Monday, August 27, 2007

UN Wants More Funds To Tackle Climate Change
The United Nations climate change watchdog called here Monday for more investment and funds to address climate changes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In a report presented to a preparation meeting for the UN climate change summit slated to be held in Bali, Indonesia in December, the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said additional investment and financial flows of up to $210 billion will be needed each year by 2030 in order to maintain greenhouse gas emissions at current levels.
The UN climate change watchdog said the developing countries need a large share of investment and financial flows because of their expected rapid economic growth.
‘If the funding available… remains at its current level and continues to rely mainly on voluntary contributions, it will not be sufficient,’ the report warns.
On Monday, more than 1,000 delegates from over 100 countries gathered in the Austrian capital for the preparation meeting for the UN climate change summit in Bali, which will focus on the financial and economic aspects of battling climate change.
According to the UN report, while the estimated investment flows to developing countries in 2030 represent 46 percent of global needs, the resulting emission reductions achieved by these countries in 2030 would amount to 68 percent of global emission reductions

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Time for new climate deal, says UN

The UN says momentum is building for tougher long-term action to fight global warming beyond the UN’s Kyoto Protocol and a climate meeting starting in Vienna on Monday will be a crucial part of the process.
Negotiators from more than 100 countries at the August 27-31 talks will seek common ground between industrial nations with Kyoto greenhouse gas caps until 2012 and outsiders led by the US and China, the biggest greenhouse gas emitters.
"Momentum is very much building," for wider action, Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate change official, said. "And Vienna’s going to be crucial." The Vienna talks will try to break a diplomatic logjam and enable environment ministers to agree at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December to launch formal two-year negotiations to define stiffer long-term curbs on greenhouse gases.

"All countries need to take more urgent action," South Africa wrote in an advance statement for the Vienna talks. "The pace of the climate negotiations is out of step with the urgency indicated by climate science."
Chances of a deal in Bali have risen sharply after reports this year blamed human activities, led by use of fossil fuels, for a changing climate set to bring ever more severe monsoons, heatwaves, droughts and rising seas.
Link Times of India

Friday, August 24, 2007

Time Bomb Ticks In Arctic
If there were any lingering doubts as to how ill-prepared we are to face up to the reality of climate change, they were laid to rest this month when two Russian mini submarines dove two miles under the Arctic ice to the floor of the ocean, and planted a Russian flag made of titanium on the seabed. This first manned mission to the ocean floor of the Arctic, which was carefully choreographed for a global television audience, was the ultimate geopolitical reality TV.
Russian President Vladimir V Putin congratulated the aquanauts while the Russian government simultaneously announced its claim to nearly half of the floor of the Arctic Ocean. The Putin government claims that the seabed under the pole, known as the Lomonosov Ridge, is an extension of Russia's continental shelf, and therefore Russian territory. Not to be outdone, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper hurriedly arranged a three-day visit to the Arctic to stake his country's claim to the region. Although in some respects the entire event appeared almost comical - a kind of late 19th century caricature of a colonial expedition - the intent was deadly serious. Geologists believe that 25 per cent of the earth's undiscovered oil and gas may be embedded within the rock underneath the Arctic Ocean. The oil giants are already scurrying to the front of the line, seeking contracts to exploit the vast potential of oil wealth under the Arctic ice. The oil company BP has recently established a partnership with Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil company, to explore the region.
