Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Climate scientists say White House pressured them
CTV (Canada)
U.S. scientists have been pressured to make their writings on global warming fit with the Bush administration’s skepticism on the topic, a U.S. Congressional committee has been told.
A survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found 150 climate scientists had personally experienced political interference in their work over the past five years. The survey had 279 respondents.
At least 435 incidents were recorded, representatives of the watchdog group told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or other similar terms from a variety of communications,” said Francesca Grifo.
…Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who chairs the committee, said the White House isn’t co-operating in supplying documents necessary to investigate such claims.
(30 Jan 2007)
Just posted from the Christian Science Monitor: Has the White House interfered on global warming reports? .
UN Agency Pressures Secty-Gen for a Climate Crisis Summit
Daniel Wallis, Reuters via Common Dreams
The U.N. environment agency pressured Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday to call an emergency climate summit amid dire reports about the risks from global warming.
A summit, tentatively planned for September, would focus on the hunt for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases widely blamed for forecasts of more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.
U.N. environment agencies are lobbying Ban to play a leading role in helping governments battle climate change after Kyoto expires in 2012. But he has yet to endorse his officials’ proposal for a summit of about 20 key world leaders.
(30 Jan 2007)
On global warming, what US can learn from Europe
Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor
Momentum is building in the United States to fight global warming. And the most popular proposal to do that, at the moment, is through a nationwide “cap and trade” system.
At least three major Senate bills incorporate the idea. Large corporations, including big oil firms that until recently opposed such regulation, are backing the approach in theory. On Friday, the United Nations is slated to release a key report on the scientific consensus on global warming, which will put even more pressure on nations to act, analysts suggest.
But the real trick to effective legislation is in its details, a lesson that the European Union (EU) has learned the hard way as it prepares to cut greenhouse-gas emissions next year under the Kyoto treaty. So many companies emit so much carbon dioxide that the potential market for emissions trading is huge. Missteps could be costly, involving billions of dollars in unwitting subsidies or penalties for industries.
“Cap-and-trade markets for carbon gases are definitely on their way to the US,” says Andrew Ertel, CEO of Evolution Markets, an energy and carbon-emissions trading firm in White Plains, N.Y. “The lesson from Europe is to keep it simple.”
In theory, cap-and-trade systems hold much promise. They allow companies to find the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions. If one firm finds it cheap to cut its emissions below its federally mandated cap, then it can sell the difference – known as a carbon emissions allowance – to a firm that finds it much more expensive to cut emissions. As the government tightens the cap, credits get more expensive, which pushes companies to trim emissions.
In practice, cap and trade is more difficult.
Under Kyoto, the EU has already used cap and trade to trim 100 million tons of C02 emissions, according to some estimates. Europe’s experience, however, has not run smoothly.
European nations still lag in meeting carbon reduction goals. They mistakenly set their base-line emissions far too high, according to an October analysis by Point Carbon, a global carbon-data firm. So when European companies began to trim their actual emissions, they found they had far more allowances than they needed. The result: The price of emissions credits nose-dived last April, falling by two-thirds in a month.
The EU plan also handed out many of its allowances free of charge, rather than having them auctioned off, says David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s climate center. That reduced the price of the allowances and sparked charges of a government giveaway to industries.
(30 Jan 2007)
Millions to Go Hungry, Waterless: Climate Report
Rob Taylor, Reuters via Common Dreams
Rising temperatures will leave millions more people hungry by 2080 and cause critical water shortages in China and Australia, as well as parts of Europe and the United States, according to a new global climate report.
By the end of the century, climate change will bring water scarcity to between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people as temperatures rise by 2 to 3 Celsius (3.6 to 4.8 Fahrenheit), a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said.
The report, due for release in April but detailed in The Age newspaper, said an additional 200 million to 600 million people across the world would face food shortages in another 70 years, while coastal flooding would hit another 7 million homes.
(30 Jan 2007)
World Scientists Near Consensus on Warming
James Kanter and Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times
Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.
Scientists involved in writing or reviewing the report say it is nearly certain to conclude that there is at least a 90 percent chance that human-caused emissions are the main factor in warming since 1950.
…Many economists and energy experts long ago abandoned any expectation that it would be possible to avoid a doubling of preindustrial carbon dioxide concentrations, given the growth of human populations, use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, and destruction of forests in the tropics.
The report is likely to highlight the hazardous consequences of that shift by finding that reaching twice the preindustrial concentration of carbon dioxide will probably warm climate between 3.5 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit and by highlighting that there is a small but significant risk that such a buildup can produce even more warming.
…“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering,” said John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an energy and climate expert at Harvard. “We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”
(29 Jan 2007)
