Climate Emergency News

Earth's energy imbalance

2012-01-31T20:25:00.001-08:00

Hansen et al. 2011

Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, and K. von Schuckmann, 2011: Earth's energy imbalance and implications. Atmos. Chem. Phys.,11, 13421-13449, doi:10.5194/acp-11-13421-2011.

Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum.

The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.58±0.15 W/m² during the 6-yr period 2005-2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change. Observed surface temperature change and ocean heat gain together constrain the net climate forcing and ocean mixing rates.

We conclude that most climate models mix heat too efficiently into the deep ocean and as a result underestimate the negative forcing by human-made aerosols. Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be -1.6±0.3 W/m², implying substantial aerosol indirect climate forcing via cloud changes.

Continued failure to quantify the specific origins of this large forcing is untenable, as knowledge of changing aerosol effects is needed to understand future climate change.

We conclude that recent slowdown of ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols and a deep prolonged solar minimum. Observed sea level rise during the Argo float era is readily accounted for by ice melt and ocean thermal expansion, but the ascendency of ice melt leads us to anticipate acceleration of the rate of sea level rise this decade.

World running out of resources: UN

2012-01-30T16:01:00.001-08:00

Jill Colgan in Washington

ABC News Online, January 31, 2012

A major United Nations report has called for a sustainable "evergreen revolution", warning that time is running out to ensure there is enough food, water and fuel to meet the needs of the world's rapidly growing population.

In a grim warning about the earth's increasing demand for resources, a panel led by the presidents of Finland and South Africa found demand will grow exponentially as the global population rises from 7 billion people to an expected 9 billion by 2040.

Within the next 20 years the world's population will need 50 per cent more food and vast new reserves of energy and water, according to UN estimates.

The report warns a failure to secure resources will condemn up to 3 billion people to poverty.

Billed as a blueprint for sustainability, the report urges governments to embrace green energy technologies and cut back on the use of non-renewable resources.

Its authors have urged governments to tackle sustainable development with a greater sense of urgency and political will.

"The current global development model is unsustainable. To achieve sustainability, a transformation of the global economy is required," the report said.

"Tinkering on the margins will not do the job. The current global economic crisis ... offers an opportunity for significant reforms."

Flooding rated as worst climate change threat facing UK

2012-01-26T16:00:00.000-08:00

Defra report lists 700 impacts, including flood risk for 3.6 million people, water shortages, soil erosion and wildlife disruption

• Climate change: threats and opportunities to the UK - graphic

Juliette Jowit,

The Guardian, Thursday 26 January 2012

Flooding is the greatest threat to the UK posed by climate change, with up to 3.6 million people at risk by the middle of the century, according to a report published on Thursday by the environment department.

The first comprehensive climate change risk assessment for the UK identifies hundreds of ways rising global temperatures will have an impact if no action is taken. They include the financial damage caused by flooding, which would increase to £2bn-£10bn a year by 2080, more deaths in heatwaves, and large-scale water shortages by mid-century.

Unusually for such documents, it also highlighted ways in which the country could benefit from milder winters and drier summers, such as fewer cold-related deaths, better wheat crops and a more attractive climate for tourists.

"If you had to pick one particular issue I think the flooding issue is the most dominant," said Sir Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Lord John Krebs, chairman of the adaptation committee of the independent advisory group Committee on Climate Change, said that without planning and investment to deal with the threats the UK would "sleepwalk into disaster". The benefits of climate change should also not be taken as reason to stop worrying about it, even with policies to reduce the threats, said Krebs: "Whether it will result in a net benefit we simply can't tell."

Scientists and other experts, led by Defra, identified 700 impacts of climate change in the UK, including the possibility of refugees arriving from wars over dwindling water and food.

High-impact events expected by mid-century included decreased forestation caused by red band needle blight, shortages in public water supply (especially in the north, Midlands and south of England), and worse water quality.

The assessors selected the 100 most pressing threats and opportunities and rated these according to their impact, the confidence of the modellers, and how soon the threats might occur. All the report's forecasts assume no governmental action to reduce or remove the threats.

The four most immediate "high consequence" risks all concerned flooding, with the expectation that in 10 years or so there will be increased flood damage to homes, with knock-on effects on insurance premiums and mental health.

Between 1.7 million and 3.6 million people are expected to be at risk of flooding by 2050, without investment to lessen the threat.

Surface water flooding would be likely to get worse, Watson added.

Other issues highlighted by the report include changes in wildlife migration, alterations in species communities as plants and animals fail to move fast enough to thrive, sewer overflows polluting the coast, changes in the soil, erosion from heavier rains, loss of staff working-time from heat stress, changes in fish stocks, and wildfires in drier summers.

The findings follow controversy over cuts to the UK flood defence budget.

However, Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, said the report justified the department's decision to ask for more capital and fewer revenue funds from the Treasury, and said government money would be supplemented by contributions from local communities.

"[Comparing] the last four years of the Labour government and the first four years of this government there will be a reduction of 6% … but you can get more homes protected for the same amount of money," said Spelman.

The report was widely welcomed as a way to help government departments, businesses and councils plan ahead.

But Mary Creagh, the shadow environment secretary, said: "In 2010 Labour invested £354m in protecting homes from flooding, which has been cut by 27% to £259m a year for the next four years under this government.

"Ministers are playing Russian roulette with people's homes and businesses by cutting too far, too fast, and could leave communities blighted, with homeowners unable to insure, mortgage or sell their homes after 2013, when Labour's deal with the insurance industry runs out."

It will be seized upon by lobbyists to argue for spending priorities, and used by government to prepare the national adaptation plan, due to be published next year.

Julian Hunt, emeritus professor of climate modelling, at University College London, said the report's finding that there would be longer periods of "static weather" and cloud cover, could threaten energy from solar and wind sources .

"This leads to dangerous urban heat island temperatures and droughts. But it also indicates the danger of lengthy, very low, wind conditions, or cloudy conditions – so low-carbon energy alternatives to wind and solar are essential," said Hunt.

Peter Mallaburn, reader in climate policy at De Montfort University, said the need to save energy was in conflict with government policies not pushing for higher energy efficiency standards for commercial buildings.

"This report says, for the first time, that not only are our homes and offices leaky, but that they will start to overheat in a warmer world," said Mallaburn. "We need a coherent strategy to sort out this mess. Let's hope that this report acts as a wake-up call."

A website has been set up asking for the public's views on the national adaptation programme.

Climate warming would cause loss of life

2012-01-17T12:34:00.001-08:00

The Age, January 17, 2012

A global temperature rise of two degrees by 2050 would result in increased loss of life, a new Australian study has found.

Scientists from the Queensland University of Technology and the CSIRO say they have conducted world-first research which looks at the "years of life lost" due to climate change.

They focused on the city of Brisbane, which has a subtropical climate.

"A two-degree increase in temperature in Brisbane between now and 2050 would result in an extra 381 years of life lost per year in Brisbane," lead

researcher Associate Professor Adrian Barnett, from the university's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said in a statement.

"A two-degree increase in temperature is the figure in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is dangerous, but could be reached unless more aggressive measures are undertaken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Professor Barnett said an increase of more than two degrees would be catastrophic.

"A four-degree increase in temperature would result in an extra 3242 years of life lost per year in Brisbane."

Professor Barnett said the "years of life lost" measurement gives greater weight to deaths at younger ages instead of focusing just on elderly people.

"We wanted to use years of life lost because we suspected that many temperature-related deaths were in the elderly, which would reduce the public health importance of temperature compared with other issues," he said.

"In fact, we found the opposite, with a surprisingly high years of life lost figure."

Interestingly, the study found that a one-degree increase would result in a decrease in the number of lives lost.

This is believed to be because the increase in heat-related years of life lost are offset by the decrease in cold-related years of life lost. The researchers said cold-related deaths are significant, even in a city with Brisbane's warm climate.

And many deaths could be avoided if people have better insulation in their houses.

"Many houses in Brisbane are built of thin planks of wood and are poorly insulated, which means the occupants are exposed to whatever the temperature is outside," Professor Barnett said.

The researchers believe that while their work was focused on Brisbane, it contains helpful information to decision-makers in other areas as well.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Fourteen steps to reduce global warming

2012-01-12T16:33:00.001-08:00

Nicky Phillips, SCIENCE

The Age, January 13, 2012

REDUCING the amount of soot and methane released into the atmosphere could slow the world's warming by half a degree, save millions of lives, and dramatically improve global air quality, a study has found.

A group of international scientists claim 14 practical methods could reduce the pollutants, which not only contribute to global warming but also kill or debilitate millions of people each year, and increase global crop yields at the same time.

While much focus has been placed on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – and black soot play a role in man-made global warming and are a significant source of air pollution.

By screening more than 400 tried-and-tested soot and methane pollution reduction processes being used on a small scale around the world, the team, led by NASA scientist Drew Shindell, came up with a list of approaches to improve air quality and reduce global warming that could be implemented on a regional and global scale.

Changes to coal mining and natural gas extraction combined with better landfill and livestock management would reduce global methane, while improvements to diesel engines, replacing wood and dung fires with modern stoves and banning agricultural burning would lower soot emissions.

To measure the impact these pollution reduction methods could have on global warming, the team added the controls to computer models using two future emissions scenarios – one based on business as usual, where carbon emissions were not constrained, and one based on a low-carbon world.

The results show global temperature could be decreased by half a degree by 2050.

And, in a low-carbon world, the soot and methane reductions would keep the world's thermostat below the danger level of 2 degrees warming.

Lower methane levels would avoid annual crop losses of between 30 million and 137 million tonnes in 2030, while soot reductions would prevent between 700,000 and 4.7 million premature deaths a year.

The cost benefits to reducing the pollutants were also significant, said the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Science.

"Methane emission reductions are valued at $700 to $5000 per metric tonne, which is well above the typical marginal abatement costs, [of about] $250," they said.

An atmospheric chemist at the CSIRO said that, scientifically, the research was "a very strong piece of work".

Melita Keywood, a principal research scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said: "The measures are the sort of things that can be done now, and can have a short-term consequence which will really appeal to policymakers."

