The piggy box is never full!

The world is losing its forests at a rate of 13 million hectares (32 million acres) a year, contributing one-third of the world's atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. The share is higher in developing countries where forests are being razed to make way for agriculture. However, this is inevitable as demand for crops keeps increasing. The challenge has been to make the developed world compensate in ways which could limit the deforestation.

REDD+ finance, the money needed to set up and implement a system that pays countries to leave forests standing, has followed a long road since the 2007 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where nations pledged to take meaningful action to reduce emissions from deforestation. A 2008 study found it would cost between $17.2 billion and $28 billion per year to cut the global rate of deforestation in half.

According to a recent policy brief from the Overseas Development Institute, $2.72 billion has been pledged for REDD+ since 2007 through five multilateral funds and two bilateral funds, more than half of it to Indonesia and Brazil. About one-tenth of the pledges have been disbursed to projects on the ground. But it has just not been substantial enough.

At the Warsaw meet, the U.S. State Department pledged $25 million last week as part of a major new $280 million funding initiative aimed at slowing deforestation and stemming its effect on world carbon emissions. The United States joined Norway, the United Kingdom and the World Bank in launching the "BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes." The fund will provide incentives to developing countries that are taking steps to limit the chopping and razing of trees under the United Nations' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program, or REDD+.The United States will be the new fund's smallest national donor, compared with Norway's $135 million and the United Kingdom's $120 million. The fund will be administered by the World Bank's BioCarbon Fund, a public-private initiative aimed at finding ways to sequester carbon.

But some observers expressed disappointment that the U.S. and its partners didn't put forward a more substantial sum.

Since the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, there haven't been any substantial pledges to fund REDD+ past 2012. Although Norway has said it will fund REDD+ through 2020, a concrete commitment has been absent.

REDD+ negotiators expect diplomats in Warsaw this week to approve text on five scientific and technical decisions that will lay the groundwork for finance. These include: human rights and environmental safeguards; the definitions of drivers of deforestation; ways for measuring countries' reference levels, or the base line upon which to measure forest loss; monitoring, reporting and verification of emissions reduction; and the creation of a national forest monitoring system.

Besides the BioCarbon Fund, the World Bank houses two other major coffers for REDD+, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and the Forest Investment Fund. The FCPF is divided into two funds, one to help countries get ready to implement a REDD+ program and another to pay for verified emissions reductions.

Forests constitute what is known as the planet's lungs, and when they disappear in chunks, it is the health of the whole biosystem that suffers. Not limited to the area or nation that applies the axe, deforestation affects everyone. That is why it is imperative that initiatives must go beyond rhetoric and mere symbolism.

Upping sea level rise

Sea-level rise in this century is likely to be 70-120 centimeters if greenhouse-gas emissions are not mitigated, a broad assessment of the most active scientific publishers on that topic has revealed. The 90 experts participating in the survey anticipate a median sea-level rise of 200-300 centimeters by the year 2300 for a scenario with unmitigated emissions.

In contrast, for a scenario with strong emissions reductions, experts expect a sea-level rise of 40-60 centimeters by 2100 and 60-100 centimeters by 2300. The survey was conducted by a team of scientists from the USA and Germany.

"While the results for the scenario with climate mitigation suggest a good chance of limiting future sea-level rise to one meter, the high emissions scenario would threaten the survival of some coastal cities and low-lying islands," says Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "From a risk management perspective, projections of future sea-level rise are of major importance for coastal planning, and for weighing options of different levels of ambition in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."

Projecting sea-level rise, however, comes with large uncertainties, since the physical processes causing the rise are complex. They include the expansion of ocean water as it warms, the melting of mountain glaciers and ice caps and of the two large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the pumping of ground water for irrigation purposes. Different modeling approaches yield widely differing answers. The recently published IPCC report had to revise its projections upwards by about 60 percent compared to the previous report published in 2007.

Can individual action save the day?

At a major United Nations climate summit in Warsaw this week, a plan is being hammered out (in the 19^th annual effort) for negotiations on a new climate treaty to be finalized in Paris in two years’ time. Delegates from 195 nations are also seeking to obtain commitments from countries to limit their greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2020.

