The next idiot in the White House?

So much to do and so little time but this one couldn't be missed.

It appears that aside from being a delightful [1] [2] politician, Sarah Palin is also in the pocket of ExxonMobil. Not exactly a novelty for a Republican, I admit.

Apparently, according to Alaska's dear governor, Polar Bears are not an endangered species and climate change isn't man-made.

In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in January.

Miss me? OK, I get the picture...

After a prolonged absence - due to work rather than a lack of Earth-threatening events unfortunately - it's time to catch up.

I remember reading somewhere that we are now supposed to be going through a period where the world cools down (or stays about the same temperature, I forget which) for a while. Apparently, the warming effect is cyclical and will continue where it left off in a few years. This, in itself, worried me - you can see governmental scientists saying "Oh, don't worry about it anymore. Look, we're cooling down." The last thing we need is for nations to stop taking Climate Change seriously... well, any less seriously than they do already.

Anyway, back to my point...

In light of this expected non-warming period, I was shocked to read that, even though the Arctic experienced a colder winter, the sea ice had melted even faster than last year - which, I understand, broke all records for ice loss at the time.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) - a US-based organisation, hence the wacky spelling of 'centre' ;-) - this year started with a larger covering of ice than in 2007, yet we are already down to the same levels as in June last year.

From the report on the NSIDC website:

Average Arctic Ocean surface air temperatures in May were generally higher than normal. While anomalies were modest (+1 to 3 degrees Celsius, +2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) over most of the region, temperatures over the Baffin Bay region were as much as 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) above normal.

My feeling is that even with a cooling period, it appears that the process is not going to be halted. Year upon year, the Arctic sea ice is declining. The long term impact - in terms of sea level rises, desalination of the oceans, loss of natural habitat and conditions, and so on - is difficult to predict... however, I'm not expecting it to be a good thing.

Changing Speed:

I've found one rather disturbing trend in Climate Change articles in the last year... things always seem to be happening faster or sooner than Scientists expect. For example, the recent articles about the imminent collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf contains the quote from Dr David Vaughn of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS):

Wilkins is the largest ice shelf yet on the Antarctic peninsula to be threatened. I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread – we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.

In this case things are happening more rapidly than we thought. We didn't really understand how sensitive these ice shelves are to climate change.

While studies indicate that climate change is an accelerating process, it is disturbing that scientists are still being surprised by the rapidity of the change. Admittedly, not half as disturbing as the lack of international action.

James Lovelock:

I've been reading an interview on the Guardian's website with James Lovelock - the scientist probably best known for devising the Gaia hypothesis. While he's quite optimistic about the long term survival of the human race, he is adamant that we've missed the boat regarding reversing climate change.

...ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

Lovelock himself has been a long-term advocate of nuclear power, rather than renewable energy (wind, tidal), as our best way forward. That's not the problem...

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."

But, to end on a positive note...

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

Fred Pearce:

I'm currently working my way through With Speed and Violence. It makes for unsettling reading.

My interest in climate change has grown as a result of being a parent. I'm concerned about the world we'll be leaving for our children. The book discusses various climate tipping points - irreversible events where the climate may spiral out of control - it appears there are potentially plenty. One of which, a rapidly moving glacier, has appeared in the news recently, described as the soft underbelly of the antarctic.

My concern is our lack of knowledge. Scientists can only speculate and make reasoned judgements as to what will happen. Some events have some more obvious consequences - an area of ice the size of France being dumped into the southern ocean raising sea levels above New York. Yep, I get that one. However, in many cases, we can only speculate... What would be the effect of shutting down the Atlantic current, for instance, and what would it take to shut it down in the first place?

My point is, do we really want to gamble with this? We don't have an alternative planet to move to if we lose.

A growing admiration for Mr de Boer:

Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said in a telephone interview with Reuters that 2050 emission targets would be an easy way for politicians to push the hard work of cutting emissions into the future because most of them would be dead by then.

Seems like a perfectly valid point to me. However, I would be more inclined to believe that most politicians only think about 5 or 10 years in advance, depending upon their potential term in office. Frankly, leaving the decision to do something about the future state of the planet to individuals who exist for short-term gain, seems a tad foolhardy.

AGU's revised position statement:

The American Geophysical Union has issued a revised position statement regarding the human impact on climate change. The opening couple of sentences are:

The Earth's climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century. Global average surface temperatures increased on average by about 0.6°C over the period 1956–2006. As of 2006, eleven of the previous twelve years were warmer than any others since 1850.

