Planet at Risk

Human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems . The assessment of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (WGII AR5) evaluates how patterns of risks and potential benefits are shifting due to climate change. It considers how impacts and risks related to climate change can be reduced and managed through adaptation and mitigation. The report assesses needs, options, opportunities, constraints, resilience, limits, and other aspects associated with adaptation.

Climate change involves complex interactions and changing likelihoods of diverse impacts. A focus on risk, which is new in this report, supports decision-making in the context of climate change, and complements other elements of the report. People and societies may perceive or rank risks and potential benefits differently, given diverse values and goals.

Compared to past WGII reports, the WGII AR5 assesses a substantially larger knowledge base of relevant scientific, technical, and socioeconomic literature. Increased literature has facilitated comprehensive assessment across a broader set of topics and sectors, with expanded coverage of human systems, adaptation, and the ocean. More

 

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Counting The Cost: Of Climate Change

Counting the Cost- Climate Change special

There has been some pretty extreme weather recently - is climate change the culprit? In India the cost of living is running higher than anywhere else in Asia.

Is carbon trading working, or are companies working the system and costing consumers?

As world leaders gather for the UN General Assembly and G20 summits climate change has been high on the international agenda.

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Climate Denial Crock of the Week

 

© 2014

Nobel Laureates Speak Out

On Wednesday, 17 Nobel laureates who gathered in Stockholm have published a remarkable memorandum, asking for “fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change”. The Stockholm Memorandum concludes that we have entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene, where humanity has become the main driver of global change. The document states:

Mario Molina signs the Stockholm Memorandum

Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. [...] We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems. We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial.

The memorandum results from a 3-day symposium (attended also by the king of Sweden) on the intertwined problems of poverty, development, ecosystem deterioration and the climate crisis. In the memorandum, the Nobel laureates call for immediate emergency measures as well as long-term structural solutions, and they give specific recommendations in eight key priority areas. For example in climate policy, they recommend to:

Keep global warming below 2ºC, implying a peak in global CO2 emissions no later than 2015 and recognise that even a warming of 2ºC carries a very high risk of serious impacts and the need for major adaptation efforts.

The memorandum was handed over to the members of the UN high-level panel on global sustainability, who traveled to Stockholm in order to discuss it with the Nobel laureates and experts at the symposium.

P.S. As a little reminder of the ongoing work of the merchants of doubt, a small band of five or six “climate sceptic” protesters were gathered outside the symposium, some of whom flown in from Berlin. Their pamphlet identified them as part of the longstanding anti-climate-science campaign of US billionaire Lyndon Larouche and claimed that climate change is “a hoax” and an “insane theory”, the global temperature measurements are “mere lies”, the Nobel laureates meeting “a conspiracy” and the Stockholm Memorandum a “Fascist Manifesto”. I approached one of the protesters who carried a banner “against Green fascism” and asked him whether he seriously believes what his pamphlet says, namely that our meeting is a “symposium for global genocide”. He nodded emphatically and replied: “Yes, of course!” More

Stockholm Memorandum signing ceremony

Signing and handing over of the Stockholm Memorandum to the UN High Level Panel on Global Sustainability.

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This is Climate Change: This is Reality

IPlil Plait has been saying for a long time that to communicate science effectively, we need to connect with people. Scientists have a habit of just relaying facts to each other, since that’s how nature itself works. But people don’t work that way at all, and just reciting facts doesn’t work.

If we want to connect with people, especially over the sound and fury of the anti-science noise machine, we need to be passionate. We need to be emotional. And we need to tell the human story.

That’s exactly what it looks like Showtime is doing with its new big-budget eight-part series Years of Living Dangerously, which will show the impact of climate change on our planet. It looks phenomenal, gorgeously shot, and features journalists and celebrities who travel the world to investigate what we’re doing to our planet. Among the people in it are Jessica Alba, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lesley Stahl, and Thomas L. Friedman.

This isn’t a fluff piece, from what I can tell: Their science adviser team includes scientists Michael Mann, Katharine Hayhoe, James Hansen, and Joe Romm, among other top-flight climatologists.*

They’ve also set up a really nice website with more information, including links to the stories they cover and the science of climate change. The trailer looks great, and there’s also a version of it on YouTube: More

 

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White House charts path to cut methane pollution

When President Obama first declared methane a critical issue, in his landmark speech at Georgetown University last June, he took a concern that had been percolating in the scientific and environmental communities and put it on the climate agenda.

At the time, there was still wide debate about whether methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, was a real issue. But the last several months has brought greater clarity with both an improved scientific understanding of the problem and an awareness of the solutions. Today’s White House announcement, which lays out the Administration’s next steps and a timeline to reduce methane emissions, adds to this momentum and is a welcome display of leadership on a critical environmental and energy security issue that requires both federal and state action.

