Showing posts with label co2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label co2. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Carbon
Published on Aug 20, 2014
CARBON is the first film in the Green World Rising Series. http://www.greenworldrising.org “Carbon” is narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, presented by Thom Hartmann and directed by Leila Conners. Executive Producers are George DiCaprio, Earl Katz and Roee Sharon Peled. Carbon is produced by Mathew Schmid and was written by Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks, Leila Conners and Mathew Schmid. Music is composed and performed by Jean-Pascal Beintus and intro drone by Francesco Lupica. Carbon is produced by Tree Media with the support of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Scientists, White House say ocean acidification is well under way
Published 20 August 2014 Science
The oceans aren’t vast enough to absorb growing amounts of carbon dioxide without ill effects to marine life and to the 1 billion people who make their living on the seas. Longer heat waves, drought, rising sea levels, more intense storms—these are some of the better-known impacts of climate change. Less familiar is the acidification of the oceans, which is well under way and will continue as the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide rises.
The oceans absorb about one-quarter of the CO 2 emitted from fossil-fuel combustion, about the same proportion taken up by land. The rest remains in the atmosphere, where its concentration steadily increases. The rate at which the oceans are acidifying, through chemical reactions with the CO 2, is faster than has occurred in at least 65 million years and possibly 300 million years, according to Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland. Marine organisms that require carbonate ions to build their shells likely won’t have sufficient time to adapt to the changing pH. “We’re taking life outside the conditions that it actually evolved for,” Hoegh-Guldberg said at the Our Ocean Conference, sponsored by the US Department of State and held 16–17 June in Washington, DC.
A much slower acidification event that occurred 55 million years ago (the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum) caused a mass extinction of deep-sea plankton and a collapse of coral reefs, according to research published in May’s Paleoceanography.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of the oceans has jumped 25%, from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1, according to the US Global Change Research Program’s 2014 National Climate Assessment. If current trends in CO 2 emissions continue unchecked, acidity will increase by 100–150% from preindustrial levels by the end of the century, said Carol Turley of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK. “It is happening now, it’s happening rapidly, and it’s happening at a speed we haven’t seen for millions of years,” said Turley at the State Department conference.
The physical chemistry of ocean acidification caused by increased atmospheric CO 2 is straightforward: Some of the dissolved gas reacts with water to form carbonic acid, H 2CO 3. However, “it gets much more complicated in coastal waters, around a coral reef or shellfish beds and estuaries, because there’s other processes besides invasion of fossil-fuel CO 2,” says Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “Coastal waters can be affected by a variety of biological processes, by chemicals, and by materials from the land,” he says. “In some places, fossil-fuel carbon may not even be the biggest contributor.”
Kramer D., 2014. Scientists, White House say ocean acidification is well under way. Physics Today 67 (8): 20-21. Article.
The oceans aren’t vast enough to absorb growing amounts of carbon dioxide without ill effects to marine life and to the 1 billion people who make their living on the seas. Longer heat waves, drought, rising sea levels, more intense storms—these are some of the better-known impacts of climate change. Less familiar is the acidification of the oceans, which is well under way and will continue as the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide rises.
The oceans absorb about one-quarter of the CO 2 emitted from fossil-fuel combustion, about the same proportion taken up by land. The rest remains in the atmosphere, where its concentration steadily increases. The rate at which the oceans are acidifying, through chemical reactions with the CO 2, is faster than has occurred in at least 65 million years and possibly 300 million years, according to Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland. Marine organisms that require carbonate ions to build their shells likely won’t have sufficient time to adapt to the changing pH. “We’re taking life outside the conditions that it actually evolved for,” Hoegh-Guldberg said at the Our Ocean Conference, sponsored by the US Department of State and held 16–17 June in Washington, DC.
A much slower acidification event that occurred 55 million years ago (the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum) caused a mass extinction of deep-sea plankton and a collapse of coral reefs, according to research published in May’s Paleoceanography.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of the oceans has jumped 25%, from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1, according to the US Global Change Research Program’s 2014 National Climate Assessment. If current trends in CO 2 emissions continue unchecked, acidity will increase by 100–150% from preindustrial levels by the end of the century, said Carol Turley of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK. “It is happening now, it’s happening rapidly, and it’s happening at a speed we haven’t seen for millions of years,” said Turley at the State Department conference.
The physical chemistry of ocean acidification caused by increased atmospheric CO 2 is straightforward: Some of the dissolved gas reacts with water to form carbonic acid, H 2CO 3. However, “it gets much more complicated in coastal waters, around a coral reef or shellfish beds and estuaries, because there’s other processes besides invasion of fossil-fuel CO 2,” says Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “Coastal waters can be affected by a variety of biological processes, by chemicals, and by materials from the land,” he says. “In some places, fossil-fuel carbon may not even be the biggest contributor.”