I reckon they should get off the fence ;)

Political funding:

Snippet from an article by the thoroughly wonderful George Monbiot:

The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies that stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m. The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on Bush, but they also gave Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

Quite.

Bali. Heh. What is it good for...

It's been an up and down week.

While the heavy hitters have been at play in Bali this week, there's been a fair amount of pressure (see here) exerted on The United States to take their heads out of the sand (regarding Global Warming). The argument apparently revolving around the CO2 reduction targets (25-40%) actually appearing in the new treaty. One tends to wonder what purpose the treaty would serve if it does not have any targets. However, I have no doubt that the oil and energy sector, coincidently where the Bush family have notable interests, would prefer the targets to be as vague as possible. But I digress...

My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.
-- Al Gore

Anyway, moving on... Agreement was reached. All seems rosy and expressions like U-turn and reversal were being used to describe the US position.

However... and this is one big b*stard of a however... this unusual generosity of stance was, naturally, not related to anything meaningful on the United States' part. The US had wanted firmer commitments to CO2 reduction from the developing countries. That is, they wanted the countries that were not responsible for the huge problem we have now to do more to reduce the polution that they undoubtedly will create in the future. While this is not a bad point, it does rather deflect attention away from the vast amount of CO2 the US have been producing and continue to produce. So, the great U-turn was to allow this to slip by but in the final text of the treaty the emission reduction targets have disappeared.

As such, the "Bali Roadmap", as it has been named, seems to be lacking in directions.

Bali Conference quotes:

At the high-level event on climate change in New York in September, world leaders called for a breakthrough in Bali. This is your chance to live up to what the leaders have been calling for. If we leave Bali without such a breakthrough, we will not only have failed our leaders, but also those who look to us to find solutions, namely, the peoples of this world.

This is the moral challenge of our generation. Not only are the eyes of the world upon us. More important, succeeding generations depend on us. We cannot rob our children of their future.
-- Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general

Every nation must become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
-- Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesian president

We must make the leap forward or be condemned to the Planet Of The Apes.
-- Yvo de Boer, Head of the UN climate secretariat

For Australians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. Our rivers are dying, bushfires are more ferocious and more frequent and our natural wonders -- the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, our rainforests -- are now at risk.
-- Kevin Rudd, Australian Prime Minister

2013 - No summer ice in the arctic:

This summer, the ice sheet in the arctic decreased to its lowest size ever. Beating the previous record, set in 2005, by an area five times the size of the UK.

A study by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski and presented to the American Geophysical Union indicated that the northern polar waters could be ice-free by the summer of 2013.

Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.
-- Professor Wieslaw Maslowski

Leaving aside the ecological disaster - the total loss of natural habitat for polar bears - that's a substantial amount of fresh water that will be added to the north Atlantic current.

Well, What a Surprise:

The Americans have adopted their usual, flexible, forward-thinking "No way, Jose" stance at Bali. The only surprise is that it took them a week to get there.

Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a "roadmap" to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009.

"We don't want to start out with numbers," [US chief negotiator Harlan] Watson told a news conference, adding that the 25-40 percent range was based on "many uncertainties" and a small number of scientific studies by the U.N. Climate Panel.
[Reuters]

Yes, and a heck of a lot of studies by the science community all around the world, supporting the U.N. findings.

Before the conference in Bali started:

• Professors David King and John Schellnhuber, science advisers to the UK and German governments, said that the world is more than 50% likely to experience dangerous levels of climate change. Also, that politicians have been too slow to cut emissions. Neither scientist believed that the world would achieve the goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of stabilising emissions by around 2015.
• A MORI poll conducted in the UK suggested that 66% of the people do not believe World leaders will solve climate change.

On a historical note:

• 1992 - Rio Earth Summit. World leaders signed the non-binding UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Emissions continued to rise.
• 1997 - Kyoto protocol. The USA and Australia pulled out, which undermined the effort to reduce emissions, and corroded the will of other governments. Japan - a signatory to Kyoto - should have cut by 6% but it has increased emissions by 7%. Italy (+7.4%) and Spain (+59.8%) are missing their targets by a mile.

Basically, since World leaders started committing themselves to tackle climate change, the World's CO2 emissions have gone up 22%.

Makes you wonder what the other 33% in the MORI poll were thinking about.

United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks off today:

I anticipate that this conference will probably result in further CO2 being omitted into the atmosphere... mainly from the mouths of the governmental delegates from the 180+ countries represented.

