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Uncomfortable Climate
Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker
Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, is one of the richest men in Congress. He made his money selling car alarms, which is interesting, because he has twice been accused of auto theft. (Issa has said that he had a “colorful youth.”) As the ranking minority member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he earned a reputation as President Barack Obama’s “annoyer-in-chief.” Issa told the Times a few months ago, “You can call me a pain. I’ll accept that as a compliment.”
Now, with the Republicans about to take control of the House, Issa is poised to become the chairman of the Oversight Committee. The post comes with wide-ranging subpoena powers, and Issa has already indicated how he plans to wield them. He is not, he assured a group of Pennsylvania Republicans over the summer, interested in digging around for the sort of information that might embarrass his fellow-zillionaires: “I won’t use it to have corporate America live in fear.” Instead, he wants to go where he sees the real malfeasance. He wants to investigate climate scientists. At the top of his list are the long-suffering researchers whose e-mails were hacked last year from the computer system of Britain’s University of East Anglia. Though their work has been the subject of three separate “Climategate” inquiries—all of which found that allegations of data manipulation were unfounded—Issa isn’t satisfied. “We’re going to want to have a do-over,” he said recently.
Issa’s priorities are, to an astonishing degree, representative of the new Republican House majority. Last year, when John Boehner, of Ohio, the incoming House Speaker, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his party’s plans to address climate change, he had this to say: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical.”
(22 November 2010)
An article by Elizabeth Kolbert is always an event. -BA
A Billion People Will Lose Their Homes Due to Climate Change, says Report
Robin McKie, Guardian
British scientists will warn Cancún summit that entire nations could be flooded
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Devastating changes to sea levels, rainfall, water supplies, weather systems and crop yields are increasingly likely before the end of the century, scientists will warn tomorrow.
[Venice is already in danger of sinking beneath the waves and the peril will increase as sea levels rise. (Photograph: Franco Debernardi/Getty Images)]Venice is already in danger of sinking beneath the waves and the peril will increase as sea levels rise. (Photograph: Franco Debernardi/Getty Images)
A special report, to be released at the start of climate negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, will reveal that up to a billion people face losing their homes in the next 90 years because of failures to agree curbs on carbon emissions.
Up to three billion people could lose access to clean water supplies because global temperatures cannot now be stopped from rising by 4C.
“The main message is that the closer we get to a four-degree rise, the harder it will be to deal with the consequences,” said Dr Mark New, a climate expert at Oxford University, who organised a recent conference entitled “Four Degrees and Beyond” on behalf of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Tomorrow the papers from the meeting will be published to coincide with the start of the Cancún climate talks.
A key feature of these papers is that they assume that even if global carbon emission curbs were to be agreed in the future, these would be insufficient to limit global temperature rises to 2C this century – the maximum temperature rise agreed by politicians as acceptable.
(28 November 2010)
UN Issues Severe Climate Warning Ahead of Summit
Michael McCarthy, Independent/UK
The world is now firmly on the path for dangerous climate change in the coming century, a major new assessment reveals today on the eve of the forthcoming UN climate conference which opens next week in Mexico.
All the pledges of the nations which have agreed to cut or limit their emissions of greenhouse gases, when added together, still leave the world far short of what is needed to halt the coming rise in global average temperatures to 2C, generally regarded as the danger threshold, according to the study from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The study sets a gloomy context for the international climate meeting opening on Monday in the Mexican resort of Cancun, which is the successor meeting to the abortive Copenhagen climate conference of last year.
(24 November 2010)
Cancun Climate Conference; the US and China won’t play
Rolf E. Westgard, Energy Bulletin
On Monday, November 29, representatives from most of the world’s nations will meet in a UN sponsored Climate Change Conference at Cancun, Mexico, in an effort to reach an agreement to address global warming. This meeting follows the December 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Conference which barely managed to achieve a non-binding Accord. Preliminary meetings before Copenhagen, especially a major one at Bali(Bali Road Map) established a working document theme for Copenhagen delegates.
The Bali Road Map stated that evidence for human caused global warming was unequivocal, and it called for a long term global goal for emission reductions. It urged enhanced action on clean energy technology and the transfer of this technology to developing countries. It also set out the necessity for substantial financial support by developed countries for developing countries in order that they could make economic progress while curbing emissions. The result of Bali was the following Copenhagen theme. It pinned the blame for existing atmosphere emission levels on developed nations and created an adversarial climate for Copenhagen:
“Developed country Parties shall provide financial resources and transfer technology to developing country Parties to make full and effective repayment of ‘climate debt’, including adaptation debt, taking responsibility for their historical cumulative emissions and current high per capita emissions.”
A final Copenhagen Accord adopted a 2 degreeC target limit on future warming without setting out specific measures to achieve it. It also set a goal of $100 billion in aid for developing countries from developed countries such as the U.S., Japan, and most of Europe. The notion of sending aid to industrial China, which poses as a developing nation, did not appeal to the U.S. Congress. The Copenhagen Accord relies completely on voluntary contributions towards climate protection that the states were supposed to specify by February 1, 2010. That amounted to a kind of collection-plate principle, by which each state gives what it considers appropriate. And the Copenhagen plate is essentially empty.
There is also a preliminary working document theme for the Cancun meeting, prepared by an assembly of fifteen nations at the small and climate vulnerable Pacific Island country of Kiribati. The result is the Ambo Declaration(named for the seat of Kiribati’s parliament). The Declaration was signed by twelve of the attending countries including Australia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Fiji, Japan, Kiribati, Maldives, Marshall Islands, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, and Tonga. Attending, but not signing, were the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. The Ambo Declaration expresses grave concerns and alarm over the threat of global warming demonstrated by scientific evidence, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and extreme weather events. It suggests ongoing commitment to the principles of both the Bali Road Map and the Copenhagen Accord. In particular, it calls for developed countries to “make available financial resources that are new and additional, adequate, and sustainable on a clear grant basis to developing country parties, especially the most vulnerable.”
The Ambo Declaration repeats the call on developed countries to transfer technology to “developing country parties to enhance their ability to contribute to the rapid reduction and mitigation of global emissions.” Finally the Declaration seeks “a legally binding outcome in Cancun in line with the Bali Road Map and the political understandings of the Copenhagen Accord.” The gulf between developed and developing countries remains wide. It’s not likely that deficit plagued developed nations will grant tens of billions to developing nations, or transfer technology to developing Asian competitors, some of whom already lead in ‘green’ technology.
But the real rivals are not other nations, but the laws of atmospheric chemistry and physics. Global temperatures for the first nine months of 2010 equal 1998, the warmest year in recorded history. And 1998 had the benefit of a major global warming El Nino. As of November 25, 2010, the Arctic ice cap was smaller than for the same date in the record low year of 2007, continuing a steady shrinking trend.
Above all, the two big emitters, the U.S. and China, are not going to play this year or in the next. China notes that its per capita emissions are one fifth that of the U.S., and it needs to burn increasing amounts of its coal to maintain growth and improve living standards. Obama could not pass a weak climate bill when he had Democratic majorities in Congress. Nearly all of those newly elected Republicans are global warming skeptics, leaving the chances of any real action on global warming emissions roughly equal to winning the Power Ball.
(28 November 2010)
Rolf Westgard is a long-time EB contributor. He taught the course “Global Warming; real or myth” for the U of Minn Lifelong Learning program during Fall Quarter. -BA
