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Secrecy breach by US officials steals thunder of climate change report
David Adam, The Guardian
A confidential draft of a high-level international report on the state of climate change has been posted on the internet by US officials months before it was due to be made public. The move to effectively publish the findings of the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has surprised experts, who say it could undermine the final report when it is released in February.
The IPCC’s fourth report draws together research over the last five years to predict the likely course of global warming. The draft was sent to governments for comment last month.
One British climate scientist and senior author of the IPCC report, who did not want to be identified, said: “They definitely shouldn’t have done that. I’m very surprised. If you put a draft document in the public domain then people will start quoting it.”
Others say the move could be a deliberate attempt to reduce the impact of the final report. The Bush administration has been critical of the IPCC and its conclusions, which form the basis for international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Kyoto protocol. The new report will underpin negotiations to extend the protocol beyond 2012.
(4 May 2006)
Also at Common Dreams.
More on the content of the report in the following article.
3C hotter. Earth’s danger point. Now scientists say it is going to happen
Mark Henderson, UK TImes
THE world will warm by 3C (5.4F) even under emissions projections for 2050 that leading scientists consider optimistic, the United Nations group that studies global warming has said.
The increase, which would cause drought and famine for 400 million people and devastate wildlife, is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its most confident assessment yet of how greenhouse gases are affecting global temperatures.
A draft of part of the panel’s fourth report, which the US Government has released on the internet, shows that it has, for the first time, placed a likely figure on the progress of global warming, indicating a level of scientific certainty that it has avoided in the past.
It says that temperatures could increase by between 2C and 4.5C when atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches double the pre-industrial level, but it declares 3C to be the “most likely value” for such change. A 3C rise is the level at which a Met Office conference last year judged that “dangerous” climate change would occur. Previous reports from the IPCC, a traditionally cautious body, have given only wider ranges of possibilities, which it acknowledged to be highly uncertain.
(4 May 2006)
Global Warming Fastest For 20,000 Years (The Independent). Also at Common Dreams.
US report: ‘clear’ human impact on climate
Richard Black, BBC
A scientific report commissioned by the US government has concluded there is “clear evidence” of climate change caused by human activities.
The report, from the federal Climate Change Science Program, said trends seen over the last 50 years “cannot be explained by natural processes alone”.
It found that temperatures have increased in the lower atmosphere as well as at the Earth’s surface.
However, scientists involved in the report say better data is badly needed.
Observations down the years have suggested that the troposphere, the lower atmosphere, is not warming up, despite evidence that temperatures at the Earth’s surface are rising.
(3 May 2006)
Related from the NY Times: Federal Study Finds Accord on Warming
“An Inconvenient Truth” – a must-see
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
Team Worldchanging got a chance to see a sneak preview of An Inconvenient Truth last night. We all left stunned.
An Inconvenient Truth is mostly footage of Al Gore giving his now-famous lecture on why we know climate change is real, here and serious. It’s not flashy, but AIT is the most important film of the year. We believe that this film will change the American debate on climate change, and that will change everything.
This movie will change the American debate on climate, if people get a chance to see it. But in order for them to see it, it needs to do well its first weekend. If you are an American and read this site, it is your duty to go see this film the weekend it opens.
(3 May 2006)
Japanese find it easier to be green
Bennett Richardson, Christian Science Monitor
In a country that has often paved paradise, more citizens back taxes aimed at stemming environmental degradation.
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TOKYO – In Japan’s rush to rebuild after World War II, the focus was on infrastructure rather than environmental management. But a combination of higher public interest in the environment, and a revamping of tax regulations is boosting efforts to reverse the country’s lingering legacy of environmental degradation.
“There is an awareness these days [of the need for care when engaging in environmental engineering] and it has been there for quite a long time,” says James Nickum, an expert on environmental management at Tokyo Jogakkan College. “That doesn’t mean there are no more significantly controversial projects, but there seem to be fewer than 10 years ago.”
Extremes of nature in Japan have long necessitated a culture of redesigning the landscape for human needs, with such tasks as waterway management to prevent flooding during typhoons a deeply ingrained part of traditional village life. Evidence also exists of periodical deforestations and replanting, particularly during the Edo period (1603-1867).
…Under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the so-called “iron triangle” of industry, politicians, and bureaucrats has weakened, giving municipalities more power over such areas as natural-resource management. Many residents are also willing to significantly increase their tax burden in the interests of lending nature a helping hand.
The result has been a mushrooming of local initiatives, often driven by grass-roots organizations, to improve tax-based funding for environmental improvements.
(3 May 2006)
A Mistake with Repercussions
Real Climate
Today, Science published an important comment pointing out that there were serious errors in a climate research article that it published in October 2004. The article concerned (Von Storch et al. 2004) was no ordinary paper: it has gone through a most unusual career. Not only did it make many newspaper headlines [New Research Questions Uniqueness of Recent Warming, Past Climate Change Questioned etc.] when it first appeared, it also was raised in the US Senate as a reason for the US not to join the global climate protection efforts. It furthermore formed a part of the basis for the highly controversial enquiry by a Congressional committee into the work of scientists, which elicited sharp protests last year by the AAAS, the National Academy, the EGU and other organisations. It now turns out that the main results of the paper were simply wrong.
