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Climate target is guaranteed catastrophe
Ed Pilkington, Guardian
One of the world’s leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in C02 limits.
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 – the most stringent in the world – should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth’s history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.
… “If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice – that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster – a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.
(7 April 2008)
UK: Why are we going back to coal?
Camilla Cavendish, UK Times
This Governments antediluvian policy of backing a new coal-fired power station is absurd
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Fashionable though it is to rail against plastic bags – our own Prime Minister recently penned a Daily Mail assault on this incarnate evil – the climate change battle will not be won by the phoney war on bags, light bulbs and bottled water.
It is energy supply that will determine how quickly Britain goes green. Rather than trying to herd millions of individual consumers into taking tiny steps, the Government could change energy supply with one stroke of the pen. But the pen seems to be doodling wildly at the margins of the page.
There are only two things that will determine whether the world can step back from climate change havoc. One is forests, which are disappearing at an alarming rate and which act as “sinks” for carbon dioxide. The other is coal. If we burn all the coal that is in the ground, and let its filthy emissions out into the atmosphere, we won’t be feeling genteel guilt in 20 years’ time, but raw fear.
Camilla Cavendish has been a McKinsey management consultant, an aid worker, and CEO of a not-for-profit company. She is now a leader writer and columnist on The Times
(3 April 2008)
Swiss say action on climate change is “crucial”
Jessica Dacey, Swiss Info
Switzerland has begun a campaign to persuade those countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions to commit to future cuts.
A government delegation took the message this week to global talks in the Thai capital, Bangkok, on the future of climate change beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.
About 1,000 government, business, research and environmental representatives attended the United Nations conference.
A climate change expert in Bern, who is backing the Swiss campaign, said the biggest CO2 emitters were “integral” to any long-term action plans for change.
Martin Grosjean, executive director of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at Bern University, told swissinfo: “It is clear that whole world is sitting in the same boat and we need a fully cooperative approach.”
… In Bern, Grosjean said plans for post-Kyoto targets had to be ambitious, with evidence pointing to a need for at least a 30 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2025, and bigger reductions in the long term.
“From a scientific point of view it is absolutely clear that really firm and radical steps have to be taken at the global level.”
“The main deficit of the Kyoto Protocol is that until 2012 it includes just a handful of countries. There is no way greenhouse gas emissions can be established at the level needed to prevent dangers in climate change if India, China and few others are not part of the post-Kyoto negotiations,” he warned.
“It is also clear that the problem mankind has produced will keep the atmosphere warm for a couple of hundred more years. It is not a problem that we can solve today or tomorrow. Scientific evidence calls for totally new approaches
(5 April 2008)
A Shift in the Debate Over Global Warming
Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times
The charged and complex debate over how to slow down global warming has become a lot more complicated.
… Most of the focus in the last few years has centered on imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies.
… But now, with recent data showing an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency, a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.
The economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated the case bluntly in a recent article in Scientific American: “Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”
What is needed, Mr. Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak.
… Proponents of treaties and legislation that would cap emissions don’t disagree with this call to arms for new, low-carbon technologies. But they say the cap approach should not be ignored, either.
One of them is Joseph Romm, a blogger on climate and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit group pushing for federal legislation to restrict greenhouse gases.
“Of course we need aggressive investments in R. and D. – I for one have been arguing that for two decades,” Mr. Romm wrote in a post to his blog, climateprogress.org. “But if we don’t start aggressively deploying the technologies we have now for the next quarter century, then all the new technologies in the world won’t avert catastrophe.”
(6 April 2008)
Andrew Revkin seems to exaggerate the appearance of a few articles into a new trend. Are these statements really new? Are they that significant?
As usual in these discussions, the prospect of conservation and efficiency are conspicuously absent.
Gristmil is monitoring this issue closely, especially in posts by Joseph Romm and David Roberts. -BA
