Down and Out in Durban: End of the Line for Kyoto?

The Council for Foreign Relations yesterday published a somewhat depressing article, outlining the prospects for success at the next big global environmental summit in Durban, South Africa:

As delegates from nearly 200 countries prepare to descend on Durban, South Africa next week for the seventeenth meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP-17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), pessimism runs high. Privately, the leaders of major established and emerging economies concede that no new climate treaty containing binding emissions reductions will be negotiated before 2016. And even if an agreement were reached, it would not come into force until 2020—eight years from now. This bleak outlook comes despite warnings from scientists and economists about the dangers of delaying dramatic action to mitigate the planet’s warming.

Just this week, the UN World Meteorological Association reported that the volume of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere reached a new record during 2010. And emissions appear to be accelerating, with carbon dioxide rising by 2.3 parts per million over the past year—a significant jump from the average (2.0) over the past decade. According to the U.S. Energy Department, recent increases in global carbon emissions exceed the worst-case projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   Adding to the warnings, a recent IPCC report predicts that dramatic planetary warming during this century is “virtually certain.” Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, warns that the world has a brief, five-year window to stop a worldwide mean temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius: “If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put into place by 2017, then the door to will be closed forever.” Two degrees Celsius may seem like a small rise, but scientists regard it as a critical threshold, beyond which the world will face more extreme weather such as melting icecaps, devastating droughts, and torrential rainfall and flooding. And without significant efforts toward mitigation, global temperatures could rise even more.

The reasons for the diplomatic deadlock are plain. Major parties to Kyoto, including Japan, Russia, and Canada, have already signaled that they will not take on a second commitment because China and the United States—the world’s top two polluters—are not included in it. The European Union (EU) is prepared to sign up for a second round, but it insists that major developing countries, whose emissions are surging as their economies grow, must embrace and follow through on real commitments. The EU’s preference is to negotiate “a single global and comprehensive legally binding instrument” including all emitters, though it would countenance an “interim” solution whereby major emerging countries would accept a “road map” and timetable for treaty commitments. Even this fall-back position faces resistance from the so-called “BASIC” caucus—Brazil, South Africa, India, and China—who are disinclined to accept binding targets that might jeopardize their domestic growth and development goals.

The United States, for its part, has abdicated leadership on climate issues. Heading into an election year, President Obama seldom mentions global warming any more. And with the laudable exception of John Huntsman—who actually believes in climate science—his Republican rivals for the presidency have mostly fallen over themselves to deny its existence or importance.

Given these international and domestic dynamics, is Durban destined to be a failure? Not entirely. While a successor treaty to Kyoto with updated, binding targets is off the table, the conferees have an incentive and the ability to snatch some measure of victory from the gathering.

• First, governments can agree to build on the climate mitigation activities they are already undertaking individually, bilaterally, and multilaterally. Under the broad Kyoto umbrella, parties have adopted various mechanisms and initiatives designed to reduce emissions, ranging from reporting requirements to market schemes for carbon trading, investments in renewable energy, and more robust fuel standards and targets for carbon intensity. As in Copenhagen and Cancun, states parties will stress the cumulative effect of parallel national efforts, rather than a stringent, binding treaty.

• Second, rather than admitting failure and declaring Kyoto “dead,” the assembled delegations could seek to keep it on life support, in the form of a political rather than a legally binding agreement. A looser, informal “Kyoto II” could play several roles. It could provide a framework for a more robust system to monitor and verify compliance with stated national goals. It could offer a mechanism for transfer of clean energy technology and climate financing to the developing world. And it could hold out the promise, however distant in the future, of a successor treaty.

• Third, Durban will ultimately be judged on whether the wealthy world makes good on its financial commitments to help developing countries adapt to the climate change the world has failed to mitigate. At Cancun last December, delegations to COP-16 agreed to create a Green Climate Fund of up to $100 billion to help countries cope with global warming. Unfortunately, that target seems increasingly out of reach, as advanced market democracies grapple with slow growth, massive fiscal imbalances and swelling sovereign debts. This week Ernst and Young reported that austerity measures across ten of the world’s major economies had created a climate funding “gap” of $22.5 billion—a figure that could double to $45 billion should the crisis in the eurozone escalate.