SIGNS OF THINGS TO COME: SALINGER ON AUSTRALIAN HEATWAVES

2012-01-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

Hot Topic by GUEST on JANUARY 10, 2012

Climate change is happening now and Australia is in the firing line says Jim Salinger in this guest post. This article first appeared in the Dominion Post.

As I watch from my summer subtropical perch in Brisbane, Queensland, the somewhat unprecedented rains that deluged parts of Australia during the summer of 2010/11 have been replaced by sizzling heat waves this summer. These raise some pertinent lessons on climate and risk management for New Zealand. Firstly let's look at some figures and ask the question of what are the climate mechanisms behind the heat waves.

For December 2011 the Bureau of Meteorology figures show that the highest temperatures of the year occurred in the third Australian heat wave of the year. This affected the Pilbara region in the north west of Western Australia. Multiple sites broke the previous Western Australian December record of 48.8ºC on December 26, 1986 with Roebourne recording 49.4ºC on December 21, Onslow Airport recording 49.2ºC on the 22nd and Learmonth 48.9ºC on the 23rd. Roebourne's 49.4ºC was the highest temperature recorded in Australia since 1998.

This month incessant heat has struck the interior with daytime highs soaring to the mid forties. As I pen this there are a few more days of this heat wave left with temperatures averaging between 35ºC and 40ºC in central Australia. Places have been recording daily lows of 30ºC and daily highs of close to 45ºC. Mean temperatures have been running over 6ºC above average.

Meteorologists measure the warmth of the air lying above one spot as the 500 – 1000 hPa thickness. The "thickness" is a measure of how warm or cold a layer of the atmosphere is. High values mean warm air, and low values mean cold air. Summer 500 – 1000 hPa thickness values lie between 5600 and 5700 metres over Australia. It was values of around 5760 metres that brought New Zealand's highest temperatures in the low forties in February 1973.

And what has been happening in late December and early January? An incredibly hot blob of air has sat over parts of inland Australia with thickness values of 5850 metres or more.

It is a simple law of physics that with more greenhouse gases in a layer of atmosphere the warmer surface temperatures get. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide now are at 392 parts per million compared with 280ppm in 1750. This means that the lower atmosphere is thicker and retains more warmth, as more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps extra heat. The consequence is that global warming leads to an increase in the magnitude and incidence of heat waves.

The first lesson from the sizzling continental heat wave is that global warming has arrived for some time now, and the climate has warmed. Global warming is no longer a theory based on abstract calculations of what the climate is very likely to do in future decades. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded: "It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent."

The second lesson – the canary in the coal mine – is that because of global warming the frequency of these extreme weather events is only going to increase. Thus the century old high temperature extremes are going to be exceeded more often in the future.

The third lesson is that there needs to be better preparation for these events by civil society. Heat waves can have debilitating effects on the elderly who are not so healthy. The 2003 European heat wave caused at least 40,000 deaths and the 2010 western Russian heat wave 55,000 deaths. Heat waves also increase the fire risk when there is little rain, as occurred in the Black Saturday heat wave and bushfires on 7 February 2009 in Victoria.

At least New Zealand is the lucky country in this respect surrounded by oceans which dampen down any high temperatures. However NIWA future climate scenarios show a large increase in days above 30 and 35ºC in eastern districts with more frequent very hot nor'westers as the 21st century progresses.

Global warming is here, now and not a phenomenon for future generations to deal with. We must embark on a course of emissions reductions targets as soon as possible, to claw back rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. If we do not act now the severity of such heat waves and the subsequent damage to life and property will increase. There is no time like the present to invest in our future wellbeing.

Jim Salinger is spending the southern summer at the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffiths University, Queensland as a visiting research fellow.

Cherry-picking contrarian geologists tend to obscure scientific truth

2011-12-31T15:35:00.001-08:00

MIKE SANDIFORD
From:
The Australian, December 31, 2011
12:00AM

GINA Rinehart notoriously claims she has never met a geologist who believes "adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate".

To listen to prominent "contrarian" geologists such as Ian Plimer, you might imagine she never could.

But, despite the bluster, our contrarian geologists are out of kilter with their own community and seem deeply confused about the way the greenhouse effect - by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, for example - has shaped both the past and the present.

All geology students learn of the importance of the greenhouse effect. It's simply impossible to understand the geological record without it.

In his 2001 award-winning book A Short History of Planet Earth, Plimer has numerous references to the greenhouse effect.

He explains what all young geologists learn as the faint young sun paradox:

"The early sun had a luminosity of some 30 per cent less than now and, over time, luminosity has increased in a steady state.

"The low luminosity of the early sun was such that the Earth's average surface temperature would have been below 0C from 4500 to 2000 million years ago. But there is evidence of running water and oceans as far back as 3800 million years ago." The question is, what kept the early Earth from freezing over?"

Plimer goes on to explain: "This paradox is solved if the Earth had an enhanced greenhouse with an atmosphere of a lot of carbon dioxide and methane."

Here's another quote from Plimer, referring to a time 100 million years ago when the dinosaurs roamed the planet: "The peak of 6 per cent carbon dioxide was at the time of a protracted greenhouse and maximum sea level. At this time, mean annual surface temperatures were 10C to 15C warmer than now."

The problem is, although his temperature estimate is about right, his CO2 estimate is about 50 times too high. CO2 levels were more like 0.12 per cent. At just three times present levels, this is a target we are on track to reach early next century.

Jump forward to 2009 and in his book Heaven and Earth Plimer seems to have quietly forgotten those geological lessons in stating: "Over geological time there is no observed relationship between global climate and atmospheric CO2."

Exactly which Plimer are we to believe?

Scientists are notoriously sceptical of the data collected by others. But ignoring a respected source is reprehensible. Cherry-picking only the data that fits is borderline. Deliberately misrepresenting data or making it up is just not on.

Here's an example. In a section from his new book, How To Get Expelled from School, as reprinted in The Weekend Australian recently, Plimer claims: "Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide."

Plimer goes on to say: "Either the ice core data is wrong, the Hawaiian carbon dioxide measurements are wrong, or the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was decreasing during a period of industrialisation."

The implication is there must be something terribly wrong with the orthodox climate science and we are all being taken for a ride.

The problem is that the primary data sources explicitly state the Hawaiian Mauna Loa CO2 measurements for 1960 were in the range 313-320ppm, and that Siple air of age about 1900 has a CO2 content of 295ppm, with the 330ppm concentrations having an estimated air age of 1962-83, entirely in keeping with Mauna Loa.

Who has been taken for a ride?

Sadly, this is not an isolated case. Plimer has persistently claimed that volcanoes contribute much more CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere than do our own activities, blithely ignoring US Geological Survey reference data showing just the opposite - volcanoes emit CO2 at about 1 per cent of the rate of anthropogenic emissions.

Another common meme promoted by our contrarian geologists is that it is now a fact that the climate is cooling.

But may we ask by whose data is this a fact?

Certainly not NASA's, which showed last year was the hottest on record, followed by 2005, 2007, 2009 and 1998. In fact, NASA ranks nine of the hottest 10 years ever recorded between 2001 and last year. You'd reckon NASA had learned a few lessons about being careful with data.

Variations on decadal timescales are more relevant to climate trends than annual variations. NASA shows the average temperature over the decade 2000-09 was a full 0.2C higher than in the 1990s - the biggest decadal rise in temperature ever recorded.

With an increase of more than 0.5C over the past 40 years, the decadal trend is now warming faster than ever. It beggars belief that any serious scientist could assert the climate is cooling.

Our contrarian geologists also avoid the devil in the detail. NASA's data shows that winters are warming faster than the summers and the Arctic faster than the tropics. While the lower atmosphere is warming, the upper atmosphere is cooling.

These characteristics provide diagnostic fingerprints of the heat trapping expected for a greenhouse effect. They provide the smoking gun that points to rising greenhouse gas levels as the cause, and rule out warming because of additional heat input from the sun.

Could that be why you won't hear our contrarian geologists refer to such data? Could their real agenda be in manufacturing doubt rather than the search for scientific truth?

If so, it wouldn't be a first, as Naomi Oreskes points out in her recent book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

Now here's a point for those who, like Rinehart, think all geologists toe Plimer's contrarian line.

Oreskes is a noted geologist. Having published groundbreaking research on the origin of the giant South Australian Olympic Dam deposit, she has arguably contributed more to the understanding of Australian mineral wealth than has Plimer.

Now just imagine a meeting between Rinehart and Oreskes - that would be interesting!

Mike Sandiford is professor of geology at the University of Melbourne

Mixed report card for environment

2011-12-12T15:54:00.001-08:00

Tom Arup

The Age, December 13, 2011

The State of the Environment Report can be downloaded here. It is a very large file (118MB). There is also a summary (1.1MB).

CURRENT government spending has been unable to arrest Australia's alarming decline in native animal and plant populations, one of the biggest probes into our environmental health has found.

The 900-page State of the Environment report, released yesterday, has also concluded that global warming, population growth and economic development have become the main drivers of environmental impacts across the country.

In a mixed scorecard, the report, produced every five years, says available evidence suggests the population, range, and genetic diversity of a wide range of Australia's wildlife species is in decline.

Despite ''promising'' government investment in measures to reduce the main pressures on biodiversity, such as revegetation and curtailing invasive species, they have not been substantially reduced and species decline isn't being reversed.

''While all jurisdictions have appropriate goals in high-level plans, these are often not matched with implementation plans or levels of resourcing capable of achieving the goals,'' the report says.

Since it was compiled, the government has committed an extra $950 million of carbon price revenue towards biodiversity.

The report also identifies unexpected declines in bird and mammal numbers in northern Australia - where land clearing and development pressures are less than the south - suggesting the trends might be worse than previously expected.

The head of the scientific panel behind the work, Dr Tom Hatton from CSIRO, told The Age there are still many parts of Australia in a good environmental state. But he identified coastal and semi-urban areas as increasingly facing the impact of rapid urban development and climate change. Dr Hatton said some positive signs were emerging that the link between economic and population growth and environmental damage could be reduced with innovation and improved efficiencies.

''Our per-capita water use is going down in the capital cities,'' Dr Hatton said, ''and there is some early evidence our landfill waste generation is slowing. So I'm hopeful we can decouple economic growth from the environment. Confident? Well that's another question.''

