These two graphics from the Climate Interactive website are probably the clearest and most easy to understand images i’ve seen yet detailing the fallout from COP15. The ‘potential’ proposals (highlighted in green) are alot more promising than the official confirmed proposals. Some of these seem incredibly ambitious, such as Costa Rica proposing 0% emissions by 2021 (although Costa Rica is 99% clean energy already).

In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean? The Sustainability Institute have simulated the effects of CO2 emissions under the COP15 scenarios and determined the impacts upon atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature increase over pre-industrial levels.

The results aren’t pretty – under the current confirmed proposals, in 2100 we would see CO2 levels peak at 780ppm – far above the recommended 350ppm for the worlds coral reefs. Even the low emissions pathway would see the world at 470ppm by the end of the century, and the ‘business as usual scenario’ is incredibly concerning.

Along these lines, we’ve added a global ‘scorecard’ to the front page that calculates the increases in global temperature using the information above. The scorecard and analysis is updated continuously – when the proposals change, the position of the blue line on the thermometer changes:

http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4b0afdf054484c54/4b400c878bc70b45/4b0bd9e53e5935f6/b72b179d

There was a great guest op-ed in the NYT on December 27, 2009 about the importance of plant life in the oceans as carbon sinks or sponges for all the carbon (CO2) people are producing on the land.

See our related posts on this here, here and here.

And read lots more about this concept and the role of algae, seagrass, and phytoplankton as carbon stores at the Blue Carbon website here.

To Save the Planet, Save the Seas

By DAN LAFFOLEY

Peterborough, England

FOR the many disappointments of the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, there was at least one clear positive outcome, and that was the progress made on a program called Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation. Under this program, key elements of which were agreed on at Copenhagen, developing countries would be compensated for preserving forests, peat soils, swamps and fields that are efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas linked to global warming.

This approach, which takes advantage of the power of nature itself, is an economical way to store large amounts of carbon. But the program is limited in that it includes only those carbon sinks found on land. We now need to look for similar opportunities to curb climate change in the oceans.

Few people may realize it, but in addition to producing most of the oxygen we breathe, the ocean absorbs some 25 percent of current annual carbon dioxide emissions. Half the world’s carbon stocks are held in plankton, mangroves, salt marshes and other marine life. So it is at least as important to preserve this ocean life as it is to preserve forests, to secure its role in helping us adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Sea-grass meadows, for example, which flourish in shallow coastal waters, account for 15 percent of the ocean’s total carbon storage, and underwater forests of kelp store huge amounts of carbon, just as forests do on land. The most efficient natural carbon sink of all is not on land, but in the ocean, in the form of Posidonia oceanica, a species of sea grass that forms vast underwater meadows that wave in the currents just as fields of grass on land sway in the wind.

Worldwide, coastal habitats like these are being lost because of human activity. Extensive areas have been altered by land reclamation and fish farming, while coastal pollution and overfishing have further damaged habitats and reduced the variety of species. It is now clear that such degradation has not only affected the livelihoods and well-being of more than two billion people dependent on coastal ecosystems for food, it has also reduced the capacity of these ecosystems to store carbon.

The case for better management of oceans and coasts is twofold. These healthy plant habitats help meet the needs of people adapting to climate change, and they also reduce greenhouse gases by storing carbon dioxide. Countries should be encouraged to establish marine protected areas — that is, set aside parts of the coast and sea where nature is allowed to thrive without undue human interference — and do what they can to restore habitats like salt marshes, kelp forests and sea-grass meadows.

Managing these habitats is far less expensive than trying to shore up coastlines after the damage has been done. Maintaining healthy stands of mangroves in Asia through careful management, for example, has proved to cost only one-seventh of what it would cost to erect manmade coastal defenses against storms, waves and tidal surges.

The discussions in Copenhagen have opened the way for all countries to improve the management of oceans and coasts to harness their immense potential to mitigate climate change — especially over the next decade, while the world’s politicians, scientists and engineers develop longer-term strategies for stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.

