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Global warming may uproot millions
Brad Knickerbocker, The Christian Science Monitor
In the coming decades, the effects of global warming are likely to turn millions into refugees.
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GLOBAL WARMING IS likely to uproot millions of people, forcing them to leave their homes and in the process create large-scale political, economic, and military challenges.
In fact, say a growing number of experts, it’s already beginning to happen.
“Human-induced climate and hydrologic change is likely to make many parts of the world uninhabitable, or at least uneconomic,” writes Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, in the current online issue of Scientific American. As a result, he says, “Over the course of a few decades, if not sooner, hundreds of millions of people may be compelled to relocate because of environmental pressures.”
Rising sea levels, stronger cyclones, the loss of soil moisture, more intense precipitation and flooding, droughts, melting glaciers, and changing snow-melt patterns are among the problems humanity will face, says Dr. Sachs. He warns:
“Combined with the human-induced depletion of groundwater sources by pumping, and the extensive pollution of rivers and lakes, mass migrations may be unavoidable.”
(21 June 2007)
Darfur conflict heralds era of wars triggered by climate change, UN report warns
Julian Borger, The Guardian
· Drought and advancing desert blamed for tensions
· Chad and southern Africa also at risk from warming
The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage, according to a UN report published yesterday.
“Darfur … holds grim lessons for other countries at risk,” an 18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) concludes.
With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara advancing by well over a mile every year, tensions between farmers and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes threaten to reignite the half-century war between north and south Sudan, held at bay by a precarious 2005 peace accord.
(23 June 2007)
Tropical, not Canadian, forests absorb greenhouse gases
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA – A new study of the world’s forests has felled one of Canada’s most cherished beliefs: that our vast forests fight global warming because they soak up and store “greenhouse” gases.
They don’t, says a new study by U.S., Russian, Japanese, French and British scientists. At least, they don’t soak up enough to matter much in the climate picture.
Forests “are not the panacea for climate change. They’re not going to save us (and), for Canada, this is very important,” says Kevin Gurney, associate director of Purdue University’s climate research centre in Indiana.
“We still have to look at the energy system, (i.e., coal, gas and oil). It is the 800-pound gorilla in the emissions world … and trees are not going to help us escape the tough work we’re going to have to do in the energy systems.”
Gurney attended the original Kyoto Protocol conference in 1997 and other meetings since, where Canada pushed hard for permission to count its forests as tools that offset its emissions. The idea was that Canada didn’t have to cut back greenhouse gas emissions as much as other countries because forests did much of the work.
But the science team publishing today in the journal Science found that claiming forests as a major weapon won’t work. It reached this conclusion by analyzing 40 years’ worth of measurements from air sampling in and above forests around the world.
(21 June 2007)
CLIMATE POLICY
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Reviewing EU’s emissions trading system
FEASTA (Ireland)
The Feasta climate group has participated in the current review of the workings of the EU’s emissions trading system by proposing that all Europe’s transport emissions should be capped and tradable permits for the tonnage of carbon dioxide involved distributed each year to every adult EU resident.
You can find its submission here (pdf document, 250K). The group has also suggested that Ireland should reduce its road transport emissions by the same method, Cap and Share. A paper on this is here (pdf document, 125K). A PowerPoint presentation made to the ‘Emissions trading and road transport sector’ conference on 1 May at the Energy Institute in London is here (750K).
Similar presentations have been made to Comhar, the Irish National Sustainability Council and to the Senior Managers’ Forum of the Irish Department of Transport.
(22 June 2007)
Carbon trading: Where greed is green
James Kanter, International Herald Tribune
Seeking to match a desire to make money with his environmental instincts, Louis Redshaw, a former electricity trader, met with five top investment banks to propose trading carbon dioxide. Only one, Barclays Capital, was interested in his proposition.
Three years later, the situation has turned around entirely, and carbon experts like Redshaw, 34, are among the rising stars in the City of London financial district. Managing emissions is one of the fastest-growing segments in financial services, and companies are scrambling for talent. Their goal: a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion, but which could grow to $1 trillion within a decade.
“Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall,” said Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital. But he said that in his current job, unlike some of his previous ones, including a stint as a British power trader at Enron, “I don’t have to compromise on anything when I get out of bed in the morning.”
If greed is suddenly good for the environment, then the seedbed for this vast new financial experiment is London.
(20 June 2007)
Big Gav writes at Peak Energy:
Call me a cynic if you must, but this sort of thing is yet another example of why carbon taxes are preferable to cap and trade schemes – if it does become the world’s biggest market, you can be sure no one will want to kill the goose that lays the golden (if sooty) eggs by killing it – which is what the end game really should be. While I’ve got no problem with making money from reducing carbon emissions (or any other form of green business), it seems to me that if you don’t want to “compromise on anything when you get out of bed in the morning”, then you should be funneling money into cleantech investment, not arbitraging the carbon credit trade between the world’s biggest polluters…
Exclusive global warming poll: The buck stops here
Peter Aldhous, New Scientist
Was it Al Gore’s movie? Or is it the legacy of hurricane Katrina and a growing realisation that the US is as vulnerable as anyone to extremes of weather and climate? Whatever the explanation, Americans are growing more worried about global warming. According to a recent poll, climate change now looms larger than any other environmental threat in the mind of the American public. Asked in April to name the world’s biggest environmental problem, a third of Americans cited global warming – double the figure from just a year before. Air pollution trailed a distant second at 13 per cent.
The same poll, conducted by The Washington Post, ABC News and Stanford University in California, found that 7 out of 10 Americans want the federal government to take more action on global warming. But what form should that action take? And does support for action hold firm if people understand that it may hurt them financially?
We suspected that if we explained various options and their probable costs, people would express clear policy preferences. So to find out, we joined forces with the Stanford polling team, led by political psychologist Jon Krosnick, and Resources for the Future (RFF), an environment and energy think tank in Washington DC.
The results of our poll challenge some common preconceptions. They show clearly that policies to combat global warming can command majority public support in the US, as long as they don’t hit people’s pockets too hard. Americans turn out to be suspicious of policies that use market forces to help bring down emissions, and are much more likely to support prescriptive regulations that tell companies exactly how they must achieve cuts. What’s more, given the probable costs, action seems more likely to win public support if it targets electricity generation rather than private vehicles.
(20 June 2007)
