Tag Archives: Climate Change

Climate change 2007 – a year in review

Posted on by
Reply

A somewhat belated happy new years to everyone reading – welcome back after the Christmas break. Not only has 2007 been quite a year in the politics of climate change (more on this from me later), there have been quite a few climatic extremes – see the article below from the Associated Press. As skeptics have been all too eager to point out, there have been plenty of examples of cold weather in 2007 (and hence global warming must be false). However, as the article clearly states: “Individual weather extremes can’t be attributed to global warming, scientists always say. However, ‘it’s the run of them and the different locations‘ that have the mark of man-made climate change, said top European climate expert Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in England.” After all, a single heatwave doesn’t prove global warming to be ‘true’.

2007 – A Year of Climate Surprises

Associated Press (1st January 2008)

When the calendar turned to 2007, the heat went on and the weather just got weirder.

January was the warmest first month on record worldwide — 1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe’s average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.

And as 2007 drew to a close, it was also shaping up to be the hottest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere.

Continue reading →

Barrier Reef’s future clouded (The Australian Newspaper)

Posted on by
Reply

The Australian, 14th December 2007
It is probably too late to save the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs from global warming.
Even if governments implement far-reaching measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, they will not prevent the annihilation of coral reefs around the world.

These are the conclusions of analysis by leading marine scientists to be published today in the prestigious journal Science.

“There is a terrible future in front of us for the reefs,” said Canada-based United Nations University professor Peter Sale, one of 17 authors from seven nations of the Science paper.

On Wednesday, Kevin Rudd told the UN’s Bali climate change conference that global warming was threatening Australian natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and rainforests, killing rivers and exposing people to more frequent and ferocious bushfires.

The scientists present three scenarios for the future of coral reefs – the world’s largest lifeforms – under different climatic conditions.

If current conditions continue, with the stabilisation of temperatures and emissions at today’s level of 380 parts per million, reefs will survive but undergo fundamental changes.

However, scientists agree that stabilisation of current conditions is not possible. The paper warns that if emissions rise to between 450 and 500ppm, with an associated temperature rise of 2C by 2050 – the most optimistic outcome predicted by the landmark study by British economist Nicholas Stern – reefs will suffer “vastly reduced habitat complexity and loss of biodiversity”.

But if they rise above 500ppm, the minimum emission level forecast by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climage Change by 2050, reefs will become “rapidly eroding rubble banks”.

Continue reading →

Global action call to save reefs

Posted on by
Reply

Eminent coral scientists have given world leaders in Bali more reason to act urgently against climate change, by producing a new report that warns coral reefs will disappear within decades if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise.

Their paper, published today in the prestigious Science magazine, is the most compelling scientific case yet that unchecked global warming will be a disaster for coral reefs and the 100 million people and one million species depending on them.

CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere is currently 380 parts per million (ppm) but the authors say if future emissions exceed 450ppm we risk losing reefs.

“This is a very ambitious target and should represent yet another reality check for world leaders meeting in Bali,” lead author UQ Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said.

Reducing CO2 emissions must also be accompanied by reducing reef risks such as overfishing, pollution and unsustainable coastal developments, a cross-section of the report’s authors (all of whom are members of the Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building for Management Program, CRTR) said at UQ.
Tools needed to reduce stress on coral reefs already exist, and include: increased protection of river catchment and coastal areas; co-management arrangements between governments and local communities; improved catchment, water quality and environmental flow measures; fishing regulation enforcement; restoration of reefs and coastal vegetation; and sustainable tourism.
The study has found serious consequences follow on from even small increases in CO2.

“The warmer and more acidic oceans caused by the rise of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels threaten to destroy coral dominated reef ecosystems, exposing people to flooding, coastal erosion and the loss of food and income from reef-based fisheries and tourism,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.
“This is happening just when many nations are hoping that growing industries like tourism and fisheries will allow them to develop beyond their often impoverished state.
“Increased CO2 not only warms the climate but also dissolves in sea water making it more acidic.
“This, in turn, decreases the ability of corals to produce calcium carbonate, which is what the all-important framework of coral reefs is made of.”

Continue reading →

Coral reefs as CO2 sinks?

Posted on by
Reply

An interesting article that has appeared in the news recently suggests that countries in the Asia Pacific region have proposed to utilise their coral reefs as carbon sinks under the new climate change protocol being developed in Bali.

Indonesian Fisheries and Marine Affairs Minister, Freddy Numberi, who opened the six countries’ senior official meeting to discuss the action plan to conserve the coral area, said that the area, which is dubbed as the Amazon of the Seas because it contains 53 percent of the world’s coral reef and over 3,000 fish species, was the earth’s epicenter of marine life and diversity.