Kramer D., 2014. Scientists, White House say ocean acidification is well under way. Physics Today 67 (8): 20-21. Article.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Court Blocks Coal Mine Expansion For Not Counting The Costs Of Carbon Pollution
Court Blocks Coal Mine Expansion For Not Counting The Costs Of Carbon Pollution
BY NIDHI THAKAR, JUNE 30, 2014 thinkprogress.org
In a landmark decision on Friday that could have far-reaching implications for federal coal leasing, a U.S. District Court judge ruled against the expansion of Arch Coal’s West Elk mine in Colorado for failure of federal regulators to consider the social cost of carbon in their environmental review.
The decision issued by Judge Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Colorado found that the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service overlooked the costs of carbon emissions from the mining and combustion operations associated with the mine’s expansion even though the agencies acknowledged that expanding West Elk’s operations would likely result in greater greenhouse gas emissions.
Friday’s ruling is the result of a challenge brought by environmental groups contesting three agency decisions on the Colorado Roadless Rule and expansion of the West Elk mine in the Sunset Roadless Area. This region is a part of the treasured North Fork Valley backcountry in western Colorado which abuts the iconic West Elk Wilderness and is a destination for hikers and hunters and habitat for the threatened lynx.
The agencies’ decisions would have permitted Arch Coal to expand the West Elk Mine into 1,700 acres of the Sunset Roadless Area, the bulldozing of six miles of road, and the construction almost 50 well pads for the venting of methane from the mine expansion. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and the second-most prevalent GHG emitted in the United States after carbon dioxide.
According to the decision, the BLM and Forest Service initially found that the social cost of carbon associated with the expansion could be as high as $984 million, but the agencies arbitrarily scrapped this analysis from the final environmental impact statement. However the associated benefits of the project were still included in the agencies’ analysis. The court called this error “more than a mere flyspeck.”
The ruling goes on to acknowledge that agencies are required to analyze the effects of their actions on climate change. The court noted that the BLM and Forest Service “acknowledged that there might be impacts from GHGs in the form of methane emitted from mining operations and from carbon dioxide resulting from combustion of coal produced,” and “this reasonably foreseeable effect must be analyzed.”
The decision was issued just in time before Arch Coal’s exploration activities were set to begin on July 1, and stops the expansion of the West Elk coal mine and any associated surface or below-ground activity, including bulldozing or construction, for now until the parties can agree on how to move forward.
Expanded coal leasing in the American West, particularly the coal-rich Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, has been a hotly contested issue in recent years, with parties raising significant concerns over the climate effects of burning the coal mined in the region.
This court’s decision reminds agencies to consider climate impacts when making decisions affecting federal lands.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Read The Secret Trade Memo Calling For More Fracking and Offshore Drilling
Zach Carter and Kate Sheppard 05/19/2014 huffingtonpost.com
WASHINGTON -- The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post.
The controversial document is an early draft of energy policies that EU negotiators hope to see adopted under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal, which is currently being negotiated. The text was shared with American officials in September. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative declined to comment on the document.
Environmental groups fear the broad language proposed for the deal would eliminate key restrictions on the export of crude oil and natural gas, fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. The document marks the first major bone of contention in the EU deal, amid an outcry from environmentalists over leaked terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a separate pact that the U.S. and 11 Pacific nations are also negotiating.
"Exports of energy goods to the other Party shall be deemed automatically to comply with any conditions and tests foreseen in the Parties’ respective legislation for the granting of export licenses," the memo reads, defining "energy goods" as "coal, crude oil, oil products, natural gas, whether liquefied or not, and electrical energy."
The U.S. government treats trade negotiation texts as classified information. Previous leaks concerning the EU deal have focused on lighter topics, including whether American cheesemakers can call their products "feta" or "parmesan."
By encouraging more crude oil and natural gas exports to the EU -- a massive economic force that uses a tremendous amount of global energy -- the proposal could spur more domestic oil and gas drilling and discourage the development of green energy in the EU, dealing a significant blow to efforts to avert climate change. Some environmental and citizens groups also object to the fracking process itself -- in which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, water, and sand is injected into rock formations to release natural gas -- because of concerns that it might affect groundwater supplies.
"Encouraging trade in dirty fossil fuels would mean more dangerous fracking here in the U.S. and would push more climate-disrupting fuels into the European Union," Ilana Solomon, director of the Responsible Trade Program at Sierra Club, told HuffPost. "The oil and gas industry is the only winner in this situation."
The U.S. banned crude oil exports in 1975, and imposes a host of restrictions on the export of natural gas for both economic and national security reasons. But the president can issue special licenses to exempt some crude oil exports from the ban, and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this month that he wants to consider relaxing it.
There has also been an increasing push to loosen constraints on natural gas exports from the U.S. to Europe, particularly as the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine has grown, highlighting Europe's dependency on Russian energy. Although burning natural gas produces lower emissions than oil or coal, the energy-intensive storage and shipping process -- liquefying the gas and then sending it in fuel-burning vessels -- eliminates many of its advantages. And critics of gas say that increasing exports would only increase reliance on fossil fuels, rather than speeding the transition to renewables. It would also likely increase energy prices in the U.S., although the effects of the deal would not come to fruition for several years.
