With world leaders still struggling to find an answer to climate change, two documentaries screened at the Pariscience film festival highlight the crucial – and costly – role played by the planet’s greatest natural assets against carbon emissions.
It’s been almost twenty years since representatives of 154 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – two decades punctuated by largely fruitless attempts to agree on a strategy to fight global warming.Like most recent gatherings, this year’s climate summit in the South African city of Durban, which is due to start on November 28, has been described as the last chance to come up with a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions, which expires next year.
To prepare for the key event, delegates from 192 countries gathered for talks this week in the Central American country of Panama, a narrow stretch of land covered by pristine rainforests and a gateway between two oceans.
The location of the discussions may have served as a reminder of the importance of the world’s greatest absorbers of carbon emissions: forests and oceans.
Between them – and in roughly equal shares – the planet’s forests and oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide we pump into the air.
Their plight is the subject of two films screened at the 7th edition of the ‘Pariscience’ science film festival, held in the French capital between October 6 and 11.
Climate Change
The latest twist in a political drama around climate science involves an admission of soliciting Heartland Institute material under a false name...
An internationally recognized water and climate change expert admitted yesterday that he lied about his identity to obtain internal funding and strategy documents from the Heartland Institute.
Writing in The Huffington Post, Pacific Institute President Peter H. Gleick apologized and called his actions "a serious lapse of my own professional ethics and judgment." But he also said his decision to fraudulently acquire and then leak a set of explosive documents from the conservative, climate skeptic think tank was prompted by sustained attacks from climate deniers.
"My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts -- often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated -- to attack climate science and scientists and prevent debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved," he wrote. 
Other wealthy individuals have also funded a series of reports into the future use of technologies to geoengineer the climate...
A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change. The scientists, who advocate geoengineering methods such as spraying millions of tonnes of reflective particles of sulphur dioxide 30 miles above earth, argue that a "plan B" for climate change will be needed if the UN and politicians cannot agree to making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gases, and say the US government and others should pay for a major programme of international research.
Solar geoengineering techniques are highly controversial: while some climate scientists believe they may prove a quick and relatively cheap way to slow global warming, others fear that when conducted in the upper atmosphere, they could irrevocably alter rainfall patterns and interfere with the earth's climate. 
Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception.
Climate negotiations have been in virtual limbo ever since the catastrophic and humiliating Copenhagen summit in 2009, where vertiginous expectations collided with hard political reality. So as negotiators – and a handful of government ministers – arrived in Durban, expectations could not have been lower.
Yet, by the end of the talks, the European Union’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, was being applauded in the media for achieving a “breakthrough” that had “salvaged Durban,” and, most significantly, for achieving the holy grail of climate negotiations, a “legally binding treaty.” According to British climate minister Chris Huhne, the results showed that the United Nations climate-change negotiation system “really works and can produce results." 
Himalayan glaciers are melting and retreating at their edges because of global warming. But they also conceal a more ominous effect of climate change: they are deflating. They are losing internal ice mass to melting, which can substantially hasten their disappearance.
Scientists have recently captured real-time video showing a glacier purging its own meltwater, and at rates far faster than the experts had imagined. To obtain the video, Ulyana Horodyskyj, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, climbed to 5,000 meters on the Ngozumpa Glacier in Nepal 
By Francesca Rheannon Part One of a Two-Part Series
With the climate talks in Durban seemingly headed for a train wreck, an innovative project is developing a new legal international framework for protecting the planetary ecosystem that could just be the most important legal initiative of our age.
The climate talks had not even started in Durban when their epitaph was already being written. It was revealed in a number of reports that at the two previous talks in 2009 and 2010, the big industrial nations of Europe and the US had bullied smaller nations into accepting no action on the climate and that the rich nations, including the UK, EU, Japan, US and the UN have already decided to quash any agreement until 2020 – at which time, no doubt it will be conveniently put off again.
