Monday 9 April 2007

New IPCC climate report warns time is running out

China, Saudi Arabia and Russia made " an act of scientific vandialism by withdrawing key facts from the report" said Jean-Luc Roux

Brussels, Belgium — The new report was agreed after almost a week of negotiations, at the end of a tense 24-hour marathon session which became increasingly political. The second of a series of four to be released throughout 2007, this report documents the widespread effects that rising temperatures are already having on ecosystems and human activities and assesses the changes projected from human induced climate change over the next century.

"This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future. The earth will be transformed by human induced climate change, unless action is taken soon and fast," said Stephanie Tunmore, Greenpeace International Climate and Energy Campaigner. "What this report shows is that we are simply running out of time."


Some of the reports key findings:

It is likely that climate change will induce mass extinction of species within 60-70 years. We have already seen the climate linked extinction of some frog species but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The scale of risk is larger than most of the five major extinction events that have occurred in the earth's history.

Over the next decades the number of people at risk of water scarcity is likely to rise from tens of millions to billions. Steadily decreasing water availability is projected for India and other parts of South Asia and Africa: whilst the poorest parts of the world are going to the hardest hit, wealthy countries such as Australia and nations in Southern Europe are also on the front line.

Reductions in food production capacity in the poorest parts of the world are projected, bringing more hunger and misery and undermining achievement of the millennium development goals. Within a few decades it is likely that we will see climate change induced wheat, maize and rice production drops in India and China.

Increased drought and water scarcity are likely to lead to growing problems of hunger and human dislocation in Africa in coming decades.

The loss of glaciers in Asia, Latin America and Europe are set to cause major water supply problems for a large fraction of the world's population, as well as a massive increase in glacial lake outburst floods and other risks for those living in the glaciated mountains.

Huge numbers of people will be at risk due to sea level rise, storm surge and river flooding in the Asian Megadeltas such as the Ganges-Brahmaputra (Bangladesh) and the Zhujiang (Pearl River).

Warming of more than another degree could commit the world to multi-metre sea level rise over several centuries from the partial or total loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Huge coastal dislocation would result and could be triggered by emissions made in the next several decades.

Politicians watering down the threat?

Green computer : Greenpeace ranking



"China give us a good lesson by being the top green computer company" said Jean-Luc Roux

Greenpeace today announced the results of their electronics company rating. The ranking is based on how the companies work with removing dangerous chemicals and their recycling programs. Nokia and Dell scored OK, but all companies have more work to do until Greenpeace will call them "green".

Tuesday 3 April 2007

Smoke alarm: EU shows carbon trading is not cutting emissions

WHEN THE MARKET IS NOT AS PROMISING AS SOME CLASSIC ECONOMIST WAS EXPECTING TO CUT CO2 EMISSIONS!
SAID JEAN-LUC ROUX

Some US states want their own 'cap and trade' scheme but the evidence is proving that permits are so generous they fail to curb industry

David Gow in Brussels
Tuesday April 3, 2007
Guardian

Brussels lambasted the US and Australia yesterday for their inaction in cutting carbon dioxide emissions and stressed Europe's leading role in the battle against global warming. "Only EU leadership can break this impasse on a global agreement [post-Kyoto] to overcome climate change," Stavros Dimas, the EU's environment commissioner, told scientists from the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change. The body is due to publish a report this week in Brussels on the impact of global warming.
What Mr Dimas knew - but did not tell the scientists, apparently - is that the EU's programme for cutting carbon, its two-year-old emissions trading scheme (ETS), remains in disarray.

The Democrats, who are now the majority party in the US Congress, and California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, are drafting plans for an American version of the carbon "cap-and-trade" scheme.

However, preliminary data on the scheme's performance last year - its second year of operation - showed that 93%, or about 9,000 of the 10,000 heavy industrial plants covered by the EU's trading scheme, emitted less carbon than their quota of free permits. The resulting 1%-1.5% rise in emissions was not as great as in 2005 but the spot price of a tonne of carbon fell by about a quarter to €1 (68p), at one point collapsing to just 92 cents.

