Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition. (more…)
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Ice Shelves Disappearing on Antarctic Peninsula
This image shows ice-front retreat in part of the southern Antarctic Peninsula from 1947 to 2009. USGS scientists are studying coastal and glacier change along the entire Antarctic coastline. The southern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula is one area studied as part of this project. (U.S. Geological Survey)
Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide.
Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.
The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.
“This research is part of a larger ongoing USGS project that is for the first time studying the entire Antarctic coastline in detail, and this is important because the Antarctic ice sheet contains 91 percent of Earth’s glacier ice,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming. We need to be alert and continually understand and observe how our climate system is changing.” (more…)
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Geoengineering Solutions to Environmental Problems Could Miss Mark
Arizona State University engineering professor Brad Allenby.
The adage says that to discover the right solutions to a problem you first have to ask the right questions.
As Arizona State University engineering professor Brad Allenby sees it, our search for technological solutions to large-scale environmental problems sometimes gets off on the wrong track largely because we’re posing the wrong questions.
Particularly in the debates about how to respond to atmospheric greenhouse gas buildup, climate change and humankind’s impact on the global environment, Allenby says, “We are often framing the discussion from narrow and overly simplistic perspectives, but what we are dealing with are systems that are highly complex. As a result, the policy solutions we come up with don’t match the challenges we are trying to respond to.”
Allenby will offer his recommendations for reframing the approach to such challenges in his Feb. 19 presentation, “Technological Change and Earth Systems: A Critique of Geoengineering,” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Allenby is a professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, a part of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. (more…)
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Ocean Geoengineering Scheme No Easy Fix for Global Warming
This map displays simulated additional surface warming (in Celsius) for the year 2100 caused by the temporary use of artificial upwelling in the green areas for the time period 2011-2060. (IFM-GEOMAR)
Pumping nutrient-rich water up from the deep ocean to boost algal growth in sunlit surface waters and draw carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere has been touted as a way of ameliorating global warming. However, a new study led by Professor Andreas Oschlies of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany, pours cold water on the idea.
“Computer simulations show that climatic benefits of the proposed geo-engineering scheme would be modest, with the potential to exacerbate global warming should it fail,” said study co-author Dr Andrew Yool of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS).
If international governmental policies fail to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to levels needed to keep the impacts of human-induced climate change within acceptable limits it may necessary to move to ‘Plan B’. This could involve the implementation of one or more large-scale geo-engineering schemes proposed for reducing the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere. (more…)
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Geoengineering and the Carbon Cycle Before Humans
Geoengineering — deliberate manipulation of the Earth’s climate to slow or reverse global warming — has gained a foothold in the climate change discussion. But before effective action can be taken, the Earth’s natural biogeochemical cycles must be better understood.
Two Northwestern University studies, both published online recently by Nature Geoscience, contribute new — and related — clues as to what drove large-scale changes to the carbon cycle nearly 100 million years ago. Both research teams conclude that a massive amount of volcanic activity introduced carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere, which in turn had a significant impact on the carbon cycle, oxygen levels in the oceans and marine plants and animals.
Both teams studied organic carbon-rich sediments from the Western Interior Seaway, an ancient seabed stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, to learn more about a devastating event 94.5 million years ago when oxygen levels in the oceans dropped so low that one-third of marine life died.
The authors of the first paper, titled “Volcanic triggering of a biogeochemical cascade during Oceanic Anoxic Event 2,” reveal that before oxygen levels dropped so precipitously there was a massive increase in oceanic sulfate levels. Their conclusion is based on analyses of the stable isotopes of sulfur in sedimentary minerals from the central basin of the Western Interior Seaway, located in Colorado. (more…)
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Climate Change Will Lead to Fewer Traffic Accidents in UK
Anna Andersson at the Department of Earth Sciences Centre, Physical Geography, University of Gothenburg. (Credit: Gothenburg University)
Climate change will lead to fewer traffic accidents in West Midlands, UK. Research from the University of Gothenburg estimates climate change to decrease the number of days with temperatures below zero degrees in West Midlands. It will also reduce the number of traffic accidents – and the need for winter road maintenance may decrease by almost 40 percent.
A study lead by Anna Andersson explores the link between winter road conditions and traffic accidents in Sweden and in West Midlands, UK. Andersson considers four different types of slipperiness, from snowy and icy roads to above-zero temperatures with slippery ice patches, and how climate change may affect these conditions in the next 90 years.
