
Norfolk also broke the 20C mark.
The
previous record was set in Dartford, Kent, in 1968 and matched in
parts of Greater London in 1989.
At
12:20 GMT, the Met Office tweeted: "Charlwood has beaten Filton,
recording 22.5 °C. This makes it the warmest #Halloween on record!"
Less
than an hour later, it tweeted: "The warmest #Halloween on
record has been broken again with Gravesend recording 23.5 °C."
Nine
out of the 10 months so far this year have been warmer than average,
BBC weather's Emma Boorman said.
"Temperatures
are not set to stay like this. They will fall away over the weekend
dropping to the seasonal norm," she said.
The
UK mean temperature for October so far is 11C, which is 1.5C above
the long-term average between 1981 and 2010, but short of the 12.2C
record set in 2001.
Amazon
rainforest is getting drier, confirms another study
The Amazon Rainforest. Photo by Rhett Butler.
Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2014/1029-amazon-getting-drier.html#o8KMrlSMtcSIjbz7.99
30
November, 2014
Parts
of the Amazon rainforest are getting considerably less rain, leading
trees to absorb less carbon, finds a study published this week in the
journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.
The
research is based on new satellite technology that measures rainfall
more accurately than previous approaches by cutting through cloud
cover. It finds that since 2000, rainfall has declined across 69
percent of the Amazon rainforest, an area amounting to 5.4 million
square kilometers. The fall in precipitation is even more substantial
in the region's tropical savannas: 80 percent of those areas have
experience declining rainfall.
The
drop is precipitation accounts for more than half the region's
decline in "greenness" as measured by the normalized
difference vegetation index (NDVI). That translates to a drop in
photosynthetic activity, meaning that carbon uptake by Amazon trees
is slowing.
The
findings, which are consistent with a spate of other studies using
different methodologies, suggest that the Amazon rainforest may be
becoming less resilient to the effects of climate change. That is a
worrying prospect given the importance of the Amazon as a carbon sink
as well as the ecosystem's role in generating regional rainfall: as
much as 70 percent of South America's GDP is produced in areas fed by
precipitation from the Amazon.
The
authors warn that should the warming trend continue, it could trigger
a positive feedback loop, shifting the intertropical convergence zone
(ITCZ) — a band that circles the planet and drives current rainfall
patterns — toward the poles, increasing drying in the region. That
in turn would exacerbate die-off, spurring increased emissions and
further accelerating climate change.
"Our
results provide evidence that persistent drying could degrade
Amazonian forest canopies, which would have cascading effects on
global carbon and climate dynamics," write the
authors.
CITATION: Thomas
Hilker et al (2014). Vegetation
dynamics and rainfall sensitivity of the Amazon.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Read more at
http://news.mongabay.com/2014/1029-amazon-getting-drier.html#o8KMrlSMtcSIjbz7.99
A characteristically rosy view of the future
There’s
A 'Public Health Emergency’ That Is Way More Threatening Than
Ebola, And No One's Addressing It
REUTERS/BeawihartaStudents wearing masks in the haze-hit Dumai in Sumatra, Indonesia. Smoke from land-clearing fires pushes air pollution above the level considered hazardous.
31
October, 2014
By
midcentury, an emerging public health problem will alter the way we
eat, the way we travel, and the places we live. It will also make us
more susceptible to mental illnesses like anxiety and depression
while exacerbating allergies and increasing the reaches of the
world’s most infectious diseases.
It’s
climate change, and it’s happening so fast it’s prompted the BMJ
to write a letter to the World Health Organization urging
them to declare the
phenomenon a public health emergency.
"Deaths
from Ebola infection, tragic and frightening though they are, will
pale into insignificance when compared with the mayhem we we can
expect for our children and grandchildren if the world does nothing
to check its carbon emissions," wrote
BMJ editor Fiona Godlee in
the editorial.
Here's
a look at some of the conditions that will plague the next generation
in a warmer world.
1.
Anxiety and PTSD
Young
Sino and his daughter Demarri Warren participate in a remembrance
event along the Industrial Canal flood wall, seen in background, in
the Lower 9th Ward section of New Orleans, on the ninth Anniversary
of Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 29, 2014.
