Insurance industry’s climate change dithering could be catastrophic for global economy

Some numbers to keep insurance executives reaching for the Ambien in the dead of the night: Extreme weather driven by climate change cost the US insurance industry $32 billion in 2011.

Superstorm Sandy alone led to some $25 billion in insured losses last year, the warmest on record. And today climate scientists released a study showing global temperatures have hit a 4,000-year high.

So one might think the insurance industry would be leading the charge on climate change, given its multitrillion-dollar exposure to property damage resulting from the hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and other weather-related calamities that are increasing in frequency and intensity as the planet warms.

Not exactly.

Ceres, the Boston-based nonprofit that promotes corporate sustainability, released a report yesterday analyzing 184 insurers’ responses to an annual climate risk survey mandated by the states of California, New York, and Washington for any insurance company conducting more than $300 million in business.

“In general, almost all companies responding to the survey show significant weakness in their preparedness to address the effects climate change may have on their business,” the report states.

As Ceres notes, the global economy would be paralyzed without insurance lubricating commerce. And since the insurance industry is also a major institutional investor—to the tune of $5 trillion—bad bets on companies exposed to climate change risk could erode insurers’ own balance sheets and their ability to cope with multiple Sandy’s in the years to come. Not to mention liability from litigation arising from customers such as power plant operators whose emissions contribute to climate change.

“A substantial proportion of the revenue generated by insurers is derived from investment returns,” the Ceres report notes. “Just as climate change may substantially increase insured losses, it may also adversely affect the investment performance that insurers rely on to meet their liabilities.”

The study found that only 23 of the 184 insurers have adopted comprehensive climate change strategies as part of their risk management operations. Of those 23 more forward-looking companies, 13 are foreign-owned.

Ceres rated insurance companies’ climate change policies on a 50-point scale. The average score was a rather dismal 7.5 with 17 companies scoring 0 and one insurer taking the highest score of 33. (Ceres withheld the identities of individual companies in the rankings.)

So while Swiss Re collaborates with the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, some US insurers appear reluctant to categorically acknowledge the existence of global warming.

“Allstate is not endorsing, rejecting or expressing any opinion with respect to any particular scientific pronouncement about climate change/global warming,” the US insurance giant cautioned in its response to the survey.

Most insurers have implemented sophisticated strategies to evaluate the risks associated with extreme weather and climate variability, according to CERES. But few are looking at climate change as an immediate threat whose impacts are accelerating with each passing year.

Property insurers, not surprisingly, are at the forefront of industry efforts on climate change. Some life insurance companies, on the other hand, see little connection between climate change and the potential consequences for their business. More

 

Large rise in CO2 emissions sounds climate change alarm

Hopes for 'safe' temperature increase within 2C fade as Hawaii station documents second-greatest emissions increase

The chances of the world holding temperature rises to 2C – the level of global warming considered "safe" by scientists – appear to be fading fast with US scientists reporting the second-greatest annual rise in CO₂ emissions in 2012.

Carbon dioxide levels measured at at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 2.67 parts per million (ppm) in 2012 to 395ppm, said Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The record was an increase of 2.93ppm in 1998.

The jump comes as a study published in Science on Thursday looking at global surface temperatures for the past 1,500 years warned that "recent warming is unprecedented", prompting UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres, to say that "staggering global temps show urgent need to act. Rapid climate change must be countered with accelerated action."

Tans told the Associated Press the major factor was an increase in fossil fuel use. "It's just a testament to human influence being dominant", he said. "The prospects of keeping climate change below that [two-degree goal] are fading away."

Preliminary data for February 2013 show CO₂ levels last month standing at their highest ever recorded at Manua Loa, a remote volcano in the Pacific. Last month they reached a record 396.80ppm with a jump of 3.26ppm parts per million between February 2012 and 2013.

Carbon dioxide levels fluctuate seasonally, with the highest levels usually observed in April. Last year the highest level at Mauna Loa was measured at 396.18ppm.