Free trade agreements frequently bind all of their participants to a specific regulatory regime, hindering the deployment of future regulations in response to new problems. Trade pacts are enforced by international courts, which can issue economic sanctions against countries that violate the deals. The proposed EU language would run counter to existing environmental standards that limit the development of the fossil fuel industry.
"It expands a trend in trade negotiations of removing policy decisions from national and local governments and enshrining those policy decisions in international trade laws," said Sarah Burt, an attorney with the environmentalist legal organization Earthjustice, who has seen the document. Those negotiations, said Burt, happen outside of the public eye and are an "opaque process where trade and economics are elevated above any other values."
Read the full document here.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Six degrees could change the world
Six degrees could change the world
Published on Jun 24, 2013
"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purpose such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use."
I do not claim to own this material and it is simply for the educational & entertainment purpose about the planet & its changes. All material and rights belongs to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and I do not make money for this.
EDUCATIONAL & ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSE ONLY
All rights belong to the original owners and content creators of this material.
2028: The End of the World As We Know It?
Climate change could reach catastrophic levels by 2028. (Photo: Courtesy of 350.org)
2028: The End of the World As We Know It?
Bill McKibben’s ‘Do the Math’ tour is a call to arms on climate change.
Matthew Fleischer, November 12, 2012 takepart.com
“There is nothing radical in what we’re discussing,” journalist and climate change activist Bill McKibben said before a crowd of nearly 1,000 at the University of California Los Angeles last night. “The radicals work for the oil companies.”
Taken on its own, a statement like that would likely sound hyperbolic to most Americans—fodder for a sound bite on Fox News. Anyone who saw McKibben’s lecture in full, however, would know he was not exaggerating.
McKibben was in Los Angeles as part of his nationwide “Do the Math” tour. Based on a recent article of his in Rolling Stone, (“The one with Justin Bieber on the cover,” McKibben joked) the event is essentially a lecture circuit based on a single premise: climate change is simple math—and the numbers do not look good. If immediate action isn’t taken by global leaders: “It’s game-over for the planet.”
The math, McKibben explained, works like this. Global leaders recently came to an international agreement based on the scientific understanding that a global temperature raise of 2°C would have “catastrophic” consequences for the future of humanity. In order to raise global temperatures to this catastrophic threshold, the world would have to release 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Here’s the problem: Fossil fuel companies currently have 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide in their fuel reserves—and their business model depends on that fuel being sold and burned. At current rates of consumption, the world will have blown through its 565-gigaton threshold in 16 years.
To prevent the end of the world as we know it, it will require no less than the death of the most profitable industry in the history of humankind.
“As of tonight,” McKibben said, “we’re going after the fossil fuel industry.”
Obviously no easy task. The oil industry commands annual profits of $137 billion and the political power to match. As McKibben noted, “Oil companies follow the laws because they get to write them.”
However, there are some numbers on McKibben’s side. Recent polling data shows 74 percent of Americans now believe in climate change, and 68 percent view it as dangerous. The problem environmental activists are facing is in converting those favorable polling numbers into grassroots action.
Enter “Do the Math.”
Using McKibben’s popularity as an author, organizers are turning what would otherwise be a lecture circuit into a political machine. Before rolling into town, Do the Math smartly organizes with local environmental groups. Prior to McKibben’s lecture, these groups are allowed to take the stage and talk about local initiatives that need fighting. Contact information is gathered to keep the audience updated on those efforts. Instead of simply listening to McKibben, as they perhaps intended, the audience has suddenly become part of their local environmental movement.
It’s a smart strategy, and an essential one—because the problem of climate change is almost exclusively a political in nature. Between renewable energy and more efficient engineering, the technology already exists to stave off catastrophic global warming. Though its application is lagging in the United States, it is being employed on a mass scale in other countries. In socially-stratified China, with its billion-plus population and tremendous wealth inequalities, 25 percent of the country still manages to use solar arrays to heat its water. Germany—Europe’s economic powerhouse—in less than a decade, has managed to get upwards of half of its energy from sustainable sources.
The same can happen here in America—provided we have the will to make it happen. McKibben says the key to realizing that goal is to battle the lifeblood of the fossil fuel industry—its bottom line.
To start, he’s calling for an immediate global divestment from fossil fuel companies. “We’re asking that people who believe in the problem of climate change to stop profiting from it. Just like with divestment movement in South Africa over apartheid, we need to eliminate the oil companies veneer of respectability.”
In conjunction with the divestment regimen, continued protests against unsustainable energy projects will also be crucial. McKibben will be in Washington, D.C. on November 18 to lead a mass rally against climate change and the Keystone Pipeline. “We can no longer just assume that President Obama is going to do everything he promised during his campaign. We need to push him.”