Perhaps coincidentally, the U.S. congressional supercommittee, composed of twelve legislators from the same country, admitted defeat this week—exhibiting a complete inability to engage in practical compromise. Given the stakes involved, let’s hope all the delegations a part of the COP-17—regardless of their diverse interests—do not resign themselves to the same fate.

BBC News: Global warming since 1995 'now significant'

Richard Black, Environment Correspondent at BBC News, provides an update on figures underlying the work of one key global warming research centre:

Climate warming since 1995 is now statistically significant, according to Phil Jones, the UK scientist targeted in the "ClimateGate" affair.

Last year, he told BBC News that post-1995 warming was not significant - a statement still seen on blogs critical of the idea of man-made climate change. But another year of data has pushed the trend past the threshold usually used to assess whether trends are "real". Dr Jones says this shows the importance of using longer records for analysis.

By widespread convention, scientists use a minimum threshold of 95% to assess whether a trend is likely to be down to an underlying cause, rather than emerging by chance. If a trend meets the 95% threshold, it basically means that the odds of it being down to chance are less than one in 20. Last year's analysis, which went to 2009, did not reach this threshold; but adding data for 2010 takes it over the line.

"The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn't significant at the standard 95% level that people use," Professor Jones told BBC News.

"Basically what's changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years - and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.

"It just shows the difficulty of achieving significance with a short time series, and that's why longer series - 20 or 30 years - would be a much better way of estimating trends and getting significance on a consistent basis."
Professor Jones' previous comment, from a BBC interview in Febuary 2010, is routinely quoted - erroneously - as demonstration that the Earth's surface temperature is not rising.

The dataset that Professor Jones helps to compile - HadCRUT3 - is a joint project between the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he is based, and the UK Met Office. It is one of the main global temperature records used by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). HadCRUT shows a warming 1995-2010 of 0.19C - consistent with the other major records, which all use slightly different ways of analysing the data in order to compensate for issues such as the dearth of measuring stations in polar regions.

Shortly before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Phil Jones found himself at the centre of the affair that came to be known as "ClimateGate", which saw the release of more than 1,000 emails taken from a CRU server.

Critics alleged the emails showed CRU scientists and others attempting to subvert the usual processes of science, and of manipulating data in order to paint an unfounded picture of globally rising temperatures. Subsequent enquiries found the scientists and their institutions did fall short of best practice in areas such as routine use of professional statisticians and response to Freedom of Information requests, but found no case to answer on the charges of manipulation. Since then, nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC's basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions. And a new initiative to construct a global temperature record, based at Stanford University in California whose funders include "climate sceptical" organisations, has reached early conclusions that match established records closely.

Do take the time to read the rest!

The Economist: The World Gets Back to Burning

Following on from our notice - late last month - of worrying reports from the IAE regarding rising carbon emissions worldwide, The Economist's Schumpeter (Business and Management blogger) has now produced his own assessment of this trend, based this time on BP's own figures:

Not since 1973 has world energy use increased by as much, in percentage terms, as it did in 2010. According to BP’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy, published today, 2010’s energy consumption was up by 5.6% on the year before. In part this is thanks to recovery from the economic crisis; in part it is down to the longer-term shift in economic activity towards emerging economies, which are less efficient in their energy use.

Robust growth was seen in all regions and in almost all types of energy use: the world consumed more of every main fuel bar one than it had in any previous year. Consumption of oil, which accounts for 34% of the world’s primary energy by BP’s calculations, rose by 3.1%. Coal, at 30% the number two fuel, was up by 7.6%, growing faster than at any time since 2003. Consumption of gas, which contributes 24%, was up by 7.4%, the biggest annual growth since 1984.