What is disturbing scientists is the the acceleration of CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, which are occurring in spite of attempts by governments to restrain fossil fuel emissions.

According to the observatory, the average annual rate of increase for the past 10 years has been 2.07ppm – more than double the increase in the 1960s. The average increase in CO₂ levels between 1959 to the present was 1.49ppm per year.

The Mauna Loa measurements coincide with a new peer-reviewed studyof the pledges made by countries to reduce CO2 emissions. The Dutch government's scientific advisers show that rich countries will have to reduce enissions by 50% percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if there is to be even a medium chance of limiting warming to 2C, thus preventing some of climate change's worst impacts.

"The challenge we already knew was great is even more difficult", said Kelly Levin, a researcher with the World Resources Instistute in Washington. "But even with an increased level of reductions necessary, it shows that a 2° goal is still attainable – if we act ambitiously and immediately."

Extreme weather, which is predicted by climate scientists to occur more frequently as the atmosphere warms and CO2 levels rise, has already been seen widely in 2013.

China and India have experienced their coldest winter in decades and Australia has seen a four-month long heat wave with 123 weather records broken during what scientists are calling its 'angry summer'.

"We are in [getting] into new climatic territory. And when you get records being broken at that scale, you can start to see a shifting from one climate system to another. So the climate has in one sense actually changed and we are now entering a new series of climatic conditions that we just haven't seen before", said Tim Flannery, head of the Australian government's climate change commission, this week. More

 

Is Bill McKibben Really Serious About Climate Change?

Andy Revkin recently published a post on his Dot Earth blog titled A Communications Scholar Analyzes Bill McKibben’s Path on Climate. In one of the videos that is embedded in the article, Matthew Nisbet describes Bill McKibben as a public intellectual and compares his activism on climate to that of Rachel Carson on the effects of pesticide chemicals.

Nuclear Submarine Under Ice

Revkin provides this quote about the video:

There’s a lot of value in this short statement, including this framing explaining why global warming has been challenging for all kinds of communicators to address: Unlike conventional environmental problems like acid rain or the ozone hole, climate change is not conventionally solvable. It’s more a problem like poverty or public health — something that we’re going to do better or worse at. We’re never going to end, we’re never going to solve it.

Though I am not a New York Times columnist or the founder of a large and growing non profit like350.org, I am vain enough to believe that I have something to offer on the topic of solving climate change. Instead of describing the work of scientists and trying to synthesize the solutions offered by technologists into some kind of coherent story to convince people that they should both care and take some action, I spend my early morning hours writing about a powerful tool that is based on my own research and experience.

Nuclear fission energy has almost magical properties. It provides massive quantities of the useful ability to do work (that is the technical definition of “energy”) without producing any greenhouse gases at all. It provides that incredibly valuable product from a tiny quantity of naturally occurring material that has few competing commercial uses. We have known about this gift for just 75 years, but within just a couple of decades after it was discovered it was already powering cities, large, fast ships and submarines.

The current fear of nuclear energy is a purely man-made construct; there is nothing natural about being afraid of a force that you cannot see, smell or taste and that rarely, if ever, harms anyone as long as it is properly handled. Anyone who has raised children knows that they are naturally fearless; they have to be taught caution around such dangerous objects as lighted fireplaces, neighborhood streets full of automobiles, and edges of a high wall.

Human beings had to be taught to fear nuclear energy. Despite what some might tell you, it was not an easy thing to do; in the first few decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the images and experiences of the bomb were freshest in the public’s mind, the support for using atomic energy was almost universal. People recognized that any fuel powerful enough to knock down a city with a single blow was powerful enough to solve many pressing energy challenges.

However, the sustained effort to teach people to be afraid of nuclear energy – instead of respecting its power and using its force for good – has been pretty successful in many places, including Vermont, the place that McKibben calls home. It continues to frustrate me when people who claim to be almost solely focused on fighting climate change and the fossil fuels whose use is a huge contribution to the problem refuse to acknowledge that their fear of nuclear energy is hampering their ability to succeed in their self-assigned mission.