Environment Minister Tony Burke said yesterday: ''There's acknowledgment in the report that given the amount of degradation that's happened in some places, we're never going back to the original environment that was here 200 years ago. But we can get it to a much better state of health.''

Marine environments are in generally good condition. But there is substantial degradation in southern and eastern waters - including Victoria's seas - with ecosystems in bays and near coasts in generally poor health. Port Phillip Bay could be the marine ecosystem most invaded by foreign pests in the southern hemisphere.

With David Wroe

Protecting biodiversity would limit damage

2011-12-11T22:27:00.001-08:00

Nicky Phillips

The Age, December 12, 2011

THE impact of climate change on Australia's animals and plants could be significantly reduced if other threats to biodiversity are managed, a new report says.

The review, the most detailed scientific paper on the impact of climate change on the region to date, says climate change is unavoidable because global emissions are not yet under control. Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands are particularly vulnerable, it says.

The report's lead author, the conservation biologist Richard Kingsford, said the effects of global warming could be offset by more than half by reducing the impact of feral animals, pollution, habitat loss and other threats to Australia's ecosystems.

Global warming will have consequences for all plant and animal species, from micro-organisms to large mammals living on land, in freshwater systems and the ocean, said Professor Kingsford, the director of the Australian wetlands and rivers centre at the University of NSW.

The review cites many independent scientific studies that demonstrate the effects of global warming on biodiversity, and its projected impact.

Rising temperatures will exceed some species' tolerance, especially in alpine regions, while increases in fire and drought will alter vegetation, favouring grasslands over trees and woodlands.

Rising sea levels will have a significant impact on low-lying islands, especially in the Pacific, while an increase in ocean acidification will affect marine animals with calcified skeletons.

"Ultimately we are dependent on biodiversity for our livelihood," Professor Kingsford said. "Plants provide the oxygen we need; the water we get from rivers is supported by catchments filled with plants and animals, and most of our food is supported by biodiversity."

Already many changes among animals and plants have been observed, Professor Kingsford said, such as coral bleaching, altered flowering patterns and shifts in the migration times of animals, particularly birds.

The last resort to prevent extinction for some species would mean relocation to a new habitat, he said.

Butterfly effect flags climate chaos

2011-12-09T18:11:00.001-08:00

Jo Chandler

The Age, December 10, 2011

Any regular observer of the annual international climate talks that have become a fixture on the Yuletide calendar over the past 17 years will be aware that these events create their own extreme weather. Conference rooms heavy with hot air are suddenly lashed by tornadoes of frenzied resolve and energy, most of which blow themselves out. Then there are the thunderous exchanges, frosty relations, occasional showers of aspiration, and the dustclouds of vanished hope.

What it all means it's often hard to say, the 10,000-plus players from 195 nations having evolved a banal language of negotiation that is near impenetrable to the uninitiated. One might be forgiven for thinking they are talking about someone else's planet.

But from outside the artificial atmospheric bubble of the UN climate talks, this planet continues to issue statements more eloquent, powerful and enduring than any of the human chatter. Its voice can be found in the volumes of scientific journals and expert reports as new pages are added to the evolving 150-year-plus archive of climate knowledge.

This year, the 12 days of Durban talks coincided with a torrent of new science, much of it timed to exploit piqued interest in climate issues (not always successfully). It began with a blast from the wild ocean waters south of the Roaring Forties, and finished on butterfly wings in the gardens of Great Britain. Links are included below.

November 29: The morning after South African President Jacob Zuma opened the Durban talks with the declaration that ''for most people in the developing countries and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death'', scientists at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart published an analysis collating the latest findings on the Southern Ocean, one of the most powerful players on global and regional climate.

Over the past 50 years its cold, deep waters have gulped down the lion's share of the heat and CO2 being pumped out by human enterprise, its mighty currents ploughing more than 40 per cent of the extra carbon dioxide into the deep water. As a consequence, the ocean is becoming more acidic - the upshot of an intense chemical attraction: CO2 loves H2O, and vice versa. The chemistry plays out in a lowering of the pH of seawater, eroding the capacity of the tiny organisms at the bottom of the marine food chain to build shells and skeletons. The timing of the threshold at which the Southern Ocean waters actually become corrosive to shells has been brought forward from around 2050 to around 2030.

Salinity is also changing. Samples hauled up from the abyss four kilometres down find the waters are both freshening (less salty) and warming.

The southern waters are warming faster than other oceans, the temperature rise trickling down to greater depths. Water temperature around Antarctica has a critical influence on ''the largest single uncertainty in estimating the future range of sea level rise … the question of what's going to happen to the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland'', says ACE CRC Oceans program leader Dr Steve Rintoul.

(www.acecrc.org.au, Position Analysis: Climate Change and the Southern Ocean.)

November 30: As the World Meteorological Organisation releases news that 2011 has been one of the warmest years on record despite the moderating influence of a cooling La Nina event (www.wmo.int), Australia's Climate Commission publishes the latest of a series of reports on The Critical Decade, shifting discussion from broader environmental concerns to more intimate questions of human health.

The report declares climate change to be one of the most serious threats facing Australians' health, due to the increased risk of death or injury during extreme weather events, and an expected rise in infectious disease and mental illness. No one is immune, the report warns, but the most vulnerable will suffer disproportionately - children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, remote indigenous communities.

(www.climatecommission.gov.au)

December 1: With Arctic temperatures rising at almost twice the average rate of the planet, the permafrost - the vast frozen tundra that holds about 1700 billion tonnes of organic matter accumulated in soils over thousands of years - is thawing. ''That is about four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity in modern times, and twice as much as is present in the atmosphere now,'' say the authors of a commentary published in Nature, informed by a survey of 41 permafrost scientists from around the world.

In recent years there have been reports of ancient carbon and methane bubbling out of lakes and igniting tundra fires. ''Carbon released into the atmosphere from permafrost soils will accelerate climate change,'' the article states. How much of an effect the thaw will have is highly uncertain. But the scientists do anticipate it will be faster than the models suggest. They calculate that permafrost thaw could, over this century, put as much carbon into the atmosphere as deforestation (if forest loss continues at current rates), making it ''cause for serious concern''.

Their fears are compounded by the observation that permafrost emissions include significant quantities of methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The survey, they say, ''outlines the additional risk to society caused by thawing of the frozen north, and underscores the urgent need to reduce atmospheric emissions from fossil-fuel use and deforestation. This will help to keep permafrost carbon frozen in the ground.''

(www.nature.com)

December 2: The powerful role of carbon dioxide as a regulator of Earth's climate over deep history is further exposed in an analysis of ancient algae found buried in seabed cores. It reveals that a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide of about 40 per cent appears to have been the driving force behind the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet 34 million years ago, say US scientists at Yale and Purdue universities in a paper in Science. ''The evidence falls in line with what we would expect if carbon dioxide is the main dial that governs global climate; if we crank it up or down there are dramatic changes,'' said Purdue's Professor Matthew Huber. ''We went from a warm world without ice to a cooler world with an ice sheet overnight, in geological terms, because of fluctuations in carbon dioxide levels.''

While the study sheds new light on the consequences of a moment one scientist described as ''the mother of all climate tipping points'', the factors that drove the fall in carbon dioxide levels remain a mystery.

(www.sciencemag.org)

December 4: At the heart of scientific investigation and public discussion about climate change is how much warming is influenced by humans, and how much is the consequence of natural variation. A fresh investigation of this question by Swiss climate modellers, using new methodology, concludes that natural factors are extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years. Since 1950, the average global surface air temperature has increased by more than 0.5 degrees celsius. To distinguish between human and natural causes of warming, the scientists analysed changes in the balance of heat energy entering and leaving Earth. Their findings, in Nature Geoscience, echo other investigations, and lead to ''an even higher confidence about human influence dominating the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times''.

(www.nature.com/naturegeoscience)

On the same day, two other papers explore different facets of the changing marine environment.

One looks at oxygen levels in the tropical north-east Atlantic Ocean. Fish need to swim - and breathe. Global warming is believed to be influencing the expansion of areas of the ocean in which dissolved oxygen levels are declining. A collaboration of American, German and Canadian scientists used individually tagged fish as part of their exploration of Atlantic waters. Their work plots a decrease in upper layer oxygen levels, and concludes that oxygen depletion and the expansion of the deep oxygen minimum zone may reduce the habitat of some fish species. This, combined with overfishing, may threaten the sustainability of valuable fisheries, they warn.

Meanwhile, anyone fishing for some good news might find a skerrick of it in a paper out of Queensland's James Cook University. The scientists set out to study the capacity of species to adapt to warmer waters. The team found that one species of common tropical reef fish was able to acclimatise within a couple of generations. The spiny damselfish didn't like being suddenly moved into warmer waters, explained Professor Philip Munday, but its descendants coped. Munday was not as reassured by his results as some media commentators. ''This is just one fish,'' he told the ABC. ''It is a complicated story. This is just one little piece of good news in that otherwise very worrying story.''

(www.nature.com/natureclimatechange); see also Science Daily.

December 5: A week into the talks in Durban, and news breaks that global emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels jumped by the largest amount on record over 2010. After a two-year slump in emissions during 2008 and 2009 as a result of the global financial crisis, emissions rose 5.9 per cent last year according to the analysis of the Global Carbon Project. ''There's no evidence that this trajectory we've been following the last 10 years is going to change,'' observed a leader of the analysis team, Dr Glen P. Peters of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo.

(www.globalcarbonproject.org)

December 7: The UN Food and Agriculture Administration (FAO) issues its first report on the State of the World's Land and Water Resources. Between 1961 and 2009, cropland grew by 12 per cent, but agricultural production expanded by 150 per cent, thanks to yield increases in major crops. But the rates of growth are slowing, and the report plots an increasing imbalance between availability and demand for land and water resources. The number of areas reaching the limits of production capacity is fast increasing, the report warns.

(www.fao.org)

On the same day, the US National and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration reports that in 2011 the US experienced a record 12 separate billion-dollar weather/climate disasters, with an aggregate damage total of about $US52 billion ($A50.7 billion).

(www.noaanews.noaa.gov)

Meanwhile in Britain, data published from the biggest ever survey of butterflies shows that nearly three-quarters of butterfly species that breed in the UK have declined in numbers over a decade. Richard Fox, lead author of the survey, told the Guardian that the results were ''significant, worrying and depressing''.