The moot question : will it make any difference? The path ahead is rife with disputes between rich and poor countries over funding, and how to allocate and enforce emissions reductions. The conference aims to outline the schedule and to set parameters for negotiations ahead of the next major climate summit in Paris in 2015, when countries hope to forge a treaty to follow the 2009 agreement settled on in Copenhagen. At Copenhagen, negotiations over a formal treaty broke down, but eventually resulted in a set of non-binding pledges — the Copenhagen Accord — for emissions reductions until 2020. The accord also blurred the distinction between developed countries, which were bound by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions.

The Warsaw talks are split into two main tracks. One focuses on the architecture of a new global climate treaty that would take effect after 2020, when the current Copenhagen commitments expire. The second examines what can be done to strengthen commitments between now and 2020 to increase the chance of limiting global warming to a target of 2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures (see ‘Emissions up in the air?’).

Indigenous leaders from across North America met half a world away and offered a prophecy: The solution will never come via the UN talks. Tribal elders from the United States, Greenland and Mexico spoke of the need for individual action rather than government edicts, and of the difficulty – and urgency – of replacing economic questions with moral ones.
A return to the "old values:" Respect, concern for the future, and sharing – alone can help the world they believe. But as one elder pointed, it is a colossal task to get people to change. “How do you instruct 7 billion people as to their relationship to the Earth?" he asked. "It's very difficult – when you're struggling to protect your people and you're hanging by a thread – to instruct other people."

Revenue from pricing carbon emissions can exceed loss for plant owners

Stabilizing global warming at around 2 degrees Celsius by cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels would mean to leave much of coal, gas and oil unused underground. Yet the instrument of pricing global CO₂ emissions could generate a revenue of 32 trillion US dollars over the 21st century, exceeding by far the 12 trillion US dollars reduction of fossil fuel owners' profits, according to a study now published by scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

"Implementing ambitious climate targets would certainly scale down fossil fuel consumption, so with reduced demand their prices would drop," says Nico Bauer, lead-author of the study. "The resulting profit loss would be overcompensated by revenues from auctioning emissions permits or taxing CO₂, which are two of the possible instruments of climate policy."

The distribution of revenues from emissions pricing depends on how climate policies are implemented on a national and international level. "Moreover, revenues from pricing carbon cannot be simply seen as a compensatory fund for the loss of income from fossil fuels," says Bauer. "This is because climate policy results in higher energy prices for households and companies, which lead to a -- rather small -- reduction of economic output. So there might be many appetites for the money raised from CO₂ pricing."

We know that fossil fuel owners will lose out on profits, but the big question is who will benefit from the new revenues generated by climate policy? It will fall to policy makers and society at large to decide this, adds Elmar Kriegler, project leader and co-author of the study. "It would be interesting to ask for the effect of using the revenues from carbon pricing to finance infrastructure investments in developing countries."

E Asia cities at risk from rising sea levels

About 12 million people in 23 East Asian cities are at risk from rising sea levels, severe storms, and more intense drought caused by climate change that could jeopardize $864 billion in assets, a new report from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) warns.

Economics of Climate Change in East Asia notes that while climate adaptation investments can be large, the aggregate cost to protect the most vulnerable sectors -- infrastructure, coastal protection, and agriculture -- would be less than 0.3% of East Asia's gross domestic product every year between 2010 and 2050. The report recommends the People's Republic of China (PRC), Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Mongolia together to invest an annual average of $22.9 billion for climate-proofing in the infrastructure sector, $4.2 billion for coastal protection, and $9.5 billion for the agriculture sector.

The report projects that severe weather related to climate change will intensify, with one-in-20-year flooding predicted to occur as frequently as every four years by 2050. When combined with rising sea levels, this is expected to cause massive swaths of land to disappear, forcing millions to migrate, and wreaking havoc on infrastructure and agriculture. Since 1970, economic losses to the four countries from climate-related natural disasters have amounted to more than $340 billion.

The heat is on!

Sea levels are creeping up at the fastest rate in 2,000 years. Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have reached "levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years" (or before modern humans evolved). Most importantly "human influence on the climate system is clear" and "continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming." Those are some of the key messages in the "Summary for Policymakers" of the physical science of global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange released on September 27.

"The planet is red" in a global map of the change in average surface temperatures, noted Swiss climate scientist Thomas Stocker, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I responsible for this summary at a press conference. "The world is warming."
Ice all over the world is melting, particularly in the Arctic, a trend that will continue unabated. Ocean circulation looks set to change, with unpredictable effects, and the oceans will become more acidic as well.  Almost all of the world's coastlines will be affected by sea level rise. And developed countries and emerging economies have burned through more than half of the fossil fuels possible to keep total concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere at a level that gives the world a chance to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius difficult.