Here is a comment that I left on Dot Earth in which I made my case that McKibben is simply not serious enough about climate change to overcome an imposed phobia or take the time to learn just why he and his followers have been taught to have that fear. I wonder if he ever stops to think about how his reluctance to use nuclear energy plays into the hands of the fossil fuel companies whose behavior he is trying to alter through his divestment campaign?

Though I applaud McKibben for his success in focusing attention on a “wicked” challenge, I continue to wonder why he has chosen to avoid support for the best available tool.

Fission can directly replace oil, gas and coal in many applications including power plants, district heating, industrial process heat and ship propulsion. On January 17, 1955, nuclear fission power demonstrated that it was capable of supplying reliable power in the most challenging environment imaginable – a sealed, submerged submarine full of breathing human beings.

In a world where we need reliable power to continue to do work and where we obviously need to take action to make that power cleaner, I fail to understand why climate activists like McKibben are so fearful of nuclear energy.

The technology, despite the scary stories told in the hydrocarbon advertiser-supported media, has a respectable safety record. There have been few, if any instances of anyone in the public ever being harmed by radiation released from a nuclear power plant. There are 0 cases of anyone being harmed by fine particulates, 0 environments being damaged by acid rain, and 0 fish being polluted by mercury released from nuclear plant smokestacks. (There are no nuclear plant smoke stacks.) More

 

Where Has All the Ice Gone?

As the earth warms, glaciers and ice sheets are melting and seas are rising. Over the last century, the global average sea level rose by 17 centimeters (7 inches). This century, as waters warm and ice continues to melt, seas are projected to rise nearly 2 meters (6 feet), inundating coastal cities worldwide, such as New York, London, and Cairo. Melting sea ice, ice sheets, and mountain glaciers are a clear sign of our changing climate.

In September 2012, sea ice in the Arctic Ocean shrank to a record low extent and volume. The region has warmed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1960s—twice as much as lower latitudes. With less snow and ice to reflect the sun’s rays and with more exposed ocean to absorb heat, a vicious cycle leads to even warmer temperatures. Thinner ice combined with rising temperatures makes it increasingly difficult for the sea ice to recover. The historically ever-present white cap at the top of the globe could disappear entirely during the summer within two decades.

While Greenland’s ice loss is astonishing, on the other side of the globe, parts of Antarctica’s vast ice sheet may be even less stable.

The Arctic plays a pivotal role in large-scale weather patterns. The stark contrast between cold air at the North Pole and warmer air in the temperate zone drives the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. As the Arctic continues to warm faster than the rest of the globe, this contrast diminishes. This can change the path of the jet stream and slow it down, leaving weather systems in the same place for a longer time. A rainy spell that sticks around can turn into flooding, while a sunny spell can turn into a drought.

Warming in the Arctic is particularly important because of its effects on Greenland’s enormous ice sheet. Greenland’s ice loss has accelerated from 51 billion tons per year in the 1990s to 263 billion tons per year today. In July 2012, an iceberg twice the size of the island of Manhattan calved off Petermann glacier in northwestern Greenland. This was the second large calving event off this glacier in just two years: the iceberg that broke away in August 2010 was twice as large.

While Greenland’s ice loss is astonishing, on the other side of the globe, parts of Antarctica’s vast ice sheet may be even less stable. The continent is flanked by 54 major ice shelves, which act as brakes slowing the movement of ice in land-based glaciers out to sea. Twenty of them show signs of thinning and weakening, which translates into accelerated ice loss. After the 3,250-square-kilometer Larsen B Ice Shelf collapsed in 2002, for instance, the glaciers it was bracing flowed up to eight times faster than before. The most dramatic thinning is in West Antarctica.

Pine Island glacier, which flows into the Amundsen Sea, is one of the main outlets for West Antarctic ice. A rift now stretches 29 kilometers across the glacier’s ice shelf, threatening to release an iceberg 14 times the size of Manhattan. Warm deep ocean water has penetrated beneath it, causing an astounding rate of retreat. In the past 20 years, the grounding line where the bottom of the glacier meets the ocean retreated by 25 kilometers, whereas over the previous 10,000 years it only moved back by 90 kilometers.

