climate1

The Independent
Britain: a leader in tackling climate change? Far from it, says new report
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Britain's true contribution to global warming is much higher than official figures show, ministers admit. And it has been rising rapidly at the very time that they have been boasting that it has been falling. The admission undermines the Government's claim to be in the vanguard of cutting the pollution that causes climate change – on the eve of negotiations among the world's most powerful leaders this week.
Global warming will be high on the agenda of the G8 summit that opens in Toyako, Japan, tomorrow – along with the rise in oil and food prices, Third World development and Zimbabwe. It will also be the focus of simultaneous talks with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and other large developing countries. Ministers have long presented Britain as a leader in tackling climate change, and last week a report published by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) and  Allianz, the insurance company, concluded that it was performing better than any other G8 country. But figures revealed last week in an obscure government report – snappily entitled Development of an Embedded Carbon Emissions Indicator – tell a much more sobering story. Produced by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Sydney University for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), it concludes that Britain is responsible for 200 million more tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year than official figures admit, an increase of 37 per cent.  And whereas Britain has been officially reporting that its emissions have declined by 5 per cent since 1992, the report says that the true picture reveals that instead they rose by 18 per cent.

The difference is in fuller accounting. The official figures are confined to totting up only the amount of pollution emitted from within a country's borders, and excludes what is produced from international aviation and shipping. The report includes such transport emissions and those produced in other countries in making goods for export to Britain, mainly in the Third World. The Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, said last week: "These findings reinforce the need for a global approach to tackling climate change. We must help businesses and individuals to understand and reduce the environmental impacts of the products and services they produce, sell or consume, wherever in the world they are made."
The Trade and Development minister Gareth Thomas yesterday visited South Africa to help its wine industry assess the "carbon cost" of its exports. The report is particularly important because it casts new light on emissions from China and India and other big developing countries just as they are becoming a focus of international negotiation. The US, in particular, insists that these nations must take action to curb the pollution before it is prepared to take strong measures itself. But the findings show that large amounts of their emissions are produced in making goods for rich countries, whose polluting industries migrated there in the 1990s. Studies by the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the New Economics Foundation have concluded that up to a quarter of China's emissions came from exports to the US and Europe. In Japan, top diplomats from the G8 countries are struggling over the weekend to try to ensure that the summit makes progress on addressing global warming – or, at least, does not slip backwards. Last year – after intense pressure from Tony Blair and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel – the summit agreed to "seriously consider" reducing worldwide emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2050, after an isolated President George Bush held out against agreeing to the target. Toyako was supposed to be the summit when – after time for such consideration – a firm commitment was made. But until late last week the target was not even mentioned in the draft communiqué, prompting fears that the leaders would take a sharp step backwards. Now, after pressure from Britain and other countries, it has been included, but it is still far from clear that the US will accept it. But Gordon Brown's main focus will be on securing backing for plans he has been quietly pushing forward for the past three years for a major fund to help developing countries evolve clean sources of energy. The Prime Minister has personally persuaded the World Bank and other development banks to devote billions of dollars to the fund, if national governments agree to set the money aside. He also wants to reinvigorate a faltering drive to tackle Third World poverty that was launched with great fanfare at the G8 summit in Gleneagles three years ago. Then the leaders pledged to increase aid by $50bn a year by 2010, but they are now set to fulfil less than half this target. Oxfam, the development charity, estimates that making up the shortfall could save five million lives and points out that, in the meantime, rising food prices are greatly worsening the plight of the poor. It says that they have already driven another 100 million people into dire poverty; other estimates suggest they could double the number of the hungry to a staggering 1.7 billion. Britain will also press for an initiative to increase the number of midwives and health workers in developing countries – at present more than half a million
women a year in the Third World die in pregnancy or childbirth – and to revive world trade negotiations.
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Arctic sea ice in 2010 melts to third lowest area on record

Arctic sea ice melted over the summer to cover the third smallest area on record, US researchers said on 15th September 2010, warning that global warming could leave the region ice free in the month of September 2030.

At the end of the spring and summer "melt season" in the Arctic, sea ice covered 4.76 million square kilometres (1.84 million square miles), the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said in an annual report.

"This is only the third time in the satellite record that ice extent has fallen below five million square kilometres (1.93 million square miles), and all those occurrences have been within the past four years," the report said.

A separate report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that in August, too, Arctic sea ice coverage was down sharply, covering an average of six million square kilometres (2.3 million square miles), or 22 percent below the average extent from 1979 to 2000.

