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.
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Ashesh rescooped this on adapting to climate change. (January 10, 11:52 AM) |
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Athena Drakou shared this post on Twitter. (January 10, 10:08 AM) |
Climate Change
Reforms in the Arab region should focus on transitioning to a green economy, argues award-winning environmental advocate Najib Saab. ... Uprisings in Arab countries have been at the centre of global news coverage for more than a year. Although it is still too early to speculate on the final outcome, the hope is that the Arab Spring will eventually steer a new direction for economic and environmental sustainability. At the moment the prospects are not good. But if reforms can be made to clamp down on administrative corruption and the mismanagement of natural resources, Arab states could make huge economic gains. Better governance will have spillover effects on environmental governance as people whose lives are most impacted by environmental concerns have more say in political decisions. .................................. Forging a future But building a green economy requires transforming the prevailing 'virtual economy' — primarily based on sales of raw extractive products and speculation in real estate — to a 'real economy' that focuses on sustainable production, protecting natural capital and generating long-term employment opportunities. It is crucial that science and education form the basis of a successful transition to the green economy; both are currently lacking in Arab countries. Although higher education institutions are proliferating, the quality of education they offer is below average. 
The biostratigraphic framework for Cenozoic planktonic foraminifera was recently revised by Bridget Wade et al. (2011), including Paul Pearson, William Berggren and Heiko Pälike. This includes the stratigraphic interval of the ‘Descent Into the Icehouse‘ project. One of the most intriguing aspects of climate scepticism, in all its forms, is how to account for country-to-country differences in its prevalence (and in some cases its virtual absence). There’s an abundance of it in the media in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada, but very little in France and most of Western Europe, and the Global South. It is not simply a result of whether there is a well-funded lobby group or think tank, supported or not by the fossil fuel industry in a country, although that of course is a major driver. Our study of climate scepticism in six countries called Poles Apart suggested that it was a result of the interplay between processes within newspapers (such as political ideology, journalistic practices, editorial culture, or the influence of editors and proprietors) and external societal forces. These could be anything from the presence of sceptical political parties, the power of sceptical lobbying groups, the public profile of sceptical scientists, a country’s energy matrix, the presence of web-based scepticism, or even a country’s direct experience of a changing climate. 
With man-induced global warming, water resources are being affected dramatically.
A dead fish in the drought-stricken La Sorrueda reservoir on Spain’s Canary island of Gran Canaria. According to a study in the journal Nature Climate Change, extreme weather events have increased over the past decade and have had a devastating impact all over the globe.
With a growing population and man-induced global warming, water resources are being affected dramatically. Freshwater around the world is stressed, and climate change is the great exacerbation, says Heidi Cullen of Climate Central. 
The cassava plant could help farmers in Africa cope with climate change because of its ability to thrive in hot temperatures, a scientific report says.
"It's like the Rambo of the food crops," report author Andy Jarvis, of the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, said.
He told the BBC: "Whilst other staples can suffer from heat and other problems of climate change, cassava thrives." The root crop is already one of the most widely consumed staple foods on the continent. But the report also stresses the need for more research to make cassava more resistant to pests and disease. Last November, UN scientists warned that a virus was attacking the crop, nearing an epidemic in parts of Africa. Viral infections have periodically wiped out the crop in some regions leading to famine. 
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)
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Seagrasses are a vital part of the solution to climate change and, per unit area, seagrass meadows can store up to twice as much carbon as the world's temperate and tropical forests. So report researchers publishing a paper this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper, "Seagrass Ecosystems as a Globally Significant Carbon Stock," is the first global analysis of carbon stored in seagrasses. The results demonstrate that coastal seagrass beds store up to 83,000 metric tons of carbon per square kilometer, mostly in the soils beneath them. As a comparison, a typical terrestrial forest stores about 30,000 metric tons per square kilometer, most of which is in the form of wood. The research also estimates that, although seagrass meadows occupy less than 0.2 percent of the world's oceans, they are responsible for more than 10 percent of all carbon buried annually in the sea. "Seagrasses only take up a small percentage of global coastal area, but this assessment shows that they're a dynamic ecosystem for carbon transformation," said James Fourqurean, the lead author of the paper and a scientist at Florida International University and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site. 
Scientists identify thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane stored for millennia is bubbling out, potentially accelerating global warming. ... The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2 and levels are rising after a few years of stability. There are many sources of the gas around the world, some natural and some man-made, such as landfill waste disposal sites and farm animals. Tracking methane to these various sources is not easy. But the researchers on the new Arctic project, led by Katey Walter Anthony from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF), were able to identify long-stored gas by the ratio of different isotopes of carbon in the methane molecules. The impact of climate change on investment and development is fundamental but is yet to be appreciated, or some in cases even understood. One related issue is a seemingly obscure technical calculation, the use of “Climate Normals” – a standard way of estimating the weather expected in a particular location for any given day. Such estimates have enormous significance for planning power plants, ports, water systems, roads, and long-lived infrastructure.
The low-lying Pacific island nation of Kiribati is considering buying land in Fiji to move its population which is threatened by rising sea levels.
Kiribati's President Anote Tong says he is involved in talks with the Fijian government to purchase land on Vanua Levu - Fiji's second largest island. Mr Tong says this is the last resort to save more than 100,000 islanders.
Some of Kiribati's 32 coral atolls - which straddle the equator - are already disappearing beneath the ocean. None of the atolls rises more than a few metres above the sea level.
Mr Tong says that climate change is daily battle for Kiribati - but admits that it is one that his country would ultimately lose.However, relocating the entire population to Fiji - more than 2,000km (1,300 miles) away - would be a monumental challenge, the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney reports.
Kiribati's officials hope that many people would also be allowed to settle in other countries in the vast region, including Australia and New Zealand. Previously, Mr Tong suggested constructing man-made islands resembling oil rigs for people to live on. In the summer 2010 Western Russia was hit by an extraordinary heat wave, with the region experiencing by far the warmest July since records began. Whether and to what extent this event is attributable to anthropogenic climate change is controversial. Dole et al. (2011) report the 2010 Russian heat wave was “mainly natural in origin” whereas Rahmstorf and Coumou (2011) write that with a probability of 80% “the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred” without the large-scale climate warming since 1980, most of which has been attributed to the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The latter explicitly state that their results “contradict those of Dole et al. (2011).”
Here we use the results from a large ensemble simulation experiment with an atmospheric general circulation model to show that there is no substantive contradiction between these two papers, in that the same event can be both mostly internally-generated in terms of magnitude and mostly externally-driven in terms of occurrence-probability. The difference in conclusion between these two papers illustrates the importance of specifying precisely what question is being asked in addressing the issue of attribution of individual weather events to external drivers of climate. 
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"? |
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