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Outsize Profits, and Questions, in Effort to Cut Warming Gases
Keith Bradsher, NY Times
QUZHOU, China – Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.
Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations of Europe and in Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide, as part of the Kyoto Protocol.
…Arrangements like this still make sense to the foreign companies financing them because they are a lot less expensive, despite the large profit for others, than cleaning up their own operations.
Such efforts are being watched in the United States as an alternative more politically attractive than imposing taxes on fossil fuels like coal and oil that emit global-warming gases when burned.
But critics of the fast-growing program, through which European and Japanese companies are paying roughly $3 billion for credits this year, complain that it mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners.
With so much money flowing to a few particularly lucrative cleanup deals, the danger is that they will distract attention from the broader effort to curb global warming gases, and that the lure of quick profit will encourage short-term fixes at the expense of fundamental, long-run solutions, including developing renewable energy sources like solar power.
(21 Dec 2006)
Nature responds to warming signs
Robert C. Cowen, Christian Science Monitor
Some insects and microscopic organisms have already shifted their behavior in response to the changing climate.
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If you’re wondering whether the climate really is changing, consider the midges and be wise. In some remote North American mountain lakes, cold-water forms of these tiny insects have given way to warm-water species. This is one of several recently announced findings that indicate climate change is being felt in diverse ways.
Microscopic plants called phytoplankton are becoming less productive as surface water warms over vast areas of the ocean. Extreme rainfall events are increasing over India as the environment warms. These trends highlight the need to adapt to changes already under way even while debate continues over the extent to which humans are jiggering the climate.
(21 Dec 2006)
2006 Set to be 6th Warmest Worldwide: UK Report
Jeremy Lovell, Reuters via Common Dreams
This year is set to be the sixth warmest worldwide since records began, stoked by global warming linked to human activities, the British Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia said on Thursday.
As England basks in unseasonably warm December weather two weeks before the end of the year, the Met Office said data from January to November made 2006 the warmest on record for central England.
“Worldwide, the provisional figures for 2006 using data from January to November, place the year as the sixth warmest year” since records began in the 1850s, the report said.
The previous warmest years were 1998 and 2005, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO was due to release its own 2006 figures later on Thursday.
“The top 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last 12 years,” it said, adding that 2006 could have been warmer but for La Nina, a cooling of parts of the Pacific Ocean.
(14 Dec 2006)
Shorelines may be in greater peril than thought
David L Chandler, New Scientist
Previous estimates of how much the world’s sea level will rise as a result of global warming may have seriously underestimated the problem, according to new research.
The study, published in Science, uses a new “semi-empirical” method instead of relying purely on computer modelling. While some modelling significantly underestimates the amount of sea-level rise that has already been seen over the last century, the new method matches the observed rise very closely, says Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, who conducted the new study.
The existing computer model deviates even more from the actual observations built into the new estimates included in a draft of the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be released in February 2007.
The draft report says newer climate models now suggest a rise only half as great as projected in the previous IPCC report. But that draft may be revised before its release to reflect the new research that suggests the rise will be greater than the IPCC’s previous estimate, Rahmstorf told New Scientist.
(14 Dec 2006)
