Climate change legislation has been dying in the Senate for months now, but Harry Reid’s decision to finally admit as much — in the midst of an endless East Coast heat wave, no less — has supporters of cap-and-trade casting about for somebody to blame. They’ve blamed the Obama administration, for prioritizing health care reform over an energy bill. They’ve blamed the American people, for being too concerned with economic issues to grapple with longer-term threats. And they’ve blamed figures like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, erstwhile supporters of cap-and-trade who have steadily backpedaled away from it.

But most of all, they’ve blamed conservatives — for pressuring Republican lawmakers to abandon legislation they once supported, and for closing ranks against any attempt to tax and regulate our way to a lower-carbon economy. [Read more...]

The small number of scientists who are unconvinced that human beings have contributed significantly to climate change have far less expertise and prominence in climate research compared with scientists who are convinced, according to a study led by Stanford researchers.

In a quantitative assessment – the first of its kind to address this issue – the team analyzed the number of research papers published by more than 900 climate researchers and the number of times their work was cited by other scientists.

“These are standard academic metrics used when universities are making hiring or tenure decisions,” said William Anderegg, lead author of a paper published in the online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Expertise was evaluated by the number of papers on climate research written by each individual, with a minimum of 20 required to be included in the analysis. Climate researchers who are convinced of human-caused climate change had on average about twice as many publications as the unconvinced, said Anderegg, a doctoral candidate in biology. [Read more...]

Climate change is expected to create yet another problem – complications in plant diseases of the future.

University of Illinois researchers are studying the impact of elevated carbon dioxide, elevated ozone and higher atmospheric temperatures on plant diseases that could challenge crops in these changing conditions.

“Plants growing in a high carbon dioxide environment tend to grow faster and larger, and they have denser canopies,” said Darin Eastburn, U of I associate professor of crop sciences.

“These dense plant canopies favour the development of some diseases because the low light levels and reduced air circulation allow higher relative humidity levels to develop, and this promotes the growth and sporulation of many plant pathogens.”

At the same time, plants grown in high carbon dioxide environments also close their stomata, pores in the leaves that allow the plant to take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, more often. [Read more...]

The impact of global warming on food prices and hunger could be large over the next 20 years, according to a new Stanford University study. Researchers say that higher temperatures could significantly reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize – dietary staples for tens of millions of poor people who subsist on less than $1 a day. The resulting crop shortages would likely cause food prices to rise and drive many into poverty.

But even as some people are hurt, others would be helped out of poverty, says Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell.

“Poverty impacts depend not only on food prices but also on the earnings of the poor,” said Lobell, a center fellow at Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). “Most projections assume that if prices go up, the amount of poverty in the world also will go up, because poor people spend a lot of their money on food. But poor people are pretty diverse. There are those who farm their own land and would actually benefit from higher crop prices, and there are rural wage laborers and people that live in cities who definitely will be hurt.”

Lobell and his colleagues recently conducted the first in-depth study showing how different climate change scenarios could affect incomes of farmers and laborers in developing countries. He presented the results on Feb. 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Household incomes

In the study, Lobell, former FSE researcher Marshall Burke and Purdue University agricultural economist Thomas Hertel focused on 15 developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Hertel has developed a global trade model that closely tracks the consumption and production of rice, wheat and maize on a country-by-country basis. The model was used to project the effects of climate change on agriculture within 20 years and the resulting impact on prices and poverty.

Using a range of global warming forecasts, the researchers were able to project three different crop-yield scenarios by 2030:

* “Low-yield” – crop production is toward the low end of expectations.

* “Most likely” – projected yields are consistent with expectations.

* “High-yield” – production is higher than expected.

“One of the limitations of previous forecasts is that they don’t consider the full range of uncertainties – that is, the chance that things could be better or worse than we expect,” Lobell said. “We provided Tom those three scenarios of what climate change could mean for agricultural productivity. Then he used the trade model to project how each scenario would affect prices and poverty over the next 20 years.

“The impacts we’re talking about are mainly driven by warmer temperatures, which dry up the soil, speed up crop development and shut down biological processes, like photosynthesis, that plants rely on,” he added. “Plants in general don’t like it hotter, and in many climate forecasts, the temperatures projected for 2030 would be outside the range that crops prefer.”

Results

The study revealed a surprising mix of winners and losers depending on the projected global temperature. The “most likely” scenario projected by the International Panel on Climate Change is that global temperatures will rise 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) by 2030. In that scenario, the trade model projected relatively little change in crop yields, food prices and poverty rates.