Aside from Russia and Canada, three other countries - Norway, Denmark (Greenland is a Danish possession that reaches into the Arctic) and the United States - are all claiming the Arctic seabed as an extensionof their continental shelves and, therefore, sovereign territory. Under the Law of the Sea Treaty, adopted in 1982, signatory nations can claim exclusive economic zones for commercial exploitation, up to 200 miles out from their territorial waters. The US has never signed the treaty, amidst concerns that other provisions of the treaty would undermine US sovereignty and political independence. Now, however, the sudden new interest in Arctic oil and gas has put a fire under US legislators to ratify the treaty, lest it is edged out of the Arctic oil rush. What makes the whole development so utterly depressing is that the new interest in prospecting the Arctic subsoil and seabed for oil and gas is only now becoming possible because of climate change. For thousands of years, the fossil fuel deposits lay locked up under the ice and inaccessible. Now, global warming is melting away the Arctic ice, making possible, for the first time, the commercial exploitation of the oil and gas deposits. Ironically, the very process of burning fossil fuels releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide and forces an increase in the earth's temperature, which in turn, melts the Arctic ice, making available even more oil and gas for energy. The burning of these potential new oil and gas finds will further increase CO2 emissions in the coming decades, depleting the Arctic ice even more quickly. But the story doesn't stop here. There is a far more dangerous aspect to the unfolding drama in the Arctic. While governments and oil giants are hoping the Arctic ice will melt quickly to allow them access to the world's last treasure trove of oil and gas, climatologists are deeply worried about something else buried under the ice, that if unearthed, could wreak havoc on the earth's biosphere, with dire consequences for human life. Much of the Siberian sub-Arctic region, an area the size of France and Germany combined, is a vast frozen peat bog. Before the previous ice age, the area was mostly grassland, teeming with wildlife.
The coming of the glaciers entombed the organic matter below the permafrost, where it has remained ever since. While the surface of Siberia is largely barren, there is as much organic matter buried underneath the permafrost as there is in all of the world's tropical rainforests. Now, with the earth's temperature steadily rising because of CO2 and other global warming gas emissions, the permafrost is melting, both on land and along the seabeds. If the thawing of the permafrost is in the presence of oxygen on land, the decomposing of organic matter leads to the production of CO2.
If the permafrost thaws along lake shelves, in the absence of oxygen, the decomposing matter releases methane into the atmosphere. Methane is the most potent of the greenhouse gases, with a greenhouse effect that is 23 times greater than that of CO2. Researchers are beginning to warn of a tipping point sometime within this century when the release of carbon dioxide and methane could create an uncontrollable feedback effect, dramatically warming the atmosphere, which will, in turn, warm the land, lakes and seabed, further melting the permafrost and releasing more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
Once that threshold is reached, there is nothing human beings can do, of a technological or political nature, to stop the runaway feedback effect. Scientists suspect that similar events have occurred in the ancient past, between glacial and interglacial periods. Katy Walter of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and her research team calls the permafrost melt a giant "ticking time bomb". A global tragedy of monumental proportions is unfolding at the top of the world, and the human race is all but oblivious to what's happening.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Forests key to climate change battle

Fossil fuels are but the slowly accumulated products of ancient photosynthesis now rapidly being converted into other forms of energy, as well as greenhouse gases. Less obvious is that approximately 23 per cent of greenhouse gases accumulating in the last analysed year came from deforestation and biomass burning.
When those gases are counted in, Indonesia is the world's third largest emitter and Brazil the fourth - based on the last year for which there are global calculations - but since then Brazil appears to have reduced annual deforestation by half. How we manage biology, and forests in particular, is clearly part of the problem and potentially part of the solution.
It undoubtedly was thought of before, but after Helmut Schmidt's 1988 Interaction Council meeting on forests, it was abundantly clear that the world's forests had to be managed in global coordination and that a market for carbon was key. In addition to the carbon/greenhouse gas reductions there would be important gains for biodiversity conservation as well.
At the moment only plantation forestry and other land use change qualify for the Kyoto protocol. Today, almost two decades later and with the effects of climate change already evident, the time is at hand for a global bargain on forests.
Urgent action
In the view of some, inclusion of forests in any global carbon trading system will weaken the incentives for the stiff changes that society as a whole needs to make in its energy base. If, however, one looks squarely at the climate change challenge, and the need to keep climate change below the dangerous level (i.e. below two degrees C), it is more than obvious that we need to be doing absolutely everything we can as fast as we can. The potential impacts on the biological fabric of the planet and freshwater make that imperative.