“I don’t know if we’re going to win. But I do know we’re going to fight.”
Using McKibben’s popularity as an author, organizers are turning what would otherwise be a lecture circuit into a political machine. Before rolling into town, Do the Math smartly organizes with local environmental groups. Prior to McKibben’s lecture, these groups are allowed to take the stage and talk about local initiatives that need fighting. Contact information is gathered to keep the audience updated on those efforts. Instead of simply listening to McKibben, as they perhaps intended, the audience has suddenly become part of their local environmental movement.
It’s a smart strategy, and an essential one—because the problem of climate change is almost exclusively a political in nature. Between renewable energy and more efficient engineering, the technology already exists to stave off catastrophic global warming. Though its application is lagging in the United States, it is being employed on a mass scale in other countries. In socially-stratified China, with its billion-plus population and tremendous wealth inequalities, 25 percent of the country still manages to use solar arrays to heat its water. Germany—Europe’s economic powerhouse—in less than a decade, has managed to get upwards of half of its energy from sustainable sources.
The same can happen here in America—provided we have the will to make it happen. McKibben says the key to realizing that goal is to battle the lifeblood of the fossil fuel industry—its bottom line.
To start, he’s calling for an immediate global divestment from fossil fuel companies. “We’re asking that people who believe in the problem of climate change to stop profiting from it. Just like with divestment movement in South Africa over apartheid, we need to eliminate the oil companies veneer of respectability.”
In conjunction with the divestment regimen, continued protests against unsustainable energy projects will also be crucial. McKibben will be in Washington, D.C. on November 18 to lead a mass rally against climate change and the Keystone Pipeline. “We can no longer just assume that President Obama is going to do everything he promised during his campaign. We need to push him.”
“I don’t know if we’re going to win. But I do know we’re going to fight.”
Friday, May 30, 2014
Climate change is simple: David Roberts
Published on Jun 12, 2012
David Roberts is staff writer at Grist.org. In "Climate Change is Simple" he describes the causes and effects of climate change in blunt, plain terms.
On April 16, 2012, speakers and attendees gathered at TEDxTheEvergreenStateCollege: Hello Climate Change to reflect on the ability -- and responsibility -- of formal and informal education to inspire and empower action in this era of climate change.
Buried carbon causes deep concern
Hidden menace: a vast store of organic carbon lies beneath the wind-blown soil of the Great Plains
Buried carbon causes deep concern
Tim Radford, May 30, 2014 climatenewsnetwork.net
Deep beneath the Great Plains of America, a vast buried store of organic carbon has been discovered by scientists − a hidden record of bygone climate, and a potentially serious danger to the future climate
LONDON, 30 May − Geographers in the US have found a new factor in the carbon cycle, and – all too ominously – a new potential source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. They have identified huge deposits of fossil soils, rich in organic carbon, buried beneath the Great Plains of America.
The discovery is evidence that the subterranean soils could be a rich store, or sink, for ancient atmospheric carbon. But if the soil is exposed – by erosion, or by human activities such as agriculture, deforestation or mining – this treasure trove of ancient charred vegetation, now covered by wind-blown soils, could blow back into the atmosphere and add to global warming.
Erika Marin-Spiotta, a biogeographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that what is known as Brady soil – ancient buried soil − formed more than 13,500 years ago in Nebraska, Kansas and other Great Plains states.
Glacial retreat
It now lies more than six metres below the surface, and it was buried by a vast deposit of loess – wind-blown dust – about 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers began to retreat from North America.
The significance is not that it survived the end of the Ice Age and the colonisation of the Great Plains by grazing animals, but in the fact that it is there at all, at such depths. Calculations about the world stock of soil carbon have focused on the topsoil, and the role of root systems, decaying vegetation, microbes and fungi in the natural carbon cycle. Now the climate scientists who play with models of the carbon cycle will have to think again.
“There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring,” said Dr Marin-Spiotta. “It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils. Most studies are done only in the top 30 centimetres. Our study is showing that we are grossly underestimating carbon in soils.”
The researchers have enough evidence to put together a picture of a stormy past in an almost empty continent. The tract of prairie that now contains the Brady soil was never glaciated. As the glaciers retreated from the rest of the continent, the climate warmed, the vegetation regime changed, and it became scorched by wildfire − “an incredible amount of fire” according to the report’s author.
Thick band
Before the ash, charred wood, and singed fibres and stalks of the prairie grasses could begin to decompose and turn back into carbon dioxide, it was covered by the accumulating loess. It now exists as a metre-thick band of dark soil far below the surface − a hidden record of bygone climate.
The researchers calculate that, altogether, there could be as much as 2.7 billion tonnes of potentially reactive carbon below the Great Plains. And what happened in the Plains, could have happened in many other parts of the world. The implication is that such deposits could exist anywhere, and could just as easily be a potential contributor to global warming if disturbed. – Climate News Network
Tim Radford, May 30, 2014 climatenewsnetwork.net
Deep beneath the Great Plains of America, a vast buried store of organic carbon has been discovered by scientists − a hidden record of bygone climate, and a potentially serious danger to the future climate
LONDON, 30 May − Geographers in the US have found a new factor in the carbon cycle, and – all too ominously – a new potential source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. They have identified huge deposits of fossil soils, rich in organic carbon, buried beneath the Great Plains of America.