The movement of land-based ice to the ocean raises sea level. Together the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets contain enough ice to raise seas by 12 meters, if they disintegrate entirely. Just a one-meter rise—well within the projections for this century—would flood half of the riceland in Bangladesh and much of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam, two countries that are leading rice producers.

Melting mountain glaciers contribute to sea level rise as well, but they are of more immediate concern because of their roles in the everyday lives of millions of people. They provide drinking water for villages and cities, irrigation water for farms, and fuel for hydropower plants. These vital services are in jeopardy because mountain glaciers worldwide are shrinking at accelerating rates. For instance, 37 reference glaciers studied by the World Glacier Monitoring Service shrank three times faster from 2000 to 2009 than from 1980 to 1989. (See data.)

The glaciers in the Himalayas—the largest concentration of ice outside of the two poles—have been dubbed Asia’s “water towers” because of their large water storage capacity. Their runoff feeds Asia’s great rivers, including the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, which support hundreds of millions of people. Climbers attracted to the one-of-a-kind peaks tell their own stories of melting ice. In many places, what had been blinding white ice and snow fields in the days of the first explorers are now bare rock. More avalanches and more crevasses add risk to already dangerous treks. Data collected by the Chinese Academy of Sciences validate these anecdotes, showing that glacier melt in the Eastern and Central Himalayas has sped up. This will continue as temperatures rise.

Glaciers in the Alps perform a similar water tower function for Europe, and they too are shrinking. Switzerland’s Great Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps, has retreated by more than 2 kilometers since 1900. In Germany, a local ski company concerned by the rapid shrinkage of Zugspitze glacier resorted to covering the ice with a 9,000-square-meter reflective blanket. But this is just a Band-Aid; without addressing the real problem of rising temperature, 90 percent of all Alpine glaciers could be wiped out by 2100. Such a dramatic loss can already be seen in the nearby Spanish Pyrenees Mountains, where close to 90 percent of the glacier cover has disappeared over the past century.

In the United States, almost all of Alaska’s glaciers are retreating or thinning. For example, data collected at Gulkana glacier each year since 1966 reveal an ice loss trend that has sped up since the early 1990s. In Montana, Glacier National Park may be “glacier” in name only within two decades. Only 25 of the park's 150 original glaciers remain.

Nearly all of the world’s tropical glaciers are found in South America in the Andes. Rising temperatures have more than tripled the rate of ice loss from these glaciers since the mid-1970s. In Peru, more than 2 million people depend on runoff from the Cordillera Blanca (the White Range). As the mountain range’s glaciers began to waste away, water runoff temporarily increased. But glaciologist Michel Baraer of McGill University in Canada estimates that runoff has already peaked and is now in decline. Bolivia’s famous Chacaltaya glacier, once a popular ski site, can now be found only on old maps. The runoff from Zongo glacier flows through 10 hydropower plants that currently generate some 25 percent of Bolivia’s electricity. But Zongo’s ice is retreating by 9 meters per year. As water supplies dwindle, competition among hydropower stations, farmers, and cities will get worse.

The last remaining glaciers in the tropical Pacific, on Indonesia’s Puncak Jaya Mountain, also are melting fast. Between 1936 and 2006, this mountain lost close to 80 percent of its ice cover. During world-renowned glaciologist Lonnie Thompson’s recent expedition to sample the ice before it disappears—along with the historical climate data trapped inside the ice—heavy rains thinned the ice around his campsite by 30 centimeters in just 13 days. More

 

Atmospheric Warming Altering Ocean Salinity And The Water Cycle

A clear change in salinity has been detected in the world’s oceans, signaling shifts and acceleration in the global rainfall and evaporation cycle tied directly to climate change.