Andersson concludes that by the 2080s, West Midlands will have an average of 28 frosty days per year compared to today’s 69. Theoretically, this will reduce the number of traffic accidents by 43%. It may also lead to a decrease in the need for winter road maintenance by 38%.
However, the total number of accidents is not determined entirely by the number of below-zero days per year, since the road conditions are in fact the most dangerous at temperatures close to zero.
‘Roads can still be dangerous when the temperature rises above zero. When we don’t think it’s slippery, and even the thermometer tells us it’s not slippery, we tend to drive as if it were summer roads. But temperatures around zero often lead to slippery spots, increasing the risk for accidents’, says Andersson, at the Department of Earth Sciences.
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Team Finds Subtropical Waters Flushing Through Greenland Fjord
Fiamma Straneo from the physical oceanography department at Woods Hole Oceaonographic Institution, at work on the deck of the Arctic Sunrise. (© Greenpeace/ Nick Cobbing)
Waters from warmer latitudes — or subtropical waters — are reaching Greenland’s glaciers, driving melting and likely triggering an acceleration of ice loss, reports a team of researchers led by Fiamma Straneo, a physical oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
“This is the first time we’ve seen waters this warm in any of the fjords in Greenland,” says Straneo. “The subtropical waters are flowing through the fjord very quickly, so they can transport heat and drive melting at the end of the glacier.”
Greenland’s ice sheet, which is two-miles thick and covers an area about the size of Mexico, has lost mass at an accelerated rate over the last decade. The ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise during that time frame doubled due to increased melting and, to a greater extent, the widespread acceleration of outlet glaciers around Greenland.
While melting due to warming air temperatures is a known event, scientists are just beginning to learn more about the ocean’s impact — in particular, the influence of currents — on the ice sheet.
“Among the mechanisms that we suspected might be triggering this acceleration are recent changes in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which are delivering larger amounts of subtropical waters to the high latitudes,” says Straneo. But a lack of observations and measurements from Greenland’s glaciers prior to the acceleration made it difficult to confirm. (more…)
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Chemists Create Synthetic ‘Gene-Like’ Crystals for Carbon Dioxide Capture
UCLA chemists Omar M. Yaghi and Hexiang Deng led a team that created three-dimensional synthetic DNA-like crystals that have a sequence of information which is believed to code for carbon capture. The discovery, published in the journal Science, could result in a new way to capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions and could lead to cleaner energy. (CNSI, UCLA–Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics)
UCLA chemists report creating a synthetic “gene” that could capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of oceans.
The research appears in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science.
“We created three-dimensional, synthetic DNA-like crystals,” said UCLA chemistry and biochemistry professor Omar M. Yaghi, who is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA and the UCLA–Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics. “We have taken organic and inorganic units and combined them into a synthetic crystal which codes information in a DNA-like manner. It is by no means as sophisticated as DNA, but it is certainly new in chemistry and materials science.”
The discovery could lead to cleaner energy, including technology that factories and cars can use to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.
“What we think this will be important for is potentially getting to a viable carbon dioxide–capture material with ultra-high selectivity,” said Yaghi, who holds UCLA’s Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Physical Sciences and is director of UCLA’s Center for Reticular Chemistry. “I am optimistic that is within our reach. Potentially, we could create a material that can convert carbon dioxide into a fuel, or a material that can separate carbon dioxide with greater efficiency.” (more…)
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Researchers Propose Rethinking Renewable Energy Strategy
Mechanical engineering professor Joshua Pearce. (Courtesy Queen's University /Tyler Ball)
Researchers at Queen’s University suggest that policy makers examine greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions implications for energy infrastructure as fossil fuel sources must be rapidly replaced by windmills, solar panels and other sources of renewable energy.
Their recommendations could be used to help policy makers restructure renewable energy production in a way that will optimize greenhouse gas emission reductions.
“The energy industry is expanding so rapidly that the dynamic nature of greenhouse gas emissions could pass a tipping point in the climate system if we’re not careful,” says Mechanical and Materials Engineering Professor Joshua Pearce, lead researcher on the study.
Pearce, Colin Law and Renee Kenny propose using dynamic life-cycle analyses for determining carbon-neutral growth rates that will not dramatically increase the level of GHG emissions as the energy industry expands.