It won’t matter by then because it will be, in the memorable words of Dr. James Hansen, “game over for the planet.” The narrow window we might just possibly still have to avert civilization-destroying climate change will close by 2015. To squeak through that window, we will have to begin ratcheting down our absolute emissions by then – in other words, reverse the direction we are currently on, which saw a 6% rise in emissions in 2010, despite the global economic downturn. 
John Vidal: Water stress and a food security crisis looms in Sudan, where millions of hectares of semi-desert has turned into desert...
A thousand miles south of Cairo, Sudan is having another rotten year. To the east, Somalia, much of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa are experiencing their third or fourth drought in a decade. This one is the deepest in 60 years and has led to millions of people becoming destitute, vast migrations and loss of animals. Sudan has this year been experiencing similar, but less dramatic conditions, with unpredictable rains, late harvests and severe crop losses. Nearly 4m people will need food aid, the harvest next year is expected to be well below average, and farmers are fleeing intense fighting between north and South Sudan troops in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan provinces.
None of this surprises Sumaya Zakieldeen, a researcher at Khartoum University's Institute of Environmental Studies who is on Sudan's delegation to the UN climate talks. She and her team have studied five regions, comparing historical data going back 70 years and found drought and extreme flooding becoming more frequent, temperatures rising in winter, extreme – good and bad – years now more common and rainfall patterns changing. She says that if temperatures continue to rise, as is predicted over the next 50 years, the country can expect more desertification, and more tension between traditionally hostile groups
Responding to Climate Change in New York State
Climate change is already beginning to affect the people and resources of New York State, and these impacts are projected to grow. At the same time, the state has the potential capacity to address many climate-related risks, thereby reducing negative impacts and taking advantage of possible opportunities.
Abstract Sea level rise over the coming centuries is perhaps the most damaging side of rising temperature (Anthoff et al, 2009). The economic costs and social consequences of coastal flooding and forced migration will probably be one of the dominant impacts of global warming (Sugiyama et al, 2008). To date, however, few studies (Anthoff et al, 2009; Nicholls et al, 2008) on infrastructure and socio-economic planning include provision for multi-century and multi-meter rises in mean sea level. Here we use a physically plausible sea level model constrained by observations, and forced with four new Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) radiative forcing scenarios (Moss et al, 2010) to project median sea level rises of 0.57 for the lowest forcing and 1.10 m for the highest forcing by 2100 which rise to 1.84 and 5.49 m respectively by 2500. Sea level will continue to rise for several centuries even after stabilization of radiative forcing with most of the rise after 2100 due to the long response time of sea level. The rate of sea level rise would be positive for centuries, requiring 200–400 years to drop to the 1.8 mm/yr 20th century average, except for the RCP3PD which would rely on geoengineering. (subscription required)
With world leaders still struggling to find an answer to climate change, two documentaries screened at the Pariscience film festival highlight the crucial – and costly – role played by the planet’s greatest natural assets against carbon emissions.
It’s been almost twenty years since representatives of 154 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – two decades punctuated by largely fruitless attempts to agree on a strategy to fight global warming.Like most recent gatherings, this year’s climate summit in the South African city of Durban, which is due to start on November 28, has been described as the last chance to come up with a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions, which expires next year.
To prepare for the key event, delegates from 192 countries gathered for talks this week in the Central American country of Panama, a narrow stretch of land covered by pristine rainforests and a gateway between two oceans.
The location of the discussions may have served as a reminder of the importance of the world’s greatest absorbers of carbon emissions: forests and oceans.
Between them – and in roughly equal shares – the planet’s forests and oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide we pump into the air.
Their plight is the subject of two films screened at the 7th edition of the ‘Pariscience’ science film festival, held in the French capital between October 6 and 11. 
A new radar map shows the flow of Antarctica's massive ice sheet toward the sea in unprecedented, stunning detail, revealing new insight into sea level rise.
The vast ice sheets that cover Antarctica are sliding inexorably into the sea. This is hardly news: it was happening last year, and in 1900, and thousands — even millions — of years before that. The slide is so slow that it’s balanced, more or less, by new ice built from the snow that falls every year. If that balance were to shift dramatically, sending all the ice into the ocean, sea level would shoot up by a catastrophic 200 feet or so.
