At the talks in Sofia, Bulgaria, most countries supported a faster process that would see three flagship reports assessing the state of climate science delivered by mid-2028, in time for the next global stocktake – the UN’s scorecard of collective climate action.

But a group of high-emitting developing countries made up of China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa – backed by Kenya – opposed an accelerated timeline, citing concerns that it would be harder to include scientists from the Global South, three sources present at the talks told Climate Home.

Governments were unable to reach a decision for the second time this year after “fraught talks” in January ended with the same outcome. The issue will be debated again at the next gathering in February 2025, while a separate expert meeting is tasked with drafting the outline of those reports by the end of 2024.

Fight over climate science

Adão Soares Barbosa, IPCC representative for Timor-Leste within the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group, expressed his disappointment over the lack of agreement in Sofia resulting from “strong polarisation in the room”.

“If the assessment reports are not able to feed information into the global stocktake process, what are they good for?” he said, speaking to Climate Home.

Joyce Kimutai, who represented Kenya at the Sofia talks, said her country’s opposition to the proposed shortened timeline was “absolutely not intended to frustrate the process” but to highlight the challenges countries with more limited resources would be facing.

“With such a tight timeline, it is likely that we will produce a report that is not comprehensive, not robust. We found that very problematic,” she told Climate Home on Monday.

IPCC delegates exchange views in an informal huddle in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

The primary purpose of the IPCC is to provide credible scientific assessments to the UN’s climate body (UNFCCC) and national decision-makers. The findings of its reports – which are usually compiled over several years by scientists working on a voluntary basis around the world – have been highly influential. They synthesise the latest research on climate change, as well as efforts to curb planet-heating emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming.

The sixth series, whose final report was issued in March 2023, played a prominent role in informing the first UNFCCC global stocktake which resulted in governments agreeing for the first time to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels” at COP28 in Dubai last December.

But some fossil fuel-rich countries like Saudi Arabia – which have pushed back against clear language on the need to cut production – have previously opposed strong recognition of IPCC reports in UNFCCC negotiations.

The UN climate body has officially requested that its scientific counterpart align its activities with the timeline of the next global stocktake. The IPCC’s input will be “invaluable” for the international review of climate action, Simon Stiell, chief of the UN climate body, told the IPCC meeting in January.

Reputation ‘at risk’

As he opened the session in Sofia, the IPCC chair Jim Skea warned of a “complex and testing” agenda.

The discussion over the report production schedule would have “far-reaching implications in terms of the timeliness of our products, and the inclusivity of both our own processes and the science that is being assessed”, he added. 

Scientists and government officials were presented with a proposal drafted by the IPCC secretariat – its administrative arm – which would see the assessment reports completed between May and August 2028. That would be a few months before the global stocktake process is scheduled to end in November 2028.

The IPCC must produce its flagship report in time for the next UN global stocktake

A majority of countries, including EU member states, the UK, the US and most vulnerable developing nations, supported the proposal, stressing the importance of the scientific reports feeding into the global stocktake, according to sources and a summary of discussions by the IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Many supporters added that the IPCC’s reputation would otherwise be at risk.

Small island states and least-developed countries argued that IPCC input is crucial for those that lack capacity to produce their own research and are most vulnerable to the immediate impacts of climate change, according to the IISD summary.

But a dozen developing countries – with India, Saudi Arabia and China being the most vocal – opposed speeding up the process, arguing that more time is needed to ensure greater inclusion of experts and research from the Global South, which would result in “robust and rigorous” scientific output.

South Africa, Russia, Kenya, Algeria, Burundi, Congo, Jordan, Libya and Venezuela expressed similar views, according to IISD.

More time for more voices

India said that “producing the best science needs time, haste leads to shoddy work”, while Saudi Arabia claimed that the shortened timeline would “lead to incomplete science and would be a disservice to the world”, according to the IISD summary of the discussions.

Kenya’s Kimutai told Climate Home that producing scientific literature and reviewing submissions takes a lot of time and, unlike their counterparts in richer countries, scientists in the Global South can rarely count on the help of junior researchers at well-funded institutions.

“We love this process – we find it important,” she added, “but we’re trying to say that, while it may be an easy process in other regions, it is not for us”.

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The IPCC has long struggled with ensuring adequate representation of expert voices from the Global South. Only 35% of the authors working on its sixth and latest assessment report hailed from developing countries, according to a study published in the journal Climate, up from 31% in the previous cycle.

In Sofia, several delegates pointed out that the IPCC is working to improve inclusivity and that a slight extension of the schedule would not be the solution. Similar views were aired by forty IPCC authors from developing countries in a letter circulated ahead of last week’s talks, urging countries to ensure that the reports are ready in time for the global stocktake.

While recognising concerns over the inclusion of under-represented communities, they argued that it would not be achieved by allowing more time but through “deliberate efforts to counterbalance long-standing inequalities” in the research world.

Writing for Climate Home, Malian scientist Youba Sokona, one of the letter’s authors, warned that the IPCC risks losing its relevance and influence over global climate policy-making if its output cannot be used in the global stocktake.

IPCC Chair Jim Skea gavels the session to a close. Photo: Photo by IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

Despite lengthy exchanges, scientists in Sofia could not find a solution and decided to postpone a decision on the timeline until the next IPCC session in February 2025, when countries will also need to agree on the outline of the reports’ content.

Kenya’s Kimutai has proposed a compromise that would see reports on adaptation and mitigation completed in time for the global stocktake, with a third on the physical science of climate change coming in later.

Richard Klein, a senior researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and a lead author of previous IPCC reports, told Climate Home the ongoing row was “problematic”. “With these delays, a shorter [report] cycle in time for the global stocktake may not be feasible anymore, which in turn makes it less likely we will see ambitious nationally-determined contributions (NDCs) after that process,” he warned.

Expert scientists from the IPCC will meet again this December at a “scoping” session to sketch out a framework for what the assessment reports should include.

Barbosa of Timor-Leste is worried that those discussions will also become “heavily politicised”.

“We are concerned that high-emitting developing countries will try water down the work on emission-cutting measures and keep out strong messages on things like the need to phase out fossil fuels,” he told Climate Home.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

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It is proposing to create the first United Nations expert group to “examine risks and opportunities” of solar radiation management (SRM), a suite of largely untested technologies aimed at dimming the sun.

The panel would be made up of experts appointed by member states of the UN’s environment programme (Unep) and representatives of international scientific bodies, according to a draft resolution submitted by Switzerland and seen by Climate Home.

Governments will negotiate and vote on the proposal at Unep’s meeting due to start at the end of February in Nairobi, Kenya. It has been formally endorsed by Senegal, Georgia, Monaco and Guinea.

A Swiss government spokesperson told Climate Home that SRM is “a new topic on the political agenda” and Switzerland is “committed to ensuring that states are informed about these technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects”.

Split scientific opinions

Solar geoengineering is a deeply contested topic and scientists are divided over whether it should be explored at all as a potential solution.

Ines Camilloni, a climatology professor at the University of Buenos Aires, welcomed Switzerland’s proposal, saying the UN “is in a good position to facilitate equitable, transparent, and inclusive discussions”.

“There is an urgent need to continue researching the benefits and risks of SRM to guide decisions around research activities and deployment”, she told Climate Home.

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But Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, head of climate science at Climate Analytics, says he is concerned about that prospect.

“The risk of such an initiative is that it elevates SRM as a real solution and contributes to the normalisation of something that is still very premature and hypothetical from a scientific perspective”, he added. “You need to be careful about unintended consequences and consider the risks of opening a Pandora’s box”.

An open letter signed by more than 400 scientists in 2022 called for an international “non-use agreement” on solar geoengineering. It also said United Nations bodies, including Unep, “are all incapable of guaranteeing equitable and effective multilateral control over the deployment of solar geoengineering technologies at planetary scale”.

Poorly understood risks

Long touted as a futuristic climate hack, solar geoengineering has risen in prominence in recent years as the prospect  of curbing emissions enough to limit global warming to 1.5C has faded.

The technologies aim to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. This could be achieved by pumping aerosols into the high atmosphere or by whitening clouds.

Its supporters say it could be a relatively cheap and fast way to counter extreme heat. But it would only temporarily reduce the impact of rising emissions, without tackling the root causes.

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The regional effects of manipulating the weather are hard to predict and large uncertainties over wider climate, social and economic implications remain.

Solar geoengineering could “introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well-understood”, the IPCC’s scientists said in their latest assessment of climate science.

Its critics argue that putting the SRM option on the table undermines existing climate policies and relieves pressure on polluters to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. There are also questions about how long this technology would be needed and what happens after it is stopped.

Space for discussion

In its proposal to the Unep assembly, Switzerland acknowledges the “potential global risks and adverse impacts”.

The 25-people-strong group would first be tasked with writing a comprehensive scientific report on solar geoengineering.

But the main goal would be to establish “a space for an informed discussion” about research on the potential use of SRM, giving the possibility for future decisions on how that should be governed, according to an accompanying technical note seen by Climate Home.

It is not the first time Switzerland brings a resolution on solar geoengineering to the Unep summit. In 2019, its attempt to get countries to agree to the development of a governance framework failed as a result of opposition from Donald Trump’s USA and Saudi Arabia – who didn’t want restrictions on geoengineering.

Calls for more research

Last year, Unep produced an “independent expert review” of the subject, concluding that “far more research” is needed “before any consideration for potential deployment” of SRM.

A Unep spokesperson said the exact characteristics of the group proposed by Switzerland would need to be negotiated at the upcoming summit. But, if approved, it would differ from any previous panel “because it would have a clear mandate from member states” with experts directly appointed by them.

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Ines Camilloni was one of the authors of last year’s UNEP report. She says “managing the risks of climate change requires a portfolio of policy responses”, of which mitigation and adaptation would be the most important and urgent.

But she added that “SRM has been proposed as a complementary approach” and more research is needed to weigh its benefits and risks against the impact of adverse climate scenarios.

A panel of leaders called the Overshoot Commission also recommended last year that governments expand research into solar geoengineering while placing a moratorium on large-scale experiments outdoors. 

A rogue SRM experiment conducted by a US startup in Mexico led the Mexican government to announce a ban on solar geoengineering in January 2023.

‘Precautionary approach’

Mary Church, a campaigner at the CEnter for International Environmental Law, says “it’s hard to see what could be gained from establishing an expert group under Unep”.

“There’s a real risk that such a group could undermine the existing regulatory framework and inadvertently provide legitimacy for solar geoengineering technology development and experimentation”.

Countries should instead “take a precautionary approach, commit to non-use, and prioritise a fast, fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels”, she added.

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As economic models fail to include tipping points, floods, droughts or indoor work, they hugely underplay the economic damage that global warming will do, the reports argue.

The models are relied upon by investors, politicians, central bank governors and influential bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

An IPCC report last year, which was signed off by all governments, summarised these models to conclude that warming of around four degrees Celsius “may cause a 10-23% decline in global GDP by 2100 relative to global GDP without warming”. Other parts of the same report warned of catastrophic physical impacts at that level of warming.

The professional body for the UK’s actuaries (IFA), whose job is to judge risk for insurance companies and pension funds, published a report last month which argued that influential economic models like this “jar with climate science”.

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One of the report’s authors, Edinburgh-based actuary Sandy Trust, told Climate Home that underestimating climate change is “extremely dangerous”.

“What economists have done is say that climate change is a cat in the bush, not a tiger,” he said.

‘Fantastical predictions’

University College of London economist Steve Keen published a similar report for Carbon Tracker last month.

He characterised the models of Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus as  “fantastical predictions” and accused economic journals of accepting “sloppy work” because it fits with economic orthodoxy.

William Nordhaus at a US embassy reception after being awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2018 (Photo credit: US Embassy Sweden)

Freedom of information requests carried out for Keen’s report show that British pension funds are using these economic models and advice from investment consultants to tell their members that climate change will only have a minimal impact on their portfolios.

The pension fund for the rural English county of Shropshire estimated that 2C of global warming would boost its returns until 2030. But climate scientists say 2C of warming would cause severe climate disasters such as increasing the number of heatwaves in a decade by six times and destroying crops and almost all of the world’s coral reefs.

The Shropshire pension fund’s claim was based on advice from investment consultants. Keen’s report finds that “just as advisers have taken refereed economic estimates of damages from climate change at face value, so too have financial regulators” like the Financial Stability Board and the USA’s Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve Board governor Christopher Waller said this year that “risks posed by climate change [to banks and US financial stability] are not sufficiently unique or material to merit special treatment”.

Tipping points

Both reports find that many economic models have assumed the economic damage caused by climate change will increase in a linear way. If it gets twice as hot, the damage will be twice as bad.

But this ignores the role of tipping points, where events like the loss of an ice sheet or rainforest trigger irreversible changes at a certain degree of global warming.

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Trust said there had been a “disconnect” between economists and climate scientists on tipping points. “As we get closer to 1.5C, we’re much closer to triggering these tipping points which individually either increase the pace of climate change by releasing greenhouse gases or increase the rate of climate change”, he said.

Vanessa Hodge advises investors like pension funds as part of the Mercer consultancy. She said that she is clear to her clients that “we know for a fact that [economic models] are understating the tipping points”. She said they are “incredibly difficult to model”.

No pain from rain

According to Keen’s report, economic models of climate change impacts often only take into account temperature changes and ignore changes in levels of rainfall.

This means that the economic impact of floods, droughts and fires is not taken into account, contributing to the underestimating of climate’s economic harm.

This underestimation is particularly severe in the colder countries which make up most of the global north.

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That’s because temperature changes mainly affect hotter countries whereas the impact of floods, fires and droughts are more widely spread.

A 2000 study led by Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn claimed there would be economic benefits in North America, Russia and Western Europe because “they are currently cool” so “warming is helpful”. Mendelsohn has links to climate-sceptic think tanks and continues to downplay the risks of climate change.

Bad assumptions

Keen’s report says that influential economists have made the “strikingly invalid assumption” that work conducted indoors will not be affected by climate change.

In a 1991 study, Nordhaus claimed that “for the bulk of the [US] economy – manufacturing, [underground] mining, utilities, finance, trade and most service industries – it is difficult to find major direct impact of the projected climate changes over the next 50 to 75 years.” Nordhaus did not respond to a request for comment.

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But rising temperatures can have a direct impact on the productivity of indoor jobs. For example, carmaking giant Stellantis had to temporarily shut down its main manufacturing plant in Italy last month as a heatwave created unsustainable working conditions.

Another flaw, Keen and Trust say, is that economics central estimates have been based on what has happened in the past when the climate has got hotter.

“By definition,” Trust says, “that excludes all of the risks of climate change – sea level rise, heat stress, involuntary mass migration, water shortages – because they haven’t happened yet”.

“Guess what,” he continues, “the answer to this is there is nothing to worry about – 3C of global warming equates to a 2% GDP impact. So yes, economists have unequivocally understated risk”.

Groupthink

While Hodge says that flaws in models are inevitable because they are intrinsically difficult and require a lot of computing power, Keen says that they are a result of groupthink.

He said economic journals are edited by economists who accept “shoddy standards” when articles “confirm what economists wish to believe”.

These articles are often peer-reviewed, he says, only by other mainstream economists who are “defending the faith” and not by climate scientists.

The IPCC appoints economists who have been published in these journals to edit the economic chapters of its reports, he says, which therefore reflect the flawed economics.

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One solution, Keen says, is to get climate scientists to referee the relevant economic papers alongside economists. Another is to inform decision-makers and the public about the economic risks of climate change, especially to the value of pensions.

The IFA report recommends improving models by making better assumptions, such as that 100% of GDP will be lost at 6C of global warming, and then working back from there to estimate the economic impact of less warming.

“Rather than trying to be precise, [it would be better] to be roughly right in that there will be severe impacts”, Trust said.

Minsky moment

Keen fears that if investors’ expectations don’t catch up with the physical climate science in an orderly manner, then they will do it in an “unpleasant, abrupt and wealth-destroying” way.

He warns of a so-called Minsky moment when the market suddenly realises that its assets aren’t worth as much as people thought they were.

Keen warns that, if that happens, pensioners will either lose money or taxpayers will have to step in to bail them out.be

The post Mainstream economists accused of playing down climate threat appeared first on Climate Home News.

Representatives of countries from an array of different regions, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and small island states, pushed to be singled out as particularly vulnerable.

Tanzania and Timor-Leste asked that the world’s poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs), be added to a list of impacted communities, according to a report of the meeting by think-tank IISD.

Africa and small island developing states (Sids) were nearly cut out of one section on vulnerabilities, the IISD report says, and replaced by a reference to “developing and least developed countries”.

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But there was a strong push from many delegates to retain them, particularly as most of those regions’ representatives had already left the talks to approve the report, as they had to catch flights home from Switzerland.