He described butterflies as the canaries in the coalmine of the environment, the health of their populations providing a telling narrative stretching back - in the context of Britain - to the 1600s. ''We have just gone through a decade which has had the highest levels of public awareness about wildlife and conservation and effort and public money gone into the landscape for wildlife: in that context it's pretty bad news.''

(www.butterfly-conservation.org) see also The Guardian

December 8: As Durban negotiators entered the last phase of talks, Dr James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Space Institute - and the scientist who first raised concerns about global warming before the US Senate in 1988 - had a message for them. If the world begins reducing CO2 emissions by 6 per cent a year starting in 2012, atmospheric levels can return to the "safe" level of 350 ppm that he and others have long called for. "If the world waits until 2020 to begin, it will need to reduce CO2 by 15 per cent a year to reach 350 ppm. We are out of time."

Jo Chandler is a senior writer.

Report warns of deadly climate change

2011-11-29T20:40:00.001-08:00

ABC News, November 30, 2011

A new report is warning more Australians face dying in heatwaves and catching infectious diseases as a result of climate change.

A Climate Commission report out today, titled The Critical Decade: Climate Change and Health, says climate change-related injury, disease and deaths will continue to grow in decades to come unless sustained action is taken.

The Climate Commission report says climbing temperatures will lead to more natural disasters and changing rainfall patterns, which will have an impact on people's health as much as on the environment.

It includes a worst-case scenario where deaths from hotter temperatures in Queensland and the Northern Territory could multiply tenfold by 2100.

Report co-author Professor Lesley Hughes says even a small rise in temperature can be detrimental to people's health.

"A small rise in average temperature actually means a fairly large rise in the number of days, for example, over 35 degrees [Celsius] every year," she said.

"So as average temperatures go up, the number of extremely hot days go up in a disproportionate way. So what we're concerned about with climate change, amongst other impacts, is the impact on heatwaves."

Professor Hughes concedes Australia already experiences killer heatwaves.

"In the last couple of years we've had some fairly significant heatwaves in the south-eastern states, especially in Melbourne and Adelaide," she said.

"In Melbourne for example, in 2009, in the weeks before the Black Saturday bushfires, there was an increase of 62 per cent on the normal death rate for that period when temperatures reached record levels in the mid-40s.

Professor Hughes says all climate models are showing there will be rises in the frequency and or intensity of many extreme events that have detrimental impacts on health.

The Climate Commission report says health burdens and costs are likely to rise as the climate changes.

"Climate change will have both direct and indirect impacts on health," Professor Hughes said.

"[It will] potentially affect the distribution of mosquitoes that carry diseases like dengue fever, maybe exposing many more people to the impacts of that disease.

"Climate change will also disproportionately affect those people in our society that are already more vulnerable.

"So the elderly, those with existing heart and kidney disease, children, people in remote communities and especially Indigenous communities.

"One of the aspects of climate change will be an economic impact via the impact on workers that will potentially have to cease working for more of the day than they do currently ... I think miners, like any outdoor workers, will be increasingly subject to longer periods of hotter weather during their working days, and that will have an impact."

The Climate Commission report was released as the United Nations' World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) released figures showing that 13 of the warmest years on record have occurred within the last decade and a half.

The year 2011 caps a decade that ties the record as the hottest ever measured, the WMO said in its annual report on climate trends and extreme weather events, unveiled at UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

"Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and that this warming is due to human activities," WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud said in a statement, urging policy makers should take note of the findings.

AAP/AFP

Research shows that Southern Ocean is warming and freshening

2011-11-28T14:58:00.001-08:00

ACE CRC, 29^th November 2011

MEDIA RELEASE

The Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC has launched a synopsis of the latest scientific research into changes in the temperature, salinity, acidity and circulation in the Southern Ocean.

The Southern Ocean plays a critical role in global and regional climate. More than 90% of the extra heat energy stored by the planet in the past 50 years has been absorbed in the world's oceans, with the Southern Ocean's latitude band storing more heat and CO2 than any other latitude band.

The synopsis, titled Position Analysis: Climate Change and the Southern Ocean, is a plain‐English summary of knowledge in this research area.

The latest research shows:

The Southern Ocean is warming faster than the average for the global ocean.

The warming extends to greater depth in the Southern Ocean than it does in low latitudesbecause of the unique ocean currents there that carry heat deep in the ocean. The large amount of heat stored in the ocean makes it expand, raising sea levels.

These currents also carry large amounts of carbon dioxide into the deep ocean, slowing the rate of climate change. More than 40% of the carbon dioxide released by human activities that ends up stored in the ocean enters through the Southern Ocean.

The Southern Ocean is getting fresher (lower in salinity). The changes in salinity provide evidence that the global water cycle is becoming more intense, with wet areas becoming wetter and dry areas becoming drier, as expected in a warming climate.

Freshening is observed in the abyssal waters off Antarctica south of Tasmania, and in the intermediate depth waters that originate in the Southern Ocean.

New measurements show that even the deepest waters, below 4 km depth, are warming and freshening. This means that even the deepest layers of the ocean can respond to changes in surface climate very quickly.

The ocean is becoming more acidic, making it more difficult for a wide variety of organisms to build shells, skeletons and reefs.

Because the effects of ocean acidification are sensitive to temperature, the threshold will be crossed first in the cold waters of the polar regions.

The report was prepared by the ACE CRC Oceans program leader Dr Steve Rintoul and the ACE CRC's Professor Nathan Bindoff, who is a project leader within the Oceans program.
Dr Rintoul said that understanding of the Southern Ocean and its role in the climate system had suffered from a lack of observations. "New technologies are allowing us to really measure the Southern Ocean for the first time, he said.

"The changes we have observed in the temperature, salinity, sea level and carbon concentrations in the Southern Ocean are important because they tell us how and why the climate system is changing," he said. "Because the Southern Ocean affects global and regional climate in profound ways, any changes in the region potentially have widespread consequences."

The CEO of the ACE CRC, Dr Tony Press, said that undertaking research in the Southern Ocean was expensive and logistically complex, making collaboration between organisations, nations and scientific disciplines crucial.

"Given its location and capabilities, Australia should provide leadership in international research efforts in the Southern Ocean," Dr Press said. "Our research in this area is already highly regarded and Australia is strategically placed to make a substantial contribution to understanding climate change in the Southern Ocean."

The Position Analysis underlines the importance of continued investment in the hardware required for ocean observation – this includes robotic instruments (called Argo floats), underwater autonomous vehicles, satellites and instrumentation that can record information from ships and planes.

The Position Analysis defines the Southern Ocean as the area south of 30◦S.

Link to Position Analysis:Climate Change and the Southern Ocean

To:

arrange interviews with oceanographers Steve Rintoul or Nathan Bindoff
discuss the policy section of the position analysis with ACE CEO Tony Press
receive a PDF of the position analysis

please contact:
Miranda Harman
ACE CRC Communications and Media Manager
+61 3 6226‐2265
+419 507 268
Miranda.harman@acecrc.org.au

Arctic sea ice loss 'unprecedented', study finds

2011-11-23T16:29:00.001-08:00

The Age, November 24, 2011

The loss of sea ice in the Arctic at the end of the 20th Century is "unprecedented" in the past 1,450 years in its duration and magnitude, an indication of human-influenced climate change, a study said.

So-called greenhouse gases may be contributing to the warming, and trends from the last several decades suggest there may soon be an ice-free Arctic in the summer, according to a study published today in the journal Nature.

The ice, which melts every summer before cold weather makes it expand again, shrank this year to its second-smallest size since 1979, covering 4.33 million square kilometers (1.67 million square miles), according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. Although previous sea ice declines have occurred at a similar pace, they don't match the extent of the melt, the study authors said.

"This drastic and continuous decrease we've been seeing from the satellites does seem to be anomalous," Christophe Kinnard, a study author and a geographer at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Aridas in La Serena, Chile, said in a telephone interview. "It does point to a continuation of this trend in the future."

The researchers used ice core records, tree ring data, lake sediment and historical evidence to reconstruct the amount of Arctic cover. The thickness and extent of sea ice have declined dramatically over the last 30 years, the researchers said.

Arctic sea ice influences the global climate, since 80 percent of the sunlight that strikes it is reflected back to space. When the ice melts in the summer, it exposes the ocean surface, which absorbs about 90 percent of the light, heating the water, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That influences climate patterns.

"You increase the radiation that's absorbed by the oceans, that's one of the strongest climate feedback mechanisms," Kinnard said. "The more sea ice you lose, the more energy you get in the ocean, which warms the atmosphere."

Bloomberg

Greenhouse Gas Concentrations Continue Climbing

2011-11-21T22:22:00.001-08:00

WMO Press Release No. 934 , 21 November 2011

WMO Bulletin highlights growth in nitrous oxide in atmosphere

GENEVA, 21 November 2011 (WMO) –The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2010 since pre-industrial time and the rate of increase has accelerated, according to the World Meteorological Organization's Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. It focussed special attention on rising nitrous oxide concentrations.

Between 1990 and 2010, according to the report, there was a 29% increase in radiative forcing - the warming effect on our climate system - from greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide accounted for 80% of this increase.

"The atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases due to human activities has yet again reached record levels since pre-industrial time," said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. "Even if we managed to halt our greenhouse gas emissions today – and this is far from the case – they would continue to linger in the atmosphere for decades to come and so continue to affect the delicate balance of our living planet and our climate."

"Now more than ever before, we need to understand the complex, and sometimes unexpected, interactions between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, Earth's biosphere and oceans. WMO will continue to collect data to further our scientific knowledge through its Global Atmosphere Watch network spanning more than 50 countries, including stations high in the Andes and Himalayas, in the remote expanses of Alaska and in the far South Pacific," he said.

