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Scientists to Canada: clean your dirty snow
Reuters
Even Canada’s thinly populated Arctic regions can play a role in curbing global warming, by reducing soot from dirty, old cooking stoves which are blackening snow and making it melt faster.
It’s one problem on a list of many outlined by researchers at the universities of California and Colorado. They urged Canadians to filter smoke stacks, reduce ship traffic and burn fuels out in their entirety to minimize dirty waste.
In a study examining the impact of burning fossil fuel in snow-covered northern climes, the scientists said grubby snow contributes to global warming because it absorbs more heat from the sun, and melts faster.
(12 June 2007)
India snubs West on climate change
Peter Foster, Telegraph
India will not curb its greenhouse gas emissions as long as the West continues to treat it as a ‘second class global citizen’ with less right to pollute than the developed world, a senior Indian environment official has said.
Pradipto Ghosh, who retired last month as India’s environment secretary and now sits on a committee advising India’s prime minister on climate change, warned that the West must “get serious” about cutting its own emissions if it wanted progress on the issue.
His comments confirm the massive gulf between the West and the world’s emerging economies a week after President Bush agreed to enter UN-sponsored climate change negotiations on condition that India and China also agreed to play their part.
Mr Ghosh reiterated India’s position that it would not compromise its continued 8 per cent economic growth to arrest global warming, arguing that it was historical polluters in the industrialised West who must make the first move.
“The fact is that India has a very, very large number of poor people who are living in conditions of which people in the West can have no conception unless they have visited India’s villages and urban slums.
“The goals of addressing climate change cannot supersede our goals of maintaining our current rates of GDP growth and poverty alleviation programs, as was agreed by everyone at Kyoto,” he told The Telegraph in New Delhi.
At the heart of India’s position on climate change is the notion that India – whose population is predicted to reach 1.5bn by 2050 – must be allowed to pollute on a per capita basis equally with the West.
(12 June 2007)
Somehow the “right to pollute” doesn’t have the ring of idealism that one might expect from the homeland of Mahatma Gandhi. Not to excuse the West’s piggishness, but mightn’t there be other ways to express concern for India’s poor? As is becoming apparent, the brunt of climate change will be borne by the poor in warm climates. For example the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas:
… for people living in the watershed of the Himalayas and other nearby mountain ranges along the Tibetan Plateau, glacial melt could have catastrophic consequences.
Himalayan glaciers release water steadily throughout the year, most critically during the hot, dry, sunny periods when water is most needed. Once they vanish, major lifeline rivers such as the Ganges and Indus could become more seasonal, and large tributaries may dry up completely during non-monsoon periods.
-BA
Contributor Billhook writes:
From where I stand (as GCI’s rural development affairs bod) it was the best news since the Africa Group of Nations at the UN similarly declared for Contraction & Convergence.
Herewith a post I put on Powerswitch, which may I hope put my outlook into some perspective.
Perhaps as a result of the G8 decision to negotiate their communique (outfuckingrageously)
before even meeting with the major GS delegates, India has declared, to the right-wing British Telegraph that it demands, de facto, the climate policy framework of Contraction & Convergence.
This ends the diplomatic haggling behind the scenes along with the brinkmanship of “Who can ignore GW the longest,” and simply dumps the etiquette of never negotiating via the press.
One of various key statements is:
The prime minister [Dr Manmohan Singh] has said that while pursuing our policies of development and poverty alleviation, we will ensure that our per capita emissions will never exceed developing countries,” Mr Ghosh added.
This is our challenge to the West. ‘You do the best you can, and we’ll match it’. If the West thinks that India will subscribe to any long-term solution that is not based on per capita emissions then it is very misguided.
Another is :
India will not accept an endgame where Western people continue to pollute the earth in perpetuity at three or four time the rate of people in this country. And my impression is that China agrees.
“We see a lot of resistance to this idea [of counting emissions on a per capita basis] but the intellectual force of the idea is unassailable.
We often hear from the West that ‘it can’t be done’ or ‘it’s impracticable’, but we say
‘do the maths and make a plan to make it possible’.
An interesting aspect of this is that GCI has learned that if China declares for C&C, then the US regime sees it will have no option but to follow suit.
At that point, the key CO2 PPMV level, and its date of achievement (Contraction), and the date of global Convergence of nations’ emission entitlements to per capita parity, can at last start their formal negotiation schedules in the UNFCCC.
The Conspiracy Widens
A final response to Alexander Cockburn
George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
(This is a response to Alexander Cockburn’s latest article for Counterpunch, which can be read here: www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06092007.html . The full debate between Cockburn and Monbiot is here: www.zmag.org/debatesglobalwarming.html )
So at last, and after only seven requests, we have some references. And, to no gasps of surprise, they reveal that the “papers” on which Alexander Cockburn bases his claim that carbon dioxide doesn’t cause global warming have not been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In fact they have not been published at all.
Cockburn appears not to understand the implications of this. Aware that I might as well argue with a tree stump, let me explain – again and for the last time – what it means. If these papers have not been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, they are not science. They carry no more scientific weight than an article in the National Enquirer.
(12 June 2007)
Nothing very enlightening in the Cockburn-Monbiot dust-up about global warming. However, the frustration prompts Monbiot to make some of his most colorful rhetorical flourishes: “I might as well argue with a tree stump.” I’ll have to remember that. -BA
Greenland ice melt speeds up
Warming: Trend is confirmed via satellite, flyovers
David Perlman, SF Chronicle
NASA scientists reading signals from a satellite in orbit, and flying aboard a low-flying plane over Greenland, are finding fresh evidence of melting snows and thinning glaciers in vast areas of the massive island.
Their observations confirm the climate’s warming trend in the far northern reaches of the world, they say, where changes in the circulation of waters feeding into the Arctic Ocean are altering crucial patterns of ocean currents there with effects that are increasingly uncertain.
The pace of glaciers sliding into the sea along Greenland’s southwestern coast “is speeding like gangbusters this year,” said William Krabill, leader of a NASA team that has just ended a three-week airborne mission probing glacier dynamics with lasers and radar.
(2 June 2007)
