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Deep ice tells long climate story
Jonathan Amos, BBC
Carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at anytime in the last 800,000 years, the latest study of ice drilled out of Antarctica confirms.
Initial results from the Epica core were published in 2004 and 2005, detailing the events back to 440,000 years and 650,000 years respectively. Scientists have now gone the full way through the column, back another 150,000 years.
The picture is the same: carbon dioxide and temperature rise and fall in step. The “scary thing”, he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.
“The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don’t have an analogue in our records,” he said.
(4 Sept 2006)
Warning on water, fires crisis
Geoff Strong, The Age
VICTORIANS should prepare for even tougher water restrictions and an extreme bushfire season this summer after the failure of the state’s winter rainfall, Australia’s most senior weather forecaster has warned.
Geoff Love, head of the Bureau of Meteorology, said that after an exceptionally dry winter and the state’s driest August on record, the prospect of good rainfall over the next few months had diminished. And even if good spring rain occurred, dam levels would struggle to recover because of increased evaporation and absorption of water into the soil as air temperatures rose.
“If the current low rainfall and high temperatures persist, the consequences will be wide ranging, including an elevated bushfire risk this summer and escalating water shortages and restrictions,” Dr Love said. The Country Fire Authority, meanwhile, has questioned whether there will be enough water to deal with a worse-than-usual fire season. ..
The length of southern Australia’s current drought has even normally cautious climatologists suggesting it is due to climate change. “It is approaching my personal threshold of being convinced,” said Michael Coughlan, director of the National Climate Centre.
Dr Coughlan said that even normal spring rain was not going to help top up water catchments. “If we had good rain in early winter, that would have been absorbed by the soil and made the soil moist, so that subsequent rain would flow into catchments. If we get good rain now, increasing amounts of it will evaporate because of rising temperatures or be absorbed into the soil,” he said.
(5 Sept 2006)
Energy review ignores climate change ‘tipping point’
Alok Jha, The Guardian
The world only has 10 years to develop and implement new technologies to generate clean electricity before climate change reaches a point of no return, something the British government has failed to appreciate in its energy review, according to an energy expert.
The UK must embark on a strategy to reduce energy use by insulating homes better and encouraging more micro-generation schemes, such as solar panels or biomass, Peter Smith, a professor of sustainable energy at the University of Nottingham, told the British Association festival of science in Norwich today.
“The scientific opinion is that we have a ceiling of 440 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon before there is a tipping point, a step change in the rate of global warming,” Professor Smith said. “The rate at which we are emitting now, around 2ppm a year and rising, we could expect that that tripping point will reach us in 20 years’ time. That gives us 10 years to develop technologies that could start to bite into the problem.”
He said the recent energy review failed to address the problem because it just reiterated two long-held assumptions: that wind power should provide 15% of the UK’s electricity by 2020, but that renewable energy alone could not fill the energy gap left by the decommissioning of nuclear power plants and the demise of traditional fossil-fuel power stations. The solution presented in the energy review was to build a new generation of nuclear power stations.
“Astonishingly, the review pays hardly any regard to the principle energy asset, which this country enjoys, namely its rivers, estuaries, coastal currents and waves,” said Prof Smith. “Huge amounts of energy could be harvested using existing technologies, which could meet the nuclear shortfall several times over.”
(4 Sept 2006)
Insurers told to do more to tackle climate change
Simon Challis, Reuters/Alertnet
Insurers, whose finances could be stretched to breaking point by climate change, stand accused of doing too little to research global warming or devise products to mitigate its potentially catastrophic effects.
Unless climate change slows, insurers warn, years like 2005, when their catastrophe bill topped $80 billion, could become the norm, with premiums for those in disaster-prone areas soaring, and some regions becoming uninsurable.
But insurers have been criticised for not doing enough to encourage their clients to be more environmentally friendly.
“It is in the industry’s best interests … to seize this moment to act on what is likely to become the greatest risk the industry has ever faced,” concluded a recent report by Ceres, a powerful coalition of American investors, environmental groups and other public interest organisations. ..
The insurance industry is too short-sighted, says Matthew Criddle, managing director of Naturesave, a British firm that is, as he puts it, “one of the few examples on the planet of a general insurance broker that is trying to use the insurance industry as a vehicle for sustainable development”. ..
(5 Sept 2006)