Mexico and Chile wanted to add Latin America to the list of regions that are particularly vulnerable while India wanted Asia included, according to IISD’s report.

The final document lists Africa, Sids, LDCs, Central and South America, Asia and the Arctic as particularly vulnerable.

The benefits of vulnerability

What makes some communities more vulnerable than others is not just physical factors like sea level rise but also social factors like poverty, governance, building standards and infrastructure.

This makes naming specific parts of the world as vulnerable a politically sensitive topic.

The inclusion of the Arctic as one of the most climate vulnerable places in the world, for example, was significant because it came just days after the US approved the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s north slope.

There are various reasons for wanting to be named as vulnerable, including global recognition and better access to climate finance.

Last year’s Cop27 climate talks agreed that a new fund for climate victims should be targeted at countries who are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

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Samoan ambassador Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr. Pa’olelei Luteru, who chairs the alliance of small island states (Aosis), said making specific note of the risks to these islands was “imperative in the context of climate justice”.

“The fact is that we are already facing devastating losses and damages of great magnitude, and funds we should be investing into sustainable development initiatives must be diverted to help us cope with climate change impacts,” he said.

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But recognising growing impacts also gives states the responsibility of acting on them.

Jörn Birkmann researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and was coordinating lead author of one of the underlying IPCC reports.

He told Climate Home: “It seems like governments fear that if their country is not mentioned, they could receive less support (e.g. global adaptation funds),”

He added: “Or vice versa; if they are mentioned it might lead to a stigmatisation or might raise questions about the role of governance.”

Measuring vulnerability

Birkmann said studies on human vulnerability all point to the same global hotspots, particularly Africa.

But even though many governments acknowledge this, there are significant tensions when measuring and mapping human vulnerability.

“It is still difficult in [a summary for policymakers report] to name specific global regions that are more vulnerable than others,” he said.

“The synthesis report is mentioning some regions, but it seems to be much easier for governments to agree on general sentences, rather than pointing to areas or countries where such deficits are evident.”

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Although it misses a lot of nuance about who is vulnerable, Birkmann welcomes the fact that the report recognises global hotspots, “since the success of adaptation and resilience building also depends on the starting point communities and countries have”.

He believes adaptation strategies should not just focus on physical phenomena and climatic hazards such as storms, but also on structures and interventions that reduce human vulnerability, such as poverty reduction, education or fighting corruption – the latter being “a very controversial topic in the political arena”.

Furthermore, when new financial mechanisms for loss and damage agreed at Cop27 are being put into practice, he said it would be helpful to define adaptation goals, not just those on emission reduction.

“These goals should also take into account the very different starting points of regions/countries/communities to build resilience,” he said.” The level of human vulnerability might be such a benchmark of the different starting points.”

The post Nations fight to be called climate vulnerable in IPCC report appeared first on Climate Home News.

As oil and gas companies rake in record profits, a team from Oxford University in the UK is making the case governments should force them to capture and store a share of the emissions from burning their products.

Myles Allen, director of the Oxford Net Zero initiative, has been developing the Carbon Takeback Obligation (CBTO) proposal for a number of years. He argues this will “decarbonise” fossil fuels, accelerate their phase out and develop the capture and removal technologies scientists say are needed to limit global warming to 1.5C.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine wreaks havoc with energy markets, his team is trying to get the idea off academic shelves and into policymakers’ hands. Their aim is to build a club of producer nations to take this forward by next year’s Cop28 climate talks in the United Arab Emirates, at the heart of the world’s top oil producing region.

Critics argue the plan gives companies a licence to keep extracting more climate-harming coal, oil and gas, when the focus should be investment in alternatives.

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The proposal is based on the principle of producer responsibility, which requires companies to account for the environmental costs of a product throughout its life cycle.

In practice, this would mean that for every tonne of carbon generated by the continued use of fossil fuels, a tonne of CO2 is permanently stored in geological formation.

Yet, the technology remains expensive and unproven at large scale despite the fossil fuel industry’s repeated claims it has the expertise necessary to make it happen.

Calling the industry’s bluff

“It’s a giant bluff call,” Allen told Climate Home News. “The industry says it can do it. So fine, do it.”

Under the proposal, oil and gas companies and their supply chain would be asked to provide certificates proving that carbon has been permanently stored either by carbon capture and storage at refineries or cement plants, for example, or through direct air capture. These certificates could be traded.

The obligation could start at 5% of a polluter’s emissions, rising to 10% by 2030 and eventually reaching 100% in line with net zero targets.

Ingrid Udd Sundvor, a researcher at Oxford University working with Allen, said the policy was “ambitious” because it confronts producer countries with the impacts of burning the oil and gas they export. This, she added, could complement other supply-side measures to restrict fossil fuel production.

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Despite soaring energy prices, advocates say the obligation would be initially cheaper than a carbon tax, even if the price increase was passed on to consumers.

That’s because the initial costs would be spread across all fossil fuels being sold. Last year, the research team estimated that an obligation to sequester 10% of emissions would add just £0.7-1.8 ($0.8-2.0 at today’s exchange rate) to a barrel of oil. Over time, investments would bring down the costs of emissions capture and storage.

Eventually, the cost of compensating for every tonne of emissions generated from burning fossil fuels would make the industry unprofitable, Sundvor said, leading to its phase out.

First-mover club

The proposal was briefly included as an amendment to the UK’s 2015 energy bill, before being scrapped.

Now there is fresh momentum behind the idea. Allen’s team is aiming to build a club of first-mover producing countries that could implement the proposal together. It is engaging with the industry and civil society groups to find out what it would take.

The Dutch government is the most actively engaged to date. The ministry of economic affairs and climate policy co-financed a feasibility report to understand “possible application as part of a transition plan for the Dutch oil and gas sector”. A spokesperson told Climate Home the cabinet is reviewing it and will soon inform parliament about possible next steps.

In the US and Canada, Producer Accountability for Carbon Emissions (Pace), a group co-founded by former ExxonMobil employees, is advocating for the policy.

The UK and Norway are also on the target list. The idea is one option proposed by the UK government for accelerating investments in carbon removals. However, consultation documents argue the policy would be difficult to implement in the short term because of a lack of supply of negative emissions certificates.

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Allen acknowledges that many green groups are sceptical. “It sounds like putting the fox in charge of the hen house,” he said.

But he argues there is a rationale for prolonging the fossil fuel industry’s life: “If they still exist, they can pay for the clean-up” and for the carbon removal technologies the world needs.

In fact, Allen suggests that fossil fuels should be used in the second half of the century to suck carbon out of the air with direct air capture – an energy intensive process.

‘Get-out-of-jail-free card’

Climate campaigners agree the fossil fuel industry should bear the responsibility of the climate harm their products cause. But most don’t believe it is part of the solution to the climate crisis, which it caused.

Tessa Khan, founder and executive director of Uplift, which campaigns to transition to a fossil-free UK, told Climate Home it risks “handing the industry a get-out-of-jail-free card for further extraction”.

It “would be dangerous if seen as an alternative to a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels, including scaling up of clean alternatives,” she said, adding that it failed to address the environmental consequences and health and social of fossil fuel extraction on local communities.

Lili Fuhr, deputy director of the climate and energy programme at the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home the idea was “crazy” and would only increase “the scale and power” of the industry that caused the problem.

Carbon capture and storage, she said, is “the big escape hatch” pitched by the industry to continue to pollute. Instead, she added, the future should be built around renewables.

The post Researchers push to make polluters put carbon back in the ground appeared first on Climate Home News.

The ocean floor is rich in mineral deposits, which could provide raw materials to manufacture batteries for electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines. Prospective mining companies see a lucrative opportunity to turbocharge the energy transition.

Yet the cold, dark and inaccessible deep sea is home to a vast array of life, which scientists are just beginning to discover.

Areas of commercial interest are turning out to be some of “the most biodiverse places on Earth,” Diva Amon, a marine biologist from Trinidad and Tobago, told Climate Home News, with 70-90% of the species discovered there never seen before.

Too little is known about the oceans’ deep, its biodiversity and the role it plays in storing carbon to fully understand the impacts the nascent industry will have, Amon said. “Whatever way you look at it, mining is going to be very destructive in the deep ocean. It’s certain to say that this will be irreversible damage.”

Yet, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates mining activities in international waters, is convening from Monday to consider a roadmap for negotiating extraction rules.

It is proposing to finalise a mining code by July 2023, after being given an ultimatum by the world’s smallest island state Nauru.

The headquarters of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica (Photo: James A R McFarlane/Wikimedia Commons

Countries have been discussing mining the bottom of the oceans for years. While some exploratory activities are under way, no commercial extraction has started in international waters.

The reason for the hype is mineral concretions on the sea bottom known as polymetallic nodules. About the size of a potato, they are thought to take millions of years to form and are rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and rare earth metals, key components of batteries for electric vehicles.

As the energy transition accelerates, demand for critical minerals could increase sixfold by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. Supply is lagging.

A high concentration of nodules has been found along a geological submarine fracture in the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ).

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The Republic of Nauru, having exhausted its own once-rich phosphate reserves, is one of the most vocal supporters of mining this potentially lucrative resource.

The ISA has given out 17 contracts to countries and companies to explore the CCZ, including to Nauru Ocean Resources Incorporated (Nori), a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based Metals Company sponsored by the Nauru government. The Metals Company also struck exploration deals with Tonga and Kiribati.

In June, the island president Lionel Aingimea wrote to the ISA council calling for regulations to be fast-tracked, so Nori can formally apply for approval to exploit the seabed.

Aingimea invoked a never-before-used procedural point, known as the “two-year-rule”. If the rules aren’t finalised by July 2023, the ISA will have to “consider and provisionally approve” licencing requests regardless.

To meet the deadline, the ISA secretariat is proposing nine weeks of in-person meetings across 2022, with countries asked to adopt the plan and start work this month.

A manganese nodule from the Pacific Ocean seafloor (Photo: James St. John/Flickr)

The Metals Company argues deep-sea mining is less environmentally and socially damaging alternative to terrestrial mining, which often takes place in biodiverse rainforests.

While the company didn’t respond to Climate Home’s questions, it pointed to literature on its website targeted at investors, which includes a plan to start commercial production in the last quarter of 2023.

Deep sea bed mining, it says, reduces the risk to carbon stored on land and doesn’t require drilling or blasting since nodules are not attached to the ocean’s floor.

Machines they call “collectors” would only remove nodules in the top five centimetres of the seabed’s sediment, allowing for “recovery to start naturally and immediately”.

The company further describes the seabed as “a barren and common, desert-like environment with limited life, and no threat to Indigenous land”.

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For Amon, this is “a flat lie”. Life in the oceans’ deep grows and reproduces slowly, with studies finding very little recovery decades after the sea floor has been disturbed. And the extent to which mining will impact the carbon cycle remains unknown.

“There isn’t enough science and they likely won’t be enough science to make informed decision for potentially decades,” Amon said.

Nor is there any guarantee that mining on land would decrease as a result. “One will not replace the other. So we’ll just see double the biodiversity loss, double the impacts,” she said.

A rare deep-sea cirrate octopoduses its fins on either side of its head to propel itself through the water column (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)

Amon is one of 621 marine science and policy experts to have signed an open letter calling for a pause on deep sea bed mining until “sufficient and robust scientific information has been obtained”.

This call for a moratorium is backed by a large number of civil society groups and NGOs, and car manufacturer and computing giants including Volkswagen Group, BMW, Volvo, Samsung, Philips and Google. The business signatories committed not to use deep sea minerals in their supply chains. Microsoft has adopted a temporary ban.

“Only a handful of individuals are talking about opening up this new industrial frontier,” Louisa Casson, an oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, told Climate Home. “But people hardly realise that this is something that governments and companies are actually considering.”

Part of the accountability deficit lies with the fact ISA meetings are dominated by a few countries which a strong interest in deep sea mining. “Not a lot of governments show up because not a lot of them are interested,” said Casson.

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Nauru’s ultimatum is pushing governments to take a stance on the issue. And some have already done so.

African countries and a Latin American and Caribbean bloc have written to the ISA to express their concerns at the forced deadline, saying more time was needed to understand the impacts of disturbing the deep and develop appropriate regulations.

In the Pacific, Fiji and Vanuatu have called for a ban on sea bed mining until 2030.

And at the world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in September, 81 member countries supported a non-binding motion for a moratorium on deep sea mining. Government agencies in Norway and Belgium were in a minority rejecting the motion. Germany, which holds exploration rights, supported the moratorium.

Yet, a moratorium is not up for discussion at the ISA meeting. “We think that should be reflected in this ISA meeting rather than just accepting an arbitrary deadline,” Casson said. “The real question is do we want this at all? Is it really needed?”

Iridogorgia and bamboo coral pictured around the Johnston Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)

From some of the most climate vulnerable nations on Earth, the answer is a firm yes.

Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati have described seabed mining as “a welcome and exciting development” that can help accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels that threatens the very survival of their islands.

It “should be embraced by everyone who cares about the climate future of our planet,” they wrote in a joint statement, arguing that it provides them with resources for sustainable economic development.

Under the ISA regime, these mineral deposits have been designated as the “common heritage of humankind”. That means royalties from their commercialisation will be distributed between all countries, taking into particular consideration the needs of developing nations. Discussions on establishing this mechanism have been particularly contentious.

“For the first time in history, an extractive industry regime will aim to alleviate some of the economic disparities that exist between the Global North and the Global South,” the islands explained.

The purple holothurian Psychropotes feeds on organic sediment deposits on the rocky substrate (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)

Campaigners see less worthy motives for the resource rush.

Matt Gianni, co-founder and political and policy advisor at the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of more 60 international organisations, told Climate Home: “Nauru triggered this two-year-rule to allow The Metals Company to list on the stock exchange.”

Previously known as Deep Green, the company merged with special purpose acquisition company SOAC to go public. Gianni said the firm “needed to convince SOAC investors that this was a good deal and to do that they absolutely needed to show that they will get a licence for mining”.

Weeks after Nauru triggered the two-year rule, the two companies merged to form The Metals Company. It was listed on Nasdaq in September, valued at $2.9 billion – a valuation that plummeted a month later after a key investor pulled out. Nauru’s UN ambassador Margo Deiye, permanent representative at the ISA, attended the listing ceremony.

The Nauru government and the ISA did not respond to requests for comment.

“This [ISA] meeting and the whole scramble of figuring out what to do is not based on a scientific study-approach at the ISA, nor the potential of deep sea mining, nor the extent to which it would impact the environment and whether the world needs these metals. None of this has happened,” said Gianni.

“This is the tragedy of the whole process. It’s almost farcical. If the first company is allowed to mine and makes money, more will pile in.”

The post A rush to mine the deep ocean has environmentalists worried appeared first on Climate Home News.

Yet many of CDR’s limitations — be that technical, financial, or political — are overlooked in the report, which focuses on the physical science of climate change.

In its key scenarios, the report did not make clear exactly how much future CDR will be required. This will be the job of the IPCC Working Group III report currently due in March 2022 – too late for the Cop26 negotiations.

In scenarios where we limit warming to 1.5-2 degrees, large net removals are shown after 2050. But the actual levels of residual emissions and the CDR offsetting them are largely invisible to the reader.

This invisibility matters for two main reasons.

First, the lack of clarity conceals the huge technical and financial challenges that would be involved in delivering high levels of removals.

In turn this allows decision makers to continue to believe they can defer hard decisions for years or decades by assuming (enough) carbon dioxide removal will be developed to clean up the mess. It allows all sorts of polluters – from coal mines to airlines – to argue that their emissions can continue, as they will eventually be offset by CDR. 

The second problem is that the report does not consider what CDR would mean for social justice. How and where CDR is deployed matters immensely for how much removal techniques compete for land with food production, or whose renewable energy supplies are going to be diverted to carbon removal. 

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Another significant problem is with the basic assumption that underpins a lot of thinking about net-zero—that “one tonne of carbon in equals one tonne of carbon out.” This is a false equivalence. 

For example, when removals by biological techniques – storing carbon in forests, soils, peat bogs or seagrass meadows – are used to offset emissions from fossil fuels, there is a multiple mismatch of timescales. It takes years – even decades – for these biological techniques to start removing and storing carbon in meaningful quantities. 

And in the face of already existing climate disruption like fires and floods, these offsetting techniques are becoming increasingly unreliable, risking the release of captured carbon much more quickly than from geological carbon stores.

These concerns strike at the very heart of the IPCC methodology – the focus on cumulative net emissions and the deployment of a carbon budget in which each unit of carbon is additional and exchangeable for any other unit of the same size. 

Effective climate policy crucially depends on the differences between units of carbon. Which emissions can we cut with the least economic damage? Which forms of carbon removal have the most co-benefits for biodiversity or health?