Greenhouse gases trap radiation within the Earth's atmosphere causing it to warm. Human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agriculture, are major emitters of greenhouse gases which are drivers of climate change. After water vapour, the three most prevalent long-lived greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

IPCC expected to confirm link between climate change and extreme weather Report likely to conclude that man-made emissions are increasing the frequency of storms, floods and droughts

2011-11-18T04:22:00.001-08:00

Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent

Guardian.co.uk, 17 November 2011 16.32

Climate change is likely to cause more storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves and other extreme weather events, according to the most authoritative review yet of the effects of global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will publish on Friday its first special report on extreme weather, and its relationship to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The final details are being fought over by governments, as the "summary for policymakers" of the report has to be agreed in full by every nation that chooses to be involved. But the conclusions are expected to be that emissions from human activities are increasing the frequency of extreme weather events. In particular, there are likely to be many more heatwaves, droughts and changes in rainfall patterns.

Jake Schmidt of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council said: "This report should be a wake-up call to those that believe that climate change is some distant issue that might impact someone else. The report documents that extreme weather is happening now and that global warming will bring very dangerous events in the future. From the report you can see that extreme weather will impact everyone in one way or another. This is a window into the future if our political response doesn't change quickly."

This special report - one of only two that the IPCC is publishing before its 2014 comprehensive assessment of the state of climate change science - is particularly controversial as it deals with the relationship between man-made climate change and damaging events such as storms, floods and droughts. Some climate change sceptics and scientists cast doubt on whether the observed increase in extreme weather events can be attributed directly to human actions, or whether much of it is due to natural variability in the weather.

The IPCC, a body of the world's leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations, is likely to conclude that extreme weather can be linked to man-made climate change, but that individual weather events can at present only rarely be linked directly to global warming.

The Red Cross warned that disaster agencies were already dealing with the effects of climate change in vulnerable countries across the world. "The findings of this report certainly tally with what the Red Cross Movement is seeing, which is a rise in the number of weather-related emergencies around the world," said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre and coordinating lead author of the IPCC report. "We are committed to responding to disasters whenever and wherever they happen, but we have to recognise that if the number of disasters continues to increase, the current model we have for responding to them is simply impossible to sustain."

Insurers are also worried. Mark Way, of the insurance giant Swiss Re, told the Guardian that the massive increase in insurance claims was causing serious concern. He said that between 1970 and 1989, the insurance industry globally had paid out an average of $5bn a year in weather-related claims, but that this had increased enormously to $27bn a year. Although not all of this was attributable to climate change - increasing population, urbanisation and prosperity also play a major part - he said insurers wanted governments to get to grips with the effects of climate change in order to prepare for likely damage and tackle the causes of global warming.

MIke Hulme at the Tyndall Centre said it would be dangerous for governments to use this report in order to justify directing overseas aid only to those countries that could be proved to be suffering from climate change, rather than other problems. In that scenario, he said: "Funding will no longer go to those who are most at risk from climate-impacts and with low adaptive capacity, but will go to those who are lucky enough to live in regions of the world where weather extremes happen to be most attributable by climate models to human agency. These regions tend to be in mid-to-high latitudes, with lots of good weather data and well calibrated models. So, goodbye Africa."

Five years to act on climate: report

2011-11-10T15:24:00.001-08:00

Tom Arup and David Wroe

The Age, November 11, 2011

THE world has just five years to make ''urgent and radical policy changes'' or lock in dangerous climate change, the world's leading energy agency has warned, sparking a debate about whether Australia should shift to gas or renewable energy.

The 2011 World Energy Outlook - released by the International Energy Agency late on Wednesday night - finds the world is on track to build enough fossil-fuel power stations, energy-intensive factories and buildings by 2017 to close the door on keeping climate change to a safe level.

The Greens seized on the report to warn the energy sector against investing in gas production, saying the sector would be taking ''a gamble'' building new gas plants when there was clearly an urgency to move straight to renewable energy sources. Energy Minister Martin Ferguson retorted that the Greens had ''completely misunderstood'' the report.

The outlook says coal consumption needs to peak well before 2020 if the world wants to halt global warming at a 2 degrees rise, which scientists say is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

If energy and climate policies currently proposed by all world governments - including Australia's carbon tax - are put in place, temperatures will rise by 3.5 degrees. If the world remains on its current path of growth in fossil fuels global temperatures will rise by 6 degrees, the outlook says.

Agency chief economist Fatih Birol said if by 2017 there is not a start to major new clean infrastructure investments ''the door to 2 degrees will be closed''.

''I am very worried,'' he said, ''if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum. The door will be closed forever.''

The outlook comes as nations prepare to converge on the South African city of Durban later this month for the next round of global climate change negotiations, but there is almost no expectation significant progress on a global pact will be made.

The agency's report says emissions from existing fossil-fuel power plants, factories and buildings have already locked in 80 per cent of the emissions allowed by 2035 to keep carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million, the maximum possible to keep temperature rises to 2 degrees. The other 20 per cent will be eaten up by 2017 on current development trends the outlook says.

Greens deputy leader Christine Milne told The Age the report showed that there was no longer time to use gas - which is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal - as a stepping stone to renewable energy such as wind, solar and geothermal. ''[The outlook] is basically saying to the investment community, 'You are going to be gambling on how long gas has got as any kind of transitional fuel'.''

Australia would need to make deeper cuts to keep to a 450ppm target, which would restrict the number of permits under the carbon-pricing scheme and make emissions more expensive.

However, Mr Ferguson told The Age: ''The flexibility of gas-fired technology and the fact it is the cleanest fossil fuel make it an attractive investment option.

''In addition to gas, the message I am getting firsthand out of China and India … is that coal-fired power will increase and Australia is well placed to supply coal to fuel their growing economies.''

Greenhouse emissions exceed worst case scenario

2011-11-04T17:31:00.001-07:00

Seth Borenstein

The Age, November 5, 2011

WASHINGTON: The global output of carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the US Department of Energy has calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for last year mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts four years ago.

''The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing,'' the co-director of the joint program on the science and policy of global change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), John Reilly, said.

The world pumped about 512 million tonnes more of carbon into the air last year than it did in 2009, an increase of 6 per cent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries - China, the US and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.

Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past, said the ''monster'' increase was unheard of. Extra pollution in China and the US accounted for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Dr Marland said.

''It's a big jump,'' said the director of the Energy Department's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tom Boden. ''From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over.''

India and China are huge users of coal. Burning coal is the biggest carbon source worldwide, and emissions from it jumped nearly 8 per cent last year.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution.

Mr Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst-case projections from the climate panel.

Even though global warming sceptics have attacked the climate panel as being too alarmist, scientists have generally found their predictions too conservative, Dr Reilly said.

He said his university worked on emissions scenarios, their likelihood and what would happen. The climate panel's worst-case scenario was about in the middle of what MIT calculated were likely scenarios.

Chris Field, of Stanford University, head of one of the panels working groups, said its emissions scenarios were intended to be more accurate in the long term and were less so in earlier years. The question now among scientists was whether the future was the panel's worst-case scenario ''or something more extreme'', he said.

But Dr Reilly and Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, found something good in recent emissions figures. The developed countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas limiting treaty have reduced their emissions overall since then and have achieved their goals of cutting emissions to about 8 per cent below 1990 levels.

In 1990, developed countries produced about 60 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases. Now it is probably less than 50 per cent, Dr Reilly said.

''We really need to get the developing world because if we don't, the problem is going to be running away from us,'' Dr Weaver said. ''And the problem is pretty close from running away from us.''

Associated Press

Climate change to spark more floods, says UK adviser

2011-10-20T17:13:00.001-07:00

Karen Kissane, London

The Age, October 21, 2011

AUSTRALIA can expect more frequent devastating floods similar to those in Queensland last year, and the world is facing decades of unprecedented hardship as a result of climate change, according to the chief scientific adviser to the British government.

''We are facing what I believe will be unprecedented difficult times over the next 20, 30, 40 years,'' warned Professor Sir John Beddington. He was speaking as chairman of a panel of scientists launching a major international report about the effects of climate change on people.

The report predicts that migration will increase markedly; that millions will move into, rather than away from, environmentally vulnerable areas; and millions more will be affected but will not be able to move.

The report says that by 2060, up to 179 million people will be trapped in low-lying coastal floodplains subject to extreme weather events such as floods, storm surges, landslides and rising sea levels, unable to migrate because they are too poor or ill-equipped, or because they are restricted by political or geographic boundaries.

Two-thirds of the world's cities with populations of more than 5 million are at least partially located in coastal zones, including rapidly growing urban centres in Asian and African ''mega-deltas'', the report said.

Other large cities would suffer water shortages, with 150 million people already living in cities where water is limited.

Migration and Global Environmental Change is the result of a two-year peer-reviewed project by 350 specialists in 30 countries. Speaking after the launch yesterday, Sir John told The Age that Australia should not expect the La Nina phenomenon that triggered the Queensland floods to be a once-in-a-generation event. The next one could not be predicted but it would return much more frequently than in the past.

''We know that climate change is happening,'' he said. ''We know that the greenhouse gases already in the upper atmosphere will determine the climate over the next 30 years [and there will be] more droughts, floods and extreme weather such as tropical storm surges.''

The World Bank said it will meet in December to assess the report's implications. The International Organisation for Migration said it would organise an international meeting in Geneva to discuss action.

The impact of ecological limits on population growth

2011-10-14T17:24:00.000-07:00

Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion this century. But with increasing pressure on water and food supplies will this projected population boom turn into a bust?

Robert Engelman for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network,

Guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 October 2011

The hard part about predicting the future, someone once said, is that it hasn't happened yet. So it's a bit curious that so few experts question the received demographic wisdom that the Earth will be home to roughly 9 billion people in 2050 and a stable 10 billion at the century's end. Demographers seem comfortable projecting that life expectancy will keep rising while birth rates drift steadily downward, until human numbers hold steady with 3 billion more people than are alive today.

What's odd about this demographic forecast is how little it seems to square with environmental ones. There's little scientific dispute that the world is heading toward a warmer and harsher climate, less dependable water and energy supplies, less intact ecosystems with fewer species, more acidic oceans, and less naturally productive soils. Are we so smart and inventive that not one of these trends will have any impact on the number of human beings the planet sustains? When you put demographic projections side by side with environmental ones, the former actually mock the latter, suggesting that nothing in store for us will be more than an irritant. Human life will be less pleasant, perhaps, but it will never actually be threatened.