The discovery is evidence that the subterranean soils could be a rich store, or sink, for ancient atmospheric carbon. But if the soil is exposed – by erosion, or by human activities such as agriculture, deforestation or mining – this treasure trove of ancient charred vegetation, now covered by wind-blown soils, could blow back into the atmosphere and add to global warming.
Erika Marin-Spiotta, a biogeographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that what is known as Brady soil – ancient buried soil − formed more than 13,500 years ago in Nebraska, Kansas and other Great Plains states.
Glacial retreat
It now lies more than six metres below the surface, and it was buried by a vast deposit of loess – wind-blown dust – about 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers began to retreat from North America.
The significance is not that it survived the end of the Ice Age and the colonisation of the Great Plains by grazing animals, but in the fact that it is there at all, at such depths. Calculations about the world stock of soil carbon have focused on the topsoil, and the role of root systems, decaying vegetation, microbes and fungi in the natural carbon cycle. Now the climate scientists who play with models of the carbon cycle will have to think again.
“There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring,” said Dr Marin-Spiotta. “It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils. Most studies are done only in the top 30 centimetres. Our study is showing that we are grossly underestimating carbon in soils.”
The researchers have enough evidence to put together a picture of a stormy past in an almost empty continent. The tract of prairie that now contains the Brady soil was never glaciated. As the glaciers retreated from the rest of the continent, the climate warmed, the vegetation regime changed, and it became scorched by wildfire − “an incredible amount of fire” according to the report’s author.
Thick band
Before the ash, charred wood, and singed fibres and stalks of the prairie grasses could begin to decompose and turn back into carbon dioxide, it was covered by the accumulating loess. It now exists as a metre-thick band of dark soil far below the surface − a hidden record of bygone climate.
The researchers calculate that, altogether, there could be as much as 2.7 billion tonnes of potentially reactive carbon below the Great Plains. And what happened in the Plains, could have happened in many other parts of the world. The implication is that such deposits could exist anywhere, and could just as easily be a potential contributor to global warming if disturbed. – Climate News Network
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Anthropocene: The closing doors of climate targets
Anthropocene: The closing doors of climate targets
Published on Dec 6, 2013
The Grantham Institute for Climate Change Annual Lecture 2013, given by Professor Thomas Stocker, University of Bern, Switzerland and Co-chair of IPCC WGI
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are now unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years, and they rise more than 100 times faster than during the past 20,000 years. This is caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels and land use change with consequent changes in the entire Earth System. The newest comprehensive assessment Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents a rapidly and profoundly changing Earth System and provides the latest understanding of changes ahead of us. There is no doubt that warming and many of the consequent changes are caused by human activity which makes this new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. How climate scientists many centuries and millennia hence will characterize the Anthropocene depends on us, on our decisions today. The implementation of international agreements to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" requires limiting CO2 emissions substantially and sustainably. Specific climate targets to limit the warming to 2°C, or even 1.5°C, are already now ambitious. But both further delay and insufficient emissions reductions close the door on limiting global mean warming, and consequent impacts, permanently.
For more information please visithttp://www.imperial.ac.uk/climatechange
Thursday, May 22, 2014
The real budgetary emergency and the myth of "burnable carbon"
No Carbon Budget Left - David Spratt from Breakthrough on Vimeo.
The real budgetary emergency and the myth of "burnable carbon"
David Spratt, 22 May 2014 climatecodered.org
How fast and how profoundly we act to stop climate change caused by human actions, and work to return to a safe climate, is perhaps the greatest challenge our species has ever faced, but are we facing up to what really needs to be done?
We have to come to terms with two key facts: practically speaking, there is no longer a "carbon budget" for burning fossil fuels while still achieving a two-degree Celsius (2°C) future; and the 2°C cap is now known to be dangerously too high.
For the last two decades, climate policy-making has focused on 2°C of global warming impacts as being manageable, and a target achievable by binding international treaties and incremental, non-disruptive, adjustments to economic incentives and regulations (1).
But former UK government advisor Professor Sir Robert Watson says the idea of a 2°C target "is largely out of the window”, International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol calls it "a nice Utopia", and international negotiations chief Christiana Figueres says we need "a miracle". This is because, in their opinions, emissions will not be reduced sufficiently to keep to the necessary "carbon budget" (2).
The carbon budget has come to public prominence in recent years, including in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, as being the difference between the total allowable greenhouse gas emissions for 2°C of warming, and the amount already emitted or spent. The budget varies according to the likelihood of overshooting the target: the higher the risk, the bigger the budget. In the IPCC report, no carbon budget is given for less than a one-in-three chance of failure.