That’s not likely to happen any time soon (“soon” being the next few hundred years, at the very least). But the flow of ice has accelerated in recent years, both in Antarctica and in Greenland, and scientists who study moving ice are understandably anxious to figure out how that trend will play out during the coming decades. Back in 2007, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last major report deliberately left out changes in the rate of ice sheet flow from its calculations for future sea-level rise, because scientists simply didn’t have enough information to say anything reliable.
But a new map, just published online by the journal Science, may help change that. It doesn’t provide any firm answers. But it does give scientists a detailed look at how, where, and how fast ice flows across the continent today — and that will be a crucial piece of information for monitoring changes over the coming years. 
When I launched my discussion with Jonathon Porritt, I did so “in the spirit of both debate and reconciliation”. I couldn’t see why the question needed to be divisive; we both have the same aims: to try to reduce human impacts on the biosphere and to find the quickest and most effective means of preventing runaway climate change. When I submitted my article questioning Jonathon’s position on nuclear power, I secured space for him to reply on the Guardian’s website, and hoped he would take up my offer of friendly engagement.
To say that this is not the spirit in which he has responded is an understatement. I regret the highly personal and vicious tone of his response. This is now the third time in recent months that I have asked Jonathon to tone down his vitriolic personal remarks. I struggle to understand why they are necessary or how they help us to resolve the dilemmas in which we are all enmeshed.
Before taking this discussion any further, we should ask ourselves what our aim is. Is it to stop climate breakdown, or is it to engineer the maximum roll-out of renewable power? Sometimes it seems to me that greens are putting renewables first, climate change second. We have no obligation to support the renewables industry – or any other industry – against its competitors. Our obligation is to persuade policy makers to bring down emissions and reduce other environmental impacts as quickly and effectively as possible. The moment we start saying we won’t accept one technology under any circumstances, or we must use another technology whether it’s appropriate or not is the moment at which we make that aim harder to achieve. 
A new study suggests that climate change will make life even more arduous for adolescent girls in the developing world.
In many developing countries, teenage girls' days are filled with hard labor as they enter into an adulthood of second-class citizenship. Now, a study finds, climate change threatens to make girls' lives even harder. The report from the nonprofit Plan U.K., as well as the U.K. Department for International Development, focuses exclusively on the developing world's 500 million adolescent girls. They are the ones, the authors note, who walk hours to find water and increasingly rare firewood, and are disproportionately killed or displaced in natural disasters. It recommends increasing access to high-quality education as a means toward helping girls address gender discrimination as well as finding paid work and building more resilient families. That, in turn, the report argues, will help reduce girls' vulnerability to climate change-related weather disasters 
Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened
his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones? |
In 1980, the biologist Paul Ehrlich and business school professor Julian Simon famously wagered on the likelihood of resource scarcity over the coming decade. Based on his expectation that population growth would lead to a rapid growth in demand for basic resources, Ehrlich bet that the prices of five commodity metals would increase; Simon, argued that rising prices incent human innovation and consequently that resource prices should be stable or declining. In the decade that followed, despite population growth of 800 million, the prices of all five commodities chosen by Ehrlich declined and he paid the bet. In July 2011, the investor Jeremy Grantham noted that if the bet had been extended to 2011, Ehrlich would have won – by a lot.
McKinsey Global Institute, a research arm of McKinsey & Company, recently revisited the debate about economic growth and resource scarcity with the release of a major study, “Resource Revolution: Meeting the world’s energy, materials, food, and water needs”. One of the lead authors, McKinsey partner Jeremy Oppenheim, recently visited the World Bank in Washington DC to describe the report’s conclusions and discuss its implications for development strategy, particularly for the World Bank. His presentation captivated a large audience and provoked a lively discussion The loss of sea-ice and the increased autumn cloud cover over the artcic can yield colder winters in London Paris and Boston
This paper by Judah Cohen et al, which have been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, ties Arctic warming to cooler winters in the eastern U.S. and northern Europe and Asia, via changes in Siberian snowfall.