Some analysts, ranging from scientists David Pimentel of Cornell University to financial advisor and philanthropist Jeremy Grantham, dare to underline the possibility of a darker alternative future. Defying the optimistic majority, they suggest that humanity long ago overshot a truly sustainable world population, implying that apocalyptic horsemen old and new could cause widespread death as the environment unravels. Most writers on environment and population are loathe to touch such predictions. But we should be asking, at least, whether such possibilities are real enough to temper the usual demographic confidence about future population projections.

For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations "medium variant" population projection, the gold standard for expert expectation of the demographic future, takes a long leap of faith: It assumes no demographic influence from the coming environmental changes that could leave us living on what NASA climatologist James Hansen has dubbed "a different planet."

How different? Significantly warmer, according to the 2007 assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit more than today on average. Sea levels from two to six feet higher than today's — vertically, meaning that seawater could move hundreds of feet inland over currently inhabited coastal land. Greater extremes of both severe droughts and intense storms. Shifting patterns of infectious disease as new landscapes open for pathogen survival and spread. Disruptions of global ecosystems as rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns buffet and scatter animal and plant species. The eventual melting of Himalayan glaciers, upsetting supplies of fresh water on which 1.3 billion South Asians and Chinese (and, of course, that number is rising) depend for food production.

And that's just climate change, based on the more dramatic end of the range the IPCC and other scientific groups project. Yet even if we leave aside the likelihood of a less accommodating climate, population growth itself undermines the basis for its own continuation in other ways. Since 1900, countries home to nearly half the world's people have moved into conditions of chronic water stress or scarcity based on falling per-capita supply of renewable fresh water. Levels of aquifers and even many lakes around the world are falling as a result. In a mere 14 years, based on median population projections, most of North Africa and the Middle East, plus Pakistan, South Africa and large parts of China and India, will be driven by water scarcity to increasing dependence on food imports "even at high levels of irrigation efficiency," according to the International Water Management Institute.

The world's net land under cultivation has scarcely expanded since 1960, with millions of acres of farmland gobbled by urban development while roughly equal amounts of less fertile land come under the plow. The doubling of humanity has cut the amount of cropland per person in half. And much of this essential asset is declining in quality as constant production saps nutrients that are critical to human health, while the soil itself erodes through the double whammy of rough weather and less-than-perfect human care. Fertilizer helps restore fertility (though rarely micronutrients), but at ever-higher prices and through massive inputs of non-renewable resources such as oil, natural gas, and key minerals. Phosphorus in particular is a non-renewable mineral essential to all life, yet it is being depleted and wasted at increasingly rapid rates, leading to fears of imminent "peak phosphorus."

We can recycle phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen, and other essential minerals and nutrients, but the number of people that even the most efficient recycling could support may be much less than today's world population. In 1997, Canadian geographer Vaclav Smil calculated that were it not for the industrial fixation of nitrogen, the world's population would probably not have exceeded 4 billion people — 3 billion fewer than are alive today. It's likely that organic agriculture can feed many more people than it does currently, but the hard accounting of the nutrients in today's 7 billion human bodies, let alone tomorrow's projected 10 billion, challenges the hope that a climate-neutral agriculture system could feed us all.

Food production also requires many services of nature that conventional agronomy tends to ignore in projecting future food supplies, and the dependability of these services appears to be fraying. Roughly one out of every two or three forkfuls of food relies on natural pollination, yet many of the world's most important pollinators are in trouble. Honeybees are succumbing to the tiny varroa mite, while vast numbers of bird species face threats ranging from habitat loss to housecats. Bats and countless other pest-eaters are falling prey to environmental insults scientists don't yet fully understand. And the loss of plant and animal biodiversity generally makes humanity ever-more dependent on a handful of key crop species and chemical inputs that make food production less, rather than more, resilient. One needn't argue that the rising grain prices, food riots, and famine parts of the world have experienced in the past few years are purely an outcome of population growth to worry that at some point further growth will be limited by constrained food supplies.

As population growth sends human beings into ecosystems that were once isolated, new disease vectors encounter the attraction of large packages of protoplasm that walk on two legs and can move anywhere on the planet within hours. In the last half-century, dozens of new infectious diseases have emerged. The most notable, HIV/AIDS, has led to some 25 million excess deaths, a megacity-sized number even in a world population of billions. In Lesotho, the pandemic pushed the death rate from 10 deaths per thousand people per year in the early 1990s to 18 per thousand a decade later. In South Africa the combination of falling fertility and HIV-related deaths has pressed down the population growth rate to 0.5 percent annually, half the rate of the United States. As the world's climate warms, the areas affected by such diseases will likely shift in unpredictable ways, with malarial and dengue-carrying mosquitoes moving into temporal zones while warming waters contribute to cholera outbreaks in areas once immune.

To be fair, the demographers who craft population projections are not actively judging that birth, death, and migration rates are immune to the effects of environmental change and natural resource scarcity. Rather they argue, reasonably enough, that there is no scientifically rigorous way to weigh the likelihood of such demographic impacts. So it makes more sense to simply extend current trend lines in population change — rising life expectancy, falling fertility, higher proportions of people living in urban areas. These trends are then extrapolated into an assumedly surprise-free future. The well-known investor caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future results goes unstated in the conventional demographic forecast.

Is such a surprise-free future likely? That's a subjective question each of us must answer based on our own experience and hunches. Next to no research has assessed the likely impacts of human-caused climate change, ecosystem disruption, or energy and resource scarcity on the two main determinants of demographic change: births and deaths. Migration related to climate change is a more common subject for research, with projections ranging from 50 million to 1 billion people displaced by environmental factors — including climate change — by 2050. The mainstream projections cluster around 200 million, but no one argues that there is a compelling scientific argument for any of these numbers.

The IPCC and other climate-change authorities have noted that extremely hot weather can kill, with the elderly, immune-compromised, low-income, or socially isolated among the most vulnerable. An estimated 35,000 people died during the European heat wave of 2003. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites research projecting that heat-related deaths could multiply as much as seven-fold by the century's end.

In the past few years, agronomists have lost some of their earlier confidence that food production, even with genetically modified crops, will keep pace with rising global populations in a changing climate. Already, weather-related disasters, from blistering heat waves to flooded farm fields, have contributed to widening gaps between food production and global consumption. The resulting price increases — stoked also by biofuels production encouraged in part to slow climate change — have led to food riots that cost lives and helped topple governments from the Middle East to Haiti.

If this is what we see a decade into the new century, what will unfold in the next 90 years? "What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next," wheat physiologist Matthew Reynolds told The New York Times in June. "What will that do to society?" What, more specifically, will it do to life expectancy, fertility, and migration? Fundamentally, these questions are unanswerable from the vantage point of the present, and there's a lesson in this. We shouldn't be so confident that the demographers can expertly forecast what the world's population will look like beyond the next few years. A few demographers are willing to acknowledge this themselves.

"Continuing world population growth through mid-century seems nearly certain," University of California, Berkeley, demographer Ronald Lee noted recently in Science. "But nearly all population forecasts... implicitly assume that population growth will occur in a neutral zone without negative economic or environmental feedback. [Whether this occurs] will depend in part on the success of policy measures to reduce the environmental impact of economic and demographic growth."

It's certainly possible that ingenuity, resilience and effective governance will manage the stresses humanity faces in the decades ahead and will keep life expectancy growing in spite of them. Slashing per-capita energy and resource consumption would certainly help. A sustainable population size, it's worth adding, will be easier to maintain if societies also assure women the autonomy and contraceptive means they need to avoid unwanted pregnancies. For anyone paying attention to the science of climate change and the realities of a rapidly changing global environment, however, it seems foolish to treat projections of 10 billion people at the end of this century as respectfully as a prediction of a solar eclipse or the appearance of a well-studied comet. A bit more humility about population's path in an uncertain and dangerous century would be more consistent with the fact that the future, like a comet astronomers have never spotted, has not yet arrived.

Glacier lakes: Growing danger zones in the Himalayas

2011-10-14T16:53:00.001-07:00

Fears rise of huge outburst flooding in the Himalayas as glaciers melt due to climate change

Suzanne Goldenberg at Imja Lake, Nepal,

Guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 October 2011

It's strangely calming to watch the Imja glacier lake grow, as chunks of ice part from black cliffs and fall into the grey-green lake below.

But the lake is a high-altitude disaster in the making – one of dozens of new danger zones emerging across the Himalayas because of glacier melt caused by climate change.

If the lake, situated at 5,100m in Nepal's Everest region, breaks through its walls of glacial debris, known as moraine, it could release a deluge of water, mud and rock up to 60 miles away. This would swamp homes and fields with a layer of rubble up to 15m thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. But the question is when, rather than if.

Mountain regions from the Andes to the Himalayas are warming faster than the global average under climate change. Ice turns to water;glaciers are slowly reduced to lakes.

When Sir Edmund Hillary made his successful expedition to the top of Everest in 1953, Imja did not exist. But it is now the fastest-growing of some 1,600 glacier lakes in Nepal, stretching down from the glacier for 1.5 miles and spawning three small ponds.

At its centre, the lake is about 600m wide, and according to government studies, up to 96.5m deep in some places. It is growing by 47m a year, nearly three times as fast as other glacier lake in Nepal.

"The expansion of Imja lake is not a casual one," said Pravin Raj Maskey, a hydrologist with Nepal's ministry of irrigation.

The extent of recent changes to Imja has taken glacier experts by surprise, including Teiji Watanabe, a geographer at Hokkaido University in Japan, who has carried out field research at the lake since the 1990s.

Watanabe returned to Imja in September, making the nine-day trek with 30 other scientists and engineers on a US-funded expedition led by theMountain Institute. He said he did not expect such rapid changes to the moraine which is holding back the lake.

"We need action, and hopefully within five years," Watanabe said. "I feel our time is shorter than what I thought before. Ten years might be too late."

Unlike ordinary flash floods, a glacier lake outburst is a continuing catastrophe.

"It's not just the one-time devastating effect," said Sharad Joshi, a glaciologist at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University, who has worked on Imja. "Each year for the coming years it triggers landslides and reminds villagers that there could be a devastating impact that year, or every year. Some of the Tibetan lakes that have had outburst floods have flooded more than three times."

