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Climate change: Lead or step aside
Editorial, Seattle Times
The United States can best influence how the world addresses global warming by leading the way instead of sniping from the sidelines. Constructive participation in meetings next month in Bali, Indonesia, must set the tone.
The United Nations climate panel issued a summary report over the weekend that put a grim exclamation point on the findings and forecasts of three studies released earlier this year:
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observation of increases in global average air and ocean temperature, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
U.S. delegates tried to water down stark language and eliminate a summation of five broad reasons for concern: risks to threatened and unique systems; risks from extreme climate events; distribution of impacts; aggregate impacts; and risks from future large-scale societal disruptions.
Roughly translated, this list portends crop failures and starvation, extinction of species, weather-related devastation and dislocation, and bigger and nastier storms and droughts.
(21 November 2007)
The Scientists Speak
Editorial, New York Times
The world’s scientists have done their job. Now it’s time for world leaders, starting with President Bush, to do theirs. That is the urgent message at the core of the latest – and the most powerful – report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists who collectively constitute the world’s most authoritative voice on global warming.
Released in Spain over the weekend, the report leaves no doubt that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (and, to a lesser extent, deforestation) have been responsible for the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures.
If these emissions are not brought under control, the report predicts, the consequences could be disastrous: further melting at the poles, sea levels rising high enough to submerge island nations, the elimination of one-quarter or more of the world’s species, widespread famine in places like Africa, more violent hurricanes.
(20 November 2007)
Climate change a growing threat in Tibet, media report
AFP
Climate change is causing more weather-related disasters than ever in the Himalayan region of Tibet, where the temperature is rising faster than the rest of China, state press reported Wednesday.
“Natural disasters, like droughts, landslides, snowstorms and fires are more frequent and calamitous now,” Xinhua news agency quoted the director of the Tibet Regional Meteorological Bureau, Song Shanyun, as saying.
…The temperature in Tibet has been rising by 0.3 degrees Celsius (0.54 degrees Fahrenheit) every decade, about 10 times faster than the national average, with visible consequences, a bureau study found.
(20 November 2007)
Climate Change – an alternative approach
Chris Vernon, The Oil Drum: Europe
The key objective in the face of climate change is to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuel. Certainly there are other aspects, it would be useful not to cut down forests for example and there are other greenhouse gasses but as this is The Oil Drum we’ll focus on fossil fuels and CO2.
The entire debate when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change is focused on demand, the consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions. This is not the only approach. Here I propose an alternative approach that totally ignores emissions but instead focuses on the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground.
… Conclusion
Attempting to reduce atmospheric concentrations by demand side approaches is unlikely to succeed as it relies on billions of stakeholders making behavioural and technological changes. A partial adoption delivers a disproportionably small response and possibly none at all.
A supply side approach achieved through extraction limits, agreed by a small number of governments removes the complexity associated with billions of stakeholders. There also exists the opportunity to compensate this small number of countries for lost revenue.
Whilst this artificial limitation of global fossil fuel supplies will create energy shortages, if the climate change predictions are correct this is likely to be preferable to the impact of climate change from unchecked extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. In any event, as fossil fuels are finite their reduced supply is inevitable. Should we reduce their supply before and in mitigation of dangerous climate change or after and cause dangerous climate change?
(21 November 2007)