Schumpeter reviews the growth of other energy sources as well, but returns quickly to one of the main sources for the rising consumption of carbon-based fuels:

Most of China’s growth came from burning more coal: in 2000 China accounted for just under a third of world coal use; in 2010 a staggering 48.2%. Repeat that sort of expansion on a smaller scale for a number of other countries and you see why coal is going up in the global mix. You also see why the world’s energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions have grown even faster than its energy use—by 5.8% last year, on BP’s figures. That is the fastest growth since 1969.

Schumpeter is balanced but concerned in his final assessment, simultaneously pointing up why these particular statistics published today are now even more valuable:

That more energy is being used than ever before is a welcome sign of economic growth after a sharp downturn. That it is being used less efficiently than before, and producing record levels of carbon dioxide, is harder to welcome. A small mercy, though, is that there are numbers like BP’s available with which to perceive such unwelcome truths. Since the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, which would become BP a few years later, first put together its annual review 60 years ago—six typewritten pages, one graph, for internal use only—they have grown into a widely valued tool for economists and energy strategists in a field where reliable compendia of facts are rare, and growing rarer. In April the United States government announced that it would stop gathering the data on which various domestic energy indicators are based, reduce efforts to assure data quality in some others and cease publication of its International Energy Statistics. It is hard to see how, if such numbers have any value at all, that doesn’t represent a false economy.

Take the time to read the whole thing - a vision of the world we will all inherit!

Global carbon emissions reach record, says IAE

BBC News has a brief summary of a worrying report from the International Energy Agency:

Global carbon emissions reached a record level last year, according to the International Energy Agency (IAE). The watchdog says emissions rose again after a dip caused by the financial crisis in 2009, and ended 5% up from the previous record in 2008. China and India account for most of the rise, though emissions have also grown in developed countries.

The increase raises doubts over whether planned curbs on greenhouse emissions will be achieved, the group says. At a meeting last year in Cancun, Mexico, world leaders agreed that deep cuts were needed to limit the rise in global temperature to 2C above pre-industrial levels. But according to the IAE's estimate, CO2 emissions reached a record 30.6 gigatonnes in 2010.

The IEA's Fatih Birol said the finding was "another wake-up call".

"The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020 if the 2C target is to be attained," he added.

"Unless bold and decisive decisions are made very soon, it will be extremely challenging to succeed in achieving this global goal agreed in Cancun."

Wired: Climate Change Wilts Farming Yields

Wired Science has the story of recent findings:

Set a place at the table for climate change; hotter weather may have already taken a bite out of food crops worldwide.

Farms across the planet produced 3.8 percent less corn and 5.5 percent less wheat than they could have between 1980 and 2008 thanks to rising temperatures, a new analysis estimates. These wilting yields may have contributed to the current sky-high price of food, a team of U.S. researchers reports online May 5 in Science. Climate-induced losses could have driven up prices of corn by 6.4 percent and wheat by 18.9 percent since 1980.
The researchers tracked country-by-country yields of these common foodstuffs over nearly three decades. Harvests of corn and wheat have climbed steadily since 1980 due in part to technological advancements, says David Lobell, a land-use scientist at Stanford University. But based on the team’s statistical analysis, farmers could have produced a lot more food if the weather had been cooler. For corn, global losses amount to millions of tons — about equal to Mexico’s yearly production of the crop. “For every decade of climate change, it sets you back a year,” Lobell says.

For reasons still up for debate, temperatures largely held steady in the U.S. over the study period. So Iowa, by and large, doesn’t seem to have lost out. Rice and soybean yields have also proved resilient to rising temperatures so far, the team discovered.

This analysis of the past three decades largely falls in line with what other studies have projected for the coming century, says Andy Challinor of the University of Leeds in England, who studies the impacts of climate on agriculture. With enough complementary analyses, scientists may start to feel more certain about predicting the future of food. Still, when it comes to agriculture, researchers rely on a very murky crystal ball. Humans can, and probably will, adapt to warmer temperatures, switching to hardier crops or developing new technology to keep harvests high.