“We have made efforts to conserve it during the past five years, so we want the world to appreciate it. One of the ways is to include it into the Kyoto Protocol framework so that it can be turned into a carbon sink, and later trade it for carbon credit,” Freddy told reporters. (Read more)

On the topic of coral reef sequestration of carbon, Dr Thomas Goreau from the Global Coral Reef Allience (a delegate at the United Nations conference in Bali) has the following to say:

Not only is the entire claim that coral reefs are a CO2 sink completely incorrect, they are in fact a source of CO2 to the atmosphere even while they remove carbon from the ocean. This has been understood by carbonate chemists for a very long time but we keep having to deal with this popular error over
and over again.

Continue reading →

The challenge: to go from climate laggard to climate leader

Posted on by
Reply

The Age, 27th November

LABOR’S exceptional victory is built on its core promises, and tackling climate change is one of them. Kevin Rudd has promised that one of his first acts in government will be to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This will come as a welcome relief to most Australians. We have been suffering from deferred ratification for a long time, and the move is 10 years overdue.

However, while in the conservative context of Australian climate politics ratification may seem like one giant leap for Australians, it is now only a modest step for mankind (and other species).

The annual meeting of parties of the UN Climate Change Convention begins in Bali next Monday. For the first time in a decade, Australia — with its delegation led by our prime minister — will sit as a credible participant in debates over the Earth’s climate future. What positions and targets will we support?

The only serious proposition on the table at Bali comes from the European Union. The EU has proposed a target for developed countries to cut their collective emissions by 30% below 1990 levels by 2020. Although this target is conservative, it is still well beyond what has been acceptable in Australia to date. How will we respond?

Continue reading →

Facing up to the realities of climate change

Posted on by
Reply

Developed countries must ‘show some spine’ on climate change
ABC News, 19th November

Some 2,500 scientists worked on the IPCC’s findings. The UN believes the worst case scenarios of global warming could be avoided if there were sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The economic cost it argues, is minimal compared with the cost of doing nothing.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is the Director of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland and also contributed to the IPCC report. “The report points out that if we are going to avoid those catastrophic scenarios, we actually have to peak our emissions in 2015, which is just around the corner, eight years away,” he said. “Now to do that, we have to have really major efforts to change the way we use energy and we’re going to have to have a range of international treaties in place not in 2012 but literally tomorrow.”

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg says it is imperative that developed nations such as Australia and the US set an example by cutting emissions immediately through reducing energy needs, better insulation and construction standards and use of technology that currently exists, like solar energy. “It’s up to the developed countries to show some spine on this issue and avoid what will be a global catastrophe. It’s relatively cost effective – in fact it’s you know, really quite cheap – to address the issue and achieve that level of stabilisation.

“If we go down the street of trying to stabilise at about 450 parts per million, it will shave only, and this is an upper estimate, only about 0.12 per cent of the average annual growth in GDP.” (Read more)


Oceans fail the Acid Test
Science Alert, 22nd November

Acid oceans are the elephant in the room of global change – an event potentially so massive and profound in its implications for life on Earth that the world media has largely avoided it, governments shunned it and scientists discussed it mostly in muted tones, usually behind closed doors.The acid oceans theory is quite straightforward: the CO2 emitted by human activity dissolves out of the atmosphere into the seas, gradually turning them more acidic. This is largely independent of global warming or other effects. It is a straight equation – about half of all the CO2 produced since the start of the industrial revolution has ended up in the sea, reducing the surface pH by 0.1 (some experiments indicate as much as 0.3 pH).

The change in acidity may seem minor but experiments by the Centre’s Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg suggest it could be enough to shut down coral growth and kill the calcareous algae that hold together the fronts of reefs. He has warned that Australia risks losing the Great Barrier Reef if atmospheric CO2 levels rise above 500 parts per million from their current level of 385ppm, as they are currently expected to do by mid-century.

If that were not serious enough, an even more profound impact is likely to occur among calcareous plankton which will be unable to form their chalky skeletons as the water acidifies. The vulnerable corals and plankton make up about a third of all life in the oceans. (Read more)

Analysis of the Australian government response to the IPCC

Posted on by
2

IPCC report shows Australian targets a sham
By Chris McGrath, Brisbane barrister and Climate Project presenter

 

Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Garrett both claim vindication on climate change from the synthesis report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Both are wrong.

Labor has a policy of reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050 compared with year 2000 emissions.

 

The Liberals have attacked this target as “likely to damage the economy”. They refuse to state their own target for emissions but this must logically be less onerous than Labor’s.

 

The central difficulty for both Labor and the Liberals in claiming vindication from the latest IPCC report is it indicates a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050 will be inadequate to protect our most valuable environmental assets such as the Great Barrier Reef.

Continue reading →

“Failing to act on climate change is criminally irresponsible.”

Posted on by
1

The Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released overnight in Valencia, Spain. If there is one thing that you are going to read from the IPCC, then it should be this document.

This is the final phase of the 4th Assessment report. The SPM draws together the evidence, discussion and conclusions of the 3 IPCC working groups from the fourth assessment report and provide it as a no-nonsense, on-partisan digest for policy makers.