Only a handful of countries shored up the market by issuing fewer emissions quotas than industry wanted. These included: Britain - where Drax, Europe's biggest coal-fired power plant, emitted 5m tonnes more than its 15.5m tonnes permit - Denmark, Ireland, Italy and Spain. The trading mechanism is designed to create scarcity, forcing up the price of carbon and prompting industries such as steel and power generation to invest in cleaner, greener technologies, such as renewable, carbon-free energy and, eventually, carbon capture and storage. So far, it is manifestly not working as planned.

Debacle

Mr Dimas and his officials deliberately released the raw data early - without analysis or interpretation - to avoid last year's debacle, when premature release of national statistics brought a disorderly collapse of the market. This year the full, sifted figures will be released on May 15.

The 2005 data showed that industry emitted 66m tonnes less carbon than allowed, prompting allegations that, in Germany alone, the four big power producers had enjoyed windfall profits of up to €8bn by cashing in their excess free carbon permits. In Britain, despite the tighter cap, generators are estimated to have made £1bn.

In 2006, industry emitted about 30m tonnes less than permitted. German emissions rose 0.6% while overall EU emissions went up by 1%-1.5% because of resumed growth in the eurozone.

Mr Dimas's officials readily admit that the first phase of the scheme has been a botched experiment because of the generous over-allocation of permits. But they now insist that the second phase will be much more successful because of tighter controls on quotas. Many EU governments have significantly reduced the number of carbon permits they will grant to polluters. Poland has cut its permit total by 26% and Latvia and Lithuania by half.

Brussels believes that the second phase of the trading scheme is crucial because it coincides with the key stage of the Kyoto protocol from 2008 to 2012. Brussels is pressing the US, other developed countries and emerging economies to agree on a global emissions trading scheme to be introduced after 2012, at UN talks starting in Bali in December. The EU has endorsed a unilateral 20% cut in greenhouse gases by 2020 and wants the developed world to sign up to a 30% cut, with countries such as China and India joining in.

"The whole idea of the second phase is to squeeze allocations, push up the carbon price by creating scarcity and encourage companies to invest in future, green technologies," one of Mr Dimas's aides said, pointing to a forward price for carbon in 2008 at close to €17 a tonne. They are delighted that the squeeze on national carbon caps for this second phase has prompted squealing from several big companies.

Cemex, the Mexican cement producer which owns the UK's RMC, is suing the European commission over the British permit plan while US Steel is similarly taking legal action over the Slovakian allocation plan. Three German companies have also launched legal action in the European court of justice.

Mahi Sideridou, EU climate policy director at Greenpeace, said yesterday's data strengthened Mr Dimas's hand in ruling on the second phase of the trading scheme. "In the first phase the commission didn't have any data and governments could freely submit; now it can compare reality to how many permits are given out," she said, suggesting that the commissioner would be emboldened to revise the scheme in time for the second phase.

Mr Dimas wants to include civil aviation in the ETS by 2011 despite the threat of legal action from the US and others. He insisted that the original EU-15 countries were still on course to meet their Kyoto target of an 8% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012, despite mounting signs that Europe is still falling woefully short of this goal on its policies. California, which said last week it planned to link its own ETS to the EU's with four other western US states, and Washington will undoubtedly need more persuasive evidence.

MORE : http://environment.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329766627-121568,00.html

US Supreme Court recognises that Co2 should be treated as air pollution

BIG VICOTRY!

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Tuesday April 3, 2007
The Guardian

The US supreme court yesterday issued a landmark ruling in favour of environmentalists and against George Bush's stance on global warming. The court judged that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had the power through a clean air law to restrict exhaust emissions, and told the agency to re-examine the issue.
The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by 12 states and 13 environmental groups frustrated with the Bush administration's lack of action. Individual states, led by California, have been imposing regulations of their own. Car makers, public utilities, and others responsible for carbon dioxide emissions opposed the lawsuit. The decision opens the way for a new president in 2009 to curb emissions - all the Democratic and Republican candidates have made climate change a major part of their platforms.

Urban air pollution 'more dangerous than Chernobyl'

Study rates risks of city life as greater than radiation
· Passive smoking worse than living in blast zone

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Tuesday April 3, 2007
Guardian

Air pollution in major cities may be more damaging to health than the radiation exposure suffered by survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to a report published today.
The study suggests high levels of urban air pollution cut short life expectancy more than the radiation exposure of emergency workers who were sent into the 19-mile exclusion zone around the site straight after the accident.