But under the “low-yield” scenario, in which temperatures increase by 2.7 F (1.5 C), the model projects a 10 to 20 percent drop in agricultural productivity, which results in a 10 to 60 percent rise in the price of rice, wheat and maize. Because of these higher prices, the overall poverty rate in the 15 countries surveyed was expected to rise by 3 percent.

However, an analysis of individual countries revealed a far more complicated picture. In 11 of the 15 countries, poor people who owned their own land and raised their own crops actually benefitted from higher food prices, according to the model. In Thailand, for example, the poverty rate for people in the non-agricultural sector was projected to rise 5 percent, while the rate for self-employed farmers dropped more than 30 percent – in part because, as food supplies dwindled, the global demand for higher-priced crops increased.

“If prices go up and you’re tied to international markets, you could be lifted out of poverty quite considerably,” Lobell explained. “But there are a lot of countries, like Bangladesh, where poor people are either in urban areas or in rural areas but don’t own their own land. Countries like that could be hurt quite a lot. Then there are semi-arid countries – like Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi – where even if prices go up and people own land, productivity will go down so much that it can’t make up for those price increases. In the ‘low-yield’ scenario, those countries would see higher poverty rates across all sectors.”

Under the “high-yield” scenario, in which global temperatures rise just 0.9 F (0.5 C), crop productivity increased. The resulting food surplus led to a 16 percent drop in prices, which could be detrimental to farm owners. In Thailand, the poverty rate among self-employed farmers was projected to rise 60 percent, while those in the non-agriculture sector saw a slight drop in poverty. In Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Uganda, poverty in the non-farming sector was projected to decline as much as 5 percent.

Risk management

Lobell said that, although the likelihood of the “low-yield” or “high-yield” scenario occurring is only 5 percent, it is important for policymakers to consider the full range of possibilities if they want to help countries adapt to climate change and ultimately prevent an increase in poverty and hunger.

“It’s like any sort of risk management or insurance program,” he said. “You have to have some idea of the probability of events that have a big consequence. It’s also important to keep in mind that any change, no matter how extreme, will benefit some households and hurt others.”

The Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford is an interdisciplinary research and teaching program that generates policy solutions to the persistent problems of global hunger and environmental damage from agricultural practices worldwide. The program is jointly run by Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. redOrbit

How do you save the planet? Chop down a tree and put it in a microwave. That’s not a joke. It’s the proposition of at least two dozen companies developing “biochar” technology that they say will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and help curb global warming.

The idea is straightforward. Trees spend their lives pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. When they die, though, they release it back into the environment. To ensure the carbon contained in the leaves and branches never escapes, trees will be chopped, chipped and put into high-tech “cookers” to reduce them to charcoal, which can then be buried.

In theory the process could be repeated over and over again, fed by giant plantations of fast-growing trees, sucking millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Chris Goodall, the Green party candidate and author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, suggested the world should set aside 200m hectares, an area equivalent to about nine UKs, for such farms. The charcoal could be put down old mine shafts for storage or mixed into soil to enrich it.

The idea is catching on and has the backing of a growing roster of green heavy-hitters, including Nobel peace prize winner Al Gore. James Lovelock, the influential environmentalist, supports its use if limited to plant matter that would otherwise be left to decay. Several firms will test prototypes this year.

Johannes Lehmann, professor of soil fertility management at Cornell University, New York, said it had the potential to remove “a few billion tonnes” of carbon from the atmosphere a year. “This could be one of the top 10 solutions to climate change. It would be irresponsible to not probe its possibilities,” he said. The world generates about 29 billion tonnes of carbon each year.

Some argue the excitement has raced ahead of the science. Almuth Ernsting, who runs the Biofuelwatch blog, said: “There have been no large-scale trials and certainly nothing to prove this actually works.”

Some studies suggest that adding it to soils may activate microbes that break down existing charcoal in the soil, leading to a net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, argues that it remains unclear how long CO2 stays contained in biochar and raised concerns over land-use change.

He said: “We need to see further research that’s disconnected from the commercial interests gathering round this. What we don’t want is clear-cutting of old-growth forest.”

Nobody has proposed that. Most speak about using land that is unused or degraded, or feeding in other waste streams such as sewage or agricultural leftovers.

The basic science that holds up charcoal as a stable and reliable carbon sink is, Lehmann said, “absolutely proven”. He added: “Charcoal has been used and produced for millennia by humanity. We need to get away from ideology and let science speak.”