The August coverage was the second lowest for Arctic sea ice since records began in 1979. Only 2007 saw a smaller area of the northern sea covered in ice in August, NOAA said.

The record low for Arctic sea ice cover at the end of the spring and summer "melt season" in September, was also in 2007, when ice covered just 4.13 million square kilometres (1.595 million square miles).

Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC, said climate-change skeptics might seize the fact that Arctic sea ice did not hit a record-low extent this year, but said they would be barking up the wrong tree if they claimed the shrinkage had been stopped. "Only the third lowest? It didn't set a new record? Well, right. It didn't set a new record but we're still headed down. We're not looking at any kind of recovery here," he told AFP. In fact, Serreze said, Arctic sea ice cover is shrinking year-round, with more ice melting in the spring and summer months and less ice forming in the fall and winter.

"The Arctic, like the globe as a whole, is warming up and warming up quickly, and we're starting to see the sea ice respond to that. Really, in all months, the sea ice cover is shrinking — there's an overall downward trend," Serreze told AFP. "The extent of Arctic ice is dropping at something like 11 percent per decade — very quickly, in other words. Our thinking is that by 2030 or so, if you went out to the Arctic on the first of September, you probably won't see any ice at all. It will look like a blue ocean, we're losing it that quickly," he said.

Losing sea ice cover in the Arctic would affect everything from the obvious, such as people who live in the far north and polar bears, to global weather patterns, said Serreze. "The Arctic acts as a sort of refrigerator of the northern hemisphere. As we lose the ice cover, we start to change the nature of that refrigerator, and what happens up there affects what happens down here in the middle latitudes," he said. "We might have less cold outbreaks, which you might say is a good thing, but it's not such a good thing in regions that depend on snowfall for their water supply."

NOAA noted in its report that the first eight months of 2010 were in equal first place with the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperatures on record worldwide, and the summer months were the second warmest on record globally, after 1998.

Source: Yahoo News, 16th September 2010.

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Oceans of evidence for global warming

Tim Radford in Washington

The first evidence of human-produced global warming in the oceans has been found, thanks to computer analysis of seven million temperature readings taken over 40 years to depths of 700 metres (2,300ft).

Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution in San Diego, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington yesterday he was "stunned" by the findings, which have yet to be published in the scientific press.

"The statistical significance of these results is far too strong to be merely dismissed and should wipe out much of the uncertainty about the reality of global warning," he said.

In effect, US scientists financed by the government have once again told the Bush administration that global warming is real, and that humans were responsible. America pulled out of the Kyoto agreement, which came into force on Wednesday, under which many nations have agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"Over the past 40 years there has been considerable warming of the planetary system and approximately 90% of that warming has gone directly into the oceans," Dr Barnett said. "So if you want to go and find out what's causing it, that's the place to look. We did look. We defined a fingerprint, if you wish, of ocean warming... We had several computer simulations, for instance, one for natural variability. Could the climate system just do this on its own? The answer was clearly no."

The climate shift that affected the oceans would have other consequences. A dramatic acceleration of glacier melting in the Andes, and in western China, could leave millions of people without enough water each summer.

Climate warming would alter snow levels in the American mountains and precipitate a water crisis in the western US within 20 years. In the past four decades, other scientists told the conference, an extra 20,000 cubic kilometres of glacial ice had flowed into the sea, changing salinity levels and threatening to alter ocean flow patterns, with unpredictable consequences.

The warming of the Arctic could have a big impact on seals, polar bears and walruses, which depend on winter ice for hunting. In 1997, hundreds of thousands of short-tailed shearwaters died because a bloom of plankton changed the colour of the water in the Bering Strait and masked the birds' food supply. There was evidence of a build-up of melt water below the Greenland ice sheet. If the ice cap melted, sea levels could rise by seven metres.

"We've got a serious problem ahead of us. The debate is no longer: is there a global warming signal? The debate now is: what are we going to do about it?" Dr Barnett asked.

"Global warming is going on and you can see it in the oceans. The evidence really is overwhelming and it's a good time for nations that are not part of Kyoto to re-evaluate their positions and see if it would be to their advantage to join."

The levels of warming were seemingly small: 0.5C (0.9F) at the surface, 0.15C at greater depths.

But oceans cover 70% of the Earth, to depths of two or three miles. What mattered was not the temperature, but the volume of heat submerged.

"If we could mine the energy that has gone in over the past 40 years we could run the state of California for over 200,000 years," Dr Barnett said.

"It's an amazing amount of energy that's gone in. Where did it come from? Not the sun, satellites would have picked that up. It's come from greenhouse warming."

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