This means, for example, weighing the benefits of dramatically increasing wind power against the increase in GHG emissions when the materials used to build the windmill are mined and when it is manufactured – not just after it’s been erected.
It also means decreasing production in some of the most polluted areas of the world, including China. (more…)
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Radical New Directions Needed in Food Production to Deal with Climate Change
Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Yields from some of the most important crops begin to decline sharply when average temperatures exceed about 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 Fahrenheit. Projections are that by the end of this century much of the tropics and subtropics will regularly see growing season temperatures above that level, hotter than the hottest summers now on record.
An international panel of scientists writing in the Feb. 12 edition of the journal Science is urging world leaders to dramatically alter their notions about sustainable agriculture to prevent a major starvation catastrophe by the end of this century among the more than 3 billion people who live relatively close to the equator.
Specifically they urge world leaders to “get beyond popular biases against the use of agricultural biotechnology,” particularly crops genetically modified to produce greater yields in harsher conditions, and to base the regulations of such crops on the best available science.
“You’re looking at a 20 percent to 30 percent decline in production yields in the next 50 years for major crops between the latitudes of southern California or southern Europe to South Africa,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.
He is a coauthor of a Perspectives article in Science that urges food production experts, scientists and world leaders to begin thinking in dramatically different ways to meet food needs in a significantly warmer world. Lead author is Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (more…)
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Alternative Futures of a Warming World
Lead author Richard Moss, a scientist with the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
An international team of climate scientists will take a new approach to modeling the Earth’s climate future, according to a paper in 11 February Nature. The next set of models will include, for the first time, tightly linked analyses of greenhouse gas emissions, projections of the Earth’s climate, impacts of climate change, and human decision-making.
This approach will influence the next international scientific assessment undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It will provide the framework for thousands of individual scientific studies on climate impacts and adaptation, climate modeling, and changes in the way societies generate and use energy.
“This is an open-ended approach that enables us to compare the environmental and socio-economic effects of different potential responses to climate change,” said lead author Richard Moss, a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who performs climate change impacts research at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md. Moss has been a long-time contributor to the IPCC, previously directed the office of the US Global Change Research Program, and served as vice president for climate programs at the World Wildlife Fund.
“This comparative evaluation is extremely important to determine the technical, policy and economic requirements for reaching whatever society decides is a safe level of climate change. We hope to provide decision-makers with better tools to help people deal with a shifting climate,” he said. (more…)
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Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptic’s Position
by Warren Meyer, climate-skeptic.com
Once upon a time, Al Gore had a PowerPoint deck. Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that Gore’s presentation was deeply flawed, so I made my own PowerPoint deck in response, and have been updating it ever since. Here is the most recent version
Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo.
Then, Al Gore made a movie from his PowerPoint deck. He won an Oscar and a Nobel prize for his movie. Those are a bit out of my reach, so I will have to settle for actually being right. My previous movie showed my PowerPoint deck presented to a live audience, and can still be found online here. I felt the sound quality could be improved and the narration could be tighter, so I went into the “studio” to create a tighter version. The product of this is what I believe to be my best effort yet at explaining, in a comprehensive but simple manner, the science of the skeptic’s position to laymen.
Warren Meyer is the author of the web-site climate-skeptic.com, a site he originally started to help report climate developments in layman’s terms, particularly the science of the skeptic’s position. Warren has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University, where his studies focused on the control and stability of dynamic systems, issues at the very heart of the climate debate. He also has extensive experience with forecasting of dynamic and complex systems, with an MBA from Harvard University and years of experience with planning and forecasting at several Fortune 50 companies. Currently Warren runs a company called Recreation Resource Management, based in Phoenix, whose business is the private management of public parks and recreation.
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Renewable Oil Companies Could Be Sustainability Barrier
Jack Reardon of the Department of Management & Economics, at Hamline University.
The entry of oil companies into the realm of renewable energy could present major obstacles for the development of a sustainable economy that is not based on carbon resources, according to a report in the International Journal of Green Economics.
Jack Reardon of the Department of Management & Economics, at Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minnesota, explains that how the transition from carbon to renewable proceeds will depend on whose values are solicited and whose voices are listened to in the process. He suggests that should the large international oil companies (IOCs) endeavor to enter this arena in a significant way that will present a possible obstacle to the transition that will preclude the emergence of democratic, distributed and green economics based on wind, solar, and other renewable resources.