At that one-in-three risk of failure, the IPCC says the total budget is 790 GtC (gigatons, or one billion tons, of carbon), less emissions to 2011 of 515 GtC, leaving a budget of 275 GtC in 2011, or ~245 GtC in 2014 (3)
What is less well understood is that if the risk is low, there is no carbon budget left (4).
Climate change with its non-linear events, tipping points and irreversible events – such as mass extinctions, destruction of ecosystems, the loss of large ice sheets and the triggering of large-scale releases of greenhouse gases from carbon stores such as permafrost and methane clathrates – contains many possibilities for catastrophic failure.
Ian Dunlop, a former senior risk manager and oil and coal industry executive, says the management of catastrophic risk has to be very different from current processes. As serious, irreversible outcomes are likely, this demands very low probabilities of failure: management of catastrophic risk "must centre around contingency planning for high-impact and what were regarded as low-probability events, which unfortunately are now becoming more probable… Major, high-risk industrial operations, such as offshore oil exploration, provide a model, with detailed contingency planning and sequential barriers being put in place to prevent worst-case outcomes" (5).
If a risk-averse (pro-safety) approach is applied – say, of less than 10% probability of exceeding the 2°C target – to carbon budgeting, there is simply no budget available, because it has already been used up. A study from The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research shows that "the combination of a 2°C warming target with high probability of success is now unreachable" using the current suite of policy measures, because the budget has expired (6).
This is illustrated in Figure 1 where, as we move to the right (greater probability of meeting target) along the blue line which is the 2°C carbon budget, we reach a point around 90% probability (blue circle) where the total budget intersects with what we have already emitted.
Figure 1: Effect or risk on carbon budget, based on based on Raupach, M. R., I.N. Harman and J.G. Canadell (2011), explanatory labels added
As well, on-going greenhouse emissions associated with food production and deforestation are often conveniently pushed to one side in discussing carbon budgets. UK scientists have shown that if some reasonably optimistic assumptions are made about deforestation and food-related emissions for the rest of the century, then most emission reduction scenarios are incompatible with holding warming to +2ºC, even with a high 50% probability of exceeding the target. In other words, food and deforestation has taken up the remaining budget, leaving no space for fossil fuel emissions (7).
In addition, the carbon budget analysis makes optimistic and risky assumptions about the stability of Arctic, and of polar and other carbon stores such as permafrost. As one example, the modelling discussed in the IPCC report projects an area of summer Arctic sea-ice cover in the year 2100 higher that actually exists at the moment, yet there is a great deal more warming and sea-ice loss to come this century! In fact, many Arctic specialists think the Arctic will be sea-ice free in summer within the next decade, with consequences for global warming that the carbon budget calculations have significantly underestimated. (8)
Australian Climate Council member Prof. Will Steffen says the IPCC carbon budget may "be rather generous". The IPCC report says the modelling used does not include explicit representation of permafrost soil carbon decomposition in response to future warming, and does not consider slow feedbacks associated associated with vegetation changes and ice sheets. Recent research suggests these events could happen well below 2°C of warming, so they should be taken into account, but they are not.
Accounting for the possible release of methane from melting permafrost and ocean sediment implies a substantially lower budget (9). This reinforces the need to take a pro-safety, risk-averse approach to the carbon budget, especially since some research suggests that Arctic permafrost may be vulnerable at less than 2°C or warming (10).
For all these reasons – that is, prudent catastrophic risk management, accounting for food production and deforestation emissions, and for Arctic sea ice and carbon store instability – the idea of "burnable carbon" – that is, how much more coal, gas and oil we can burn and still keep under 2°C – is a dangerous illusion, based on unrealistic, high-risk, assumptions.
A second consideration is that 2°C of warming is not a safe target. Instead, it's the boundary between dangerous and very dangerous (11), and 1°C higher than experienced during the whole period of human civilisation (12), illustrated in Figure 2. The last time greenhouse gas levels were as high as they are today, modern humans did not exist (13), so we are conducting an experiment for which we have no direct observable evidence from our own history, and for which we do not know the full result.
Figure 2: Past and future global temperature and the safe-climate zone
However, we do understand that many major ecosystems will be lost, a 2°C sea-level rise will eventually be measured in the tens of metres (14), and much of human civilisation and large, productive river delta systems will be swamped. There is now evidence to suggest that the current conditions affecting the West Antarctic ice sheet are sufficient to drive between 1.2 and 4 metres of sea rise (15), and evidence that Greenland will contribute more quickly (16), and they are just two contributors to rising sea levels.
It is now clear that the incremental-adjustment 2°C strategy has run out of time, if for no other reason than the "budget" for burning more fossil fuels is now zero, yet the global economy is still deeply committed to their continuing widespread use.
We all wish the incremental-adjustment 2°C strategy had worked, but it hasn't. It has now expired as a practical plan.