Of course, such questions might well be seen to fall in the remit of the upcoming reports of Working Groups II and III of the IPCC. But with the Working Group I’s insistence on carbon equivalence and failure to properly address concerns about scalability, the IPCC could be creating fertile ground in which misunderstandings about CDR might take root, risking poor policy choices down the line. 

In the worst case scenario, the report gives cover to bad actors seeking to deliberately muddy the discussion on the scale and speed of emissions reductions required for a Paris-aligned world. 

Optimum policy measures look very different if carbon units have complex and multiple characters than if they are all fungible with one another. And promises of future carbon removal might deter or defer otherwise practical emissions reductions. 

Both factors speak against carbon trading and offset markets, and in favour of regulation, mandates and targeted, specific support for selected forms of emissions cuts and carbon removal techniques.

When our future depends on the sustainable removal capacity to repair the climate, the question of how much removals are needed to offset residual emissions becomes intensely political. But the IPCC’s Working Group I report – vital in its content and timing ahead of the Glasgow Cop, doesn’t ask this all-important question.

When policy makers meet at Cop26 in November, they must not make the same mistake. They should establish separate targets for emissions reduction and carbon removal. And critically, make sure that emissions are ultimately eliminated at the source.  

Duncan McLaren is a professor at the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University.

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Levels of the ozone-harming and planet-warming CFC-11 gas fell over east Asia in 2019, a study published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday concluded.

The study put this fall down to “timely reporting and subsequent action by industry and government in China”.

Avipsa Mahapatra, climate campaign lead at the NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), said this was “absolutely great news from our planet’s perspective as well as from an ozone perspective”.

CFC-11 is a potent ozone depleting gas and has a global warming potential 4,750 times that of carbon dioxide. It is primarily used to produce foams for the construction and insulation industries.

Developed countries banned CFC gases in 1996 and developing countries like China followed suit in 2010 under the Montreal Protocol. Despite the ban, a 2018 study published in Nature found levels of CFC-11 had risen since 2012.

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In response, the EIA asked 21 companies in China if they used CFC-11 to produce foams intended for the construction industry.

Of those 21, 18 admitted to using CFC-11 as a blowing agent rather than the legal alternative, which was regarded as less efficient and more expensive.

When asked where the illegal gas was produced, one company representative told an undercover investigator: “Shady and hidden operations”.

Another foam-maker told EIA that their connections with the local environmental administration meant they received a warning when an inspection was planned. “Local officers would call me and tell me to shut down my factory. Our workers just gather and hide together,” he said.

Following the publication of the EIA’s findings in July 2018, China’s ministry of ecology and the environment said they raided illegal CFC production facilities, seizing the gases and arresting suspects.

Between June and August 2019, the ministry said officials inspected 656 companies across 11 provinces and found 16 enterprises using CFC-11 illegally. One CFC-11 production site was found and demolished.

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By 2018, the foam-makers’ industry association had launched an initiative to stop illegal CFC-11 use, urging companies to voluntarily boycott illegal blowing agents. The group also called for clear labelling in raw material trading contracts and set up a hotline for reporting illegal activity.

While celebrating progress, Mahapatra said the Chinese government could do more to phase out CFC-11 completely. “We are yet to see recovery of polyol or CFC-11 in a scale that matches the scale of the problem,” she said.

And enforcement efforts would have to continue if the fall in CFC-11 levels is to be sustained, she added.

The latest Nature study estimated that between 90,000 and 725,000 tonnes of CFC-11 were produced and embedded in products like foams and gases between 2013 and 2019, which have not yet been emitted into the atmosphere.

This foam is in buildings across China and the rest of the world. If it is not disposed of safely, the EIA warns it will gradually emit the equivalent of up to 3.4bn tons of CO2 — about the amount of the European Union’s annual CO2 emissions.

The post Study suggests China’s crackdown on illegal CFC gases is working appeared first on Climate Home News.

Her appointment was seen as another sign that a Biden administration would make climate action a priority.

Harris is an original sponsor of the Green New Deal. She campaigned for environmental justice and is tough on holding oil and gas companies to account for their pollution. The first black woman chosen to run for vice-president, she will add “fire-power” behind Biden’s climate plan, supporters say.

If they win on 3 November – and there is no guarantee of an easy ride – the pair could spur global climate action, undermine the laggards and energize the vanguards, filling a climate diplomacy void left by Donald Trump’s withdrawal from global commitments to cut emissions.

The big question is whether Biden and Harris can navigate the US’ complex relationship with China and cooperate with Beijing on raising ambition  despite a raft of tensions over trade, intellectual property rights and human rights.

But to have any credibility on the international stage, they will first have to prove they can cut emissions at home…. for that, they first need to win.

This week’s stories

• Kamala Harris might help ‘night and day’ shift for US on global climate diplomacy
• Wind, solar generate 10% of world electricity, doubling share since 2015
• Green shift urged to revive Brazil’s economy and shield Amazon forests
• Most of UN climate science report likely to be delayed beyond 2021 Glasgow summit
• Angola ratifies Paris Agreement promising more ambitious climate plan

Trending 

As Covid-19 hit energy demand, coal generation fell by its largest half-year decline in decades. For the first time, the world’s coal fleet ran at less than half capacity.

Climate think tank Ember estimates that 30% of coal’s decline was due to increased wind and solar generation. Since 2015, wind and solar have doubled their market share to generate a tenth of global electricity between January and June.

But the transition is not happening fast enough to meet the world’s tougher climate goal. According to some analysis, coal needs to fall to just 6% of global electricity generation by 2030 from about a third today to limit temperature rise to 1.5C. That means steep cuts throughout the 2020s.

Never too late… 

Angola ratified the Paris Agreement this week leaving just seven countries to formally endorse the climate deal (leaving out the US which will become the only nation to formally exit the accord on 4 November).

A climate diplomat said Angola had been in no rush to ratify the agreement before making sure it had the tools and data to monitor emissions. Now that it does, the government is working to design a climate plan to meet a seemingly shifting UN deadline for countries to update their pledges.

… but later than expected 

And as timetables continue to slip, most of a major UN scientific report on climate change won’t be ready before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021 because of delays caused by Covid-19.

Only one of the three sections of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is expected to be published before next year’s summit, Alister Doyle reports.

Recovery 

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro could considerably boost the country’s growth by embracing low-carbon policies, according to an international study in partnership with World Bank executives.

It found that measures such as reducing deforestation, promoting sustainable agriculture and developing cleaner transport, could cut emissions beyond Brazil’s current 2030 climate pledge, create two million jobs and add the equivalent of Belgium’s GDP to the country’s growth over the next 10 years.

The post On the ticket – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

The WMO’s Global Observing System provides critical data and observations on the state of the atmosphere, oceans and land surface which inform weather analyses, forecasts and warning signals around the world.

Large parts of the observing system, such as satellite components and ground-based networks, are partly or fully automated and are expected to continue to function for several weeks.

But if restrictions to contain Covid-19 continue for more than a few weeks, the lack of repairs, maintenance and deployments “will become of increasing concern,” the WMO said in a statement.

Manual parts of the observing system have already been significantly affected by the pandemic. Commercial planes, for example, provide in-flight measurements of ambient temperature and wind patterns – an important source of information for weather prediction and climate monitoring.

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The data contributes to the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay programme (Amdar) which collects, processes and transmits the information to ground stations via satellite or radio links.

The collapse of air travel, particularly over Europe, has seen a “dramatic” decrease in the number of measurements, the WMO said.

Data from Eumetnet, a network of 31 European national meteorological services, shows the significant decline in observations provided by airlines such as EasyJet and Germanwings in the past month.

(Source: Eumetnet via WMO)

Lars Peter Riishojgaard, director of the Earth System Branch in WMO’s infrastructure department, said that as the decrease of aircraft weather observations is expected to continue, “we may expect a gradual decrease in reliability of the forecasts”.

WMO said European countries affiliated to the network are currently discussing ways to boost the short-term capabilities of other parts of their observing networks to partly mitigate the loss of aircraft observations.

In developing countries, the meteorological community still relies on surface-based weather observations that are compiled and processed manually. Over the last two weeks, WMO reported a “significant decrease” in the availability of manual observations.

Japan sticks to 2030 climate goals, accused of a ‘disappointing’ lack of ambition

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas warned that although national meteorological and hydrological services currently continue to provide data and observations, “we are mindful of the increasing constraints on capacity and resources”.

“The impacts of climate change and growing amount of weather-related disasters continue,” he said.

“The Covid-19 pandemic poses an additional challenge, and may exacerbate multi-hazard risks at a single country level. Therefore it is essential that governments pay attention to their national early warning and weather observing capacities despite the coronavirus crisis.”

Elsewhere, the EU’s earth observation programme Copernicus is helping researchers and policy-makers monitor the atmosphere and air quality across Europe. The agency has launched  a web platform  to provide updated air quality information on a daily and weekly basis.

The post Coronavirus pandemic threatens climate monitoring, WMO warns appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Mauna Loa observatory at 3,397 metres is home to the Keeling Curve, tracking increasing carbon dioxide concentrations since 1958. Named after its late founder, Charles Keeling, it is widely viewed as the most iconic measure of humanity’s impact on global climate.

“There has never been an economic shock like this in the whole history of the curve,” Ralph Keeling, professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and son of Charles Keeling, told Climate Home News of the impact of the coronavirus.

He said scientists were now studying data from the mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for signs that the economic slowdown linked to the coronavirus could reduce the rise in atmospheric carbon concentrations.

The coronavirus, which has killed more than 22,000 people by 26 March, is slowing the global economy and cutting the use of fossil fuels in cars, power plants and factories that emit carbon dioxide. “I can look out of my window now and the number of cars has dropped,” he said.

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But there was a long way from reduced use of fossil fuels to a crisis that would affect carbon dioxide concentrations in the global atmosphere.

Keeling estimated that global fossil fuel use would have to decline by 10% for a full year to show up in carbon dioxide concentrations. Even then, it would be a difference of only about 0.5 parts per million.

Since 1958 there have been no world wars, for instance, that might abruptly depress economic activity and emissions and show up as a measurable impact on the curve, he said.

Recessions, like the 2008-09 financial crisis or even the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, did not cause a discernible drop. And other factors that have tended to drive the curve up more steeply, such as the economic rise of China this century, were not visible as sudden events.

This March 2020 data may hint at a slight slowdown in the rate of rise.

“It’s too early to say,” if it is related to coronavirus, Keeling said, adding there were big variations from year to year and that the March trend was similar to some previous years.

Two-year record of carbon dioxide (Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

Current carbon concentrations  “are approaching last year’s peak right now,” he said, at about 415 parts per million on 24 March, with big daily swings. If sustained, that is already in line with the record high, judged as a monthly average, of 414.7 ppm for the May 2019.

Carbon dioxide levels have risen from about 270 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and are at the highest in at least 800,000 years, according to the UN panel of climate scientists.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

Carbon dioxide concentrations have their annual peak at the end of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, where North America, Asia and Europe make up most of the planet’s land masses. When spring arrives, plant growth on these continents soaks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, slightly reducing levels.

Keeling likened economic activity affecting the atmosphere to a tap pouring water into a bathtub.

If you turn down the tap in a bathtub you can see there is less water coming in “but it takes a while to be able to see that the rising water level slows,” he said. “We’re still in that phase.”

The Keeling Curve, Mauna Loa Observatory

On the other side of the world in Norway, Kim Holmen, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, says his team is also closely monitoring carbon dioxide levels at the Zeppelin station on a mountain on the Arctic island of Svalbard.

“The curve is not pointing upwards,” he said of carbon dioxide measurements in March, which are usually rising at this time of year. Still, he said that it would probably take months to know if it was related to coronavirus.

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And he said there were many local factors affecting carbon levels, even in parts of the world isolated from industrial centres such as Hawaii or Svalbard.

Around Svalbard, for instance, “it has been colder this winter than the past 10 years,” Holmen said. That meant there had been more ice on the surrounding seas in the winter, putting a lid on waters that can release carbon dioxide into the air.

The UN wants steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to limit rising temperatures to goals set in the Paris Agreement of “well below 2C” above pre-industrial times while pursuing efforts for a stricter ceiling of 1.5C.

Emissions rose sharply after the financial crisis but Keeling expressed hopes that policy makers would help drive cuts in coming years, after the pandemic passes.

“We can hope that emissions stay down for the right reasons afterwards. This [coronavirus] is not the right reason,” he said.

The post Coronavirus: in Hawaii’s air, scientists seek signs of economic shock on CO2 levels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Yet amid this wave of deforestation, two countries are bucking the trend.

In fact, Colombia and Costa Rica saw not only a drop in deforestation rates, but renewed efforts to restore previously degraded forests that generated revenue for their economies.

What did these two verdant countries have in common? Both have imposed taxes on carbon emissions.

Economists and scientists agree that carbon taxes help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by creating an incentive for people to use less fossil fuels. But that’s not all they can do, as we and our co-authors – ministers from both countries – note in an essay published in the journal Nature.

Carbon taxes are also effective at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions created by the destruction of tropical rainforests, making them even more critical to addressing the climate crisis.

If tropical deforestation were a country, it would be the world’s largest emitter after China and the United States. Moreover, tropical rainforests remove carbon from the atmosphere: The Amazon, for example absorbs five percent of global carbon emissions every year.

This means that when we cut down our rainforests, we also eliminate one of our best tools for addressing the climate crisis.

But in both Colombia and Costa Rica, deforestation rates are down, while revenues to fund forest restoration efforts are up.

Don’t shop till you drop: advice to UK citizens on net zero climate goals

The programmes have different structures but similar impacts. Since 1997, Costa Rica’s carbon tax has helped to protect and restore lands across a quarter of the country. It generates $26.5 million in revenue every year, which the government then pays out to farmers and landowners that commit to rainforest protection or restoration on their property.

Meanwhile, Colombia’s programme has generated more than $250 million in revenue over the past three years. More than a quarter of that revenue goes toward environmental causes such as reducing deforestation and monitoring protected areas.

These programmes also offer a counterpoint to the argument that carbon taxes disproportionately impact people with lower incomes.

In Costa Rica, the government helps lower-income residents to complete their applications, and it prioritises lower-income regions when distributing payments. As a result, two out of every five people who receive a payment from the programme live below the poverty line.

We wanted to see what would happen if other countries adopted similar policies, so we analysed their potential impact on 12 countries with tropical rainforests across Africa, Asia and South America.

Our model found that if all 12 countries adopted a policy like Colombia’s, these countries would collectively generate $1.8 billion every year. If they decided to adopt an even more ambitious proposal in the face of increasing global emissions, their revenue would soar to nearly $13 billion — equivalent to the GDP of Nicaragua.

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Either scenario would have a profound impact on protection and restoration efforts. Countries facing the biggest threats from deforestation, like Indonesia, would have robust funding streams to help restore devastated landscapes.

Other countries, like Mexico and Malaysia, would be able to better monitor their protected areas. And every country would reduce the public’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Our research shows that a carbon tax is one of the most effective investments a country can make, and a particularly easy initiative for countries with existing carbon offset programs like Peru and Ecuador.

It offers a powerful tool for governments to fight deforestation, reduce emissions and support rural communities. Governments should consider it, and international institutions should encourage it.

Science tells us that humanity has about a decade to change course and avoid a worst-case climate scenario. A carbon tax in tropical countries would go a long way to that end — while helping those who are most vulnerable to climate impacts.

Edward Barbier is university distinguished professor at the Department of Economics, Colorado State University and Sebastian Troëng is executive vice president of Conservation International.

Their research was published this week in Nature.com together with Colombia’s Minister of Environment Ricardo Loranzo and Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Carlos Manuel Rodriquez. 

The post Carbon taxes are key to stop deforestation appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UN Biodiversity summit, due to take place in Kunming in October, is a critical moment for countries to agree on a global framework to halt the destruction of the planet’s plants and wildlife.

But the coronavirus outbreak has forced UN agencies to relocate preparatory talks due to take place next month in Kunming to the offices of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, Italy.

The move came after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a “public health emergency of international concern” because of the rapid spread of the virus. More than 200 people in China have died since the beginning of the epidemic and nearly 10,000 cases have now been reported.

Meanwhile, travel restrictions to and from China have intensified in recent days. On Thursday, the Italian government announced it was suspending all flights between Italy and China. Travel restrictions could make it more difficult for Chinese participants to attend the meeting.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) said it was committed to ensure preparations for the October summit “proceed in a timely and effective manner”.

Spawning crisis

The desert locusts swarm in the Horn of Africa could provoke a humanitarian crisis, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned.

