Climate Change Quickens, Seas Feared Up 2 Metres
Global warming is happening faster than expected and at worst could raise sea levels by up to 2 metres (6-1/2 ft) by 2100, a group of scientists said on Tuesday in a warning to next month’s U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.
In what they called a “Copenhagen Diagnosis”, updating findings in a broader 2007 U.N. climate report, 26 experts urged action to cap rising world greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 or 2020 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“Climate change is accelerating beyond expectations,” a joint statement said, pointing to factors including a retreat of Arctic sea ice in summer and melting of ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.
“Accounting for ice-sheets and glaciers, global sea-level rise may exceed 1 metre by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 metres considered an upper limit,” it said. Ocean levels would keep on rising after 2100 and “several metres of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.”
Many of the authors were on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2007 foresaw a sea level rise of 18-59 cms (7-24 inches) by 2100 but did not take account of a possible accelerating melt of Greenland and Antarctica.
Coastal cities from Buenos Aires to New York, island states such as Tuvalu in the Pacific or coasts of Bangladesh or China would be highly vulnerable to rising seas.
“This is a final scientific call for the climate negotiators from 192 countries who must embark on the climate protection train in Copenhagen,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a statement.
AMAZON, MONSOON
Copenhagen will host a Dec. 7-18 meeting meant to come up with a new U.N. plan to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. But a full legal treaty seems out of reach and talks are likely to be extended into 2010.
“Delay in action risks irreversible damage,” the researchers wrote in the 64-page report, pointing to a feared runaway thaw of ice sheets or possible abrupt disruptions to the Amazon rainforest or the West African Monsoon.
The researchers said global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were almost 40 percent higher in 2008 than in 1990.
“Carbon dioxide emissions cannot be allowed to continue to rise if humanity intends to limit the risk of unacceptable climate change,” said Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California.
In a respite, the International Energy Agency has said emissions will fall by up to 3 percent in 2009 due to recession.
The report said world temperatures had been rising by an average of 0.19 Celsius a decade over the past 25 years and that the warming trend was intact, even though the hottest year since records began in the mid-19th century was 1998.
“There have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend,” it said. A strong, natural El Nino weather event in the Pacific pushed up temperatures in 1998. By Alister Doyle, The Star
Bredesen: Biofuels Investment Back In ‘Good Shape’
Gov. Phil Bredesen said Tuesday that a private investment deal is back on track following discussions between the company and the head of a legislative panel that questioned a state-backed biofuels initiative in East Tennessee.
The Legislature’s Fiscal Review Committee last week delayed approval for an $11 million contract to operate the University of Tennessee plant to turn switchgrass into ethanol. The Democratic governor responded that the move was “outrageous,” and could have scuttled a previously unannounced investment related to the project.
But subsequent conversations between the head of the legislative panel, Republican Sen. Bill Ketron of Murfreesboro, and the company have soothed fears over the future of the project and returned the deal into “good shape,” Bredesen told reporters Tuesday.
“When you’re a sophisticated company I think you sometimes understand how politics works,” Bredesen said. “Once we convinced them this was not some rump effort to turn Tennessee away from a commitment to solar power, but really something that was much more of a political transaction, I think it made them comfortable.”
Bredesen said he considers the switchgrass project among the state’s solar power efforts because it is made from a renewable resource grown by the sun.
“I think we’ve got this all straightened out,” said Ketron. “We see the opportunity for the citizens of Tennessee and we’ll move forward in this.”
As originally envisioned, the facility was to produce 5 million gallons of ethanol per year that could be sold to pay the operating costs of the research refinery. Under subsequent changes, the facility will now produce only about 250,000 gallons annually.
Officials say that’s enough to determine whether the process of turning switchgrass to fuel will work for a full-size refinery, but the legislative review staff said it’s not enough to pay for ongoing costs.
After a presentation from Jim White, the panel’s executive director, several lawmakers raised questions about the project and Ketron suggested future investment could fall victim to the state’s budget crunch.
Ketron on Tuesday chalked up those concerns to a lack of communication between the administration, lawmakers and White. Had they known about the potential third-party investment, “it would have changed the whole perspective,” he said.