We now have a choice to make: accept much higher levels of warming of 3–5°C that will destroy most species, most people and most of the world's ecosystems; a set of impacts some more forthright scientists say are incompatible with the maintenance of human civilisation.
Or we can conceive of a safe-climate emergency-action approach which would aim to reduce global warming back to the range of conditions experienced during the last 10,000 years, the period of human civilisation and fixed settlement. This would involve fast and large emissions reduction through radical energy demand reductions, whilst a vast scaling-up of clean energy production was organised, together with the remaking of many of our essential systems such as transport and food production, with the target being zero net emissions. In addition, there would need to be a major commitment to atmospheric carbon dioxide drawdown measures. This would need to be done at a speed and scale more akin to the "war economy", where social and economic priority is given to what is perceived to be an overwhelming existential threat.
After 30 years of climate policy and action failure, we are in deep trouble and now have to throw everything we can muster at the climate challenge. This will be demanding and disruptive, because there are no longer any non-radical, incremental paths available.
Prof. Kevin Anderson and Dr Alice Bows, writing in the journal Nature, say that "any contextual interpretation of the science demonstrates that the threshold of 2°C is no longer viable, at least within orthodox political and economic constraints" and that "catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it (unfettered choice, deregulation and so on) could provide an opportunity to think differently about climate change" (17).
Anderson says there is no longer a non-radical option, and for developed economies to play an equitable role in holding warming to 2°C (with 66% probability), emissions compared to 1990 levels would require at least a 40% reduction by 2018, 70% reduction by 2024, and 90% by 2030. This would require "in effect a Marshall plan for energy supply". As well low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions and they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption, what he calls a radical emission reduction strategy (18). All this suggests that even holding warming to a too-high 2°C limit now requires an emergency approach.
Emergency action has proven fair and necessary for great social and economic challenges we have faced before. Call it the great disruption, the war economy, emergency mode, or what you like; the story is still the same, and it is now the only remaining viable path.
Notes
(1) Jaeger, C.C. and J. Jaeger (2011), "Three views of two degrees", Reg. Environ. Change, 11: S15-S26; Anderson, K. and A. Bows (2012) “A new paradigm for climate change”, Nature Climate Change 2: 639-70
(2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19348194; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/carbon-emissions-nuclearpow; http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/climate-pioneers-see-little-chance-of-avoiding-dangerous-global-warming-20131105-2wyon.html
(3) IPCC (2013) "Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013; The Physical Science Basis: Summary for Policymakers"
(4) "For a 90% probability of not exceeding 2C of warming the carbon budget had reduced to zero by 2012, using a multi-agent (that is, the well-mixed greenhouse gases, including CO2 and CH4)", Raupach (2013, unpublished), based on Raupach, M. R., I.N. Harman and J.G. Canadell (2011) "Global climate goals for temperature, concentrations, emissions and cumulative emissions", Report for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. CAWCR Technical Report no. 42. Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Melbourne; Rogelj, J., W. Hare et al. (2011) "Emission pathways consistent with a 2°C global temperature limit", Nature Climate Change 1: 413-418 show at Table 1 no feasible pathways for limiting warming to 2°C during the twenty-first century with a "very likely" (>90%) chance of staying below the target, without carbon drawdown.
(5) Dunlop, I. (2011), "Managing catastrophic risk", Centre for Policy Development,
http://cpd.org.au/2011/07/ian-dunlop-managing-catastrophic-risk/
(6) Raupach, M. R., I.N. Harman and J.G. Canadell (2011) "Global climate goals for temperature, concentrations, emissions and cumulative emissions", Report for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. CAWCR Technical Report no. 42. Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Melbourne.