The insects are ravaging the East African region in the worst outbreak in decades and is causing “an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods,” the UN agency has said.

Urgent calls for funding to stop the outbreak have been issued as the locusts have started laying eggs and the FAO fears new swarms could form in Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen.

Fuel blunder

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has come under pressure to regulate new shipping fuels introduced at the start of the year to reduce sulphur levels, which could be accelerating warming in the Arctic.

Research shows the new fuel blends could be causing a surge in black carbon emissions – a short-lived but potent pollutant that traps heat in the atmosphere and contributes to warming.

The fuels which were designed to improve air quality and protect human health could be increasing the shipping’s sector climate impact, especially in the Arctic region.

Now campaigners are asking tough questions about who knew what and when about the new fuels’ potential impacts on emissions. “It’s hard to see how experts in marine fuels like yourselves could not have been aware” of the risks, they said.

Carbon source

A new study found that indigenous and protected land in the Amazon emit far less carbon dioxide than the rest of the rainforest.

The study is the first to comprehensively include carbon losses from forest degradation (such as illegal logging and mining, floods and droughts), deforestation and forest growth and provides a detailed carbon account of the changing land use.

It prompted calls for greater support for indigenous land rights as a cost-effective way to limit climate change. Jocelyn Timperley reports.

Ratification

10 countries still haven’t ratified the Paris Agreement. Turkey and four large oil exporting countries, including Iran, Iraq, Angola and Libya, have not formally endorsed the agreement. Alister Doyle takes a look at who makes the list.

Quick hits

• UN relocates biodiversity talks to Italy from China after coronavirus emergency
• UN biodiversity meeting in China under review following coronavirus outbreak
• Locusts lay eggs as plague worsens in Horn of Africa, UN warns
• Indigenous lands, protected areas limit Amazon’s carbon emissions
• IMO under pressure to regulate new ship fuels over Arctic warming
• Which countries have not ratified the Paris climate agreement?

And in climate conversations

• UN ruling on climate refugees could be gamechanger for climate action

The post Coronavirus side effect – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

The crisis is a timely reminder that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of severe flooding across the world. Although no single flood can be linked directly to climate change, basic physics attests to the fact that a warmer world and atmosphere will hold more water, which will result in more intense and extreme rainfall.

The monsoon season usually brings heavy rains but this year Kerala has seen 42% more rain than would be expected, with more than 2,300mm of rain across the region since the beginning of June, and over 700mm in August alone.

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These are similar levels seen during Hurricane Harvey, that hit Houston in August 2017, when more than 1,500mm of rain fell during one storm. Tropical cyclones and hurricanes, such as Harvey, are expected to increase in strength by up to 10% with a 2C rise in global temperature. Under climate change the probability of such extreme rainfall is also predicted to grow by up to sixfold towards the end of the century. The rivers and drainage systems of Kerala have been unable to cope with such large volumes of water and this has resulted in flash flooding.

Much of that water would normally be slowed down by trees or other natural obstacles. Yet over the past 40 years Kerala has lost nearly half its forest cover, an area of 9,000km², just under the size of Greater London, while the state’s urban areas keep growing. This means that less rainfall is being intercepted, and more water is rapidly running into overflowing streams and rivers.

One of the most striking things from the videos and images emerging from the area is the brown colour of the flood waters and the extreme damage caused by landslides. Our recent research has shown that geomorphology – the processes of erosion and deposition that shape the Earth’s surface – is sensitive to rainfall intensity, so more frequent and more extreme floods mean more rapid changes across our landscapes.

How ‘extreme’ are the Kerala floods?

The floods have been described as “the worst in 100 years” by Kerala state’s chief minister. Similar descriptions are often used to try and define the magnitudes of a flood, such as a “one-in-100 year flood event”, despite it being widely recognised that such descriptions are ineffective for communicating flood risk. Our ways of thinking about probability and the risk of flooding, as well as measuring its magnitude, are in desperate need of updating. The 100-year flood, the flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year, does not register in public consciousness.

A different way of thinking about it is that a 100-year flood at a given location has close to a one in four chance of occurring within the term of a 25-year mortgage. A 25% chance your house will flood before you’ve finished paying for it is far more relatable and more likely to get people to consider and engage with their own individual risk.

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Likewise, governments, both regional and national, along with agencies and first responders, need to develop improved flood maps and update them to incorporate uncertainty. Alongside this, we need more effective communication and public engagement to develop flood risk literacy – long term this will help improve policy decisions. The UK’s 25-year environment plan is a step in that direction.

Most critically we have to accept that, with the changing climate and changing patterns of rainfall, the behaviour of rivers will also shift. All our assessments of flood risk currently assume a static, steady-state system where rivers respond in the same way they have in the past. An increase in rainfall, and in particularly extreme events, will cause our landscapes to adjust. Rivers and their basins will become more dynamic and prone to change.

How quickly rivers change, and how quickly we respond with urban drainage and flood mitigation measures, will play a significant role in our evolving flood risk. Layered on this will be how rapidly societies, and their governments, begin to adopt more resilient ways of living with water.

Flooding is a challenge across individual, local, regional and global scales, and is set to increase in the future and its impacts will become more damaging. We need solutions across each of these scales to improve individual and societal resilience – so when flooding does occur it isn’t the disaster we are currently witnessing unfold in Kerala.

Daniel Parsons, professor of process sedimentology and associate dean for research (Science and Engineering), University of Hull and Christopher Skinner, postdoctoral research assistant in numerical modelling of fluvial geomorphology, University of Hull

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Kerala shows how floods are changing appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a warming world the vapour capacity of the atmosphere increases, and more extreme rainfall, like Texas is witnessing right now, is to be expected as a result. This leads many to conclude that climate change exacerbated the impacts of hurricane Harvey.

It is very appropriate to highlight that this is the kind of event we expect to see more of in a warming world. However, to apply this argument directly and attribute (and quantify) the impacts from Harvey itself to human-induced climate change, neglects that climate change is not just about warming.

In a changing climate, two effects come together: not only does the atmosphere warm up (thermodynamic effect) but the atmospheric circulation, which determine where, when, and how weather systems develop, can change as well (dynamic effect).

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Changes in the atmospheric circulation can increase the thermodynamic effect (as we saw during floods Louisiana in 2016) or act in the opposite direction to the thermodynamic effect, leading to locally decreasing the risk of extreme rainfall or canceling the effect of the warming alone (examples here).

Dynamical factors and thermodynamic aspects of climate change can interact in complex ways and there are many examples where the circulation is as important as the thermodynamics.

Hence, while it is very likely that climate changes played a role in the intensity of the rainfall, it is far from straightforward in practice to quantify this role. As such, determining the role of climate change in increasing or decreasing the present and future likelihood of a rain storm like Harvey presents a challenge.

It is possible that while the magnitude of Harvey’s rainfall could have been increased due to climate change, the overall risk of extreme rainfall like this occurring in a warming world could have decreased or not changed. 

Did climate change intensify Hurricane Harvey? @yayitsrob reports with input from Kevin Trenberth: https://t.co/JeyJHBwbU2

— Dana Nuccitelli (@dana1981) August 28, 2017

For individual extreme weather events there are three possible ways climate change can affect the likelihood of the event:

• It could increase the likelihood
• It could decrease the likelihood
• It could have no effect on the likelihood of the event occurring

The latter is not equivalent to climate change not playing a role, because such results are obtained when the effect from a warmer atmosphere is in the opposite direction to the effect on the atmospheric circulation.

To quantify the impact of human-induced climate change on Harvey and to estimate whether it indeed exacerbated the rainfall thus requires taking into account the atmospheric circulation as well as the overall warming.

This is possible and the emerging science of extreme event attribution is doing exactly that. However, while such studies are now routinely conducted for heatwaves and large scale rainfall in mid-latitudes (see Carbon Brief for an overview), it is still the cutting edge for hurricanes.

Attribution science sounds relatively easy in theory: “simulate what is possible weather in a world with climate change and compare it to simulations of possible weather in the world that might have been in a world without anthropogenic climate change”. But in practice this requires climate models that are able to reliably simulate the weather systems in questions over and over again to assess the likelihood of its occurrence. Many simulations are necessary to sample the statistics of extremes events. And to simulate hurricanes very high-resolution models are required that are expensive to run.

If we thus want to know whether Harvey is a “harbinger” for the future of Houston, the attribution question addressing the overall likelihood of a hurricane like Harvey to occur, which includes many variables other than temperature and sea level rise that interact, needs to be answered by carefully estimating the likelihood of such hurricanes developing in a warming world as well as how much rain they bring. It is a question scientists now can answer, but it requires a dedicated study.

Furthermore, attributing the flooding and damages to climate change add more complexity. The answer does not depend on the weather alone but on the land surface, local hydrology, management, … and ultimately who and what is in harms way.

Dr Friederike Otto is a senior researcher at Oxford University’s ECI Global Climate Science Programme and leads and coordinates the distributed computing climate modelling project climateprediction.net.

Editor’s note: The Science Media Centre in London has been canvassing opinions of climate scientists. As they come in, we will post their responses below, unedited.

Prof Stephen Belcher, Chief Scientist at the Met Office, said:

“The mechanics of tropical cyclones and how they interact with our changing climate is extremely complex. There is strong evidence that increasing sea temperatures increase the intensity of tropical storms when they develop. Rising sea levels also increase the risk of coastal flooding. When it comes to the frequency of these storms, it’s a much more challenging picture. At the moment we can’t say how all the different factors will combine to increase or decrease the number of storms we see.” 

Julian Heming, tropical cyclones expert at the Met Office, said:

“The unprecedented rainfall from Hurricane Harvey is heavily influenced by blocking area of high pressure preventing the system from moving inland, concentrating the rainfall nearer the coast. The fact that the storm stalled just a little way inland and has indeed moved back out to sea means it has been able to collect more moisture from the sea and dump it inland.”

Dr Ilan Kelman, Reader in Risk, Resilience and Global Health at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and Institute for Global Health, UCL, said:

“As the continuing horror of Hurricane Harvey’s impacts unfold with the death toll sadly rising, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is not a natural disaster. When we build a city or build a dam, we must understand and deal with possible vulnerability to flooding at that point. By the time a storm forms, it is too late.

“The emergency responders and everyone helping out have done an incredible job. Nothing more could be asked of them. But emergency response to deal with people and houses in a floodplain is too late. Hurricane Harvey unfortunately shows yet again how decades of development and politics, which do not factor in environmental extremes, then causes a disaster.

“The hurricane is a natural event. The hurricane disaster comes from society, not from nature.”

Prof Richard Allan, Professor of Climate Processes at the University of Reading, said:

“There is a question of whether human-caused climate change has been a factor in this devastating storm. If the same conditions that caused the storm had occurred in a world without the warming observed over the last century, it would not have been as severe. A warmer ocean and the air above were able to inject greater quantities of moisture into the storm leading to intensification of already extreme rainfall. Additionally, sea level rise driven by climate warming combined with coastal subsidence related to human activities increased the storm surge while urban development such as paving over grasslands and prairies are likely to have exacerbated flooding.

“The dynamics of the storm are also curious but cannot easily be linked to climate change. When storms like this one move inland, they tend to die off. However, lingering near the coast where it has been, Hurricane Harvey maintained a healthy energy supply and has been able to continue picking up moisture and dumping it over land through sustained and intense rainfall.

“We can’t say that climate change ’caused’ Hurricane Harvey but the severity of the storm and associated damage was worsened by human activities, particularly the substantial emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the oceans and the air above.”

Prof Dave Reay, Professor of Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh, said:

“The scenes from Texas are shocking. Such extreme rainfall events are likely to get even more intense as our climate warms. When the flood waters finally recede, and the rebuilding of homes, businesses and lives begins, climate resilience needs to be front and centre.  Flood defence plans based only on past events will become obsolete as our warming atmosphere delivers much more rain and much more often. President Trump may have withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, but he can’t opt out of the laws of physics.”

Prof Mike Hulme, Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, said:

“It’s important to separate out different elements the Houston flooding rather than simply saying ‘climate-change caused it’.  There was the Category 4 hurricane hitting land (unexceptional), the sustained heavy rainfall (exceptional), the exposure of the city to flooding and then the emergency response (little to do with ‘climate change’ as such).

“And we also need to be clearer about offering ‘climate-change’ as a causal factor.  Humans are changing the atmosphere in many different ways – emitting greenhouse gases, aerosols and smoke, changing the reflectivity of the land, and so on – each of which has different effects on the weather.  Rather than climate-change being a catch-all explanation for everything wrong with the weather, public and scientific commentary about the human influences on weather disasters needs to be much more nuanced.”

Prof Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, said: 

“What has made Harvey so disastrous for Texas is the fact that it has stalled and the circulation patterns are continuously feeding moist air from the Gulf of Mexico up over Texas. So perhaps the single most important question for attributing Harvey to climate change is whether such stationary hurricanes will become more commonplace in the future.

“This is a question about possible changes in circulation and hence dynamics, rather than changes in the moistness and warmth of the air per se and hence thermodynamics. Unfortunately it is not a question that can be answered with a great deal of confidence from current-generation global climate models since their spatial resolution is typically inadequate to address such regional matters with any degree of reliability. There is still uncertainty about many aspects of the dynamics of climate change, and this will only be addressed by investment in climate models and the top-of-the-range supercomputers needed to run them. This is an area where UK scientists must continue to collaborate strongly with their colleagues in Europe.” 

Dr Ilan Kelman, Reader in Risk, Resilience and Global Health at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and Institute for Global Health, UCL, said:

“As Hurricane Harvey’s devastation is revealed, we must ask how those affected are being supported. Was transport provided for people with mobility difficulties and other disabilities? Were isolated elderly contacted and helped to evacuate? Will undocumented migrants wish to seek life-saving shelter and aid given fears of deportation?

“The disaster is about people, especially people who cannot help themselves.

“Climate change might have intensified the hurricane. Climate change did not cause the hurricane disaster. The disaster is about where we construct our buildings and how, what preparation we can do for storms, and how society chooses to support those without knowledge, resources, or opportunities to act on their own.

“The disaster is about us creating and continuing vulnerability, not about the specifics of a single storm.”

The post Link between Hurricane Harvey and climate change is unclear appeared first on Climate Home News.

Several countries are grappling with the effects of this extreme heat, which include wildfires and water restrictions.

Temperatures have soared past 40C in parts of Italy, Greece and the Balkans, with the extreme heat spreading north into the Czech Republic and southern Poland.

Some areas are having their hottest temperatures since 2007 when severe heat also brought dangerous conditions to the southeast of the continent.

The heat is associated with a high pressure system over southeast Europe, while the jet stream guides weather systems over Britain and northern Europe. In 2007 this type of split weather pattern across Europe persisted for weeks, bringing heavy rains and flooding to England with scorching temperatures for Greece and the Balkans.

Europe is a very well-studied region for heatwaves. There are two main reasons for this: first, it has abundant weather observations and this allows us to evaluate our climate models and quantify the effects of climate change with a high degree of confidence. Second, many leading climate science groups are located in Europe and are funded primarily to improve understanding of climate change influences over the region.

The first study to link a specific extreme weather event to climate change examined the record hot European summer of 2003. Since then, multiple studies have assessed the role of human influences in European extreme weather. Broadly speaking, we expect hotter summers and more frequent and intense heatwaves in this part of the world.

We also know that climate change increased deaths in the 2003 heatwaves and that climate change-related deaths are projected to rise in the future.

To understand the role of climate change in the latest European heatwave, I looked at changes in the hottest summer days over southeast Europe – a region that incorporates Italy, Greece and the Balkans.

I calculated the frequency of extremely hot summer days in a set of climate model simulations, under four different scenarios: a natural world without human influences, the world of today (with about 1C of global warming), a 1.5C global warming world, and a 2C warmer world. I chose the 1.5C and 2C benchmarks because they correspond to the targets described in the Paris Agreement.

As the heatwave is ongoing, we don’t yet know exactly how much hotter than average this event will turn out to be. To account for this uncertainty I used multiple thresholds based on historically very hot summer days. These thresholds correspond to an historical 1-in-10-year hottest day, a 1-in-20-year hottest day, and a new record for the region exceeding the observed 2007 value.

While we don’t know exactly where the 2017 event will end up, we do know that it will exceed the 1-in-10 year threshold and it may well breach the higher thresholds too.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of hot summer days in southeast Europe. Likelihoods of the hottest summer days exceeding the historical 1-in-10 year threshold, one-in-20 year threshold and the current record are shown for four scenarios: a natural world, the current world, a 1.5C world, and a 2C world. Best estimate likelihoods are shown with 90% confidence intervals in parentheses. (Credit: Author provided)

Whatever threshold I used, I found that climate change has greatly increased the likelihood of extremely hot summer days. The chance of extreme hot summer days, like this event, has increased by at least fourfold because of human-caused climate change.