Interestingly, the IPCC has shifted from talking about concentrations in the atmosphere, like 400 parts-per-million, to total carbon budget in gigatons. Since 1880, 531 gigatons have been emitted and emissions should not exceed 800 gigatons of C for a better than 50-50 chance at keeping global temperature rise below 2 degree C.

"We cannot emit more than 1000 billion tons of carbon," Stocker says.

In the time since the 2007 version of this report, the human effect on the climate has grown more than 40 percent stronger, thanks to continued emissions of greenhouse gases and more precision in measurements, with carbon dioxide leading the charge. The good news is that extreme global warming by century's end, anything above 3 degrees C or more, seems "extremely unlikely," in the words of the IPCC.

The report notes that the current "pause" in new global average temperature records since 1998—a year that saw the second strongest El Nino on record and shattered warming records—does not reflect the long-term trend and may be explained by the oceans absorbing the majority of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases as well as the cooling contributions of volcanic eruptions.

Even if CO2 emissions stopped tomorrow, climate change would continue. In other words, humanity is in the process of setting the Earth's thermostat. The world has already warmed by roughly 0.85 degree C since 1880 and further heat extremes are "virtually certain." So the question is: how much hotter can we stand? Or as United Nations Secretary General Ban-ki Moon put it in a video address to the IPCC press conference: "The heat is on. Now we must act."

Yes, it is due to global warming!

A glance through climate change news will show the growing gap between believers and deniers even today. Is the climate disruption we are witnessing linked to global warming, is still contested. New research released yesterday links human-caused climate change to six of 12 extreme weather events from 2012. Teams of scientists from around the world examined the causes behind extreme weather events on five continents and in the Arctic. Their results were published as a special report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

One of the stronger linkages between global warming and severe weather was found in an analysis of last year's high July temperatures in the northeastern and north-central United States. The Stanford team found that climate change had made the likelihood of such a heat wave four times more likely than in a world without elevated levels of greenhouse gases. They were able to determine this by running models with current levels of greenhouse gases as well as ones that reflected preindustrial levels and examining the relative likelihood of the heat wave.

Others looked at 2012's hot spring temperatures over the eastern United States and also found that human influences contributed about 35 percent to late spring heat that year.

In some other parts of the world, climate change was linked, although in a small way, to extreme precipitation events. New Zealand experienced an extreme two-day rainfall in December 2011; researchers said 1 to 5 percent more moisture was available for that event due to climate change, which is increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

Australia also experienced record rainfall in early 2012, and while La Niña, a natural variation, was behind much of that, researchers found that human-caused climate change increased the chance of the above-average rainfall by 5 to 15 percent.

This is the second time the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has collected information on the previous year's weather extremes and tried to tease out the role of climate change in those events. The researchers involved in the effort stressed that the science of attribution, or of linking specific events to climate change, is still young and evolving.

Productivity to go down as the globe warms

A new NOAA study projects that heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate. Recent studies project a collapse in labor productivity from business-as-usual carbon emissions and warming — with a cost to society that may well exceed that of all other costs of climate change combined.  A 2 percent drop in productivity per degree rise is how the US study sees it. How about in hotter climes then??

Is it possible to reduce emissions 50 percent globally by 2050s? Only one country, France, has ever reduced greenhouse emissions at the pace we’d have to keep up between now and 2050. Over a remarkable period of 30 years, France went from getting less than 1 percent of its power from nuclear power plants (which emit no carbon dioxide directly) to getting about 80 percent from them. During the period of the fastest nuclear build-out, France managed to reduce emissions at a rate of 2 percent per year, says David Victor, co-director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego. But the transition was tough.

This kind of transition for the rest of the world could be tough to almost improbable. Look at what’s happened in the United States. A major recession slowed energy consumption, and at the same time technological advances unlocked huge amounts of natural gas, leading utilities to shut down coal plants in favor of natural-gas plants that emit half as much carbon dioxide. In just one year, 2009, emissions dropped by an impressive 6.7 percent. But that was only across one year. If you look back to 2000, the average reduction was less than 1 percent a year, less than half of what’s needed to meet emissions goals! Looks like the human race better get set for tough times ahead.