Von Storch et al. claimed to have tested the climate reconstruction method of Mann et al. (1998) in model simulations, and found it performed very poorly. Now, Eugene Wahl, David Ritson and Caspar Amman show that the main reason for the alleged poor performance is that Von Storch et al. implemented the method incorrectly. What Von Storch et al. did, without mentioning it in their paper, was to remove the trend before calibrating the method against observational data – a step that severely degrades the performance of Climate Field Reconstruction (CFR) methods such as the Mann et al. method (unfortunately this erroneous procedure has already been propagated in a paper by Burger and Cubasch (GRL, 2005) where the authors refer to a personal communication with Von Storch to justify the use of the procedure).
…One could view this story as a positive example for the self-correcting process of science: erroneous results are eventually spotted and corrected, even if it sometimes takes time. If only science were at stake here, we’d need say no more: this would have been a sometimes inappropriately sharp, but otherwise regular technical debate about improving the methodology of proxy reconstructions.
Unfortunately, while the dispute has been used in the public arena to score political points, e.g. to discredit the IPCC process and to question all of the relevant climate science, the significance of this dispute for the bigger picture has been wildly blown out of proportion (see here for a previous discussion). We hope that after this new correction, the discussion can move on to a more productive level. The key issue is how we can improve reconstructions of past large-scale climate variability – of which by now almost a dozen exist. We should not lose sight of the fact that the debate here is about a few tenths of a degree – a much smaller change than is projected for the next century. It is also important to remember one principal point: Conclusions on whether recent warmth is likely to have been unprecedented in the past millennium, or the recent extent of human-caused warming, are based on the accumulation of evidence from many different analyses and are rarely impacted by a technical dispute about any one paper such as this.
(27 April 2006)
Doomsday Scenarios
What will happen to the Earth if we don’t change our polluting ways?
Seed Magazine
…Seed caught up with three climate specialists to find out just what will happen to our weather patterns in the next century if carbon emissions continue unchecked. We are doing this for your information, for your own good and, maybe, to scare you a little.
TIM PALMER is the head of the Probability and Seasonal Forecasting Division at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. He also served as lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent survey report.
Let’s start off with the summer months—June, July and August. Think about the drought that Europe had a couple of years ago, which resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities and major crop loss. According to analyses of the world’s climate, a European summer drought that would [currently] occur once every 20 years, can be expected to occur once every three years toward the end of the century, when carbon dioxide emissions will be roughly twice what it was in pre-Industrial Revolution times. That’s a seven-fold increase.
The same calculations go for El Niño-like weather patterns in the Pacific and monsoons in Southeast Asia. Extreme flooding could make countries like Bangladesh uninhabitable and would displace thousands of environmental refugees.
Under the stress of extreme drought, many plants stop absorbing carbon and actually emit more into the atmosphere. If the Amazon rainforest, a big carbon sink, becomes too stressed under drought conditions then it could significantly impact the carbon budget on the atmosphere, and you have a potential feedback effect.
Agriculture will also become a problem. We have growing populations, but it will be difficult to sustain food crops in particular regions with extreme changes in climate. Another consequence of changing climate would be a rise in the frequency of climate-related diseases—forms of malaria, cholera and meningitis are known to be linked with climate variability.
(1 May 2006)
James Lovelock and Martin Hoffert are also interviewed.
Trade winds’ slowdown backs warming theory
Carl T. Hall, SF Chronicle
Climate scientists have documented a pronounced slowdown in the Pacific Ocean atmospheric system that drives the trade winds, a prediction of global warming theory that appears to be coming true.
A study released today in the journal Nature suggests that the movement of moisture and heat across the tropical Pacific has tapered off by 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s, when such records begin, and appears likely to ease by another 10 percent this century.
That could have wide repercussions for weather and sea life throughout the Pacific region, although it’s hard for anyone to be certain at this early stage what effect the slowing of the winds would have.
Possibilities include more El Niño-like conditions, stronger hurricanes and less upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water from the deep Pacific. Weather generally may become more variable — and harder to predict.
(4 May 2006)
Related:
Guardian
Cox News Service
Associated Press
Just wait, says Sierra Club, you too may be under water
Miro Cernetig, Vancouver Sun
Environmental group shows what could happen if the icecaps melt and the oceans rise
Real estate agents like to say nobody’s making Vancouver waterfront anymore. But global warming just might, creating beachfront as far out as Surrey, if you wait a century or two, according to a new satellite map from the Sierra Club of Canada.
Using data published in the journal Science, the environmental group unveiled a map today showing much of the Lower Mainland will be under water within the next two to three centuries if some of the more worrying warming predictions prove true.
“You’re going to be saying goodbye to all of Delta, most of Richmond, the airport, the ferry terminal and lots of Surrey,” predicts Kathryn Molloy, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada’s B.C. chapter. “It even looks like David Suzuki’s [Kitsilano] house is going to be under water.”
The group’s map supposes the accuracy of the research published two weeks ago in Science, in which some scientists said new findings on melting glaciers suggests a great global melt may be occurring faster than expected. The Sierra Club’s map, which it plans to send out by the thousands in the days ahead, assumes sea levels will rise by six metres within three centuries, about the midpoint of what Science suggests may be in the cards.
(4 May 2006)
From the Sierra Club: New map shows much of Lower Mainland under water after climate change.