My analysis shows that under natural conditions the kind of extreme heat we’re seeing over southeast Europe would be rare. In contrast, in the current world and possible future worlds at the Paris Agreement thresholds for global warming, heatwaves like this would not be particularly unusual at all.

There is also a benefit to limiting global warming to 1.5C rather than 2C as this reduces the relative frequency of these extreme heat events.

As this event comes to an end we know that Europe can expect more heatwaves like this one. We can, however, prevent such extreme heat from becoming the new normal by keeping global warming at or below the levels agreed upon in Paris.

Andrew King is a climate extremes research fellow at the University of Melbourne. This article was first published on The Conversation.

The post Sweltering European summer has human fingerprints appeared first on Climate Home News.

The chance of this being pure co-incidence is little more than one in a thousand, unless human-induced or anthropogenic climate change is factored in. The chance of 2016 reaching the temperature it did, when it did, would have been one in a million, unless climate change was counted as a contributor.

And if anthropogenic global warming, driven by the profligate combustion of fossil fuels over the last two centuries, is fed into the calculations, then the probability becomes quite high: in fact there would be a 50% chance of three consecutive record-breaking years at any time since the beginning of the century, according to a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

Michael Mann, the distinguished climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, is at it again. He and colleagues have been calculating the odds on the recent run of high temperatures to see if they can be explained by any factors other than climate change.

He has done this before: at the beginning of the year he calculated the chance that 13 of the warmest 15 years ever had all occurred in the first 15 years of this century. The probabilities at their highest worked out at one chance in 5,000, unless climate change was taken into account. At their lowest, the probability was one in 170,000.

Mann, who first drew the “hockey stick” graph that shows a steep rise in global temperatures with ever greater levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, also attracts considerable abuse from those who claim that climate change is not happening.

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But he prefers to counter denial with simple statistics. The run of record breaking temperatures from 2014 to 2016 would have a chance of no more than 0.03% without anthropogenic influence: that is, without all that extra greenhouse gas from fossil fuels.

“With climate change, this is the kind of thing we would expect to see. And without climate change, we really would not expect to see it,” he said.

Since the late 19^th Century, the average surface temperature of the planet has risen by about 1.1C. Most of this warming has been in the past 35 years. According to the US space agency Nasa, 16 of the 17 warmest years have all happened since 2001.

If natural and human events – these include cyclic natural weather phenomena such as El Niño and volcanic eruptions and of course the increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere – are taken into account, and understood to overlap the three years in question, then the chance of  2014 to 2016 becoming the hottest consecutive years on record since 1880 rises to up to 3%.

This kind of statistical calculation delivers odds that professional gamblers, merchant bankers, stockbrokers and hedge fund managers would take seriously. The challenge is now to get the rest of the human race to take the hazards seriously.

The odds are shortening on increasingly destructive consequences. Even a modest further rise in temperatures will be accompanied by a series of dangerous extremes of rainfall and potentially lethal heat. 

“The things that are likely to impact us most about climate change aren’t the averages, they’re the extremes,” said Mann. “Whether it’s extreme droughts, or extreme floods, or extreme heat waves, when it comes to climate change impacts … a lot of the most impactful climate related events are extreme events. The events are being made more frequent and more extreme by human-caused climate change.”

This article was originally published on Climate News Network.

The post Humans massively increased odds of three consecutive hottest years appeared first on Climate Home News.

El Niño is a weather phenomenon that starts in the Pacific Ocean and has knock-on effects around the world. It has contributed to recent droughts in east and southern Africa.

A study published in Nature Climate Change on Monday found that with 1.5C global warming, the number of extreme El Niño events will double.

Even if temperature rise is stabilised at this level – the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement – the higher frequency of El Niños will continue for up to a century, models showed.

Climate experts advise African countries must be prepared for more drought and floods.

Richard Ewbank, global climate advisor at Christian Aid, said this should involve forecast-based warnings 6-12 months in advance, backed up by early action funds.

Otherwise, he said, crop failures will turn into full-scale emergencies, requiring “a much more expensive humanitarian response”.

The international community should support African governments in this, he added. “The main call would be for the international climate funds such as the Green Climate Fund to take the initiative here.”

Kenya’s food crisis
Drought raises prices and political tensions
‘With this kind of farming, I only make a loss’

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) advises African countries to take climate predictions such as this study seriously to prevent disasters.

Philip Omondi, ICPAC climate information expert, said scientists can typically predict El Niño six months in advance, but that knowledge is not being used.

“Predictions by scientists have been accurate in the past few years but in Africa there is a lack of goodwill by decision makers to take early action,” Omondi told Climate Home.

Africa is still recovering from an exceptionally strong El Niño event in 2015/16 that left at least 36 million Africans hungry.

Each region is affected differently, said Omondi. “An El Niño results into floods in some parts of East Africa and drought in the northern sector… However, southern Africa experiences drought during an El Niño.”

The reverse of El Niño, La Niña, is also expected to intensify with global warming, bringing a different set of impacts.

The post African countries urged to prepare for rise in extreme El Niño events appeared first on Climate Home News.

Trump’s face, shared widely on social media, hardly suggests any great delight and we cannot expect that a dense theological text will trigger his climate epiphany

But then Trump was never the intended audience. The critical question is whether, in the two years since it was released ahead of the Paris climate conference, the papal encyclical has shifted opinion among Catholics. And unfortunately the answer is “probably not”.

On the face of it the encyclical should have been a key moment in galvanising global action. Climate change is a complex issue around which people require clear guidance – what social theorists call “elite cues” – from trusted high profile figures. And who could be more trusted to the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics than the leader of their church?

But climate change is also an exceptionally politically divided issue. A team at the University of Queensland recently reviewed surveys in over 56 countries and concluded that political orientation was by far the largest determinant of attitudes to climate change. Nowhere is this more the case than in the United States where attitudes to climate change are more strongly divided between left and right than any other single issue – including such hot button topics as gun control and abortion.

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Three major US studies have found that liberal Catholics were far more motivated and inspired by the encyclical than conservative Catholics. The most recent study, published last week in the International Journal of Cognitive Science, concluded that “encyclical messages were processed through the perceptual filter of political ideology”. We have no research on the response of Catholics outside the United States but can be reasonably confident, based on wider research on climate change attitudes, that these findings could extend to other developed countries.

What was more surprising, though, was that the encyclical actually increased polarisation. Research by Yale University found that following the publication of the encyclical the number of Catholics who strongly trusted the Pope as a source of information about global warming increased by a quarter. The number who strongly distrusted him doubled.

Scanning the language of Laudato Si reveals one of the fundamental problems: in every way it speaks to and embodies left-wing values and frames. Growth and affluence are condemned at every turn and the transformative opportunity of renewable energy (indeed, the word “opportunity” itself) are mentioned only once. The framing of “justice”, which research by Climate Outreach and University of Wales has found to among the most politically polarising, is used throughout.

Maybe this is understandable: after all “social justice” is one of the key terms in Catholic social teaching. Less explicable is the abstruse focus on what Pope Francis calls “integral ecology” – the word “ecology” is used over 80 times. The canticle of St Francis of Assisi, with its praise for Sir Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Mother Earth, inspired his papal namesake so much that it is enshrined in the text. It might be well-suited to an eco-activist circle but it hardly speaks well to the values of urban conservatives.

Thankfully few people will get that far. Donald Trump is notoriously uninterested in reading anything at all but even dedicated readers will  find it hard to wade through this dense and verbose text. As with any church teaching, it is only through simplification and then diffusion through sermons and church publications that it will become salient to ordinary Catholics.

But this is where we can see the greatest disappointment. In a survey by Yale University only 18% of Catholics said that the Pope’s views on global warming had been discussed in their church after publication. The encyclical evidently failed to break through the barriers of collective silence that remove climate change from the domain of public awareness.

So maybe on reflection this should, and still could, have been done better. The encyclical is, I fear, far beyond the influence of any communications professional. But it should be supported by a wide range of more engaging materials to communicate its meaning to individual Catholics, and, most especially, to enable individual priests to speak on the subject from the pulpit.

All wider research confirms the critical importance of conversations between trusted peers in forming attitudes. The Catholic Church has greater influence than any other organised religion over the conversations that take place within its network. It should use this power to require all churches to openly discuss and consider the arguments of the encyclical.

Thankfully politicians like Donald Trump fade with each election cycle and the battle against climate change will ultimately be won by reaching the public who vote for them. The struggle to energise the world’s Catholics has only begun, and requires a far more creative and energetic approach than a single heavy report.

George Marshall is co-founder and director of projects at Climate Outreach

The post Pope’s climate essay won’t convince Trump, it didn’t even work on Catholics appeared first on Climate Home News.

This will seriously reduce the amount of land that can be used to grow crops for human consumption and prevent many deeper-rooted shrubs and trees from growing at all.

This latest finding in Nature Communications overturns received wisdom that deep-rooted woody plants would survive better in subtropical dry areas because they would be able to extract moisture from far below ground.

Scientists discovered that these deep soils dried out and stayed dry for longer periods because the moisture from the rains evaporated or was used by shallow-rooted plants before it could percolate down to the subsoil.

Groups of scientists studied vast areas of land in North and South America, Asia, Southern Africa and the Western Mediterranean basin. They found that temperate drylands reduced in size by about one-third but only because they morphed into subtropical drylands as temperature rose. Absence of frost from temperate drylands enabled subtropical plants and insects to invade them.

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The paper says these impacts “could have large consequences for human wellbeing: aggressive human diseases, including dengue and schistosomiasis, as well as mound-building termites, occur in subtropical climates and could expand as temperate drylands warm, whereas cool season crops such as wheat and potato would no longer be economically viable”.

All areas, except for some parts of East Asia and North America, had fewer wet days and longer meteorological droughts. As a result, shallow soils lost on average an extra seven days’ growing season while subsoils, below 20cm, lost another 22 days.

“Degradation and desertification will become a challenge to the global ecosystem and human survival in the near future”

These extra periods of drought will have a serious effect on the varieties of plants that can grow in these areas, with much existing vegetation dying off and an increase in the number of wildfires. Areas such as the Mediterranean where currently it is possible to grow wheat and potatoes in the spring before the summer heat arrives, will no longer have enough soil moisture available for growing food crops, the paper says.

Since these global drylands extend over 40% of the Earth’s surface, an increase in their size will affect millions of people who currently live in them or at their margins. The scientists say that measures need to be taken now to reduce the impact of drought in these highly populated regions, because their research shows that there will be a major shift in vegetation and the ability to grow food.

“Extended drought due to enhanced warming and rapid population growth pose major threats to the people living in the drylands,” said atmospheric scientist Jianping Huang at Lanzhou University in China. “Degradation and desertification will become a challenge to the global ecosystem and human survival in the near future.”

By the end of the century, changes in evaporation due to warming, and changes in rainfall patterns, will mean an extension of drylands to 56% of the Earth’s surface. Apart from human welfare, the number and diversity of plant and animal species that can survive in these areas will diminish, and soil conservation and carbon storage is also likely to suffer. Increasing drylands due to global warming will reduce the soil organic carbon storage, resulting in emission of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Report: Boko Haram terrorists are thriving on climate crisis

In a paper in Nature Climate Change, Huang and colleagues report that they have discovered that drylands heat up to 44% more than humid climates. This means a lower global warming limit than 2C is required to avoid serious consequences for drylands.

He says: “Decreased maize yields and runoff, increased long-lasting drought and more favourable conditions for malaria transmission are greatest over drylands if the global warming were to rise from 1.5C to 2C.

“Strict management and rational utilisation of water resources, along with the restoration of soils and vegetation to reduce ecosystem vulnerability on a global scale are urgently needed to develop a global action plan to prevent future desertification and eradicate present desertification problems.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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Smoke from power stations, car exhausts and factory chimneys must have contributed. But a month-long episode of severe and choking air pollution that made world headlines now seems to have been made possible by climate changes that shifted China’s winter monsoon, to trap tiny floating particles of soot and dust over the nation’s biggest cities and industrial centres.

If so, the haze could get worse, as the Arctic goes on warming and the northern latitudes get the extra burden of snow.

“Emissions in China have been decreasing over the last four years, but the severe winter haze is not getting better,” says Yuhang Wang, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech in the US.

“Mostly, that’s because of a very rapid change in the high polar regions where sea ice is decreasing and snowfall is increasing. This perturbation keeps cold air from getting into the eastern parts of China where it would flush out the air pollution.”

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China has taken steps to reduce pollutant haze, and continues to do so. But though the 2013 episode prompted strict emissions reduction targets, the winter haze returned.

Professor Wang and colleagues wondered if other factors were at work. They report, in Science Advances journal, that they worked from satellite data and visibility measurements.

They created their own pollution potential index (PPI) and used anomalies in air temperature gradient and surface wind speeds to answer questions about the movement of air over eastern China, a series of basin formations flanked by mountains to the west and ocean to the east.

“Once we generated the PPI and combined it with the visibility data, it was obvious that January 2013 was well beyond anything that had ever been seen before, going back at least three decades,” says Wang. “But in that month emissions had not changed, so we knew there had to be another factor.”

So then they looked at large-scale factors – sea ice, snowfall, the timetable of the Pacific climate phenomenon known as El Niño and other climate oscillations. They found a correlation between stagnant air conditions over China and the record low sea ice in the Arctic in 2012 plus record snowfall in the higher latitudes of Siberia.

“The reductions in sea ice and increase in snowfall have the effect of damping the climatological pressure ridge structure over China,” Professor Wang says. “That flattens the temperature and pressure gradients and moves the East Asian Winter Monsoon to the east, decreasing wind speeds and creating an atmospheric circulation that makes the air in China more stagnant.”

The same factors were at work in the winter of 2016-17. There were low levels of Arctic sea ice with high snowfall and severe haze. So the message from the research is: expect more of the same.

The stakes are high: Beijing is to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. A repeat of the 2013 winter haze would be much worse than the smog during the 2008 summer Olympic Games in Beijing, because in summer the dust and soot are more likely to be blown away or washed out by rain, the scientists say.

“Despite the efforts to reduce emissions, we think that haze will probably continue for the future. This is partly climate-driven now, so it probably won’t get much better in the winter. Emissions are no longer the only driver of these conditions,” says Professor Wang.

“The very rapid change in polar warming is really having a large impact on China. That gives China an incentive not only to follow through on air pollutant emission reductions, but also to look at the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our research shows that cutting greenhouse gases would help with the winter haze problem.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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The title page called it the “America First” budget. “Our aim is to meet the simple, but crucial demand of our citizens – a Government that puts the needs of its own people first,” said Trump in a foreword addressed to the US Congress.

The budget, which covers the 2018 financial year, is likely to be substantially amended as it goes through Congress.

The State Department section of the budget proposal said the Global Climate Change Initiative (GCCI) would be eliminated. According to its 2016 budget request the GCCI, which was set up by president Barack Obama, directs money to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the diplomatic and scientific branches of the UN’s climate process.

Through the GCCI, the State Department is a major funder of the UNFCCC, providing €6 million (US$6.44m) each year – roughly 20% of its operating budget.

An official told Climate Home the State Department had not provided any funds appropriated in the 2017 financial year to the UNFCCC or IPCC.

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Nick Nuttall, spokesperson for the UNFCCC, said: “We understand that the new US administration today published its first budget proposal. We also understand that approval of such a budget can be a long and complex process and we will follow it with interest.”

The UNFCCC has been deeply unpopular among conservative Republicans, both for its core mission and for its acceptance of the state of Palestine as a full member. The GOP platform for the 2016 election held that payments to the organisation were against a US law that prohibits payments to UN bodies that recognise Palestine.

The GCCI is also a major funder of the Montreal Protocol, which protects the ozone layer from harmful chemicals. It was amended last year to control hydrofluorocarbons, a class of potent greenhouse gases used in air conditioners.

Under the proposed budget, the State Department would also make savings by “eliminating US funding related to the UN’s Green Climate Fund and its two precursor Climate Investment Funds”.

The US has pledged $3bn to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In one of his last acts as president, Barack Obama sent $500m to the fund, but the total released remains just $1bn.

The GCF is the major international instrument for financing climate-related projects in the developing world. If the US fails to deliver the rest of its pledge it will leave a $2bn hole in the fund’s $10bn balance sheet. Developing countries, which are suffering the greatest consequences of climate change but did little to cause it, see this support as a matter of justice.

A spokesperson for the UN secretary-general António Guterres issued a statement in response to the budget in which he said he was ready to hold discussions with the US on how to reform the UN to “create a more cost-effective organisation to pursue our shared goals and values”. But that “abrupt funding cuts can force the adoption of ad hoc measures that will undermine the impact of longer-term reform efforts”.

