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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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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