An increase in available moisture, due to warming and sea-ice loss in the Arctic, supplies more energy in the atmosphere for storms to work and potentially results in higher precipitation effiecienty over Siberia where temperatures are still cold to yield snow.
Moreover, recent research have shown that the mean October snow over the Eurasian continent has increased the last two decades and that has important implications for the winter climate.
The paper argues that a warmer, more moisture-laden Arctic atmosphere in the autumn contributes to an increase in Eurasia snow-cover during that season. 
Neal R. Peirce: Greater global sustainability starts with "bottom-up approaches."
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presses the point even more forcefully. Speaking at an event at U.N. headquarters on Dec. 15, Bloomberg championed a major role for cities at Rio plus 20, specifically including mayors on national delegations.
Even as national and global efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have faltered, Bloomberg said, cities across continents have moved aggressively to the "forefront of climate change action." And that matters hugely, he suggested, since burning of carbon fuels by cities not only accounts for an overwhelming 70 percent of global greenhouse emissions, but "clogs our city streets, pollutes our air, harms the health and shortens the lives of the people we serve."
The mayor, who also chairs the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, noted New York's pacesetting "PlanNYC" -- the "greenprint" for his city's future. But he pointed as well to significant carbon reduction efforts in such cities as Lagos, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Berlin and Seoul. In the third installment of our iq2 Shorts series, environmentalists Simon Zadek and George Monbiot spar over the motion 'London's policy on climate change s... 
An international team of scientists who monitor the rapid changes in the Earth’s northern polar region say that the Arctic is entering a new state – one with warmer air and water temperatures, less summer sea ice and snow cover, and a changed ocean chemistry. This shift is also causing changes in the region’s life, both on land and in the sea, including less habitat for polar bears and walruses, but increased access to feeding areas for whales.
Changes to the Arctic are chronicled annually in the Arctic Report Card, which was released today. The report is prepared by an international team of scientists from 14 different countries. Ice photos from NOAA Ships.
Among the 2011 highlights are:
Atmosphere: In 2011, the average annual near-surface air temperatures over much of the Arctic Ocean were approximately 2.5° F (1.5° C) greater than the 1981-2010 baseline period.
John Vidal: Coffee has been the cash crop mainstay of Rwenzori for generations but climate change is tilting the crown, villagers say...
One by one, the farmers, who mostly cultivate two acres of land each, tell us what they have observed in their lifetimes. "The springs are drying up"; "we find we can only plant crops twice'; "the coffee has started behaving differently; it flowers even as it fruits"; "we have more diseases"; "we have lost 20% of our income"; "there is less water from the mountain".
Coffee has been the cash crop king of Rwenzori for generations but climate change is tilting the crown, they argue. Less rain in the hills means the rivers now run slower, which leaves three hydroelectric plants in the region short of water and therefore unable to generate electricity all the year. Increased poverty down below leads to more people coming up the mountain in search of land, food and work. 
You are likely already aware of the CO2 problem: trace gasses (primarily carbon dioxide) in the earth’s atmosphere alter its thermal properties, causing it to retain heat. Human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, is increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and as a result heating up the earth’s surface.
However, a less appreciated fact is that in addition to being a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is acidic. This is not at all controversial; it was well recognized more than a century ago in Svente Arhennius’s pioneering article 'On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground’. When we burn fossil fuels, we add CO2 to the atmosphere, but about a quarter that carbon winds up in the oceans. This increases the acidity of the oceans, with potentially severe repercussions for organisms like corals, which build shells out of calcium carbonate and suffer under more acidic conditions. The chemistry is relatively straightforward, and not especially controversial; if you would like more information on the subject, Skeptical Science has an excellent introductory series written by Doug Mackie, Christina McGraw, and Keith Hunter.
When the science of anthropogenic climate change proved politically and economically inconvenient for many people, a cottage industry has popped up in trying to dismiss it. The same effort to dismiss ‘the other CO2 problem’ is now underway; there have been a few snipes from Monckton and the Idsos, but I want to focus on some recent congressional testimony in this vein, coming from a Dr. John Everett. A copy of his testimony can be found here. I think it's important to go through this testimony, because it is one of the only pieces of high-profile misinformation on the subject, and because it shows similar distortions at work behind the denial of climate change and ocean acidification. As you read on, ask yourself: have I seen this tactic before? Graphs manipulated so as to hide an incline? An extrapolation of a few years' worth of climate data? "It's changed in the past"? 