In that context, moving on forests and carbon, while not without its political, social and economic complications, is something that can be done right away.
At the same time, current renewable energy technologies should be deployed with alacrity. Technologies for clean coal and other acceptable forms of energy must be developed on a crash basis and indeed anticipated in the design of all new coal fired plants so that once available conversion will be easily and quickly achieved.
Australia, once again in the forefront with an important technical contribution, has developed a Carbon Accounting System that makes it possible to track progress or lack thereof in managing carbon, and forest carbon in particular. The $200 million global initiative proposed by Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull will assist Indonesia and others in improving management and protection of forests, which is an important step in advance of global mechanisms.
The details of course will be important, such as mechanisms to actually get the financial incentives to the right places, especially the communities in the forested regions that deserve reward for forest protection.
It will be important as well that some forests be protected outright as opposed to selectively logged. Some way will need to be devised to provide a biodiversity premium in those cases.
A careful balance between being careful and thoughtful about details and implementation, vs losing precious time through ponderous bureaucratic procedure, will also be key.
Adaptation
As essential as concerted action to prevent dangerous climate change is, it must be accompanied by the management of nature to ease the adaptation to the climate change already taking place.
Ripples of change are being detected in nature worldwide in response to the 0.7 degrees C warming that has already occurred. Plants and animals are on the move, threshold changes are occurring in some ecosystems, and the seas are already 30 per cent more acidic (affecting organisms with calcium carbonate shells).
We know an equal amount of climate change will occur just from existing greenhouse gas concentrations and the lag in climate response. The ripples of change in nature will be succeeded by the shaking of the very biological underpinnings of human civilisation.
There are two ways to minimise impact: one is to reduce other stresses on natural ecosystems such as pollution and invasive species, and the second is to assure natural connections in the landscape so organisms can move freely in seeking required conditions in a changing world. Without the latter the landscape represents an obstacle course to such movement.
The proposal to increase Australia's National Reserve System made by a June workshop of some of Australia's most prominent scientists under the auspices of WWF and IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) would be a keystone contribution to buffering Australia's extraordinary biota from climate change impacts. The price is modest compared to the $23 billion annual economic benefit of nature related tourism.
Climate change demands new thinking and new ways from all. It can sometimes seem so overwhelming as to engender paralysis.
Yet clearly two things of importance that can be done, and done right away, are the forests and carbon trading initiative with Indonesia, and acting at home to buffer Australia's amazing flora and fauna against climate change that cannot be avoided.
These would be good for Australia but would also be an inspiration for the rest of the world.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Arctic ice dips, islands emerge
Previously unknown islands are appearing as Arctic summer sea ice shrinks to record lows, raising questions about whether global warming is outpacing UN projections, experts said. Polar bears and seals have also suffered this year on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard because the sea ice they rely on for hunts melted far earlier than normal. "Reductions of snow and ice are happening at an alarming rate," Norwegian environment minister Helen Bjoernoy said at a seminar of 40 scientists and politicians that began late on Monday in Ny Alesund, 1,200 kms of the North Pole. "This acceleration may be faster than predicted" by the UN climate panel this year, she told reporters at the seminar. Ny Alesund calls itself the world's most northerly permanent settlement, and is a base for Arctic research. The UN panel of 2,500 scientists had said in February that summer sea ice could almost vanish in the Arctic towards the end of this century. It said warming in the past 50 years was "very likely" the result of greenhouse gases caused by fossil fuel use. "There may well be an ice-free Arctic by the middle of the century," Christopher Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, told the seminar, accusing the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of underestimating the melt. The thaw of glaciers that stretch out to sea around Svalbard has revealed several islands that are not on any maps. "Islands are appearing just over the fjord here" as glaciers recede, said Kim Holmen, research director at the Norwegian Polar Institute, gesturing out