The difference today is how it can be made. The companies developing the technology all rely on the same basic approach. Called pyrolysis, it heats organic material to between 300C and 600C in an oxygen-starved environment. The result is gas, which can be used in a turbine to generate electricity. Depending on the process, the other products are liquids that can be used for fuels or solids like charcoal.

Carbonscape, a New Zealand group, has come up with a variation that uses a patented microwave-assisted pyrolysis process that can zap organic material such as trees and weeds in a matter of minutes.

Chris Turney, the geology professor at Exeter University who invented the system, envisions machines being rolled out all over the world, especially in the tropics, where deforestation is rife. They are made to fit into a standard shipping container and even if powered by coal-fired electricity, Turney said, the machine removes twice the carbon released by the process.

“The whole reason this works is that we could reforest land, harvest it and then reforest again,” he added.

Turney is not alone. Best Energies in America, BIC in Belgium, AnthroTerra in Australia and Agri-Therm of Canada are among those developing rival systems.

The hard fact remains, however, that there is no intrinsic value in incinerating trees and shrubs. None of these biochar pioneers will get far without public money. The most logical way would be to make biochar eligible for the credits that are traded in Europe’s £70 billion carbon trading system. Politicians at last month’s climate summit in Copenhagen proposed its inclusion, as have American legislators.

Meanwhile, biochar has attracted its share of opportunists. Mantria, an American company, was last month charged with fraud after allegedly swindling $30m (£18.5m) from investors, claiming it was the “world’s leading manufacturer and distributor of biochar”.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the American stock market regulator, said: “Mantria has never sold any biochar and has just one facility testing biochar for possible commercial production.” By Danny Fortson, The Sunday Times

I’m going to guess that not many outdoor sportsmen are grabbing a newspaper or flipping on their TV just to catch the latest news on the U.N. global warming conference in Copenhagen.

Pictures of police arresting demonstrations on the streets of Copenhagen can appear to have little to do with fragile brook trout habitat in the mountains of Virginia.

The rank-and-file of hunters and anglers often have expressed skepticism over the threat of climate change; yet, they would be the first to see its impact.

Is the climate change issue real or a hoax? Is it a natural cycle that in time will reverse itself or is human activity responsible for changing the climate?

“There are a lot of questions that I don’t have answers for,” said Cliff Burkett, the wildlife action plan coordinator for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

Burkett, who came to Virginia from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, is the closest thing that the DGIF has to a global warming czar, but we can be thankful that he doesn’t flaunt himself as that. He is quick to admit that he really has little idea what climate change might do in Virginia.

So what does he have planned?

“The emphasis is to take a large issue and pinch out a starting point,” he said.

At its last meeting in October, the DGIF board adopted what is called “Virginia’s Strategy for Safeguarding Virginia’s Species of Greatest Conservation Need from the Effects of Climate Change.”

You say you didn’t read anything about that? It occurred at the same meeting that the board gave its go-ahead to look for opportunities to establish an elk herd in far Southwest Virginia.

The elk issue got the headlines, because big-antlered elk have way more sex appeal than global warming. You get an idea of that when you consider that I wrote the elk story a few days after it occurred and am just now getting around to the climate change column.

The DGIF has adopted a commendable climate change strategy. Rather than get involved in highly emotional debates over global warming, or get into the business of promoting a different style light bulb, the agency says its first priority is to take care of current wildlife populations and their habitats. That’s Burkett’s “pinched out” starting point.

Wildlife populations and habitats that are healthy are going to be in the best position to deal with climate change, he said.

Even before reports of greenhouse gases were grabbing headlines, Virginia’s wildlife faced daunting challenges. Five years ago, an exhaustive DGIF wildlife action plan — that was the envy of the nation — identified more than 900 species in the state that are being impacted by habitat degradation. Over half of these could become extinct or be extirpated from the state, the report said.

Climate change could spread another layer of stress on many creatures and habitats that already are in trouble, Burkett reported.

A host of solid outdoor organizations have lined up to help address this concern. They include Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, BASS/ESPN, Izaak Walton League, Coastal Conservation Association, American Sportfishing Association, Pheasants Forever, Wildlife Management Institute and National Wildlife Federation.

My take on global warming is this: Even if you have a difficult time believing that the buildup of greenhouse gases is changing the climate, as an outdoorsman you know first-hand how pollutants can degrade your opportunities to catch fish and hunt game. Put aside the bickering in places like Copenhagen and concentrate on doing everything you can to protect your favorite outdoor sport or species.

Hunters and anglers have been the voice for wildlife for 100 years. Let’s not change now, even though the challenges we face are more complex and arduous than ever before. By Bill Cochran, Roanoke Times