Ideally, green economics will see a switch from an energy intensive and consumption-focused society economy that perpetuates poverty, gender inequalities and environmental degeneration to one of sustainability that circumvents the carbon-based energy regime. If, however, present trends continue, then by 2030, global energy demand will increase 45%, with China and India accounting for just over half the increase and oil consumption will increase from 85 million barrels per day to 106 with all of the projected increase from non-OECD countries and four-fifths of the projected increase from China. (more…)
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Majority of Americans Still Support Passage of Federal Climate and Energy Policies
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change.
Despite a sharp drop in public concern over global warming, Americans—regardless of political affiliation—support the passage of federal climate and energy policies, according to the results of a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.
The survey found support for:
* Funding more research on renewable energy, such as solar and wind power (85 percent)
* Tax rebates for people buying fuel-efficient vehicles or solar panels (82 percent)
* Establishing programs to teach Americans how to save energy (72 percent)
* Regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant (71 percent)
* School curricula to teach children about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming (70 percent)
* Signing an international treaty that requires the United States to cut emissions of carbon dioxide 90 percent by the year 2050 (61 percent)
* Establishing programs to teach Americans about global warming (60 percent).
“Surprisingly, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats support many of these policies, including renewable energy research, tax rebates, regulating carbon dioxide, and expanding offshore drilling for oil and natural gas,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “Further, majorities in both parties support returning revenues from a cap-and-trade system to American households to offset higher energy costs, perhaps opening a pathway for Congressional action.”
Sixty percent of Americans, however, said they have heard “nothing at all” about the cap-and-trade legislation currently being considered by Congress. Only 12 percent had heard “a lot.” (more…)
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American Opinion Cools on Global Warming
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change.
Public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008, according to the results of a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.
The survey found:
• Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming, a 13-point decrease.
• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent.
• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.
In line with these shifting beliefs, there has been an increase in the number of Americans who think global warming will never harm people in the United States or elsewhere or other species.
“Despite growing scientific evidence that global warming will have serious impacts worldwide, public opinion is moving in the opposite direction,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “Over the past year the United States has experienced rising unemployment, public frustration with Washington and a divisive health care debate, largely pushing climate change out of the news. Meanwhile, a set of emails stolen from climate scientists and used by critics to allege scientific misconduct may have contributed to an erosion of public trust in climate science.” (more…)
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‘Geoengineer’ the Planet’s Atmosphere Urge Some Climate Change Experts
U of C scientist David Keith.
Internationally coordinated research and field-testing on ‘geoengineering’ the planet’s atmosphere to limit risk of climate change should begin soon along with building international governance of the technology, say scientists from the University of Calgary and the United States.
Collaborative and government-supported studies on solar-radiation management, a form of geo-engineering, would reduce the risk of nations’ unilateral experiments and help identify technologies with the least risk, says U of C scientist David Keith, in an article published in the Jan. 27 online edition of Nature. Co-authors of the opinion piece are Edward Parson at the University of Michigan and Granger Morgan at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Solar-radiation management may be the only human response that can fend off rapid and high-consequence climate change impacts. The risks of not doing research outweigh the risks of doing it,” says Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy’s energy and environmental systems group and a professor in the Schulich School of Engineering.
Solar-radiation management (SRM) would involve releasing megatonnes of light-scattering aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere to reduce Earth’s absorption of solar energy, thereby cooling the planet. Another technique would be to release particles of sea salt to make low-altitude clouds reflect more solar energy back into space. (more…)
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Managing Ecosystems in a Changing Climate
ESA President Mary Power
Global warming may impair the ability of ecosystems to perform vital services—such as providing food, clean water and carbon sequestration—says the nation’s largest organization of ecological scientists. In a statement released today, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) outlines strategies that focus on restoring and maintaining natural ecosystem functions to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
“Decision-makers cannot overlook the critical services ecosystems provide,” says ESA President Mary Power. “If we are going to reduce the possibility of irreversible damage to the environment under climate change, we need to take swift but measured action to protect and manage our ecosystems.”
ESA recommends four approaches to limiting adverse effects of climate change through ecosystem management:
Prioritize low-alteration strategies. Many ecosystems sequester a sizable amount of carbon—simply allowing them to function naturally can significantly help mitigation efforts. Deforestation, for example, has a two-fold impact: removing agents of carbon sequestration—trees in this instance—while simultaneously releasing stored carbon. Therefore, preserving forests is a straightforward way to both reduce and offset emissions.