Guterres said: “The international community is facing enormous global challenges that can only be addressed by a strong and effective multilateral system, of which the United Nations remains the fundamental pillar.”

Report: Republicans file climate resolution as public concern hits 30-year high

Domestically, an estimated $77bn of spending on climate programmes is spread across many government agencies, Bloomberg reported this week. That will make it difficult for the Trump administration to sweep all of it away in this budget.

But the most obvious targets are getting hammered. Trump proposed a 31% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, equivalent to 3,200 jobs in the department.

The administration said it would discontinue funding for Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut carbon emissions from the energy sector. The plan was announced in 2014 and contributed to the striking of an historic bilateral climate agreement between the US and China. The willingness of the world’s two biggest polluters to commit to emissions reductions in turn laid the foundation for international collaboration on the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Reports this week suggested Trump will also sign an executive order that reverses the legislation through which Obama introduced the plan.

The EPA budget said the administration also intends to stop funding climate change research. The US is a key source of climate science and data. Earlier in the year, British scientists said the withdrawal of the US from the field would damage climate science everywhere.

The post Trump budget: US to stop funding UN climate process appeared first on Climate Home News.

Repeated heatwaves broke maximum temperature records, culminating in the epic days of 11-12 February that pushed the mercury beyond 45C in many parts of the state. Devastating fires consumed whole villages and wildlife perished from exposure to the heat.

Analysis of the events by a team from World Weather Attribution and the University of New South Wales found the record average heat could “be linked directly to climate change”.

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The researchers used two different modelling approaches and both returned a similar conclusion.

“We see that average summer temperatures like those seen during 2016-2017 are now at least 50 times more likely in the current climate than in the past, before global warming began,” the researchers said in a document released on Thursday.

High single-day maximums were also found to have been made more likely`. In this case by a factor of 10. Under previous atmospheric conditions, such temperatures would have occurred just once in 500 years. Now they can be expected every 50 years.

“The heat seen this past summer across parts of Australia is still rare in our current climate. However, if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically reduced, intense summer heat will become the norm in the future,” said the scientists.

New South Wales, located in southeastern Australia, reported its hottest summer on record while the northwestern part of Australia reported cooler than average temperatures. (Photo: Australian Bureau of Meteorology)

The earth’s surface has warmed roughly 1C since the industrial revolution began. If the world warms to 2C, which is the upper limit set by the Paris climate agreement, extreme summer heat like this summer will happen every five years.

At a local level, the signal of climate change is more difficult for researchers to pick out. They looked at a heatwave that struck Australia’s capital city of Canberra from 9-11 of February and found that such weather was 50% more likely to have occurred in 2017 than it would have been in the past.

Source: WWA/Climate Central

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Not everyone is convinced, least of all the respected climate economist William Nordhaus, who dimisses the deal as “rhetoric” in a new paper.

The Yale academic – who has explored the implications of climate change since the early 1990s – ran the numbers through his economic model known as DICE and came up with some bleak answers.

“The international target for climate change with a limit of 2C appears to be infeasible with reasonably accessible technologies – and this is the case even with very stringent and unrealistically ambitious abatement strategies,” he writes.

“This is so because of the inertia of the climate system, of rapid projected economic growth in the near term, and of revisions in several elements of the model. A target of 2.5C is technically feasible but would require extreme policy measures.”

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Nearly 200 countries submitted climate plans as part of the Paris deal. Independent analysts reckon their combined emission cuts will only limit warming to 2.7C above pre industrial levels, breaching the global target and likely to lead to faster sea level rise and erratic weather events.

Ramming home the message, Nordhaus says: “notwithstanding what may be called ‘The Rhetoric of Nations,’ there has been little progress in taking strong policy measures.”

European plans to cut emissions 40% on 1990 levels by 2030 are “very modest”, Nordhaus says, despite repeated claims that Brussels is a global green leader.

In the current political climate, he suggests, “the prospects of strong policy measures seem to be dimming”.

Assumptions:
No negative emissions technology till 2050
Per-capita growth 2.1% till 2050
Real return on investment (discount rate) 4.25% to 2100

Nordhaus’ bleak assessment is based on economic growth projections through 2050, which he estimates to be around 2.1% a year, slightly down on the 2.2% witnessed from 1980 to 2015.

The lack of any tough international carbon tax – which he believes is the most effective policy available – means that sustained growth translates to rising emissions.

“The future is highly uncertain for virtually all variables, particularly economic variables such as future emissions, damages, and the social cost of carbon,” he says.

“It might be tempting to conclude that nations should wait until the uncertainties are resolved, or at least until the fog has lifted a little. The present study finds the opposite result.

“When taking uncertainties into account, the strength of policy (as measured by the social cost of carbon or the optimal carbon tax) would increase, not decrease.”

Nordhaus’ calculation of the social cost of carbon (SCC) – an estimate of damages linked to climate change – has risen 50% since his last round of DICE modelling in 2013.

Under Barack Obama, the US government’s SCC is based on three models, one of which is DICE. The central value is US$36 a tonne of CO2, rising to $69 in 2050.

President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is expected to challenge that figure, considering it too high.

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The project, introduced this week in Nairobi, will look at an extreme event that has affected one or both the countries in the recent past and “attribute” a certain percentage of its severity and likelihood to climate change.

The pilot, expected to start by March 2017 once a case study is selected, is the result of a collaboration between institutions of the two countries and the university of Oxford in the UK, which will provide the knowledge to start out. Scientists see this as an important step forward towards the global knowledge of climate dynamics and hope to build a compelling, evidence-based case for better risk preparedness in the continent.

Attribution science uses climate models to simulate how severe certain extreme events would be in a world without climate change, or under a higher concentration of greenhouse gases. “Comparing the two scenarios we can identify whether and to what extent climate change made extreme events more or less likely,” said Friederike Otto, a senior climate scientist at Oxford university who will take part in the project.

“Currently, the scientific community doing attribution is very small and we are a very homogeneous group,” she said. “Most of us are educated somewhere in Europe or the US. We can’t do attribution experiments for Africa very well, because we don’t have the knowledge and expertise of the local meteorology.”

In pictures: the aftermath of Nairobi’s deadly flash floods

Attribution studies have been carried out in America, UK and Asia, but never before in Africa.

Zewdu Eshetu, a climate scientist at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, said that being able to attribute an extreme event to a long term climate change pattern could prompt governments to take action. “In the short term, we will make disaster risk management a crucial part of our development agenda, which will also include climate change.”

Infrastructure development is booming in Ethiopia, with massive investments in roads and dams. One of the biggest projects, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, was financed by the citizens through bonds. But if climate risks aren’t incorporated in the plans, the big plans that people have gambled on won’t deliver the benefits they are hoping for.

“We want to identify disaster risks associated with infrastructure development, for example flooding caused by river dams and road construction,” said Eshetu. “So when designing those developments, we need to think of what will be happening if there is [extreme] rainfall.”

The Ethiopian scientist believes that this pilot project will help incorporate risk management in his country’s ambitious development plans, but the road to success is still long.

Report: Africa flying blind as continent tips into climate crisis

The vast majority of African countries, including Kenya and Ethiopia, do not have the strong climate records needed to run the models.

“That is obviously one of the problems, so that’s why we form a team,” said Kinfe Hailemariam, an officer at the National Meteorological Agency in Ethiopia. “Working with multiple institutions allows the researchers to fill data gaps.”

Most Met offices in the region run weather forecasts and collect a vast body of data, but they don’t use it for scientific purposes. “For example we blended observational data [from weather stations] with 30 years of satellite data” Hailemariam said. “And there is also a wealth of data that we can rescue from paper archives”.

If successful, the attribution pilot will not only help inform infrastructural plans, but will also reinforce the call for better adaptation and long term humanitarian action. “We know that short term solutions are not enough anymore to address the problems faced by the community,” said Suada Ibrahim, a member of Kenya Red Cross. “We are looking at the underlying causes and the drivers of vulnerability in the community”.

The Red Cross team in Kenya has seen drought and floods getting much more severe in recent years. Ibrahim believes that pinpointing the role of climate change in such events will convince policymakers and development professionals that emergencies are the new normal and should be budgeted for. “Seasonal rain has always been present in Nairobi, but it didn’t used to be so bad. Buildings are collapsing, houses are marooned, people are just saying that climate change plays a part in all of this but we don’t have that sort of proof yet,” she said.

Interview: UN weather agency pivots to developing countries in warmer era

Equally, the models might find that climate change was not the primary driver of a particular extreme weather event. In that case, it could shed light on other factors that put communities at risk.

“There are some narratives out there that see all the extreme events being made worse by climate change,” said Otto. In 2014, she and her team looked at drought in Sao Paulo and discovered that climate change played only a minor role in the havoc it caused. “However, we also looked at population increase and water usage, and discovered that the latter had exponentially increased in the past 10 years.”

In Nairobi, the potential effects of climate change are combined with an array of other vulnerabilities. For example, part of the reason why recent floods have been so disastrous is the lack of basic infrastructure in the city’s informal settlements and the poor materials used to build homes.

When climate change turns out not to be the culprit, governments have to take full responsibility for their land management or urban planning, an unpopular message to convey. But the scientists working on the project hope that the benefits will win over governments, development professionals and the public.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post Africa gears up for first-of-a-kind climate impact study appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world is warming, they confirm, because more greenhouse gases are getting into the atmosphere, and the changes in the solar cycle are not a significant factor.

This is not the first such reassurance. Teams of researchers have in the last few years eliminated cosmic radiation as a factor in climate change and confirmed that sunspots, too, can be declared innocent.

But in 2011, with backing from the European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST), scientists set up their own project.

They wanted to better understand the relationship between the cyclically changing patterns of sunlight and variations in climate, against a background of global warming.

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The TOSCA project – which stands for “towards a more complete assessment of the impact of solar variability on the Earth’s climate”− is a co-operation involving solar physics, geomagnetism, climate modelling and atmospheric chemistry.

The scientists went for a global approach, with 61 researchers from many disciplines working together to examine as many aspects as possible that might link variations in the sun’s behaviour with variations in climate. And they have summarised the story-so-far in a new report.

What they identified is solar mechanisms that could alter regional climate, but none that could trigger global warming.

Looking at the possible natural & human causes of #climatechange makes the dominant role of greenhouse gases even more plainly visible. pic.twitter.com/hLtkBcyM5G

— NASA Climate (@NASAClimate) September 20, 2016

They looked on timescales longer than a century, and indeed found that variations in radiation corresponded with variations in climate.

But the effect of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere still provided the most convincing explanation for global warming. And at the end of the exercise, they understood the sun’s role more completely.

Ultraviolet radiation accounts for only 7% of the sun’s energy, but variation in UV radiation does produce changes in the stratosphere from the Equator to the polar regions. Winters in Europe could be milder and wetter, or drier and cooler, depending on the sun’s state.

Formation of aerosols

Solar winds – the rapid-fire of particles from the sun – could affect the formation of aerosols, which in turn would affect rainfall, and this would be useful information for climate modellers.

But, ultimately, the exercise did not change the big picture: the steady trend of global warming − sometimes masked or amplified by natural cycles in the sun’s behaviour − is a consequence of human combustion of fossil fuels.

“Our biggest achievement was changing the way we interacted, by looking at Earth-solar connections as a whole, not individually,” says the study’s leader, Thierry Dudok de Wit, professor of solar-terrestrial physics at the University of Orleans in France.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Don’t blame the solar cycle for global warming appeared first on Climate Home News.

Because green plants will respond to extra carbon dioxide, the water taken up by the roots could be halved.

In effect, the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten the world’s climates could at the same time limit one of the grimmer consequences − more frequent and more prolonged droughts in those places already more at risk.

Scientists in the US have looked again at estimates that 70% of the planet will experience more drought as emissions of greenhouse gases quadruple over the next century, and temperatures soar accordingly.

They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that such calculations do not take into account the extra growing efficiency conferred by the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect.

Drought-stricken areas

Throw that into the mix, and drought-stricken areas fall to 37%. So perhaps climate modellers should get back to the drawing board, and include the response of green things in their simulations.

Abigail Swann, a researcher in atmospheric sciences and biology at the University of Washington, says: “Plants matter. A number of studies assume that plant water needs are constant, when what we know about plants growing in lots of carbon dioxide suggests the opposite. It’s a significant effect.”

The study will be challenged. Science is normally engaged in a continuous argument with itself, and climate scientists keep testing their own assumptions. But there is existing evidence that the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect is indeed significant.

Researchers have more than once measured the effect already, including the effect on forests, and confirmed that drylands are not becoming more arid at the predicted rates.

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That doesn’t mean governments, growers and farmers can afford to be complacent. Prolonged droughts linked to climate change have already been identified in Australia, in the eastern Mediterranean region, and in California. And researchers predict worse to come for the US.

So the latest research is a reminder that climate modellers are working with necessarily incomplete data, and there are many puzzles still to be resolved.

The Washington research suggests that projections that are based only on predictions of future temperatures, humidity and precipitation may have to be reconsidered.

“I had a strong suspicion that you would get a different answer if you considered how the plants were responding,” Dr Swann says.

“In some sense, there’s an easy solution to this problem, which is that we just have to create new metrics that take into account what plants are doing. We already have the information to do that; we just have to be more careful about ensuring that we’re considering the role of plants.”

The latest study confirms that lower rainfall will increase drought across southern North America, southern Europe and northeastern South America.

Extremes of heat

But in central Africa and temperate Asia – and that includes China, the Middle East, East Asia and most of Russia – water conservation by plants could counterbalance the parching due to climate change.

However, that too is a crude calculation. With drought will come greater extremes of heat − potentially lethal extremes in some regions − that could harm plants and devastate crop yields.

So although the more efficient use of water by plants may moderate the impact of drought in some places, others may see wilting cereals, denuded pastures and dying woodlands.

Dr Swann doesn’t think the greenhouse world is necessarily going to be much safer just because the plants will take up less of the available groundwater.

“There’s a lot we don’t know, especially about hot droughts,” she says. “Even if droughts are not more prevalent or more frequent, they may be more deadly when they do happen.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

The post Carbon dioxide eases drought pressure – study appeared first on Climate Home News.

It’s hard to believe that one day all of this green might wither away, but this is a danger as drier seasons and soil erosion due to heavy, erratic rains take their toll.

During my trip across the Kenyan Rift Valley, I see early signs of such a dire outcome, amid the luscious forests and shiny tea plantations that are Kericho’s main source of income.

My guide, Suzanne Jacobs, a PhD student with the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Kenya, explains that climate change is one of the biggest challenges that her research program is trying to address. Many developing countries are not putting adaptation at the top of their priorities, despite being more vulnerable. Not only do they have to battle poverty first, but they also lack the basic infrastructure to ramp up climate action.

Kenya is one such example when it comes to water management in the face of increasing temperatures and erratic rains. Scientists know so little about the country’s water system that they in turn fail to inform local institutions on how better to allocate water when it becomes scarce, or how to prevent the worst impacts of floods.

In order to develop predictive models for the short and long term, and learn to distribute resources more effectively, Kenya needs a monitoring system that simply isn’t there, and would cost a fortune to set up. Jacobs and her team have devised a strategy to make water system monitoring simpler, cheaper, and almost as effective as deploying thousands of high-tech sensors across the country.

The idea is to involve local communities in the daily measurement of water levels, turning smallholder farmers into citizen scientists. They teach people to read gauges installed at key locations, then send the value to a main database by a simple SMS text.

The project is being piloted at 14 sites in the river Sondu catchment, near Kericho, with a view of scaling it up to regional and national level if successful.

“We aim at receiving one text per station every day. This should be enough to build a comprehensive body of data capturing the dynamics of the local water system,” says Jacobs. She explains that the geological features of each place determine what happens to the rain that falls there.

“In some places, the soil will absorb a lot of precipitation through infiltration, the water will be stored in the catchment for a long time before emerging into the main water stream, and travel to Lake Victoria,” she says. “In other places, especially where the soil is depleted by grazing, the water flows straight into the river.” This means that the stream will be much “flashier”, Jacobs tells me, often causing floods.

Understanding the dynamics of a water system is vital both to plan ordinary resource management – who gets water and when – and be prepared in case of extreme events. A simple step such as mapping water levels across a region can make a world of difference, but the process is lengthy, at least at the beginning.

Zacchaeus Kemboi of the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), CIFOR’s partner for the project, is tasked with facilitating communication between researchers and citizens, who often speak little English.

I tag along to one of the training workshop where farmers of the Bomet county get their first introduction to the project, and I receive a warm welcome as well as permission to take photos.