While it’s far from a prediction, Lobell says his study identifies a number of problem areas that do need attention — not later but now. “If we really invest a lot in the development of crops that can withstand really high temperatures,” he says, “that would potentially change things a lot.”

Even today, food scarcity is a pressing problem, says Navin Ramankutty, a geographer at McGill University in Montreal. As populations climb steeply, putting added pressure on agricultural production, an estimated one in seven people go hungry across the globe.

Why the UN can never stop climate change

For any progress to be made, diplomacy should shift to smaller forums, with achievable goals and focus on adaptation—this is the message of David G. Victor, professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego and author of Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet (Cambridge University Press).

Writing in Monday's Guardian, Professor Victor reviews the likelihood of any meaningful advance in tackling global warming during the UN summit that opened last Sunday:

On Sunday in Thailand diplomats opened another round of formal United Nations talks on global warming. For more than 20 years, the UN has been working on this problem, with little progress. Expectations have never been lower. The December 2009 conference in Copenhagen that was supposed to finalise a new treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto protocol ended in deadlock. Last year's talks in Cancún ended without agreement on most of the important new issues.

... failure to make progress.... is mainly due to bad strategy. The United Nations forum is the wrong place for serious diplomacy. One of the chief strengths of the UN system – that it involves every nation on the planet – is a huge liability for global warming. By working in large groups, UN talks are often held hostage to the whims of even small players – as happened in Copenhagen and Cancún when Sudan and Bolivia and a few other nations whose emissions of warming pollution are tiny. The UN system has also relied on legally binding agreements, which sound good in theory yet have proved difficult to tailor and adjust in light of the many different interests that must be reflected in any serious international pact to control emissions.

Professor Victor makes three suggestions: 1. that discussion should only take place in small forums that involve only the larger countries; 2. shift focus of discussions to that which is really achievable; and, 3. talks must shift from focusing exclusively on controlling emissions to dealing with the reality that lots of climate change is inevitable....

Read his opinion piece in full in order to review his suggestions in more detail. It all sounds very sensible! Meanwhile, the professor succinctly-stated views help to document reasons why tackling climate change is / has been so difficult—grist to our examination mill!

BBC News: Polar ice loss quickens, raising seas

Richard Black, the Environment correspondent at BBC News Online, brings news today of a research article—soon to be published—proving recent accelerated ice loss in polar regions:

Ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland has accelerated over the last 20 years, research shows, and will soon become the biggest driver of sea level rise.

From satellite data and climate models, scientists calculate that the two polar ice sheets are losing enough ice to raise sea levels by 1.3mm each year. Overall, sea levels are rising by about 3mm (0.12 inches) per year.

Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, the team says ice loss here is speeding up faster than models predict. They add their voices to several other studies that have concluded sea levels will rise faster than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its landmark 2007 assessment.

By 2006, the Greenland and Antarctic sheets were losing a combined mass of 475Gt (gigatonnes - billion tonnes) of ice per year.

On average, loss from the Greenland sheet is increasing by nearly 22Gt per year, while the much larger and colder Antarctic sheet is shedding an additional 14.5Gt each year. If these increases persist, water from the two polar ice sheets could have added 15cm (5.9 inches) to the average global sea level by 2050.

A rise of similar size is projected to come from a combination of melt water from mountain glaciers and thermal expansion of seawater.

That last detail is particularly worrying...

Can California scientists end the war on climate change?

The Guardian has a feature today on the work of a group of scientists based in California who have no small ambition—The Berkeley Earth project, led by physicist Richard Muller, say they are about to reveal the definitive truth about global warming...

For the past year, Muller has kept a low profile, working quietly on a new project with a team of academics hand-picked for their skills. They meet on campus regularly, to check progress, thrash out problems and hunt for oversights that might undermine their work. And for good reason. When Muller and his team go public with their findings in a few weeks, they will be muscling in on the ugliest and most hard-fought debate of modern times.

Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet's temperature.

Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming. In no other field would Muller's dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naive.

"We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find." Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? "We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close," he says.

Quite a bit of detail to absorb, but worth the read and a worthy project. Let's hope they can come up with something definitive! If you want to check the project out directly, go to http://www.berkeleyearth.org/

Cartoon: Choice on the Nile

A brilliant cartoon from the Chattanooga Times newspaper, depicting the three essential choices ahead for the Egyptian people:

 

We're studying Conflict, War and Terrorism (Unit 4) at the moment - which of the above options is more likely (from Realist, but especially Liberal viewpoints) to promote conflict, which is more likely to promote peace within the Middle East region?

Arctic canary looking sicker than ever

Environment correspondent for BBC News Online Richard Black has assembled an extremely useful summary of recent research findings from ongoing scientific studies of the Arctic region:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2011/01/if_the_arctic_is_really.html

If the Arctic really is the "canary in the coal mine" for climate change impacts, as it's often been labelled, then it's a canary about which we know a little more following a spate of scientific papers coming out over the last week or so.

And looking at what they say, as well as readings from instruments monitoring the canary's heath, the signs of sickness appear to be stronger and more certain than before.

There are several distinct symptoms that need monitoring here: sea-ice area and volume, air temperature and wind, water temperature and currents, and the state of the Greenland icecap.

Along with all this is the constant effort to interpret new data and see whether long-term beliefs about how Arctic weather works still hold true, or whether - as with the El Nino Southern Oscillation, for example - the sustained rise in global temperatures may change mechanisms people thought they understood.

Black's blog entry summarises and links conveniently to five or six separate studies, each worrying by themselves, but which together add up to no small concern for the stability of the northern polar zone. Why not spend some time this weekend exploring a selection of the links?

2010 warmest ever year, says UN weather agency

AFP, via The Independent, summarises last Thursday's announcement from the UN (complete text below):

The UN's World Meteorological Organisation said Thursday that 2010 was the warmest year on record, confirming a "significant" long-term trend of global warming. The trend also helped to melt Arctic sea ice cover to a record low for December last month, the WMO said in a statement.

Last year "ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998," the WMO added, confirming preliminary findings released at the global climate conference early December that were based on a 10-month period.

"The 2010 data confirm the Earth's significant long-term warming trend," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said. "The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998."

In 2010, the global average temperature was 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1961 to 1990 mean that is used as a yardstick for climate measurements, according to the WMO. That exceeded 2005 levels by 0.01 C (0.02 F) and was 0.02 C (0.05 F) above the 1998 mark, but within a margin of error that made the difference between the three years statistically insignificant, according to the WMO.

"Arctic sea-ice cover in December 2010 was the lowest on record" for the month, the WMO said.

Sea ice around the northern polar region shrank to an average monthly extent of 12 million square kilometres, 1.35 million square kilometres below the 1979 to 2000 December average, according to the UN weather agency.

Over past decade, global temperatures have been the highest-ever recorded for a 10-year period since the beginning of instrument-based climate records. Last month, even before the year was over, Jarraud confirmed that 2001 to 2010 set a new record as the warmest decade ever.

The WMO says that the temperature observations on their own do not pin the cause on man-made greenhouse gases, although it believes this is confirmed separately by other research into carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

It could be worth reading the original press release from the World Meteorological Organisation as well!

BBC News: Ice-cold reality of warming projections

BBC News Online, courtesy of its environment editor Richard Black, has published a survey of current scientific thought on the topic of global warming:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2011/01/given_the_importance_of_glacie.html

Infographic: The Carbon Economy

A year ago today, XPLANE and the The Economist put out a video infographic—entitled "The Carbon Economy" to coincide with the latter's Carbon Economy Summit:



Definitely worth watching a year later as a means of getting some handle on how government and business worldwide are getting to grips with the new thinking on the environment.