Critically evaluate management-intensive strategies. Management strategies that seek to increase carbon sequestration above natural levels should undergo thorough life-cycle analysis and evaluation prior to implementation. For example, increasing carbon uptake on agricultural lands—one approach to enhancing the sequestration potential of ecosystems—typically requires more fertilizer than standard processes; the tradeoff, therefore, is higher emissions and pollution associated with fertilizer production. (more…)
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Levitating Magnet May Yield New Approach to Clean Energy
MIT and Columbia University researchers have begun an experiment at the Plasma Fusion and Science Center that could lead to a new source of energy. Key to the work is this huge vessel reminiscent of a spaceship. Photo / Donna Coveney
A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion — the process that generates the sun’s prodigious output of energy.
Fusion has been a cherished goal of physicists and energy researchers for more than 50 years. That’s because it offers the possibility of nearly endless supplies of energy with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than that produced by today’s nuclear plants, which are based on fission, the splitting of atoms (the opposite of fusion, which involves fusing two atoms together). But developing a fusion reactor that produces a net output of energy has proved to be more challenging than initially thought.
The new results come from an experimental device on the MIT campus, inspired by observations from space made by satellites. Called the Levitated Dipole Experiment, or LDX, a joint project of MIT and Columbia University, it uses a half-ton donut-shaped magnet about the size and shape of a large truck tire, made of superconducting wire coiled inside a stainless steel vessel. This magnet is suspended by a powerful electromagnetic field, and is used to control the motion of the 10-million-degree-hot electrically charged gas, or plasma, contained within its 16-foot-diameter outer chamber.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, confirm the counter-intuitive prediction that inside the device’s magnetic chamber, random turbulence causes the plasma to become more densely concentrated — a crucial step to getting atoms to fuse together — instead of becoming more spread out, as usually happens with turbulence. This “turbulent pinching” of the plasma has been observed in the way plasmas in space interact with the Earth’s and Jupiter’s magnetic fields, but has never before been recreated in the laboratory. (more…)
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Ice Mission Satellite Arrives Safely at Launch Site
CryoSat-2 arrives safely at Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan on 13 January. (ESA/W.Simpson)
In what might seem rather appropriate weather conditions, the CryoSat-2 Earth Explorer satellite has completed its journey to the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan, where it will be prepared for launch on 25 February.
The satellite and support equipment left the ‘IABG’ test centre in Ottobrunn, Germany, by lorry on 12 January. The CryoSat mission is dedicated to precise monitoring of the changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and variations in the thickness of the vast ice sheets that overlay Greenland and Antarctica. With much of Europe still in the grip of one of the coldest winters for some years, the icy conditions aptly set the stage for this first leg of CryoSat-2’s journey.
After arriving at Munich airport, the containers were loaded onto an Antonov aircraft. Along with team members from ESA and their industrial partner for CryoSat-2, EADS-Astrium, the Antonov took off in the early evening bound for Ulyanovsk, a city some 900 km east of Moscow, Russia. Once through customs clearance at Ulyanovsk, the aircraft continued the journey to the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The weather was –12°C and fine on arrival. Safely cocooned in its thermally controlled container, CryoSat-2 and accompanying cargo were offloaded and moved to the integration facility. The launch campaign team will now spend the next six weeks preparing the satellite for launch. CryoSat-2 will be launched by a Dnepr rocket – a converted intercontinental ballistic missile – on 25 February at 14:57 CET (13:57 UT). (more…)
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The Asia-Pacific Partnership and the Kyoto Protocols: In Conflict or Cooperation?
Aynsley Kellow from the University of Tasmania
President Obama’s visit to China before December’s Copenhagen conference underlined views that the international strategy to tackle climate change truly hinges on cooperation between the United States and the developing Asian economies. This relationship, as represented in the Asia-Pacific Partnership (APP), is controversial to environmental analysts. In two papers published today in WIREs Climate Change, analysts debate the significance of the APP and its role as an alternative to the Kyoto treaty.
Launched in 2006, the APP is a non-treaty agreement between the United States, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, South Korea and, perhaps most importantly, the People’s Republic of China. It is increasingly seen as a viable agreement between the United States and the emerging Asian economies, yet is criticised for not being legally binding.