The farmers arrive in small groups at the meeting point, a monitoring station on the Lower Sisei river which consists of a simple gauge installed under a bridge. Even for a visitor exploring the site for the first time, the metal bar says it all: the water level is extremely low, especially given August and September are supposed to be the peak of the rainy season. Kemboi confirms that this season has been particularly dry, perhaps as a consequence of the heavy rains brought about by El Nino last year.

Men and women gather on a patch of grass where Jacobs, the village chair and Kemboi introduce the project and demonstrate how to read the gauge. People seem curious, but later on the researchers explain that involving them is one of the sticking points of the initiative: people may attend the meetings and show interest, sometimes out of politeness, but when it comes to taking action they often aren’t bothered.

The village women, who would be best placed to take part because they are the ones who collect water and wash clothes by the river on a daily basis, are present at the workshop but sit apart and don’t actively participate, leaving it to the men to approach the trainer and ask questions.

Jacobs explains that the cost of each SMS, 1 Kenyan shilling (US$ 0.01) can put people off. “It seems cheap to us, but if you have 100 shillings in your pocket, it’s a significant amount,” she says.
Perhaps the main factor that fuels people’s skepticism is the lack of a tangible, direct benefit. After the workshop, as we drive back to Kericho, Kemboi explains that “what’s in it for me?” was the main question he was asked during the day.

Grasping the importance of long term planning in the face of climate change is a challenge that crosses continents, and in different ways the whole world still struggles to come to grips with it. But some of the citizens who participate in the pilot group have quickly become enthusiastic champions. I meet them at the station on river Sondu, where a series of three gauges tells the same story: this year water is scarce.

As we speak, women trail through the green patch towards the river to collect water or wash clothes, and further downstream others swim. Teresa Adhiambo, chair of the Water Resource Users association, tells me that the group protects the river by planting indigenous trees to strengthen the river banks. They also raise awareness within the community about the need to avoid toxic discharges, and since the monitoring project started a few months ago, about the importance of keeping an eye on water levels.

“We read the gauges and we send the level measurement via phone,” she tells me. “And right now we hope that these messages will help us.” I ask how these texts are going to make a difference for them.

“Our community is located on the lower catchment, so when there is a lot of rain from the upper catchment our homes get flooded and people have to shelter on higher ground.” she explains. A system that provides timely alerts on flood risk would be invaluable: “For us the [positive] impact [of this initiative] is very tangible.”

Zacchary Samoei, the association’s treasurer, also helps monitor levels at the water station. He tells me that over the past few years many springs that used to feed into the river have dried up, “and the environment is changing in many other ways. The rain is becoming scarcer by the year and water-borne diseases – such as typhoid, amoeba, cholera – are on the rise.”

Samoei confirms that a big part of their work consists of raising awareness of the problem among the public. As many villagers in rural areas do not speak English, they act as mediators passing on the knowledge provided by the researchers. But he also concedes that the association represents a tiny minority. Africans, as he puts it, are not easy to convince if they don’t see a direct, material return. “It takes time,” he says, “and you have to convince people step by step by setting an example and showing the benefits of a new idea or method.”

Members of the Water Resources User Association of the river Sondu with researcher Suzanne Jacobs (right)

Citizen science has a long way to go in Kenya. If this pilot takes off, though, it could eventually bypass one of the main hurdles to climate change response in the developing world – the sheer lack of monitoring infrastructure – while helping communities to take control of their future.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN.

The post In pictures: the citizen scientists tracking Kenya’s water woes appeared first on Climate Home News.

By 2050, there could be 9.9 billion people alive on the planet, and the global total is expected to hit 10 bn by 2053, according to the latest calculations by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a private not-for-profit organisation based in the US.

By 2050, the population of Africa will reach 2.5 billion, which was roughly the population of the entire globe at the close of the Second World War in 1945.

The number of people on the two American continents will rise by just 233 million to 1.2bn, and Asia will gain 900 million to reach 5.3bn, but Europe’s population will fall from 740 million to 728 million.

“Despite declines in fertility rates around the world, we expect population gains to remain strong enough to take us toward a global population of 10bn,” says Jeffrey Jordan, president of the PRB.

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“Significant regional differences remain, though. For example, very low birth rates in Europe will mean population declines there, while Africa’s population is expected to double.”

These numbers will soar in a world increasingly challenged by climate change and the potential loss of “natural capital” in the form of natural biodiversity in forests, wetlands and other ecosystems that underwrite or deliver for free a whole range of natural services, from pollination to water management.

Nor are the PRB’s projections the worst. In 2014, UN statisticians looked again at their own projections and warned that human numbers will not stabilise at 9bn by 2100 as hoped. By the end of the century, these could be as low as 9.6bn or as high as 12.3bn.

But the most recent figures leave no room for complacency. Populations in 29 countries, mostly in Africa, are set to double. In Niger, with the world’s highest birthrate, numbers could triple.

“We expect population gains to remain strong enough to take us toward a global population of 10 billion”

In other parts of the world, fertility is falling. For example, Romania’s population could tumble from 20 million to 14 million by 2050.

In the light of such projections, scientists have warned of growing numbers of climate refugees, and have been trying to calculate ways in which harvests could increase to keep pace with human numbers, over decades in which prolonged drought and a greater frequency of heatwaves are expected to hit yields.

Researchers have argued repeatedly that food can be delivered without the destruction of the remaining forests in ways that would intensify climate change.

So the latest data sheet from the PRB simply sets out the indicators so far. A quarter of the population is not yet 15 years old. In the least developed countries, this proportion grows to 41%. In the more developed countries, it stands at 16%.

Demographic changes

One in four Japanese people are older than 65. In Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, this proportion is one in 100. In sub-Saharan Africa, fertility rates are highest, with nearly all countries averaging six children per woman. In Europe, the average is 1.6 children. Some 33 nations in Europe and Asia already have more people aged over 65 than under 15.

So population rates are changing unevenly. Between 1992 and 2013, global annual carbon emissions rose by 60%, to 9.8bn tonnes. The greatest increase from any one country − and the largest total − was in China, which now emits 2.8bn tonnes. Another 43 countries reduced carbon emissions over the same timespan, with the largest reduction being in Ukraine.

Renewable sources, including hydroelectricity, now provide 18% of the world’s energy, and the average number of people per square kilometre of arable land worldwide is 526.

This average masks continuing inequality. In the developed countries, there are 238 people per square kilometre of arable land. In the poorer nations, there are 697.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Shovelled full of coal, the steam locomotive was hauling freight along the world’s first intercity rail route – a major advance in the industrialisation of the globe.

It was around this moment, scientists have discovered, that our own planet began to go off the rails.

Using 2,000 years of paleoclimate data – the earth’s historical temperature measured from natural sources such as the growth bands of corals and trees, ice cores and the amount of pollen trapped in sediment layers – a global team of researchers lead by Australian National University associate professor Nerilie Abram, have pinpointed the moment when the earth’s temperature began to rise because of human greenhouse gas emissions to between 1830 and 1850.

Abram said the findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, were “extraordinary” and had implications for our understanding of the sensitivity of the globe to even tiny increases of carbon in the atmosphere.

A scientist extracts coral cores at Rowley Shoals, west of Broome in Western Australia.
Source: Eric Matson, Australian Institute of Marine Science

Study co-author, Dr Helen McGregor, from the University of Wollongong said: “The early onset of warming detected in this study indicates the earth’s climate did respond in a rapid and measurable way to even the small increase in carbon emissions during the start of the industrial age.”

Abrams said the increase in atmospheric carbon between the onset of warming and the end of the 1800s was “small”, around 15 parts per million. But even this raised the temperature by a few tenths of a degree. The increase since 1900 has been more than 100 parts per million.

Paleoclimate temperature records were most famously analysed in the 1990s by US scientist Michael Mann to produce the “hockey stick” graph, which shocked the world with its dramatic depiction of the rapid recent rise in temperature after a millennia of relative stability.

400ppm: The milestone that puts Earth in the “danger zone”

But these natural almanacs have never so accurately calculated the beginning of human-induced warming.

In a paleoclimatological first, Abram’s study incorporated not only land based sources like tree rings, but measured marine temperatures as well. The scientists found the land of the northern hemisphere and seas of the tropics began warming at roughly the same speed around 1830.

“Seeing that parts of the oceans are a very responsive part of the climate system is a new and very interesting bit of information,” said Abram. Particularly because those oceans contain some of the most climate sensitive ecosystems, coral reefs. The southern hemisphere was around 50 years behind. This was likely the result of cooling currents in the huge southern oceans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5VC98yZCu0

This regional variability also allowed Abram’s team to chart the different stages of “emergence” around the globe. That is the point at which the average temperature has increased so much that it exceeds even extreme natural fluctuations.

“In the tropical oceans and the Arctic in particular, 180 years of warming has already caused the average climate to emerge above the range of variability that was normal in the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” said Abram. The Antarctic, however, remains stubbornly un-warmed to this day.

Because of the huge technological leaps and enormous new wealth that drove projects like the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, early industrial emissions were dominated by the United Kingdom.

According to the World Resource Institute, by 1850 the furnaces of the British industrial revolution had belched 122.6 million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This cumulative total was twice as much as the rest of the world combined had emitted to that point – most of it coming from Britain’s great rivals, France, the US and Germany. Today, Britain emits around 500 million tonnes every single year.

The findings shift our understanding of exactly what is normal, because instrumental records of the global temperature only reliably go back as far as 1880.

Using that baseline, Nasa has determined that the first six months of 2016 were 1.3C warmer than normal. But Abram says the world had already warmed a few tenths of a degree by 1880, pushing the world beyond the 1.5C limit already.

“That’s important for conversations that we are having at the moment about trying to limit warming to 1.5C. We are getting scarily close to that already, but that’s when we are talking about the baseline being in the 1880s-1900. So we don’t yet have the full picture,” she said.

The post Climate change now has a start date appeared first on Climate Home News.

Half of the reef’s coral has disappeared in the past three decades due to a combination of warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, invasive starfish and agricultural runoff.

A survey published this week in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism found 69% of tourists had been driven by a sense of urgency to see Australia’s coral icon while there was still time.

This year, the reef has experienced its worst bleaching event on record. A huge underwater heatwave, which has killed off coral across the globe, has affected 93% of the reefs along the 2,300km wonder. In the northern and central sections, almost half the coral has been bleached so intensely and for so long that it will not recover.

“Our research suggests that the ailing health of the Great Barrier Reef has in fact given tourists a new reason to visit, albeit one that doesn’t exactly promise a long-term future,” authors Annah Piggott-McKellar and Dr Karen McNamara of the University of Queensland wrote in the Conversation.

Healthy coral on Wilson Reef in the Great Barrier Reef marine park. Photo: XL Catlin Seaview Survey/Underwater Earth

It is a poignant example of the times we live in. Reef visitors were asked to choose between 15 reasons for their trip.

“To see the reef before it is gone” was the forth strongest motivator, after “to discover new places and things”, “to rest and relax; and “to get away from the demands of everyday life”.

Corbin Forest, a Texan student who visited the reef in June while studying in Australia, said he had never heard of bleaching specifically but was aware the reef was in danger.

“I had just heard for years that “it’ll be gone [sometime this century]”, “it’s being polluted”, “tourism is killing it”. So I figured I needed to make sure I saw it before it disappeared in case any of that ended up being true,” said Forest.

https://twitter.com/CorbinForest/status/752551753388691456

Forest took a snorkelling tour on Green Island, a popular dive spot near Cairns. In April, a survey found that a third of the corals there had been bleached, but few had yet died.

“I was not aware of any type of bleaching and am not sure what it is entirely so I wasn’t looking for it, but if it means the different colours of the coral disappear, I can see that being an occurrence there. Much of the reef looked a greyish-brown colour, unlike what I was expecting,” said Forest.

The most recent major assessment of reef health found that unless radical cuts are made to global carbon emissions, ocean conditions would become so warm that bleaching will occur on the reef every year by the middle of the century. Reef scientists believe that this would be the end of the ecosystem.

This has lead some tour operators, including Australia’s national airline Qantas, to use “last-chance tourism” as a marketing tool. Time Magazine listed the reef as one of ten “amazing places to visit before they vanish”.

Great Barrier Reef tourism is an industry worth $5.4bn per year and 60,000 people have jobs that rely on the reef’s ongoing health.

Source: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority

Reef tour operators have reacted vociferously to media coverage of the bleaching event, which they deem to be damaging to their business prospects.

One business leader has called it a “great white lie”. Earlier this year, the Australian government and Unesco were left red-faced when it was discovered they had removed the Great Barrier Reef from a scientific report on the threat climate change posed to world heritage sites. The Australian government explained that it had been concerned about negative impacts on tourism.

But it may be that in the short term, the threat has played a role in a mini-tourism boom. The UQ survey was conducted in 2015, before the bleaching event had struck. That year saw record number of tourists visit the reef (although the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority notes that there a many factors that affect numbers).

“This raises another question,” said Piggott-McKellar and McNamara. “Is there a threshold beyond which the Great Barrier Reef is seen as “too far gone” to visit? If so, might future more frequent or severe bleaching episodes take us past that threshold?”

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Now, US scientists have developed an artificial leaf that could produce a climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuels.

It solves some tough energy and environmental challenges, according to a study published in the journal Science.

“We burn so many different kinds of hydrocarbons – like coal, oil or gasoline – that finding an economical way to make chemical fuels more reusable with the help of sunlight might have a big impact,” said physicist and co-author Peter Zapol.

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Lab tests at the University of Illinois at Chicago showed how the reaction could work. Analysis carried out with the Department of Energy’s Argonne Laboratory suggested it has wider potential.

The crucial step is to turn carbon dioxide into the more reactive carbon monoxide. “On its own, it is quite difficult to convert carbon dioxide into something else,” said chemist Larry Curtiss.

This kit mimics the processes used by plants to turn CO2 into usable energy (Pic: University of Illinois at Chicago)

Researchers needed to find a catalyst to mimic the role of enzymes that naturally occur in plants. They found metal compound tungsten diselenide, made into tiny flakes to maximise the surface area, did the job.

The resulting carbon monoxide can be made into fuels like methanol using methods that have already been proven.

Zapol explained: “Making fuel from carbon monoxide means travelling ‘downhill’ energetically, while trying to create it directly from carbon dioxide means needing to go ‘uphill’.”

UN: climate-friendly flying could cost $60 billion a year

Importantly, the process involves minimal energy loss.

“The less efficient a reaction is, the higher the energy cost to recycle carbon dioxide, so having an efficient reaction is crucial,” Zapol said.

The catalyst is also relatively durable, the paper revealed, lasting for more than 100 hours.

If it proves viable on a larger scale, this breakthrough could add a valuable tool to the low carbon toolkit.

While renewable electricity is increasingly mainstream, other sectors have been slower to shift away from polluting energy sources.

Transport, for example, still largely runs on oil. Synthetic fuels are potentially a cleaner option.

The post The artificial leaves that turn CO2 and sunshine into fuel appeared first on Climate Home News.

For example, studies suggest a prolonged drought hit crop yields and heightened tensions in Syria, contributing to the ongoing civil war.

Statistical analysis published in journal PNAS on Monday shows a wider relationship: 9% of armed conflicts over 1980-2010 coincided with climate-related disasters.

It’s a figure that rises to 23% in countries with deep ethnic divides.

UN peacekeepers on patrol in the Congo – war has raged since 1997 (Pic: Sylvain Liechti/UN photos)

“We’ve been surprised by the extent that results for ethnic fractionalized countries stick out compared to other country features such as conflict history, poverty, or inequality,” said co-author Jonathan Donges of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

“We think that ethnic divides may serve as a predetermined conflict line when additional stressors like natural disasters kick in, making multi-ethnic countries particularly vulnerable to the effect of such disasters.”

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War gaming the climate: How global warming could trigger nationalism
Report: Global warming raises tensions in Boko Haram region

It rings alarm bells for conflict-prone regions like central Asia, northern and central Africa, where ethnic identities are deep-seated and climate change is bringing fresh threats.

Nearly two thirds of civil wars since 1946 have been fought along ethnic lines.

A few failed harvests or destructive floods can strain relations between racial, tribal or religious rivals.

Climate change heightens the risk of violent conflict, say experts (Pic: Flickr/DVIDSHUB)

It may be that one group dominates the political system and hogs relief funds. Perhaps communities that traditionally herd animals are harder hit than crop farmers, or vice versa.

“There is no simple cause and effect chain,” lead author Carl Schleussner told Climate Home, but natural disasters may “enhance the risk”.

More research is needed to establish how this broad trend is reflected in individual conflicts, he added.