In a paper published … in the journal Science, Australian scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported changing patterns of salinity in the global ocean during the past 50 years, marking a clear symptom of climate change.

Lead author Paul Durack said that by looking at observed ocean salinity changes and the relationship between salinity, rainfall and evaporation in climate models, they determined the water cycle has become 4 percent stronger from 1950-2000. This is twice the response projected by current generation global climate models.

“These changes suggest that arid regions have become drier and high rainfall regions have become wetter in response to observed global warming,” said Durack, a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Scientists monitor salinity changes in the world’s oceans to determine where rainfall has increased or decreased. “It provides us with a gauge — a method of monitoring how large-scale patterns of rainfall and evaporation (the climate variables we care most about) are changing,” Durack said.

With a projected temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the researchers estimate a 24 percent acceleration of the water cycle is possible.

[JR: Actually the projected warming by century's end is closer to 5°C -- see review of literature here -- which would yield a stunning 40% acceleration of the water cycle.]

Scientists have struggled to determine coherent estimates of water cycle changes from land-based data because surface observations of rainfall and evaporation are sparse. According to the team, global oceans provide a much clearer picture.

“The ocean matters to climate — it stores 97 percent of the world’s water; receives 80 percent of all surface rainfall, and it has absorbed 90 percent of the Earth’s energy increase associated with past atmospheric warming,” said co-author, Richard Matear of CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship.

“Warming of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere is expected to strengthen the water cycle largely driven by the ability of warmer air to hold and redistribute more moisture.”

He said the intensification is an enhancement in the patterns of exchange between evaporation and rainfall, and with oceans accounting for 71 percent of the global surface area, the change is clearly represented in ocean surface salinity patterns.

In the study, the scientists combined 50-year observed global surface salinity changes with changes from global climate models and found “robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of about 8 percent per degree of surface warming,” Durack said.

Durack said the patterns are not uniform, with regional variations agreeing with the ‘rich get richer’ mechanism, where wet regions get wetter and dry regions drier.

He said a change in freshwater availability in response to climate change poses a more significant risk to human societies and ecosystems than warming alone.

“Changes to the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will affect food availability, stability, access and utilization,” Durack said.

Susan Wijffels, co-chair of the global Argo project and a co-author on the study, said maintenance of the present fleet of around 3,500 profilers is critical to observing continuing changes to salinity in the upper oceans. More

This piece of research was originally published at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

 

Killer Heat Waves and Floods Linked to Climate Change

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 27 2013 (IPS) - Killer heat waves, floods and storms are increasingly caused by climate change, new research reveals.

Scientists in Germany say they have found how greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are helping to trap the jet stream, resulting in extraordinary weather such as the 2010 Pakistan flood and the 2011 heat wave in the United States.

Human-driven climate change repeatedly disturbs the flow of atmospheric waves around the globe’s Northern hemisphere, said lead author Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany.

Giant atmospheric waves called Rossby waves are meanders in the strong, high-altitude winds known as jet streams and have a major influence on weather. These wave movements are caused by the difference in temperatures between the cold air from the Arctic and hot air from the tropics.

When the waves shift north, they suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the U.S., and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic, said Petoukhov.

“During several recent extreme weather events, these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks,” he said. “So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays.”

This unnatural pattern is due to human heating of the climate through emissions of greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels, according to the study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, this heating of the atmosphere is wildly uneven. The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global temperature rise of 0.8C and that affects the Rossby waves and is slowing the jet stream.

“(Our research) complements previous research that already linked such phenomena to climate change,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a co-author of the study.

IPS previously reported research showing the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice and rapid warming of the region was affecting weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.

The unprecedented expanse of ice-free Arctic Ocean has been absorbing the 24-hour sun over the short polar summer. The heat in the water must be released into the atmosphere if the ice is to re-form in the autumn.

“This is like a new energy source for the atmosphere,” Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University, told the Guardian.

Major declines of Arctic summer sea ice as in 2011 and 2007 have been linked to colder winters in the UK and northern Europe, Francis said. The record ice loss in 2012 has been followed by a cold and stormy winter over much of Europe.