In their continuing negotiations on climate change, nations should now make it a priority to produce a single map of the world that documents all the different types of coastal carbon sinks, and identify the ones that are in most immediate need of preservation. New studies should be undertaken to better understand how best to manage these areas to increase carbon sequestration. Then, following the example of the forests program, it will be possible to establish formulas for compensating countries that preserve essential carbon sinks in the oceans.

We urgently need to bring the ocean into the agenda alongside forests so that, as soon as possible, we can help the oceans to help us.

Dan Laffoley is the marine vice chairman of the World Commission on Protected Areas at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the principal specialist for marine at Natural England.

In the last few months, we’ve heard the comment “Notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man-made CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world’s warming has stopped” pushed around with alarming regularity. We discussed this in a previous posting (‘Abbott’s climate change policy is “bullshit”‘) which included a great analysis by Tamino, who demonstrated pretty well that the temperature this decade did exactly as expected – it’s getting warmer (see also “WMO finds 2000–2009 the warmest decade; so much for that “global warming pause” meme“)

Another one of those re-occurring memes that’s been posted here on the comments section of Climate Shifts is that the “computer climate models (are) known to not be able to predict future climate very well” and “observational evidence does not match the models to date“. Considering that it’s almost the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it seems like a good time to be checking our predictions and future projections of climate change. Enter Gavin from Real Climate, who points out the vital importance of “updat(ing) all of the graphs of annual means with another single datapoint”:

Above is the annual mean anomalies from the IPCC AR4 models (black line) and their 95% envelope (grey shading) and the surface temperature records from HadCRUT3v (red line) and GISTEMP (blue lines). As Gavin points out:

As you can see, now that we have come out of the recent La Niña-induced slump, temperatures are back in the middle of the model estimates. If the current El Niño event continues into the spring, we can expect 2010 to be warmer still.

So far, the model predictions are looking solid. We can pretty much debunk the meme “observational evidence does not match the models to date“.

Next up, Gavin deals with a pretty key question: how does the oldest of all climate models hold up? Below are three scenarios from Hansen’s 1988 paper on climate projections:

How about that “computer climate models (are) known to not be able to predict future climate very well” meme? It seems like even the first GCM model did a pretty good job of predicting the increases in temperature pretty well, although the B & C scenarios are a little warm compared to the actual surface temperature records.  To conclude:

…despite the fact these are relatively crude metrics against which to judge the models, and there is a substantial degree of unforced variability, the matches to observations are still pretty good, and we are getting to the point where a better winnowing of models dependent on their skill may soon be possible. (Read more over @ Real Climate)

What was that? Can’t hear me? Don’t worry, ocean acidification will fix that.

According to a new paper published in Nature Geoscience, as the oceans become more acidic through increased atmospheric CO2, the changes in seawater chemistry will result in fewer reactions and less acoustic used. This means that sound will travel further, and therefore be louder at a fixed distance than under less acidic conditions.

Sound absorption attenuation as a function of frequency and seawater pH (Ilyina et al 2010)

The authors predict that by 2100, sound absorption could fall by up to 60% high latitudes regions of the world. Most of the absorption of sound occurs at low frequencies (1,000 to 5,000 hertz) – the same range as propellor noises, ship sounds and military sonar. Marine noise is a huge issue in the oceans, and is already known to harm cetaceans (‘i’m beached as, bro‘) – and this is projected to get louder and louder:

Temporal evolution of seawater pH and sound absorption coefficient in acoustic hotspots (Ilyina et al 2010)

“We’re not saying that during the next 100 years all dolphins will be deafened,” Dr. Zeebe said. “But the background noise could essentially override or mask the sounds that they’re depending on.” (Read More)

Ilyina et al (2010) Future ocean increasingly transparent to low-frequency sound owing to carbon dioxide emissions Nature Geoscience (3)18-22