It is happening now

The Global Estimates report reveals that 32.4 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2012 by disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes. While Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt, 1.3 million were displaced in rich countries, with the USA particularly affected.

98% of all displacement in 2012 was related to climate- and weather-related events, with flood disasters in India and Nigeria accounting for 41% of global displacement in 2012. In India, monsoon floods displaced 6.9 million, and in Nigeria 6.1 million people were newly displaced. While over the past five years 81% of global displacement has occurred in Asia, in 2012 Africa had a record high for the region of 8.2 million people newly displaced, over four times more than in any of the previous four years.

It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm). Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”

LA turns into a climate lab!

Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and elsewhere are turning the entire Los Angeles metro region into a state-of-the-art climate laboratory. From the ridgeline, they deploy a mechanical lung that senses airborne chemicals and a unique sunbeam analyzer that scans the skies over the Los Angeles Basin. At a sister site at the California Institute of Technology, researchers slice the clouds with a shimmering green laser, trap air samples in glass flasks, and stare at the sun with a massive mirrored contraption that looks like God’s own microscope.

These folks are the foot soldiers in an ambitious interagency initiative called the Megacities Carbon Project. They’ve been probing L.A.’s airspace for more than a year, with the help of big-name sponsors like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and the California Air Resources Board. If all goes well, by 2015 the Megacities crew and colleagues working on smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Boston will have pinned down a slippery piece of climate science: an empirical measurement of a city’s carbon footprint.

The idea is to prepare a set of climate archetypes that can be applied to different megacities. The L.A. area is on the ocean, ringed by mountains, and often holds emissions in place like a lidded bowl. Perhaps what the Megacities team learns about emissions here will also apply in Mumbai, India, which has a similar geography.

Historically, researchers have tried to understand anthropogenic global warming by looking at it from the big picture — first across the planet, then by regions and countries. But two things happened in the past few years that turned their frame of reference. First, they realized that the emissions of a large landmass are extremely difficult to measure. Second, they encountered a climate gridlock in the United States government.  It became clear to environmental stakeholders that if any policy was going to happen on cutting emissions, it was going to be at the scale of states and cities.

They now suspect that cities are some of the worst offenders when it comes to generating greenhouse gases, especially so-called megacities with more than 10 million residents, like Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and Mumbai. Urban areas and their enabling power plants are thought to pump out about 70 percent of humankind’s total fossil-fuel emissions. With the world’s urban population expected to nearly double by 2050, the boom in development could release a flood of greenhouse gas, as more city dwellers torch colossal quantities of coal and oil to power their cars, feed their stoves, and crank their air conditioners.

A major issue is that governments estimate the volume of emissions with indirect measurements, such as tracking the carbon output of power plants or surveying the number of people riding mass transit or buying gasoline. Nobody is really testing greenhouse gases above cities on a focused, long-term basis, which is crucial in verifying whether the measurements urban governments use to make policy decisions are accurate.

Only one spacecraft in orbit right now is monitoring greenhouse gases, Japan’s Gosat (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite), and its resolution isn’t good enough to give an accurate picture of a city’s emissions. But in the next few years, NASA plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite and install a new instrument (OCO-3) on the International Space Station. Both devices will periodically take snapshots of the “chemical weather” over population centers.

Hopefully the climate footprint of cities will emerge sharp and clear, giving indications of how to proceed.

SE4All could be the answer

The UN's Sustainable Energy for All initiative, if successful, could make a significant contribution to the efforts to limit climate change to target levels, according to a new analysis. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, showed that reaching the 3 energy-related objectives proposed by the United Nations in their Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative, launched in 2011, would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change and, in combination with other measures, could help keep global temperature rise from exceeding the internationally agreed target level of 2°C.

The SE4All objectives include providing universal access to modern energy, doubling the share of renewable energy globally, and doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency -- all by 2030. While the SE4All objectives do not explicitly address climate change, it is clear that sustainable energy is a prerequisite for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: 80% of human carbon dioxide emissions come from the global energy system, including transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity, heat, and fuel production.

But as the team observed, the UN's objectives must be complemented by a global agreement on controlling greenhouse gas emissions. While the UN energy objectives are formulated as global goals, the researchers also note that regional and national actions will be vital to achieving them.