“The jet stream is clearly weaker,” said Francis. That means weather systems, be it rain or dry conditions, are slow to move on and last longer. Ultimately, this can result in “blocking” events, such as the conditions that produced the terrible heatwave in western Russia during the summer of 2010 and floods in Pakistan, she said.

Last summer, Greenland experienced a similar blocking anti-cyclone, resulting in a record surface melting of its ice sheet. “Blocks act like a traffic jam, slowing down weather patterns elsewhere,” Francis said.

Scientists are surprised by how extreme these changes have been with a relatively small amount of warming. That has prompted some to speak out politically to urge emission reductions. On Monday, a group of Canadian and U.S. scientists pleaded with the Canadian government to stop the expansion of the Alberta tar sands oil projects and take real steps to reduce carbon emissions. More

 

 

The melting Arctic must not be an excuse for a resource grab: UNEP

The speed of changes in the Arctic is hard to grasp.

The Arctic Ocean has been covered by sea ice for most of the past three million years. But now it is melting before our eyes and could see its first ice-free summer in a couple of decades or less.Since my school years, the Arctic summer sea-ice extent has already shrunk to half!

Last week the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) cautioned against a rush in the Arctic for exactly the fossil fuel resources that fuelled the melt in the first place.

Arctic permafrost and the Greenland ice sheet are also melting at an alarming speed, and oceans becoming more acidic. Without rapid action, the world can be tipping towards irreversible climate chaos.

Yet, instead of cutting pollution and protecting the Arctic, some, like Shell, want to accelerate the destruction, by rushing to exploit the area’s natural resources. Greenpeace, together with 2.7 million Arctic Defenders around the world, is not going to let this happen.

The UNEP Year Book 2013, released at the UNEP’s 1^st universal Governing Council in Nairobi, issues an Arctic alert for governments, calls for extreme caution and says there should be no steps to exploit the new state of the Arctic prior to assessing impacts, and until adequate management frameworks have been put in place.

The Arctic mustn’t be seen only as a regional issue and left for the Arctic countries alone to manage, says UNEP. All governments must take responsibility for protecting it, because failing to do so would have dramatic consequences for the whole world. As UNEP’s Nick Nuttal put it: “We are bringing the Arctic issue here because we want all ministers to be involved in this issue.”

We agree, which is why I took the floor and urged governments to act on UNEP’s recommendations without any delay. What we want to see, in terms of management, is the creation of a global sanctuary in the area of international waters around the North Pole; a ban on offshore oil drilling; and a moratorium on industrial fishing in previously unfished areas of the Arctic region. We also urgently need measures to manage the potentially damaging impacts of increased shipping in the Arctic, and measures to control the emissions of black carbon.

The Arctic wasn’t really a topic at this UNEP GC itself. Instead the agenda focused on reinventing the UNEP institutionally, to strengthen it as the unique convening authority on environmental sustainability. This was one of the decisions governments made in the Rio+20 summit last June.

Unfortunately, after 40 years of UNEP’s existence, governments still aren’t willing to make it strong enough to match today’s environmental challenges. Last week some decisions were taken to make the organization more strategic and policy-relevant and raise its profile as a global authority. This is all good, but as long as UNEP can only plead, coach and capacity build, while the World Trade Organization can impose punitive tariff measures on those breaking their rules, there is an unacceptable inequality of power, as my bosses write in the latest issue of Our Planet.

Let’s get serious about protecting our planet, our only home, by building the institutions, laws and coalitions that it requires. In the near future, the Arctic will be the primary test of the ability of the global community to act together, to save ourselves from ourselves.

I challenge the environment ministers around the world to become ambitious Arctic defenders, and join a race that isn’t about exploitation, but about boldest actions for protection. The Arctic environment ministers, who met recently in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, spoke in Nairobi about some of the plans they had for taking action forward, including under the Convention of Biological Diversity. UNEP’s ideas are also worth exploring more. More