across the bay. "We're already seeing adverse effects on polar bears and other species." "I know of two islands that appeared in the north of Svalbard this summer. They haven't been claimed yet," said Rune Bergstrom, environmental expert with the Norwegian governor's office on Svalbard. He said he had seen one of the islands, roughly the size of a basketball court. Islands have also appeared in recent years off Greenland and Canada. Rapley also said the IPCC was "restrained to the point of being seriously misleading" in toning down what he said were risks of a melt of parts of Antarctica, by far the biggest store of ice on the planet that could raise world sea levels. Still, in a contrast to the warnings about retreating ice and climate change, snow was falling in Ny Alesund on Monday, several weeks earlier than normal in a region still bathed by the midnight sun. About 30 to 130 people live in the fjord-side settlement, backed by snow-covered mountains. Bjoernoy said it was a freak storm that did not detract from an overall warming trend. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center said that Arctic sea ice had "fallen below the 2005 record low absolute minimum and is still melting". Arctic sea ice reaches an annual minimum in September before freezing again. The US records are based on satellite data back to the 1970s. Rapley said that shrinking ice was bad for indigenous peoples and for much wildlife but could help anyone wanting to hunt for oil and gas or open short-cut shipping lanes between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Norway hopes the seminar, with delegates from countries including top greenhouse gas emitters the US and China, may put pressure on governments to agree to make deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Bjoernoy said.
Links Times of india
North not immune from climate change: WWF
Scientists have ranked it as one of the last remaining natural wonders of the world, alongside the Amazon rainforests and the icy wilderness of the South Pole.
But a new report warns that vast areas of Australia's northern tropics are now at high to medium risk from climate change.
Dr Stuart Blanch heads the northern landscapes division of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which commissioned the study.
"Climate change is not a southern Australian phenomenon," he said.
"Some of the stronger impacts on river flows might be felt in the Murray-Darling Basin, but the best science we have at the moment shows that rivers in the north may be dealing with less water in the future too."
It is the first time scientists have assessed the full impact of climate change on all the major ecosystems in the north, from tropical rivers to coral reefs, wetlands, rainforests, woodland savannah and low islands.
Dr Blanch says the report shows even the most pristine environment is at risk from global warming.
"All aspects of climate change are going to come to bear in northern Australia," he said.
"Hotter temperatures, more variable rainfall, potentially much longer droughts, rising sea levels, much bigger or more intense cyclones."
One of the report authors, Mikila Lawrence, says she hopes the report will curb the rush to exploit water and land in northern Australia as an ill-considered solution to climate change in the south.
"The recommendations were to stop this gut reaction which is happening which is to look at northern Australia as a solution to some of the problems which are already being experienced in the south," she said.
"These are pristine landscapes, that doesn't mean they're not susceptible themselves."
And Dr Blanch says there are clear lessons for politicians and farmers seeking to establish the tropics as the food bowl of Asia.
"If we do try to develop these for farming or intensification for cattle, we risk damaging them," he said.
"With climate change on top of that we might get the double-whammy of climate change and society's response to climate change in the south by sending more farmers north, and that's a real risk."
A prime ministerial task force meets in the remote Kimberley region next week as part of a broad-ranging review of the potential to boost farming in the tropics, to take advantage of the abundant land and rainfall.
But its chairman, Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, says his task force is every bit as environmentally conscious as groups like WWF.
"The notion that there's some great mass migration of farmers and the creation of a huge food bowl is some sort of mythical notion," he said.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Climate change campaigners strip naked on melting glacier
Nearly 600 volunteers have stripped for the camera on a melting Swiss glacier high in the Alps for a publicity campaign to expose the impact of climate change.
The environmental group Greenpeace, which commissioned the photo shoot by world-renowned photographer Spencer Tunick, says the volunteers turned up under blue skies near the foot of the Aletsch glacier, a protected UNESCO World Heritage site.
Nicolas de Roten of Greenpeace Switzerland says there are almost 600 people there.
"It's relatively chilly but that doesn't seem to be disturbing them," he said.