“[The APP] has been hailed as a new model for an international climate agreement and as an alternative to the Kyoto protocol,” said Ros Taplin from Bond University in Australia. “However implementation has had challenges. As an opposing model to Kyoto it is a contravention of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) principle of common, but differentiated responsibilities.” (more…)
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Overwhelming Majority of Americans Support Global Warming Action in Poll
The overwhelming majority of Americans support action to limit carbon pollution and move the U.S. toward a clean energy future, according to a new poll released today by National Wildlife Federation.
“The American people can’t be more clear when it comes to solving global warming: they want the U.S. to be Rudolph out in front of the sleigh, leading the world toward a clean energy future,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president of NWF. “There is overwhelming public support for the Senate to pass legislation with firm limits on carbon pollution that will stimulate massive new investments in clean energy technologies.”
American voters demonstrate a strong desire for the U.S. to transition toward a low-carbon economy, with strong support among Independents.
• Strikingly, 82 percent voters and 80 percent of Independents, support the U.S. government increasing investment in clean energy sources. (more…)
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Disproportionate Effects of Global Warming and Pollution on Disadvantaged Communities
Sylvia Hood Washington, Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Justice, and Research Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
Global warming, pollution, and the environmental consequences of energy production impose a greater burden on low-income, disadvantaged communities, and strategies to prevent these inequities are urgently needed. A provocative collection of articles on climate justice presents the global implications of climate change and its effects on human health and the environment in a special issue of Environmental Justice, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The entire issue is available online at www.liebertpub.com/env
This important series of articles emerged from a conference on climate justice held earlier this year in New York City, co-hosted by West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) and the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change. WE ACT, an active participant in the climate debate and the environmental justice movement, compiled the special issue under the leadership of Guest Editor Peggy Shepard.
The articles explore a range of topics, including “The Environmental Injustice of ‘Clean Coal’,” by Stephanie Tyree and Maron Greenleaf and “Climate Change, Heat Waves, and Environmental Justice,” by Jalonne White-Newsome and colleagues. The issue offers both a global perspective in “The International Dimension of Climate Justice and the Need for International Adaptation Funding,” by J. Timmons Roberts, and a focus on more local concerns, including “Minding the Climate Gap: Environmental Health and Equity Implications of Climate Change Mitigation Policies in California,” by Seth Shonkoff and coauthors, and “Best in Show? Climate and Environmental Justice Policy in California,” by Julie Sze et al. (more…)
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What Green Lessons Can We Learn from COP15?
The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, known as “COP15,” faced a simple problem – how do you hold a global conference on the environment without increasing greenhouse gas emissions, wasting paper and otherwise being un-green?
Not surprisingly, the Climate Change Conference answered all these questions correctly and more, producing a successfully green conference of an enormous magnitude. What can we take away from the UN’s success? The knowledge that if a large scale operation can be green, there is no reason that businesses can’t act similarly on a smaller scale.
First, start with a green city for the summit. The Economist Intelligence Unit just completed a survey of 30 European cities and found Copenhagen was the greenest based on: CO2 emissions; energy; buildings; transportation; water; air quality; waste and land use; and environmental governance.
Second, plan it to be green. The Danish Foreign Ministry said, “COP15 is organized following BS8901, a sustainable management standard. BS8901 was developed for the sustainable organization of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.” What was done and what effects it had will be published in March 2010 as the Copenhagen Sustainable Meetings Protocol. This will be a case study that future meetings can use as a guide. (more…)
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Global Temperatures Could Rise More Than Expected, New Study Shows
Mark Pagani, associate professor of geology and geophysics at Yale.
The kinds of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide taking place today could have a significantly larger effect on global temperatures than previously thought, according to a new study led by Yale University geologists. Their findings appear December 20 in the advanced online edition of Nature Geoscience.
The team demonstrated that only a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was associated with a period of substantial warming in the mid- and early-Pliocene era, between three to five million years ago, when temperatures were approximately 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today.
Climate sensitivity—the mean global temperature response to a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric CO2—is estimated to be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, using current models.
“These models take into account only relatively fast feedbacks, such as changes in atmospheric water vapor and the distribution of sea ice, clouds and aerosols,” said Mark Pagani, associate professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and lead author of the paper. “We wanted to look at Earth-system climate sensitivity, which includes the effects of long-term feedbacks such as change in continental ice-sheets, terrestrial ecosystems and greenhouse gases other than CO2.” (more…)
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