Apparently, the aim of this two-weeks of negotiations is "not to deliver a fully negotiated and agreed climate deal, but are rather aimed at setting the necessary wheels in motion for a future climate change regime."

So, two-weeks in Bali with the intention to ... um ... agree to meet again. How about Cancun next? It's a tough job but someone's got to do it.

The big question for me is: Ministers, what is your political answer to what the scientific community is telling you so very clearly?
-- UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer

The UN: We have 10 Years...

As an introduction to the Human Development Report, the UNDP issued the following stark warning:

There is a window of opportunity for avoiding the most damaging climate change impacts, but that window is closing: the world has less than a decade to change course. Actions taken—or not taken—in the years ahead will have a profound bearing on the future course of human development. The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest.

How true.

We're going to burn and it's all our fault:

Is not exactly what the IPCC are saying. However, in their own wishy-washy way, they're saying that we can be 90% certain that we're to blame for global warming and it could have irreversible consequences if we continue to ignore it.

If you look at the overall picture of impacts, both those occurring now and those projected for the future, they appear to be both larger and appearing earlier than we thought [in our 2001 report].
Some of the changes that we previously projected for around 2020 or 2030 are occurring now, such as the Arctic melt and shifts in the locations of various species.
-- Martin Parry, IPCC

The UN are calling for world leaders to do something about it.

... and maybe, just maybe, the UK might be about to take serious action.

Arctic Seas Ice Levels:

Over to the NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center) website - nsidc.org - for this one:

In September 2005, after four years of lower-than-average fall sea ice extent, scientists using satellite data determined that the Arctic sea ice extent had reached a new record low: 5.32 million square kilometers (2.09 million square miles) versus the long-term average [Magenta line on the picture opposite] of 7.7 million square kilometers (2.97 million square miles).
...
The bottom line is that Arctic sea ice extent for 2007 is on pace to set a new record minimum that could be substantially below the 2005 record.

So, what does this all mean? 5 million square kilometres is still a heck of a lot of ice isn't it? Not when the coverage was more than 7 million just over a decade ago.

Ice reflects heat back out into space, while the ocean absorbs around about 90%. The more ice that melts, the warmer the arctic gets. You can see where this is heading. Leaving aside the ecological disaster - kiss polar bears goodbye for a start - the reduction of the arctic ice cover is dumping more and more pure water into the northern oceans. The risk of stalling the sea currents that bring warm air to the northern hemisphere is becoming greater.

Scientists talk about dramatic climate change coming in sudden snaps. How near are we getting to the next one?

Global Warming - Taking a breather till 2009:

At least, that's what the the UK Met Office are telling us.

The Hadley Centre has developed a short term climate model that predicts the weather for the following decade. According to its first initial prediction, Over the 10-year period as a whole, climate continues to warm. The model suggests that the next couple of years will see temperatures stall but at least half of the years between 2009 and 2014 are predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record - 1998.

China building more power plants

Article on the BBC News website.

Key points:

• John Ashton, the top climate change official at the UK Foreign Office, has said that China is now building about two power stations every week.

• A new report suggested that China may have already become the world's biggest polluter - much earlier than expected. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said China's CO2 emissions had risen by 9% last year, compared to 1.4% in the US.

• It is estimated that the average American still pollutes between five and six times more than the average Chinese person.

Running behind again:

Ah, the pleasures of being buried under mounds of work...

Just a brief note again. China, the one country that could potentially out-pollute the United States, has come out with a rather worrying statement.

China has, rather accurately, pinned the blame for global warming on the developed nations and has stated that it will make efforts to combat global warming through energy saving, agricultural adaptation, and forest expansion. However, China has also said that it would not sacrifice economic growth to satisfy international demands to help combat global warming.

Two things to bear in mind:

1. The US produces 25% of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions and has a population of 300 million, or 4% of the world.
2. China has a population of 1,300 million, more than 4 times the population of the States, and currently produces around 15% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.

China has the potential to massively increase it's carbon dioxide output. So, while they ought to be applauded for making a great effort to keep their emissions under control, if it slips we could be in a lot of trouble.

Court rules against Bush in global warming case - Yahoo! News

By James Vicini
Mon Apr 2, 5:52 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters)

In a stinging defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that U.S. environmental officials have the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming.

By a 5-4 vote, the nation's highest court told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to climate change.

The high court ruled that such greenhouse gases from motor vehicles fall within the law's definition of an air pollutant.

The ruling in one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court marked the first high court decision in a case involving global warming.