The campaign is aimed at drawing attention to melting Alpine glaciers, one clear sign of global warming and of man-made climate change, Greenpeace says.
Greenpeace says the human body is as vulnerable as glaciers like the Aletsch in southern Switzerland - which is shrinking by more than 100 metres a year - and the world's environment.
The group hopes its billboard and poster campaign showing people exposed to the cold will send a shiver down the spines of the public and politicians, and convince them to do more to tackle pollution and climate change.
"They'll be used at the right moment for our campaign, in Switzerland first and then worldwide," Mr de Roten says.
Tunick split the volunteers into two groups of about 300 for separate shots on or around the lower end of the spectacular 23 kilometre long sweeping ice floe, at an altitude of about 2,300 metres and about an hour's hike away from the village of Bettmeralp.
Temperatures were well above freezing - about 10 to 15 degrees Celsius - unlike the riskier snowbound section higher up in the mountains.
The US-born photographer is renowned for his spectacular art photos of hundreds if not thousands of naked people grouped in carefully chosen poses around landmarks.
Tunick calls them "living sculptures" or "body landscapes" and these days he works mainly to order for contemporary galleries.
About 18,000 nudes posed for the US-born photographer in Mexico City's Zocalo Square in May.
Other backdrops have included the Gateshead Centre for Contemporary Art in Britain (2005), the Biennale in Lyon, France (2005), and Grand Central Station in New York (2003).

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Power giants snub marchers
Two of the UK’s biggest greenhouse polluters have declined to meet Christian Aid campaigners who are walking 1,000 miles to draw attention to climate change.
Drax Group and Scottish and Southern Energy have both turned down Christian Aid’s requests to meet with the marchers as they passed the companies’ power stations on Friday, 10 August 2007.
Drax Group owns the UK’s largest coal-fired power station, Drax, which is in Selby, North Yorkshire, and has an output capacity of 4,000 megawatts (MW).
The company says Drax is the “cleanest” coal-fired power station in the UK.
However, coal is inherently dirty, producing more carbon dioxide than any other fuel. The giant power station emits 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – more than countries such as Chad, Mozambique and Senegal.
Scottish and Southern Energy meanwhile owns the Ferrybridge power station in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, which the climate change marchers also hoped to visit.
Ferrybridge is coal-fired, although it also burns some biomass, and has a capacity of 2,000 MW. Scottish and Southern emits almost 26 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year which is more than the annual emissions of countries including Sri Lanka, Jordan, Ghana, Uruguay and Burkina Faso.
Electricity generation is by far the most carbon-intensive of all industrial sectors in the UK because it is done mainly by burning coal and gas in a process which is highly inefficient.
‘They are hurting us’
One of the climate change marchers, Mohamed Adow from Kenya, said he was disappointed by the two companies’ rejections. ‘It is quite disheartening that the major emitters of carbon in the UK will not meet us,’ he said.
‘Their actions, their emissions, are hurting us. Kenya has been ravaged by climate shocks, shocks that emanate from climate change. Part of it is due to the burning of fossil fuels. Countless people have lost their lives and their livelihoods, had their lives devastated.’
Mohamed Adow works with poor farmers in Kenya, helping them to adapt to the drying effects of climate change.
He added that he hoped consumer power would force Drax and Scottish and Southern to work to reduce their climate impact, as people increasingly demand power from renewable sources.
‘People in poor countries are the first and the worst affected by your actions and God in his grace, through the actions of your clients, will make you do justice,’ he said.
‘The world has enough to satisfy our energy needs but nothing to satisfy your greed.’
Christian Aid’s marchers want to meet major companies along the route of their trans-UK walk, to draw their attention to the severe damage that climate change is already doing in countries where the aid agency works.
Half the core team of 20 marchers are themselves from developing countries, including Brazil, Kenya, Tajikistan, India and Bangladesh. The marchers are also asking firms about what they are doing to reduce their contribution to climate change.