“We just all need to be focused on working together and communicating,” Ketron said. By Erik Schelzig, Houston Chronicle
Study Sheds Light On Greenland Melting Rate
The Greenland ice sheet responded to global warming over the past 10 000 years more quickly than thought, according to a study released on Wednesday.
As a result, a medium-sized temperature increase this century could cause the continent-sized ice block to start melting at an alarming rate, it suggests.
“It is entirely possible that a future temperature increase of a few degrees Celsius in Greenland will result in a ice sheet mass loss and contribution to sea level rise larger than previously projected,” it warns.
Greenland contains enough water to raise sea levels by about seven metres. Even a far more modest increase would put major coastal cities under water and force hundreds of millions of people out of their homes.
Until recently, experts were confident that the planet’s two ice sheets – in Greenland and Antarctica – would remain largely stable over the coming centuries despite global warming.
But more recent studies have cast doubt on this, showing the pace at which glaciers are sliding off from both ice sheets into the oceans has picked up over recent decades.
The new paper, published in the British journal Nature, uses a new technique for measuring changes in the ice sheet over the last 10 000 years that resolves a paradox.
Earlier measurements suggested that parts of Greenland had somehow defied a trend of general warming in the northern hemisphere during a 3 000 year period that started 9 000 years ago.
The new research, led by Bo Vinther of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, demonstrates that the problem lay with how the the raw data had been interpreted.
The team examined core samples taken from four locations from the ice sheet, which reaches depths of more than three kilometres. As with earlier studies, the results were inconsistent.
But with the help of two new samples taken from two areas just beyond the ice sheet, the researchers were able to determine that the variations were due to changes in height, not because of inconsistent warming.
“The elevation itself causes different temperatures,” Vinther said in a press release. As a consequence, the ice sheet responded more uniformly – and more vigorously – to rising temperatures during this period. – AFP
Climate Change Will Damage Your Health
Human society faces a global health catastrophe if climate change is not effectively tackled at the UN conference in Copenhagen in December, leading doctors from around the world warn today.
Calling on medical practitioners everywhere to put pressure on politicians in advance of the meeting, the doctors say that the world’s poorest people will be hit first by the health effects of global warming, but add that “no one will be spared”.
Their stark challenge to governments follows a report in May which said climate change would represent “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”.
Malaria, dengue fever and other tropical diseases would increase, the study predicted, spelling out how rising temperatures will cause health crises in half a dozen areas: there will be increased problems with food supplies, clean water and sanitation, especially in developing countries. Meanwhile, the migration of peoples will combine with extreme weather events such as hurricanes and severe floods to make for disastrous conditions in human settlements.
The doctors make their appeal as momentum begins to build for the UN conference, which will be held in the Danish capital from 7-18 December, and which will see the world community attempt to draw up a comprehensive new climate treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto protocol. Its crucial objective will be drastic worldwide cuts in the emissions of industrial gases such as carbon dioxide which are causing the atmosphere to warm.
On Tuesday, the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon is convening a climate change summit of world leaders in New York, including Gordon Brown and President Obama, to try to give some impetus to the tortuous pre-conference negotiating process – the draft text of 200 pages already contains 2,000 “square brackets”: that is, points where the 190 countries taking part disagree.
The doctors’ challenge to politicians to sort this out comes in a letter published simultaneously in Britain’s two principal health journals, the British Medical Journal and The Lancet.
In the letter, Professor Ian Gilmore, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, joins 17 other national doctors’ leaders from the US to Australia in saying: “There is a real danger that politicians [at Copenhagen] will be indecisive, especially in such turbulent economic times as these. Should their response be weak, the results for international health could be catastrophic.”
They go on: “Doctors are still seen as respected and independent, largely trusted by their patients and the societies in which they practise … As leaders of physicians across many countries, we call on doctors to demand that their politicians listen to the clear facts that have been identified in relation to climate change and act now to implement strategies that will benefit the health of communities worldwide.”
The letter follows the report on the health effects of global warming which was launched jointly last May by The Lancet and University College London (UCL), and which squarely labelled climate change as the 21st century’s biggest global health threat.