Why are tidal turbines like roadworks? As a traffic engineer-turned-oceanographer, Simon Neill should know. He explains how taking energy from the tides on a large scale with farms of 'underwater windmills' could affect how sand moves around our coastal seas, affecting beaches, sand banks and ultimately the risk of flooding.
Tidal currents flood and ebb, mainly due to the gravitational force of the moon, combined with the Earth's rotation. When these currents are fast enough, they pick up grains of sand from the seabed, which are then transported with the flow. This is like cars picking up passengers en route to their destination.
In the middle of the day, on a typical road, there is no particular pattern to the flow of traffic, so the number of passengers will flow equally in both directions. It's the same in the shelf seas - the shallow waters around our coastlines - where symmetrical tidal currents transport sand equally in both directions. This symmetry means that in the long term there is no significant net movement of sand.
Yet something interesting happens on the roads during the morning rush hour. There is a large net flow of passengers towards the cities, so the number of passengers transported is strongly asymmetrical. In the sea, this kind of asymmetry in the tidal currents leads to a net large-scale movement of sand in either the flood or ebb direction.
Throughout the world's shelf seas, interactions between the sweep of the tide and friction at the seabed generate a complex distribution of regions of symmetry, and regions of asymmetry. We can use computer models to make detailed maps of such processes, and these have been widely applied over the past few decades to understand large-scale sand movements.
Flooding and ebbing tidal currents, transporting sand either equally in both directions or with a net transport in one direction or the other, are responsible for the distribution of sand around our shelf seas. These large-scale sand movements feed into coastal systems like beaches and offshore sandbanks. Such systems remove the energy from storm waves, and so are vital natural forms of coastal protection. Coastal engineers must understand these systems to manage flood risk, just as traffic engineers and town planners need to understand the volume of traffic and passenger numbers travelling through each section of the road network.
However, what would happen if we were to exploit tidal energy to generate electricity on a significant scale? How would this affect the large-scale movement of sand, and so ultimately affect this natural form of coastal protection? 
The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”
Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation. Never mind that America needs a national policy. Mr. Perry has a big soapbox, and what he says, however fallacious, reaches a bigger audience than any scientist can command. 
According to updated NOAA climate normals, what used to be an unusually hot day isn't so abnormal anymore.
The updates come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which will impliment its new 30-year “Climate Normals” on July 1. When weather forecasters use terms like “above normal” or “below normal,” they’re referring to average temperatures and precipitation figures compiled from daily, monthly and yearly readings at thousands of locations across the country during the previous three decades. The normals that are about to expire are based on conditions from 1971–2000; the new ones start in 1981 — and unlike their predecessors, they include the first decade of the 21st century, which was among the hottest on record for the country (and was the hottest on record globally). They also exclude the 1970s, which was a particularly chilly decade in many areas. As a result, the new normal temperatures for Philadelphia and the rest of the nation are higher than the previous set The Nuclear Debate.- live video feed from the Chemistry Centre presented by The Reaction and The Royal Society of Chemistry... 
The newest crop in India could be electricity from the sun.
“Solar Farming” can help change India’s energy economy to clean and efficient renewable energy during the day when it is needed the most, create millions of jobs, and could help India achieve energy independence and better national security. Imagine a crop that can be harvested daily on the most barren desert and arid land, with no fertilizer or tillage, and that produces no harmful emissions. Imagine an energy source so bountiful that it can provide many times more energy than we could ever expect to need or use. An hour’s worth of sunlight bathing the planet holds far more energy than humans worldwide consume in a year. You don’t have to imagine it — it’s real and it’s here. Solar energy is an abundant enormous resource that is readily available to all countries throughout the world, and all the space above the earth. It is clean, no waste comes from it, and it’s “free.” |
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