We’ve been anxiously awaiting the internal administrative task force to finish its work and the news couldn’t come at a better time, for two reasons.

First, reducing methane pollution is an urgent environmental problem. Unburned natural gas is primarily methane. Over the first twenty years after it is released into the atmosphere, methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) in trapping more heat at the Earth’s surface, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More than one third of the warming in the next couple of decades due to current emissions will be from short-lived greenhouse gases. And these emissions are on the rise. IPCC data suggests that about 30 percent of the warming we will experience over the next 20 years as a result of this year’s greenhouse gas emissions will come from methane. Oil and gas activities are the largest industrial source of U.S. methane emissions. Hence, targeting reductions here, particularly where known solutions exist, is highly effective.

Second, addressing methane pollution is also an urgent priority for national energy security. Recent events in the Ukraine remind us of this, in that access to domestic energy resources provide a measure of security to our nation and its allies. How is it possible, then, given the strategic value of the abundance of U.S. natural gas supplies, that we allow it to be wasted through unnecessary venting, flaring and leaks? This is even more perplexing when you consider that we have the technologies necessary to avoid much of this. And further, these technologies are verycost effective to deploy and maintain, and in some cases, even save companies money because the avoided loss of natural gas bears a market value (worth between $4 and $5 today).

This is the message of a recent study by ICF International which concluded that we could reduce projected losses of natural gas over the next five years by 40 percent for less than a penny per thousand cubic feet of gas produced. To put this in context, a 40 percent reduction is the equivalent of 54 LNG tankers, every year!

Can you imagine the public outcry if the United States lost 54 LNG tankers on the high seas, every year? It would be a national crisis. And yet, that is exactly what is happening in the United States today. Fifty-four tankers worth of natural gas, literally, are vanishing into thin air. Yet, this is a problem we can afford to solve for pennies on the dollar.

So, given how important it is to the environment and national energy security to put an end to the waste of natural gas and the methane pollution it creates, today’s question isn’t why the Administration is acting to announce a national policy to reduce methane, the question is what took us so long to get started? More

 

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Global Climate Will Cause Abrupt World Changes

If nations ignore the imminent problem of the increasing global climate, it will cause the world to endure abrupt changes that one single country is not prepared to handle.

Food and water supplies will be interrupted, the economy will diminish, millions of people will be displaced and civil unrest and violence will be triggered. The changing climate is causing permanent damage to ecosystems across the world, such as the loosening melt of Greenland, parching of the Amazon rainforest and melting of the Himalayan ice. Climate observations from around the world could prove to the naysayers that global warming is more than just a scientific theory. Many people of industrialized nations have a flat-earth view of the global climate change situation, which they think is an overreaction of tree huggers claiming the earth is warming up due to human abuse of the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) composed a 29-page draft that summarizes various ways to prepare for increasing temperatures, scorching heatwaves, floods and heightened sea levels. The 29-page draft evaluates food and water shortages, extinction of animal and plant life and projects crop yield to remain the same or decline in range of up to two percent a year. More than a 100 governments and scientists will convene in Japan on March 25-29 to modify and approve the report. It will direct policies for the upcoming 2015 UN summit that is taking place in Paris, to circumvent greenhouse gas emissions. Almost 200 governments have agreed to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels. The report outlines options for more efficient planning for catastrophes; like floods, hurricanes, efforts to cultivate drought and/or flood resistant crops and implementing practices conducive to water and energy conservation.

Another report released by several U.S. organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund, is arguing that it is hard to measure world abrupt changes caused by global climate change. The changes of nature can be determined more easily than economic impact. Computer models give a more accurate view at rising sea levels and temperature predictions than the effects of drought and floods. The loss of biodiversity is hard to calculate and famine, social chaos community displacement are caused by other factors rather than just climate change alone.

A lead scientist of the IPCC report has commented that global climate change is shifting from environmental research to real-world observations of extreme climate events and added the climate is much different from thirty or forty years ago. Such as the drought in California, which is experiencing one its driest winters ever.

The most at-risk area of the world are the coastal regions of Asia, especially those living in the cities. Experts claimed they could endure the worst effects of global warming than any other part of the world. Millions of homes can be destroyed by flood and rising sea levels and famine could wipe out a large portion of the population. Climate change in coastal Asian urban centers will break down economic and social infrastructure prompting for extreme poverty and sociopolitical conflict. The causes of the global climate are already destroying the planet, however government, businesses and individuals can slow down the process of climate warming to prevent abrupt world changes. More

 

© 2014