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This is ultimately bad news for human food security because biological diversity underwrites what naturalists call the resilient ecosystem services on which humans and all higher animals depend – crop pollination and pest control, nutrient decomposition and recycling, water and air purification − and because that 58% of the terrestrial planet is home to 71% of all humans,

That humans are reducing biodiversity − and at a cost to the disturbed ecosystems − is not news. Separate research teams have repeatedly warned of the dangers of extinction of species.

But Tim Newbold, a bioscience research associate at University College London, and colleagues report in Science journal that instead of drawing conclusions from one or a series of studies, they looked at the biggest picture available.

The research, which is part of a British partnership study called PREDICTS, analysed 2.38 million records made by other scientists of 39,123 species at 18,659 places.

The embrace of their research included bats in urban Australia, grasshoppers in Greece, spiny water fleas in Wisconsin, US − anywhere that plants or animals interacted or depended on each other.

“Decision-makers worry a lot about economic recessions, but an ecological recession could have even worse consequences”

On average, the local abundance of each species had fallen to 85% of the value that would have been expected in undisturbed habitat. The “safe level” of disturbance has been set at 90%.

The study focused on land-use change and its impact. Although climate change is likely to create even greater pressures on global ecosystems, the researchers were concerned to measure what humans had already done to the woodlands, swamps, savannahs and forests around their farms and cities.

“It’s the first time we’ve quantified the effect of habitat loss on biodiversity globally in such detail, and we’ve found that, across most of the world, biodiversity loss is no longer within the safe limits suggested by ecologists,” Dr Newbold says.

“We know biodiversity loss affects ecosystem function, but how it does this is not entirely clear. What we do know is that, in many parts of the world, we are approaching a situation where human intervention might be needed to sustain ecosystem function.”

Real-world observations

Over the decades, in both laboratory experiments and in real-world observations, naturalists have confirmed that as the diversity of living things in a forest or a field or grassland is reduced, so is the ecosystem’s resilience − its capacity to go on supporting life and turning sunlight, air and water into green growth to nourish all other creatures.

And the greatest changes have happened in the last century or so as human numbers, and human economic exploitation, have soared.

“It’s worrying that land use has already pushed biodiversity below the level proposed as a safe limit,” said Andy Purvis, life sciences research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, and leader of the PREDICTS team.

“Decision-makers worry a lot about economic recessions, but an ecological recession could have even worse consequences – and the biodiversity damage we’ve had means we are at risk of that happening. Until and unless we can bring biodiversity back up, we’re playing ecological roulette.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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Storms such as the super-typhoon Nepartak that scoured Taiwan earlier this month with winds of 150 miles per hour and then flooded parts of China, are expected to grow even fiercer as the planet warms. That trend is not clear yet, but scientists in the US say it soon will be.

Ironically, one of the main reasons why these storms will gain in power is the effort in many countries to reduce air pollution. Damaging as it is in stunting and shortening lives, the one arguable benefit of filthy air is its ability to dampen the effects of greenhouse gases (GHGs) on cyclones and their like.

Over the last century, tiny airborne particles called aerosols, which cool the climate by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, have largely cancelled out the effects of GHG emissions on tropical storm intensity, according to a new scientific review paper published in Science journal.

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Many aerosols are emitted by the burning of fossil fuels and wood, and cause lung damage, also adding to acid rain and smog. Industry, transport and power plants in more and more countries have introduced filters and scrubbers to reduce their impact, and atmospheric levels of aerosols from human causes have begun to decline. But GHG concentrations continue to rise.

The authors of the Science journal report provide new calculations on the cancelling effects of aerosols and GHGs on tropical cyclones.

“The fact that global warming’s fingerprints don’t yet jump out at us when we look at hurricanes isn’t surprising – it’s what current science tells us we should expect,” says lead author Adam Sobel, professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and School of Engineering.

“The same science tells us that those fingerprints will show up eventually in more ultra-powerful storms.”

They examined a wide range of published analyses of tropical cyclone data and computer modelling, looking specifically at potential intensity, which predicts the maximum intensity the storms could reach in a given environment.

Their new calculations of the cancelling effect follow a 2015 study on hurricanes, led by Lamont’s Mingfang Ting, with fellow research professor Suzana Camargo, also a co-author of the new paper. It showed similar effects over the North Atlantic, where hurricanes that make landfall in the US form.

“The science tells us that [global warming’s] fingerprints will show up eventually in more ultra-powerful storms”

Many factors determine the intensity of a tropical storm such as the notorious Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Its convective strength – the boiling motion of air rising from the ocean surface to the atmosphere – depends on the temperature difference between the surface ocean and the upper atmosphere.

Computer models that simulate the physics of tropical cyclones suggest that this difference should increase as the climate and sea surface temperatures warm, and that storm strength should increase with it.

But something that is less well understood is how climate change should influence the number of cyclones that form each year. Computer models show that, while the total number should decline in a warming climate, more intense, highly destructive storms such as Nepartak are likely to become more common.

The scientists say the largest increases in tropical cyclone potential intensity are expected to be at the margins of the tropics, particularly in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The amount of rain that tropical storms bring is also expected to increase as the planet warms, because of increasing water vapour. And coastal flooding from storm surges that accompany tropical storms is expected to become more of a problem as sea levels rise.

Response to warming

The scientists also describe a shift in tropical cyclone tracks towards the tropics’ outer edges, although it is unclear whether the shift is a response to warming. Simulations for the western North Pacific suggest that it is, at least in part.

Two factors make it hard to detect GHG-related trends in tropical cyclone intensity, the authors say. One is the influence of aerosols, which models show have about twice the effect of GHGs on a tropical cyclone’s potential intensity.

So while GHG levels have been greater than aerosol levels for many decades in terms of absolute magnitude, they have only recently overtaken the cooling effect of aerosols in terms of their influence on storm intensity.

The other challenge is natural variability. Tropical cyclones are relatively rare, averaging around 90 a year, and that number fluctuates annually and from decade to decade − largely because of natural causes. It is statistically difficult to detect long-term trends within that large natural variability.

Scientists at Lamont are developing a tropical cyclone risk model that can be used in urban planning, which incorporates climate factors in determining the probability of a tropical cyclone making landfall at a given location.

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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Peat bogs – massive stores of atmospheric carbon, held in partly-decomposed fibrous plant material – could catch fire and smoulder below the surface as they dry out in a regime of global warming.

It was dried peatlands that fuelled a blaze in Slave Lake, Alberta, in 2011, and the devastating forest fires around Fort McMurray this year also ignited peatland alongside the only highway of rescue or escape.

And the scientists warn in Scientific Reports journal that the mining or “quarrying” of peat for horticulture, agriculture and drainage, along with climate change, has made a growing number of the world’s peat bogs increasingly vulnerable to fire.

Such fires are dangerous. Smoke from one is estimated to have killed 3,000 people in 2010 in Moscow, while peat fires in southeast Asia in 2015 released at least 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to accelerate global warming still further.

“The key is to keep peat wet and get that moss growing on the surface again”

Peatlands cover at most only 3% of the planet, but they store a quarter or perhaps even a third of the world’s soil carbon. So climate scientists are not worried just about forest fires, but also about the other slow-burning hazard buried beneath many of the northern forests.

Black spruce in Canada has colonised peatlands, and the growth of timber above has dried what would normally have been a shield of moist moss, and has lifted water from the peat-rich soil to create fire hazard both above and below ground.

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“You end up with a landscape with a lot more fuel than you would have had”, says Mike Waddington, professor of ecohydrology in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

The answer is to manage the forests, and channel water back into the peat bogs. Waddington, one of the authors of the reports, explains: “The key is to keep peat wet and get that moss growing on the surface again.

“Our research shows very conclusively that if you can re-wet the system and get the key peat mosses growing on the surface, you can essentially put a cap on the system and limit burning, or resist fire completely.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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Yet scars of long dried up river basins on the surface suggest it was once much denser and, scientists believe, mostly made up of carbon dioxide.

Understanding what happened to that CO2 could help tackle the greenhouse gas here on Earth, according to researchers from Glasgow University.

“Our theory is it has been brought down into carbonate rocks,” explained head of geography Martin Lee, at the Royal Society’s Summer Exhibition in London.

“When you look at meteorites from Mars you find these crystals in the rock.”

Colour coded image of Osuga Valles shows rivers used to flow on Mars (Pic: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin)

He held up a small chunk of clear calcite crystal. Weighing 45g, it held equivalent carbon to the emissions from a car driving 110 metres, he said.

While cutting emissions is the priority to curb global warming, many climate projections involve removing CO2 from the air to stabilise temperatures.

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Water and carbon dioxide react with certain minerals to form stable carbonates. This happens naturally over hundreds of thousands of years, but can be artificially accelerated.

A pilot project in Iceland showed results within months, pumping emissions from a geothermal plant underground to form rock.

Another trial in the Netherlands involved grinding up olivine, a greenish mineral, and using it to “fertilise” the ocean so it absorbed more carbon.

Researcher Adrienne Macartney shows a piece of olivine, a mineral that can react with carbon dioxide to remove it from the air

It is not yet clear how such interference with geological processes could affect ecosystems, said doctoral researcher Adrienne Macartney.

Seeing how the reactions played out on Mars could help to predict the impact of using these techniques to absorb and store carbon, with potentially significant implications for the climate.

“Because the geoengineering is very new, we can apply some of the lessons from Mars,” she said.

“It is quite shocking how little the two communities have talked about this. When I start dialogues with carbon capture and storage companies, they are also quite surprised that Mars research is so relevant.”

The post Red planet: What Mars can teach us about geoengineering appeared first on Climate Home News.

That approach is reaching its limits, farmers heard at a Royal Society event on Friday.

The future of agriculture is all about ultra-lightweight robots, satellite data and laser weed killers – and it could be far more energy efficient.

Simon Blackmore, professor at Harper Adams University, UK estimates 90% of energy used in cultivation is needed to repair the damage done by huge machines.

Giant tractors compact the earth, squeezing out spaces for air and water, increasing flood risk and reducing productivity. The traditional solution is to plough the field.

“The best thing to do with soil is to leave it alone,” says Blackmore: “Let the worms do their work.”

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At the National Centre for Precision Farming, his research team is developing robot prototypes that exert far less pressure.

Instead of spraying entire fields with herbicide, drones can apply microdots directly onto the weed, reducing the volume needed by 99.99%. A 5W laser can zap unwanted plants.

When it comes to harvest, robots could select only the ripe crops and avoid waste. At present, 20-60% of harvested crops are thrown away because they don’t meet supermarket standards.

These technologies are some way off widespread commercial use, but Blackmore is convinced that environmental and competitive pressures will drive demand.

“Tractor manufacturers aren’t interested [in robotics] because it’s too disruptive. There will be agricultural robots, but whether they will be in two years’ time or twenty years’ time we will have to wait and see.”

Report: No hiding for polluters as carbon-tracking satellite numbers rise

Meanwhile, increasingly high resolution satellite data is already helping farmers to be more selective about where they spray.

Photos from space show how moist and nutrient-rich different parts of a field are, explained Barbara Ryan, director of the Geneva-based Group on Earth Observations.

“With those images, farmers are now able to differentiate their applications of pesticides or nutrients. If you can use lower quantities, you are spending less money and get the same kind of return.”

Responsible for around 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2012, agriculture takes a back seat to energy in the climate debate.

Since governments signed up to ambitious international goals to curb global warming in Paris, all sectors will come under more scrutiny.

As the number of mouths to feed grows, sustainable intensification is the name of the game.

Blackmore has not calculated the potential emissions savings from his automated vision of the future, but the idea is to slash waste.

“Crop production has to become a lot more flexible and efficient,” he said.

The post Can robots cut farming’s carbon footprint? appeared first on Climate Home News.

That was the remarkably upbeat conclusion of a study by researchers from 10 institutions, published in the journal GCB Bioenergy this week.

It addresses concerns raised by some campaigners that the world’s poor could suffer from a dash to bioenergy to meet climate goals.

“We all started with conventional wisdom that there must be some negative impacts,” lead author Keith Kline of Oak Ridge National Laboratory told Climate Home.

When they looked at data, however, researchers found a different story.

“Investment in biofuels seems to be promoting improvements in the way people are managing land. There seem to be a lot of positive benefits of bringing biofuels into these sectors.”

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The paper, part funded by the US Department of Energy, focuses on the biggest sources of bioethanol, used as transport fuel: sugarcane in Brazil and maize in the US.

Biofuel expansion was widely blamed for food price spikes in 2007-08 – not least by the World Bank and Food and Agricultural Organization.

Kline and his colleagues dispute that narrative, citing other studies that point to oil prices, trade policies and speculation as bigger factors.

Global biofuel consumption – chart by Kline et al based on data from US Energy Information Administration and REN21

Food prices did not continue to correlate with growing energy cropping, they note.

In 2012, the US suffered its worst drought since the 1950s, hitting maize yields. Farmers responded by reducing bioethanol production, cushioning the impact on food prices.

Report: Activists row over bioenergy role in meeting 1.5C climate target

Ramping up supplies of plant-based energy to replace fossil fuels will not necessarily require significantly more land, Kline contends.

“All the land that is in production now could be producing a lot more biomass. What we need are markets for the biomass to make that happen.”

Tim Searchinger, academic at Princeton University and senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, expressed doubts.

“If that happens, fine, but it has not happened yet and is very unlikely to happen, particularly at any meaningful scale,” he said.

Something of a crusader against bioenergy, Searchinger told Climate Home he saw “virtually no new analysis” in the paper.

Report: Bioenergy “incompatible” with sustainable food production – study

The debate got heated on the sidelines of climate talks in Bonn last month, when ActionAid warned against the use of bioenergy to meet the ambitious target of holding global warming to 1.5C.

Scientist Bill Hare cried “bullshit” and accused the charity of exaggerating the risks.

Kelly Stone, a policy analyst for the charity, told Climate Home she was “not reassured or persuaded” by Kline’s paper.

“Land is a limited resource, and any increases in efficiencies and yields will not come at a scale that leaves us with large amounts of land for biofuels,” she said.

“Investments driven by commodity crops don’t support food security. Instead, they support a broken agriculture model that is heavily reliant on expensive fertilizers that are bad for the environment.”

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Is the fabric of ancient Greek temples or the Egyptian pyramids in danger from increases in temperatures or sudden rain deluges? Will world heritage sites such as Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or the Great Wall of China survive in a rapidly warming world?

Researchers from the University of Lincoln in the UK and the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland have come up with a simple, inexpensive and easily-maintained tool that they hope will show clearly just how historic monuments will react to changes in climate.

Five 50mm stone cubes are attached to a stainless steel bedding plate. Each cube is different: Portland limestone, and Peakmoor sandstone, both from the UK, and two consisting of manufactured substances − one poured concrete, the other brick.

Climate records

The fifth stone cube is site-specific, consisting of the same stone as that of the monument where the row of stones and its bedding plate – called the Legacy Tool Indicator (LegIT) – is located.

Over various periods, the stones will be taken off their mounts and analysed and measured. This will be carried out in tandem with an examination of climate records from each site where the LegIT tool is placed.

“The LegIT will illustrate actual weathering as it occurs on heritage sites,” says Cathy Daly, lecturer in conservation at the University of Lincoln and the author of the report on the stone monitoring device.

“The hope is that it will indeed be a legacy − a resource for conservators and heritage managers of the future”

“Relating this data to long-term climate records will enable an understanding of the influence of climate change on deterioration processes.”

The aim is to continue this monitoring process for an extended period – up to 100 years – passing on data from one generation of researchers to the next.

Researchers say that such a project is cheap to run – an important factor for often cash-strapped heritage sites, so that funds do not have to be spent on investing in and maintaining computerised equipment.

Analysis will be made of how any build-up of salt in the atmosphere affects the stones, how chemicals eat away at surfaces, and how microbiological activity such as the growth of fungi, algae and lichens – influenced by changes in climate – can damage the composition of buildings.

Daly says these are all factors causing concern at heritage sites in western Europe as the climate changes.

The LegIT has already been installed at five national monuments in Ireland. The megalithic World Heritage site of Brú na Bóinne in County Meath and the monastery of Clonmacnoise in County Offaly are both rural, while the archaeological site of the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary is semi-urban, and Dublin Castle is urban.

Teething problems

The second World Heritage site chosen is Skellig Michael, a rocky outcrop off the southwest coast of Ireland that in ancient times was the site of a monastic settlement, but has been uninhabited since the late 12th century.

The first stones were put in place in 2011, and the project has had some teething problems. One of the cubes was stolen, and some stones started to crack. But the researchers remain optimistic.

“By the end of 2016, one full set of exposure measurements will be completed and it will be possible to make some early assessments on the success of this pilot study,” Daly says.

“The hope is that the LegIT will indeed be a legacy − a resource for conservators and heritage managers of the future wishing to understand in real terms how climate change is affecting the sites and monuments in their care.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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