In
2006, a team of psychologists visited thousands
of victims of Hurricane Katrina — six months after the original
event. They diagnosed nearly half of the residents they visited with
a serious anxiety disorder. One in six, the doctors said, had PTSD,
and many suffered from both illnesses. Over time, these disorders can
lead to suicidal thoughts and, in some cases, suicidal behaviors.
In
2008, mental health workers returned to New Orleans. To their
surprise, the number of people regularly contemplating suicide hadn't
fallen (as is usually the case after a natural disaster). On the
contrary, the number of suicidal residents had
risen significantly,
along with the number of people with serious mental illness. Even in
2009, the number of suicides in New Orleans Parish remained
double its
pre-Katrina levels.
Because
cases of mental illness and suicidal behavior increased in general in
the years after the recession, which happened to coincide with the
occurrence of Hurricane Katrina, it's impossible to pinpoint Katrina
as the sole driving force behind the huge uptick in mental illness
here.
2.
Heat Stroke — but not for the reason you'd think
APA
woman in Las Vegas wipes her face with a cold wet towel to cool off
while working outside holding an advertising sign. The heat kills at
least 2,000 Americans each year.
Having
a psychiatric illness like depression can more than triple your
risk of dying during a heat wave.
First,
depression can make it harder to take the necessary steps to protect
oneself from changes in the environment. People with depression
already experience difficulties with self-care,
such as staying hydrated, maintaining personal hygiene, and taking
their medications consistently. High temperatures can make these
activities especially taxing.
Worse
still, people who take medications to treat mental illness are
especially susceptible to heat stroke, a serious condition that
results when the body overheats, because many mental health
medications interfere
with our body’s natural ability to regulate its temperature.
Antipsychotics like Abilify and Risperdone, for example, block brain
cells from communicating with the body's thermostat, the
hypothalamus. Anticholinergics, such as Cogentin and Enablex, inhibit
sweating and make it easier to overheat.
3.
Respiratory Disorders
AP
Photo/ Manish SwarupTraffic
moves in front of the landmark India Gate monument enveloped by a
blanket of smog, caused by a mixture of pollution and fog, in New
Delhi, India
Ever
wonder why smog always seems so much worse on a hot, sunny day? Your
eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. The chemical reactions that
form ozone —
one of smog’s main components — happen faster at higher
temperatures.
The
warmer it is outside, the more ozone gums up the air. Ozone doesn’t
just dirty the horizon, though. The toxin also exacerbates a host of
respiratory conditions (from asthma to bronchitis and emphysema) by
irritating the delicate tissue lining the lungs.
In
recent years in some parts of the US, ground-level ozone has
reached dangerous
levels.
Overall, though, the US is a partial success story for the pollutant:
Ozone levels started
to decline for
the first time here in the 1980s.
Ozone
levels are still on the rise in other
parts of the world,
however, leading to more complications and even deaths from
respiratory conditions that could have previously been treated. In
India, levels of the pollutant were so high in 2014 that scientists
estimated it killed enough crops to
feed close to 100 million people in poverty.
4.
Infectious Diseases
Increased
heat will expand the range of pests carrying deadly disease. In the
past few years, mosquitoes carrying malaria (which killed 630,000
people last year) have
already begun creeping
up mountains to recently-warmed, higher-altitude elevations, where
they spread malaria to areas never previously exposed to the disease.
Since
they've never been exposed before, people living in these areas will
have zero protective immunity from the disease. The result? Malaria
will be deadlier than ever.
Bacteria,
too, will take advantage of their newly-welcoming habitats.
5.
Starvation
Climate
change will make it harder for everyone to grow and access food.
Climate
change is projected to drive down global food production by 2%
every ten years,
even as the demand for food increases by 14%. Across Africa and South
Asia — regions where much of the world's food is produced —
yields of wheat, corn, and millet will fall nearly 10% by
mid-century. As a result of this rocky imbalance, the price of rice
and corn will skyrocket, likelydoubling
by 2050.
With
the exception
of a few,
the majority of the world's crops will be ravaged by the new pests
and diseases that take advantage of warmer temperatures.
6.
Dehydration
In
other parts of the world, where crops that feed the rest of the globe
depend on a steady stream of slowly-melting glacier water, water
scarcity is an even more serious problem. The Himalayan glacier, for
example, presently supplies 25% of the world's cereal crop. If it
melts too quickly, however — as some estimates suggest it
has already begun doing — it will become nearlyimpossible to
meet the needs of a growing, hungrier planet
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