Summarizing most the conclusions that fall into the IPCC’s ‘likely’ to ‘almost certain’ categories, the following seems to true for climate change. We are now in a rapidly warming climate that is changing natural and human systems. The burning of fossil fuels and land-use change by humans is driving these changes. Ice is disappearing from our glaciers and snow fields, water supplies are drying up and food production is being threatened. Natural ecosystems from rainforest to the southern ocean are changing rapidly. Millions of lives are threatened by the combination of a hot house future, with rising sea levels and intensifying natural disasters.

The synthesis highlights several growing certainties. These are that our current trajectory will put us into a world which is described at the upper end of the IPCC trajectories. “There is high agreement and much evidence that with current climate change mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global GHG (Green House Gas) emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades.“

Specifically, this will involve the loss of water supplies to hundreds of millions, the loss of coral reefs, rainforests and other significant global assets, the loss of 50% or more of species, increasing crop failures at low latitudes, inundation of coastal areas, and a rapidly rising death toll from disease, flooding and heat waves. The kicker is that many of these impacts, while serious at high latitudes will be greatest for developing nations which are mostly clustered at low latitudes.

The worst impacts will be on those people who least can afford to respond. Hence, in the words of Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), “Failing to recognize the urgency of this message and acting on it would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible.”

Continue reading →

IPCC release “Climate Change 2007” – the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)

Posted on by
Reply

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the most rigorous scientific processes of modern times. In the synthesis report released today in Valencia, Spain, it has reasserts the undeniable evidence that the earth is warming rapidly due the rise of anthropogenic generated greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. These changes are being driven by the burning of fossil fuels and the massive destruction of nature landscapes such as forests.

The changes that we are seeing are unprecedented in the last several million years. Events thought to be unlikely, such as the breakup of the polar and Greenland ice sheets are now happening. The report indicates that natural ecosystems are changing rapidly, water availability is diminishing and that impacts on food supply for many countries will continue to grow. This report is yet another wake-up call to the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change.

Coral reefs are indicative of the changes that are occurring in natural ecosystems. Worldwide coral reefs are responsible for supporting the subsistence food supply for it leased 100 million people. It coral reefs disappear, as the IPCC report warns, there would be catastrophic consequences for many societies throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. For Australia, a loss of coral reefs would have serious economic consequences for boom economy states like Queensland. At present, the second-largest industry in Queensland is the tourist industry generated by the beauty and ecologically pristine nature of the Great Barrier Reef. Without the Great Barrier Reef, this $6 billion per year industry would dwindle.

The IPCC synthesis report also provides the very strong case that the consequences for human societies everywhere will be catastrophic if we don’t act right now. Decisive, non-partisan action is required. This action must listen to the science and the seriousness of the problem. It must act on that science. Anything less is foolhardy.

Without acting right now we will miss the only opportunity to act. Strong leadership is required that sets clear targets that must reduce our emissions to less than 10% within the next three decades. We have not seen that leadership in Australia or elsewhere as yet. Currently, with Australia’s leading the world as the highest emitters of CO2 per person, changing our current disastrous track will require some strong and clever decisions. Given this and the fact that we are wealthy as a nation, we should be leading the world rather than dragging our feet.

While both sides of politics in the recent electoral debates have recognized the issue of climate change as being important, both sides have been reluctant to specify the action that they will take to reduce emissions over the next few decades. This is unfortunate given that we need strong leadership not only to adapt to climate change (which is where most of the money has gone so far) and also to specify strong emission reduction targets that are commensurate with the scale of this global emergency. This decade may be among the last in which we can choose between a future during which humans to continue to prosper in many regions, versus one in which we will continually struggle to survive as the climate becomes more and more hostile, and beyond our control.

Australia and climate change

Posted on by
Reply

“Australians named worst emitters”

BBC News, 14th November 2007

A study of the world’s power stations has shown the extent to which developed countries produce more carbon dioxide per head than emerging economies. Australians were found to be the world’s worst polluters per capita, producing five times as much carbon from generating power as China. The US came second with eight tonnes of carbon per head – 16 times more than that produced by India.The US also produced the most carbon in total, followed by China.The Carbon Monitoring for Action (Carma) website is the first global inventory of emissions and looks at 50,000 power stations.Its data was compiled by the Center for Global Development, a US think-tank. (Read More)

“CSIRO scientist says sign Kyoto”The Age, 15th November 2007

The former head of CSIRO’s atmospheric research unit says Australia should sign the Kyoto Protocol or be left on the sidelines at the United Nations’ climate change talks in Bali next month.

Graeme Pearman, who is now a consultant in the private sector, said Australia will be ”sitting on the sidelines” while world leaders launch serious negotiations on comprehensive post-2012 Kyoto agreement on fighting climate change.

”Frankly, I think we should sign and I don’t say that lightly,” Mr Pearman told AAP after addressing a conference of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) in Sydney.

Dr Pearman said he was not a fan of the Kyoto Protocol at the start, as it was not a level playing field. ”I haven’t been a strong supporter, quite honestly, of Kyoto because Kyoto was not based on any level playing field – there are all sorts of political games (that were) being played when the rules were set up,” he said. ”Now is a time to join.”

(Read More)