Two explosions at the Chernobyl reactor killed three people immediately and more than 30 died from acute radiation poisoning, but the radioactive plume released from the reactor spread over most of Europe and is estimated to have caused up to 16,000 deaths.

The latest study follows a report last month from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution which said air pollution was responsible for 24,000 premature deaths in Britain every year.

Sir John Lawton, chairman of the commission, said the government had consistently failed to tackle rising levels of chemicals in the atmosphere in cities.

Other findings this year showed that women living in areas of high air pollution were at greater risk of heart disease and death, while children living within 500m of motorways suffered more permanent lung damage and lower life expectancy, probably because of their greater exposure to pollutants in vehicle fumes.

Jim Smith, a scientist at the government's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorchester, assessed the health risks faced by emergency workers at Chernobyl directly after the explosion and those who unofficially set up home in the exclusion zone afterwards. He compared them with the more familiar risks of air pollution, obesity, and passive and active smoking. He concluded that the Chernobyl group received doses of radiation equivalent to more than 12,000 chest x-rays and likely to cause one extra death in a hundred by increasing the risk of cancer.

The health risks associated with air pollution and passive smoking appear more severe. Pollution in central London increases mortality due to heart and lung disease by 2.8% compared with Inverness, Britain's least polluted city, while living with a smoker increases mortality by 1.7%, the study found.

In the journal BMC Public Health, Dr Smith writes: "Populations still living unofficially in the abandoned lands around Chernobyl may actually have a lower health risk from radiation than they would have if they were exposed to air pollution in a large city, such as nearby Kiev."

Dr Smith also calculated long-term mortality rates among survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and compared them with obesity and active smoking. "The immediate effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs led to approximately 210,000 deaths in the two cities. However, radiation exposures experienced by the most exposed group of survivors led to an average loss of life expectancy significantly lower than that caused by severe obesity or active smoking," the report states.

Dr Smith said the aim of the report was to put health risks from radiation in context with more familiar threats. "We can all face such risks just going about our ordinary daily lives," he said.

"One of my reasons for comparing everyday risks with those of radiation contamination was the way in which contaminated Chernobyl refugees felt rejected by society. Our understandable fear of radiation needs to be placed in the context of other risks we encounter in our daily lives if we are to properly understand, and respond to, the potential impacts of any future radiation incidents."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Sunday 1 April 2007

What Now For Our Feverish Planet?




"We do not have time to play around with this."

It was probably always too much to believe that human beings would be responsible stewards of the planet. We may be the smartest of all the animals, endowed with exponentially greater powers of insight and abstraction, but we're animals all the same. That means that we can also be shortsighted and brutish, hungry for food, resources, land--and heedless of the mess we leave behind trying to get them.

And make a mess we have. If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and the images of drowning polar bears didn't quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. Dismissing a scientist's temperature chart is one thing. Dismissing the death of a major American city is something else entirely. What's more, the heat is only continuing to rise. This past year was the hottest on record in the U.S. The deceptively normal average temperature this winter masked record-breaking highs in December and record-breaking lows in February. That's the sign not of a planet keeping an even strain but of one thrashing through the alternating chills and night sweats of a serious illness.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on the state of planetary warming in February that was surprising only in its utter lack of hedging. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the report stated. What's more, there is "very high confidence" that human activities since 1750 have played a significant role by overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide hence retaining solar heat that would otherwise radiate away. The report concludes that while the long-term solution is to reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, for now we're going to have to dig in and prepare, building better levees, moving to higher ground, abandoning vulnerable floodplains altogether. When former Vice President Al Gore made his triumphant return to Capitol Hill on March 21 to testify before Congress on climate change, he issued an uncompromising warning: "We do not have time to play around with this."

The Global Warming Survival Guide


GLOBAL WARMING
51 Things We Can Do
Can one person slow global warming? Actually, yes. You—along with scientists, businesses and governments—can create paths to cut carbon emissions. Here is our guide to some of the planet's best ideas, with an assessment of their impact and feel—good factor.