Using a broad range of scenarios, the researchers found that if all the SE4All objectives were met, the likelihood of keeping temperature rise below 2°C would be more than 66%.­ If only the renewable energy goal is met, chances of keeping temperatures below 2°C would range from 40 to 90%, while achieving just the energy efficiency goal would improve the chances to between 60 and 90%. But the researchers warn that the latter result depends strongly on what economic growth is assumed in the future. The researchers note that the likelihood of reaching climate targets within the scenarios depended on a variety of other factors, including future energy demand growth, economic growth, and technological innovation.

The study also found that providing universal energy access by 2030 will not hinder long-term climate goals, thanks to the marked gains in energy efficiency that will result.

The next level

Scientists at the Stanford University Global Climate and Energy Project have proposed taking the global warming fight to a whole new level. Instead of managing the emissions, instead of simply trying to reduce the carbon we put into the atmosphere, the Stanford team proposes a carbon negative strategy in which plants are deployed on a massive scale to grab carbon out of the atmosphere.

In this, the Stanford team has identified the biomass as one of the most promising ways to achieve carbon negative systems, on a large scale. These biomass-based systems are called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

The basic idea is to break the carbon cycle. As plants grow they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Rather than letting carbon cycle back into the atmosphere, there are various ways to capture and convert it into other useful products. Conventional industrial carbon capture is based simply on direct storage but there are improved solutions.

A company had announced two years ago that it had developed a proprietary microbe that thrives in the carbon rich, hydrogen poor waste gases from steel mills. The initial process yielded pure ethanol, and the plant has since stepped up its carbon recycling platform to produce 2,3-Butanediol -- a foundational chemical for making any number of products that are normally made with petroleum, including plastics and synthetic rubber as well as fuel.

Aside from steel mills the system also works on industrial flue gas from other types of facilities, and on synthetic gas derived from other systems including biogas (from landfills or manure biogas systems), biomass, municipal waste, agricultural or forestry waste, and even burning tires.

Water stress & climate change

In Ground Water and Climate Change, international scientists explain how several human-driven factors, if not rectified, will combine with climate change to significantly reduce useable groundwater availability for agriculture globally. The paper was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The authors note that inadequate groundwater supply records and mathematical models for predicting climate change and associated sea-level-rise make it impossible to forecast groundwater's long-range fate globally. "Over-pumping of groundwater for irrigation is mining dry the world's ancient Pleistocene-age, ice-sheet-fed aquifers and, ironically, at the same time increasing sea-level rise, which we haven't factored into current estimations of the rise," says a team member. "Groundwater pumping reduces the amount of stored water deep underground and redirects it to the more active hydrologic system at the land-surface. There, it evaporates into the atmosphere, and ultimately falls as precipitation into the ocean."

Current research estimates oceans will rise by about a metre globally by the end of the century due to climate change. But that estimation doesn't factor in another half-a-centimetre-a-year rise, says this study, expected due to groundwater recycling back into the ocean globally.

Increasing climate-change-induced storm surges will also flood coastal areas, threatening the quality of groundwater supplies and compromising their usability. This is the second study from the team to assist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in assessing the impact of climate change on the world's groundwater supply.

Carbon bombs?

China and Australia top a global list of planned oil, gas and coal projects that will act as "carbon bombs" and push the planet towards catastrophic climate change, according to a Greenpeace report. The Point of No Return study calculated that the 14 giant fossil fuel projects would produce 6.3 gigatonnes of CO2 a year in 2020 – as much as the entire United States emits annually.

The largest contributors will be China's five north-western provinces, which aim to increase coal production by 620m tonnes by 2015, generating an additional 1.4bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Australia's burgeoning coal export industry, already the largest in the world, is in second place due to its potential growth to 408m tonnes of shipped resource a year by 2025, resulting in an annual 760m tonnes of CO2.

Meanwhile, controversial exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic could release 520m tonnes of CO2 a year, with further major emissions set to flow from other new fossil fuel frontiers, such as tar sands oil in Canada and shale gas in the US.

The Greenpeace report states that these 14 "carbon bomb" projects will increase global emissions by 20% and eat up nearly one-third of the carbon budget that the International Energy Agency says can't be breached if warming is to be kept below 2C, considered the threshold for dangerous climate change.

The analysis suggests that there is a 75% chance of keeping emissions below the 2C target if all 14 projects – which are at varying stages of planning and approval – are cancelled, with emissions peaking in 2015 before falling by 5% annually.