That report’s lead author, Professor Anthony Costello, director of UCL’s Institute for Global Health, said at the time: “The big message of this report is that climate change is a health issue affecting billions of people, not just an environmental issue about polar bears and deforestation. The impacts will be felt not just in the UK, but all around the world – and not just in some distant future but in our lifetimes and those of our children.”
Today’s letter is accompanied by an editorial written by two of Britain’s most senior figures in the area of health and development: Professor Sir Michael Marmot, director of the UCL International Institute for Society and Health, and Lord Jay of Ewelme, who as Sir Michael Jay was head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and is now chair of Merlin, (Medical Emergency Relief, International), the UK charity which provides healthcare and medical relief for vulnerable people caught up in natural disasters, conflicts and major disease outbreaks.
The two men write: “A successful outcome at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December is vital for our future as a species, and for our civilisation.” And they echo the writers of the letter in asserting: “Failure to agree radical reductions in emissions would spell a global health catastrophe.”
They point out that there is now wide consensus that global temperatures are rising and that human actions are responsible; that there is a need to cut carbon emissions by at least 50 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change; and that the economic argument that taking action now rather than later will be cheaper has also been widely accepted since the Stern report in 2006. Furthermore, they say, the election of President Obama has shifted policy in the US from seeking to block an agreement to seeking to find one.
They go on: “So the chances of success should be good but the politics are tough. The most vocal arguments are about equity: the rich world caused the problem so why should the poor world pay to put it right? Can the rich world do enough through its own actions and through its financial and technological support for the poor to persuade the poor to join in a global agreement?” By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor, The Independent.
India’s Solar Energy Plan
For centuries Hindus have revered the sun god, Surya, as a source of health and prosperity, building lavish temples and holding festivals in his honour across a country with more than 300 days of sunshine a year.
Now India is putting its faith in the sun in a more literal sense by revealing what experts describe as the world’s most ambitious plan to develop solar energy over the next three or four decades. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, will chair a meeting today to decide whether to approve a National Solar Mission designed to curb India’s carbon emissions and ease its crippling power shortages. It proposes boosting India’s solar power generation capacity from almost zero to 20 gigawatts (20 billion watts) by 2020, 100GW by 2030 and 200GW by 2050, according to a draft seen by The Times. The entire world can generate about 14GW of solar power today.
India’s plan also proposes reducing the price of solar power to the same level as that from fossil fuels by 2020, according to the draft, dated April 29. Solar power in India currently costs about 15 rupees (37.4 cents) per kWh, compared with an average 3.5 rupees per kWh for electricity from the national grid, which is largely produced by coal-fired thermal power plants. Other targets include forcing all government buildings to have solar panels by 2012 and developing micro-financing to encourage 20 million households to install solar lighting by 2020.
The plan also outlines a system — similar to Germany’s — of paying households for any surplus power from solar panels fed back into the grid. To achieve these and other goals, the mission proposes that the Government invest 920 billion rupees ($23bn) in developing, manufacturing and installing solar technology over the next 30 years. The mission is primarily designed to improve India’s energy security as it has abundant supplies of coal — the dirtiest of the fossil fuels — but has to import 70 per cent of its crude oil and half its natural gas. It is also meant to ease a chronic power shortage that has left 400m Indians without electricity, causes daily blackouts in cities, and represents one of the biggest obstacles to economic growth.
India now has the capacity to produce 150GW — less than a fifth of China’s — and demand outstripped supply by 9.5 per cent between 2008-09, and by 13.8 per cent during peak hours, according to the Power Ministry. Indian officials also hope that the mission will help to ease the pressure from Western governments at international talks for a new UN climate pact in December. Environmental campaigners have welcomed the plan, saying that solar energy is India’s most realistic alternative power source, as it does not have the space for large wind plants.
Siddharth Pathak, chief climate change campaigner for Greenpeace in India, said: “India’s putting a very strong argument in front of developed countries that it has huge potential for renewable energy.” However, some government officials remain sceptical about risking so much money on new technology, rather than spending it on providing all Indians with electricity from conventional sources.