But mobilising engineering equipment and expertise to a lake 5,100m up and several days' hard walking away from the nearest transport hub is challenging in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world. People living in the small village of Dingboche below the lake say scientists and government officials have been talking about the dangers of Imja for years.

Some years ago one of the visiting experts was so convincing about the dangers of an imminent flood that the villagers packed up all their animals and valuables and moved to the next valley. They came back after a week when the disaster did not materialise, but say it's hard to dismiss the idea that there could be a flood one day.

"When I was 21 I went to the lake and it was black and really small," said Angnima Sherpa, who heads a local conservation group in Dingboche. "Two years ago I went there and it was really big. I couldn't believe it could get so big. It was really scary."

But scientists and engineers still cannot agree on whether to rate Imja as the most dangerous glacier lake in the Himalayas, or a more distant threat.

Mobilising international assistance for large-scale engineering projects during a global recession is also difficult. The Mountain Institute's initiative was to call in experts from the Andes, where Peruvians have developed systems for containing glacier floods since a disaster in the 1940s killed nearly 10,000 people.

Cesar Portocarrero, who heads the department of glaciology at Peru's national water agency, has overseen engineering works to drain more than 30 glacier lakes, building tunnels or channels to drain the water and reduce the risk of flooding.

But he conceded it would be an enormous challenge to apply these methods at Imja.

"It's not easy to say 'we are going to siphon the water out of the lake'," Portocarrero said. "Where do you find the people who can work at high altitudes? How do you move in the equipment? What do you do in bad weather? You have to have exhaustive planning." There are also other contenders for immediate action, with some 20,000 glacier lakes across the Himalayas, although many are concentrated in the Everest region. Bhutan alone has nearly 2,700.

Three of those, known as the Lunana complex, are practically touching, increasing the possibility of cascading floods far more devastating than any rupture at Imja.

"If the barrier fails between them we are going to have a massive glacier lake outburst flood," said Sonam Lhamo, a geologist for the Bhutanese government.

The United Nations Development Programme and other agencies have supported a project to drain the lakes but those funds are running out.

John Reynolds, a British engineer and expert on glacier lakes who has worked in Nepal, argues that the international community has focused on Imja because of its proximity to Everest and trekking routes popular with western tourists. He says there are other, more hazardous lakes elsewhere.

The Nepali government ranks Imja among the six most dangerous glacier lakes in the country largely because it is growing so quickly. More than 12 other such lakes are also seen as high risk.

But Reynolds argued: "Just because a lake is getting bigger doesn't necessarily mean that it is getting more hazardous. As the climate is changing, generally speaking more glacial lake systems are forming.

"The question is how to decide which ones are hazardous now and which ones have the propensity to become hazardous in the future."

Imja, though fast-growing, is held in by a relatively wide moraine, which makes it secure in comparison to some others.

Most glacial lake floods begin as high-altitude tsunamis. A large block of ice falling from a glacier at great height sets off a series of giant waves that wash over the moraine.

That's not such a risk for Imja. The glaciers feeding the lake are gradual in slope, which reduces the risk of a large chunk of ice falling from a great height and setting off large waves.

Watanabe concedes the geography of the lake could keep disaster at bay, at least in the next year or two. But, he says, there are signs that an outlet channel at the bottom of the lake may be widening dangerously.

Reynolds said Nepal and the international community need to think of a Himalaya-wide action plan.

"As the climate is changing more glacial lake systems are forming," he said. "The question is how to decide which are hazardous now and which are going to become hazardous in the future."

Alps could become snow-free by 2050

2011-10-09T17:01:00.001-07:00

David Wroe

The Age, October 10, 2011

AUSTRALIA'S ski slopes could be completely bare of natural winter snow by 2050 unless concerted action is taken against global warming, according to a government-commissioned report that paints a grim picture of the effects of climate change on alpine areas.

The report, Caring for our Australian Alps Catchments, has found the Alps, which stretch from Victoria through New South Wales to the Australian Capital Territory, face an average temperature rise of between 0.6 and 2.9 degrees by 2050, depending on how much action the international community takes to combat climate change.

''The effects of climate change are predicted to be the single greatest threat to the natural condition values of the Australian Alps catchments,'' the report states.

Rain, snow and other precipitation will decrease up to 24 per cent over the next four decades, accompanied by more bushfires, droughts, severe storms and rapid runoff, causing heavy erosion.

Australia's major mountain range, which peaks with Mount Kosciuszko at 2228 metres, is vulnerable to climate change and faces a dramatic transformation unless serious efforts are made, the study concluded.

''The scenario that is most likely is that there will be less snow both in total and in area, and that we shift more to summer rainfall,'' said study co-author Roger Good, a retired botanist with the NSW government.

''There won't be snow that sits around and slowly melts as there has been in the past. There will be more storm events in summer and therefore faster run-off, which has a lot of potential impacts in terms of soil erosion and damage to vegetation. The worst-case scenario is that there will be no snow at all … only rainfall in both summer and winter.''

The study looked at the 235 Alps catchments, which provide about 29 per cent of the annual water flows into the Murray-Darling Basin. Towns and cities from Wagga Wagga to Mildura and all the way to Adelaide would be affected by global warming damage to the Alps, Mr Good said.

It was the first full health check on the Alpine catchments since 1957. Six out of 10 of the catchments are in ''poor to moderate'' condition. Less than a quarter are getting better.

Snow cover has already declined by more than 30 per cent since 1954. The spring thaw has happened two days earlier per decade.

Loss of vegetation and more severe storms meant that the catchments would hold less water, leading to more rapid run-off, the report states. This would erode soil and reduce water quality as well as causing dams to overflow.

''They would not be able to regulate the flows,'' Mr Good said. ''We would have less water to actually utilise in future, both for human use and for storing for environmental uses.''

Ski fields should continue to get reasonable natural snow cover if the international community sticks to its ambition of keeping global carbon dioxide levels to 450 parts per million (ppm), up from the present 385 ppm, the report states.

But if less action is taken, leading to a concentration of 550 ppm, cover lasting more than 60 days could be reduced by up to 96 per cent by 2050
.

Al Gore: clear proof that climate change causes extreme weather

2011-09-29T01:18:00.001-07:00

Former US vice president tells Scottish green conference that evidence from floods in Pakistan and China is compelling

Severin Carrell

Guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 September 2011

Al Gore has warned that there is now clear proof that climate change is directly responsible for the extreme and devastating floods, storms and droughts that displaced millions of people this year.

Speaking to an audience of business leaders, political leaders including Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond and green energy entrepreneurs in Edinburgh, Gore said the world was at a "fork in the road".

The former US vice-president and climate campaigner also argued that America has suffered a "breakdown in democratic governance", because members of Congress are obsessed with appeasing special interests in return for campaign funding, rather than confronting climate change.

The former vice president and climate campaigner said that US democracy had been undermined. "In the language of computer culture, our democracy has been hacked," he said.

In a near hour-long speech to the Scottish low-carbon investment conference, Gore said the evidence from the floods in Pakistan, China, South Korea and Columbia was so compelling that the case for urgent action by world leaders to combat carbon emissions was now overwhelming, Gore said.

"Observations in the real world make it clear that it's happening now, it's real, it's with us," he said. Failing to take action meant the world would face a catastrophe.

He added that nearly every climate scientist actively publishing on the subject now agreed there was a causal link between carbon emissions and the sharp increase in intense and extreme weather events seen across the globe.

"Every single national academy of science of every major country on earth agrees with the consensus and the one's that don't agree with it do not exist. This is what they say to governments: 'The need for urgent action is now indisputable'.

"The scientists have made a subtle but profound change in the way that they speak about the connection between the climate crisis and the extreme weather events. They used to say you can't connect any extreme weather event to climate because there are multiple factors. Now they've changed.

"The environment in which all storms are formed has changed. It's influence is now present according to the leading scientists in all storms, and they speak of relative causation."

Gore said there was now evidence that the globe's hydrological cycles were changing: as the atmosphere and oceans warmed, more water was evaporating and getting stored in the atmosphere. The amount of water vapour over the oceans had increased by 4% in 30 years, particularly around the tropics and sub-tropics.

In turn this fed even heavier and more violent storms and flooding incidents, which in Pakistan displaced 20 million people earlier this year, and which forced out 8.5 million from 13 provinces in China.

This destabilisation of global weather patterns then fed into a complex cycle of more intense and prolonged droughts in drought-prone regions, which in turn caused more frequent and more vicious wildfires, increased desertification of agricultural land, and was now affecting river levels in the Amazon.

There were 387 million people affected by droughts in the first six months of this year. China, Iraq and Iran also recorded their highest ever temperatures during this period. The city of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan recorded a temperature of 53.5C, while in the United States, 200 cities broke their highest temperature records this summer. In Texas, 252 out of the state's 254 counties had experienced major wildfires during 2011.

Gore then cited a recent report from the global insurance Munich Re, that climate change was "the only plausible explanation" for the rapid increase in extreme weather events. "They're paid to get this right. It's their job," he said.

He continued: "They used to say we're changing the odds, we're loading the dice that make it more likely that we'll get extreme weather events. Now the change is we're not only loading the dice, we're painting more dots on the dice. We're not only rolling more 12s, we're rolling 13s and 14s and soon 15s and 16s."

Arguing that the younger generation would demand world leaders showed the "moral courage" to take action, he heaped praise on Salmond, applauding his "vision and leadership" for championing wave, tidal and offshore wind power in Scotland. He said the rapid growth in new renewable technologies gave hope that a successful shift from fossil fuels was possible.

Outside the conference venue, two women employed by the Kreate promotions agency in London handed out anonymously produced leaflets to delegates reproducing media reports of a high court judgment that heavily criticised the accuracy of Gore's 2007 climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Barry Duncan, the manager of Kreate, said their staff had been hired by a client who wanted to remain anonymous, on behalf of another anonymous client, to hand out "leaflets on renewable energy". Duncan said: "This is a bit strange, I totally agree."

Arctic ice melts to lowest level on record

2011-09-12T16:23:00.001-07:00

John Vidal

The Age, September 13, 2011

LONDON: Ice at the North Pole has melted to the lowest level since satellite observations began in 1972, meaning the Arctic is almost certainly the smallest it has been for 8000 years, polar scientists said.