Must invest in future: Stiglitz

Are we responding in ways that exacerbate our long-term problems? Economist Joseph Stiglitz has a thought-provoking article on what is going wrong and how to set it right, as climate change crisis deepens. As he notes, the path marked out by the deficit hawks and austerity advocates both weakens the economy today and undermines future prospects. (Read on)

Given insufficient aggregate demand, we must invest in our future, in ways that help us to address simultaneously the problems of global warming, global inequality and poverty, and the necessity of structural change. Growing inequality is one of the reasons for the economic slowdown, and is partly a consequence of the global economy's deep, ongoing structural changes.

Just as the Great Depression arose in part from the difficulties in moving from a rural, agrarian economy to an urban, manufacturing one, so today's problems arise partly from the need to move from manufacturing to services… Before the 2008 crisis there was much talk of global imbalances, and the need for the trade-surplus countries, such as Germany and China, to increase their consumption. That issue has not gone away.

As China increases its consumption it will not necessarily buy more goods from the United States. In fact, it is more likely to increase consumption of non-traded goods – such as health care and education – resulting in profound disturbances to the global supply chain, especially in countries that had been supplying the inputs to China's manufacturing exporters.

Finally, there is a worldwide crisis in inequality. The problem is not only that the top income groups are getting a larger share of the economic pie, but also that those in the middle are not sharing in economic growth, while in many countries poverty is increasing. In the US equality of opportunity has been exposed as a myth...

Unfair trade agreements – including the persistence of unjustifiable agricultural subsidies, which depress the prices upon which the income of many of the poorest depend – have played a role. The developed countries have not lived up to their promise in Doha in November 2001 to create a pro-development trade regime, or to their pledge at the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 to provide significantly more assistance to the poorest countries.

The market will not, on its own, solve any of these problems. Global warming is a quintessential "public goods" problem. To make the structural transitions that the world needs we need governments to take a more active role.

Spinning out of control

It is no more about how to check climate change. No more about 2 and 3 and 4 degrees. The scenario has shifted to how we plan for a warmer world. A much warmer world! This is because it is inevitable. We have crossed the tipping point.

Going by a latest study, it will now be almost impossible to keep the increase in global average temperatures up to 2100 within the 2C target that scientists believe might avert dangerous and unpredictable climate change.

The study by the accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) sees the world as destined for dangerous climate change this century – with global temperatures possibly rising by as much as 6C – because of the failure of governments to find alternatives to fossil fuels!

An analysis of how fast the major world economies are reducing their emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels suggests that it may already be too late to stay within the 2C target of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it found. To keep within the 2C target, the global economy would have to reach a “decarbonisation” rate of at least 5.1 per cent a year for the next 39 years. This has not happened since records began at the end of the Second World War, according to Leo Johnson, a PwC partner in sustainability and climate change.

Even doubling our current rate of decarbonisation would still lead to emissions consistent with 6C of warming by the end of the century.

This could well end up as another reason why not to do anything at all!

Learning from Sandy

Sandy is the power of Nature over man, man in all his technological might. But more important Sandy shows human failure: our failure to listen to those who understand far better than most of us do the impact of human behavior on the atmosphere, our climate system, and the ecosystems that surround us.

While it is true that no singular weather event can be directly linked to human-caused global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported with increasing confidence that weather extremes will become more frequent, more widespread, and more intense with rising greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC’s assessments have led to many prominent people term global warming as this century’s greatest threat.

Sandy reveals our refusal to take responsibility for our actions and our skepticism that real change (of natural systems as well as of our own behavior) is possible, as Worldwatch Institute. (Read the excerpts from the institute's note.)

The storm devastated the Caribbean before heading up the East Coast of the United States, then turned inland and finally crawled all the way up to Canada, reminding us that climate change is a shared threat that knows no national boundaries. It is well accepted now that in order to prevent a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (considered the absolute maximum of temperature increase without major disruptions to the climate system and many ecosystems), human-caused greenhouse gas emissions need to peak well before 2020, possibly 2015. There is no action towards this.

Sandy illustrates what we cannot tire of emphasizing: if we don’t want our climate system to spin out of control entirely, to the point of no return, then efforts to change must be made in all sectors and on all levels of human activity and interaction. From the individual to the local, from states and provinces to nations, from the regional to the global: we need change—political, technical, and behavioral change—wherever it can be achieved, as quickly as it can be achieved.

Sandy also whos how those communities that have begun to prepare for higher sea levels and stronger storms are faring better than those that didn’t believe this would be necessary. And despite our rapid nearing of the 2°C threshold, we should not forget how much worse the impacts of climate change might already be without the many actions that humans have taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can—and should—make us believe that, after all, change is possible.

Not too far

Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study. By 2030, the researchers estimate, the cost of climate change and air pollution combined will rise to 3.2% of global GDP, with the world's least developed countries forecast to bear the brunt, suffering losses of up to 11% of their GDP.

The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather linked to climate change is contributing to deaths from malnutrition, poverty and their associated diseases.

Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5m people a year. The 331-page study, entitled Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of A Hot Planet was carried out by the DARA group, a non-governmental organisation based in Europe, and the Climate Vulnerable Forum. It was written by more than 50 scientists, economists and policy experts, and commissioned by 20 governments.

Climate change is not necessarily a long-term problem. Scientists have been alarmed by the increasingly rapid melting of Arctic sea ice. Some research suggests that this melting could be linked to cold, dull and rainy summers in parts of Europe. In the US, this year's severe drought has raised food prices and in India the disruption to the monsoon has caused widespread damage to farmers. Yet, we fail to rise to the challenge.

Arctic snow too melting fast

A recent estimate from climate researchers suggested that the melting of Arctic sea ice could result in the warming equivalent of 20 years of CO2 emissions, due largely to the loss of huge swaths of the color white. White reflects light — including sunlight. More white means less absorbed heat. Now it seems not only sea ice but snow on land too is melting at record rate. A study by Canadian researchers finds that springtime snow is melting away even faster than Arctic ice. That also has profound implications for the Earth’s climate.

Springtime snowmelt matters a lot: It determines when spring runoff comes out of the mountain to fill our rivers. And Chris Derksen at Environment Canada in Toronto says snow also reflects sunlight back into space, helping to keep the Earth from heating up too fast.

“When you remove the snow cover form the land surface, much as when you remove the sea ice from the ocean, you take away a highly reflective, bright surface, and you expose the bare land or tundra underneath, and that absorbs more solar energy,” he says.

What’s worse is that the decline of springtime snow is happening faster than that of Arctic ice. The Environment Canada team calculated that snowmelt is declining at 18 percent per decade, compared to 11 percent for the ice cap. And what’s even worse is that the snowmelt is only the first layer of the problem. Beneath the snow is the permafrost, which is no longer as “perma.” Thawing permafrost, as we’ve mentioned before, releases methane into the atmosphere, contributing more to warming than the same amount of carbon dioxide.

Apocalypse in the making?

White to grey

We have written about the loss of Arctic ice. Distant as it seems, the repercussions can be felt far away from the poles! In fact, the loss of Arctic ice is massively compounding the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, ice scientist Professor Peter Wadhams told BBC Newsnight. The absorption of heat by the melt water has the effect “equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man”.

Thirty years ago there was about eight million square kilometres of ice left in the Arctic in the summer, and by 2007 that had halved, it had gone down to about four million, and this year it has gone down below that. Yes, climate change.

However, the U.N. climate talks featuring delegates from 190 nations, that have been ongoing for the last week in Bangkok, Thailand, and which conclude today, have produced nothing much to write about!

Last December at the Durban COP talks, the world's nations agreed that they would sign a legally-binding pact to cut emissions and help developing nations adapt to climate change, from 2020. Part of this agreement included a promise to deepen existing promises to cut emissions by the end of the decade. At the summit, the U.N. released a report showing that several rich nations will not even meet their existing pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade, made at Copenhagen in 2009. These nations include Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the US.

Not a single country has made a fresh commitment, and US negotiators stunned delegates by calling for a new treaty to be ‘flexible’ and ‘dynamic’ rather than legally binding, representing a complete U-turn on its previous position.

With the present level of commitments to reduce emissions, the world is still on for at least a 3°C temperature rise, which would have catastrophic repercussions.
India is experiencing its fourth drought in a dozen years, raising concerns about the reliability of the country’s primary source of fresh water, the monsoon rains that typically fall from June to October. Studies using 130 years of data show big changes in rainfall in recent decades, according to <http://bit.ly/Qgblr2>B. N. Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Climate models suggest that while overall rainfall should increase in the coming decades, the region can expect longer dry spells and more intense downpours ­ forces that would seem to cancel each other out but in fact pose new threats. Heavy rains are normally short duration, and therefore the water runs off, while weak rains are important for recharging groundwater.