If the trend continues, the Arctic will be largely ice-free in the northern summer 40 years earlier than anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.

Daily satellite sea ice maps released by Bremen University physicists show that with a week's further melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered 4.24 million square kilometres on September 8. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27 million square kilometres on September 17, 2007.

The National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US is expected to announce similar results in a few days.

The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. ''The sea ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability … caused by weather,'' the head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen, Georg Heygster, said.

''Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic.''

The albedo effect is related to a surface's reflecting power - sea ice reflects more of the sun's heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun's heat and gets warmer.

A senior researcher at the Australian Antarctic Division, Tony Worby, said the consensus view among polar scientists was that the Arctic melt was happening faster than the models used by the IPCC predicted.

''Some of the climate models showed that the ice would disappear in summer in about 70 years, but the observations are tracking well ahead of that,'' Dr Worby said.

Separate research suggests Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area and also thinning. Scientists at the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington, Seattle, said last week that Arctic sea ice volume hit its lowest level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year.

Their data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month was half the average and 62 per cent lower than the maximum covering the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

''Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,'' the University of Washington senior oceanographer, Axel Schweiger, said.

The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summer-time ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period.

Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate. Retreating summer sea ice is described by scientists as a measure and a driver of global warming. This year, the Northwest and Northeast passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008.

Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the Northeast Passage in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand. The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a ship operator's favourite.

Guardian News & Media

with Ben Cubby

Australia to broach radical global warming solutions

2011-09-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

Graham Readfearn

The Age, September 9, 2011

Clouds could be made more reflective and oceans fertilised to increase carbon dioxide absorption under ideas to be discussed at Australia's first high-level climate engineering conference later this month.

International interest in climate engineering – also known as geoengineering – is increasing as efforts to curb the world's emissions of greenhouse gases continue to falter.

Scientists said the event was an important step for Australia into the controversial geoengineering debate but expressed grave concerns some proposed technologies could have dangerous and far-reaching side effects.

The two-day science symposium, starting in Canberra on September 26, is being hosted by the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

Among the more controversial ideas being discussed is the injection of sulphur particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and slow global warming.

Other technologies include fertilising oceans to increase uptake of carbon dioxide and spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to increase the reflectiveness of clouds.

But the meeting will also cover relatively benign ways to pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, including planting more trees and using climate-friendly agricultural techniques.

Speaker at the event Graeme Pearman, a respected climate scientist and former CSIRO chief of atmospheric research, told brisbanetimes.com.au it was a "very significant first step".

"It needs to be made clear that no one really wants to do this," Dr Pearman said.

"Some of the options are potentially dangerous, but we need to be prepared to act if we have to and we need to be assured that others will not act imprudently or in regional interest alone.

"It is my view we can only be assured of this by having these discussions out in the open."

Global emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels hit an all-time high last year, according to the International Energy Agency.

Dr Pearman said the meeting was timely given slow global action to cut emissions and the observed changes in the climate. Also, private companies were already being set-up to "capitalise" on some geoengineering technologies.

In early 2009, German scientists dropped six tonnes of dissolved iron into the south-west Atlantic to fertilise a 300 square kilometre area. But scientists reported only a "modest" amount of CO2 had been soaked up.

Later this year, a team of academics in Britain are to test equipment that could spray particles 20 kilometres up into the atmosphere using a hose tethered to a balloon.

Geoengineering has gained prominence since Britain's Royal Society published a report in 2009 calling for more research into the area.

The influential UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will also assess geoengineering science in several chapters of its next assessment report, due out in 2014. The IPCC reports inform government policy across the globe.

An international conference of 165 international scientists, including Dr Pearman, was also held in Asilomar in California last March and was part-funded by the Victorian Government.

The final report from the conference included a set of five principles to promote "responsible conduct of research on climate engineering".

Last November the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, to which Australia is a signatory, called a global moratorium on any geoengineering experiments that could affect biodiversity, but its effectiveness has been questioned.

Roger Gifford, chair of the AAS National Committee for Earth System Science, who will open the event, said Australia needed to be part of any global decisions, especially on how geoengineering was governed.

"Whether it is to squash some of these proposals or encourage certain aspects, Australia needs to be involved in the research and the global decision-making," he said.

Dr Gifford said it was "pretty much inevitable" that the globe would warm by 2 degrees above their pre-industrial levels.

"Everyone is aware that fiddling with the global energy balance directly could carry as many risks and potential unknowns as humanity's current collective fiddling with the greenhouse gas composition of the atmosphere has," he said.

In relation to geoengineering measures to block the sun's rays, Dr Gifford said: "Almost everyone in climate science is saying that if it comes to this then the world really is in a desperate shape climatically."

Also invited to speak at the Canberra meeting is author Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, who is a strong critic of the principles and motivations behind many geoengineering technologies.

He fears some policy makers might see embracing geoengineering as an alternative to switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

"Anyone who has observed the politics of climate change knows that governments are keen to find alternatives to imposing deep emissions cuts,'' said Professor Hamilton, who is writing a book on geoengineering.

"If geoengineering appears to be an alternative to mitigation then governments will grab it if they can."

The Canberra conference, which costs $240 to attend, aims to "develop a southern hemisphere perspective" on geoengineering.

David Karoly, a leading atmospheric scientist at the University of Melbourne, said there was a perception the southern ocean was a preferred region to carry out ocean fertilization. This could have serious implications for marine biodiversity in the region, he said.

Professor Karoly warned cloud-whitening technologies and pumping sulphur particles high into the atmosphere could have global and regional impacts by changing rainfall patterns and damaging the ozone layer.

Falling sulphur particles and depleted ozone had additional human health impacts, he said.

Summer's extra rain lowers sea levels

2011-08-26T17:05:00.001-07:00

Juliet Eilperin

The Age, August 27, 2011

THE global sea level this northern summer is 0.6 of a centimetre lower than last summer, NASA scientists say, in contrast to the gradual ocean rises of recent years.

The change stems from two strong weather cycles over the Pacific Ocean - El Nino and La Nina - which shifted rain patterns, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California said. The two cycles brought heavy rains to Brazil and drought to the southern United States.

Researchers monitored the ocean's width, height, temperature and salinity through satellites and robot-operated floats, and presented their findings at the annual Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Science Team meeting in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

''This year the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,'' Carmen Boening, an oceanographer and climate scientist at the laboratory said.

Josh Willis, who also works at the lab, warned that this water would eventually return to the ocean, and the long-term trend of rising sea levels would continue.

''What this shows is the impact La Nina and El Nino can have on global rainfall,'' he said.

Computer climate models show sea levels are expected to rise because water expands as it warms, and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to global sea levels. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave what it called a conservative estimate in 2007 that the ocean could rise between 18 and 147 centimetres by 2100. Recent research suggests it could rise by as much as 76 to 198 centimetres during this period.

The question of how much the ocean could rise due to warming is a topic of intense debate. In the past two decades global sea levels increased at a rate of roughly 0.3 centimetres a year, compared to 0.17 centimetres from 1961 to 2003, according to satellite data. A recent tide gauge study of sea levels in Australia and New Zealand, published in the Journal of Coastal Research, provided readings that suggested the rate of ocean rise has declined in the past decade.

Patrick Michaels, from the libertarian Cato Institute, noted that recent satellite data showed a slight decline in the rate of sea-level rise, which casts doubt on whether the ocean would expand as some predicted by the end of the century.

Associated Press

Climate-change scientist cleared in US over emails

2011-08-23T15:42:00.001-07:00

The Age, August 23, 2011

A US researcher who has been a target of climate-change sceptics has been cleared of wrongdoing by US investigators over the flap surrounding emails hacked from a British university.

The National Science Foundation found no "evidence of research misconduct" by Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University.

The foundation, based in Arlington, Virginia, closed its inquiry into Professor Mann, according to report from the inspector general for the agency, released last Monday.

The university exonerated Professor Mann in February of suppressing or falsifying data, deleting emails and misusing privileged information.

Climate-change doubters pointed to the stolen emails, which surfaced in blogs in 2009, as proof that researchers conspired to quash studies questioning the link between human activity and warming.

Professor Mann was lead author of the first reconstruction of northern-hemisphere warming going back 1000 years, which showed recent temperatures increasing sharply. The 1998 findings have been confirmed by several studies, Professor Mann said.

"The way you get ahead in science is by proving the other guys wrong," Professor Mann said. "There is literally no study in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that contradicts our original conclusion."

Last week, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, renewed the assertion that scientists have "manipulated" data on climate change.

"It was a pretty definitive finding" that the charges "swirling around for over a year" were baseless, Professor Mann said in an interview.

"I was very pleased."

The report confirms findings from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's inspector general and a separate panel of seven scientists based at universities in Britain, the US and Switzerland.

The University of East Anglia announced the committee. Ron Oxburgh, the former head of Shell Transport & Trading Plc and a member of the British House of Lords, was chairman.

'Closes the books'

"It certainly closes the books on Michael Mann and the emails," Joe Romm, a blogger for the Centre for American Progress, an advocacy group with ties to President Barack Obama's administration, said in an interview.

"They found nothing wrong with the science, or any evidence that there was anything wrong with how the scientists went about their work."

The inquiries focused on the University of East Anglia's climate-research unit, which stored the poached emails on its computer server.

The university's work contributed to some of the key findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has issued reports that blame human activity for rising temperatures.

Emails to and from Professor Mann were in the pilfered cache. One message by another scientist discussing Professor Mann's work spoke of a "trick" used in presenting data to smooth out year-to-year anomalies in climate-change information.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's report, released in February, was requested by US Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who called the theory of man-made climate change a hoax. The report found no evidence of "manipulation of data".

'Deeply troubling'

"To say that the scientists have been vindicated is oversimplifying the situation," Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe, said in an interview yesterday.

"What was revealed as part of the Climategate scandal was deeply troubling and certainly a setback for climate science."

A report on the dispute commissioned by the University of East Anglia found that, while the honesty and rigour of British scientists were not in doubt, they may have deleted emails to avoid having to make them public.

"There has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness," the panel said in July 2010.

Presidential campaign

Climate change has emerged as an issue in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

"There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects," Perry said last week. "I think we're seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change."

Another Republican candidate, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, has said he believes human activity is causing climate change.