(7) Anderson, K. and A. Bows (2008) “Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 366: 3863-3882; Anderson, K. and A. Bows (2011) “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369: 20–44
(8) Wadhams, P. (2012) “Arctic ice cover, ice thickness and tipping points”, AMBIO 41: 23–33; Maslowski, W., C.J. Kinney et al. (2012) "The Future of Arctic Sea Ice", The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 40: 625-654
(9) IPCC (2013) "Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013; The Physical Science Basis;
(10) Vaks, A., O.S. Gutareva et al. (2013) “Speleothems Reveal 500,000-Year History of Siberian Permafrost”, Science 340: 183-186; Schaefer, K., T. Zhang et al. (2011) "Amount and timing of permafrost carbon release in response to climate warming", Tellus 63:165-180
(11) Anderson, K. and A. Bows (2011) “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369: 20–44
(12) Marcott, S.A, J.D. Shakun et al. (2013) "A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years", Science 339: 1198-120; Hansen, J., P. Kharecha et al. (2013) "Assessing 'dangerous climate change': Required reduction of carbon emissions to protect young people, future generations and nature", Plos One 8: 1-26
(13) Tripadi, A.K., C.D. Roberts et al. (2009), "Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years", Science 326: 1394-1397
(14) Rohling, E. J.,K. Grant et al. (2009) “Antarctic temperature and global sea level closely coupled over the past five glacial cycles”, Nature GeoScience, 21 June 2009 `af
(15) NASA (2014), "NASA-UCI Study Indicates Loss of West Antarctic Glaciers Appears Unstoppable", Media release, 12 May 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/may/nasa-uci-study-indicates-loss-of-west-antarctic-glaciers-appears-unstoppable, accessed 19 May 2014; Rignot, E., J. Mouginot et al. (2014) "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011", Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1002/2014GL060140; Joughin, I., B.E. Smith et al. (2014), "Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica", Science 344: 735 -738
(16) NASA (2014), "Hidden Greenland Canyons Mean More Sea Level Rise", Media release, 19 May 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/may/hidden-greenland-canyons-mean-more-sea-level-rise, accessed 19 May 2014; Morlighem, M., E. Rignot et al. (2014), "Deeply incised submarine glacial valleys beneath the Greenland ice sheet", Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo2167
(17) Anderson, K. and A. Bows (2012) “A new paradigm for climate change”, Nature Climate Change 2: 639-70
(18) Anderson, K. (2014) "Why carbon prices can’t deliver the 2°C target", 13 August 2013, http://kevinanderson.info/blog/why-carbon-prices-cant-deliver-the-2c-target, accessed 19 May 2014; Anderson, K. (2012) "Climate change going beyond dangerous – Brutal numbers and tenuous hope", Development Dialogue, September 2012; Anderson, K. (2011) "Climate change going beyond dangerous – Brutal numbers and tenuous hope or cognitive dissonance", presentation 5 July 2011, slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/DFID/professor-kevin-anderson-climate-change-going-beyond-dangerous; plus (7) above.
Friday, May 16, 2014
High CO2 Makes Crops Less Nutritious
Higher atmospheric CO2 levels may reduce nutrients in crops such as wheat (seen here growing in Drummond, Idaho).
High CO2 Makes Crops Less Nutritious
Climate change could increase deficiencies in zinc and iron, new study suggests.
Eli Kintisch, MAY 7, 2014 National Geographic
Crops grown in the high-CO2 atmosphere of the future could be significantly less nutritious, a new study published today inNature suggests. Based on hundreds of experiments in the field, the work reveals a new challenge as society reckons with both rising carbon emissions and malnutrition in the future.
Scientists generally predict that crop yields could fall in a warmer world—though higher atmospheric CO2 by itself should raise yields, as plants find it easier to extract CO2 from the air to make carbohydrates. (Related: "Cornfields Could Yield Less by Midcentury.")
The effect climate change might have on the nutritional value of crops, as opposed to their yield, has been even murkier. Previous studies have given conflicting results.
In the largest study yet, Samuel Myers of Harvard University and colleagues report that the CO2 levels expected in the second half of this century will likely reduce the levels of zinc, iron, and protein in wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans. Some two billion people, the researchers note, live in countries where citizens receive more than 60 percent of their zinc or iron from these types of crops. Deficiencies of these nutrients already cause an estimated loss of 63 million life-years annually.
C3 Crops Hit Hardest
Conducted over six growth years on field sites in Japan, Australia, and the United States, the study compared crops grown in normal conditions with ones grown in nearby experimental plots where the air is enriched with CO2 via open-air sprayers. The current atmospheric CO2 level is 400 parts per million; in the enriched plots, it was between 546 and 586 parts per million, a level scientists expect the atmosphere to reach in four to six decades.
In addition to wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans, which all use a form of photosynthesis known as C3, Myers and his colleagues studied corn and sorghum, which use C4 photosynthesis, a faster kind. They found relatively little effect of CO2 enrichment on the nutritional value of the C4 crops.
In the C3 crops, however, they found significant declines in zinc and iron. The largest was a 9.3 percent drop in the zinc level in wheat. They also found reduced levels of protein in wheat, rice, and peas, but not in soybeans.
Myers says the "enormous number of observations" in the study, which involved multiple cultivars, or varieties, of each of the six crops, allowed a total of 143 comparisons between cultivars fed enhanced CO2 and cultivars that grew in normal air. "That gave us the statistical power to resolve a question which has been open in the literature," he says. "Crops are losing nutrients as CO2is going up."
Unfortunately, the new study sheds little light on why more CO2 in the atmosphere should mean less nutritious plants. One hypothesis has been that plants in an enriched atmosphere produce so much carbohydrate that it dilutes the other nutrients.
The new study seems to rule out that hypothesis: Instead of a uniform dilution of all other nutrients in the crops, it found that nutrients changed unevenly when CO2 was higher.
Quality and Quantity
The need to balance changes in yield against changes in the nutritional value of crops makes predicting the future of agriculture an even more complicated task, says Stephen Long, an agronomist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who did not participate in the study.
"Rising global CO2 increases yield and decreases water use by crops, and this is often presented as one positive of atmospheric change," Long says. But the Nature study's "significant" finding suggests that higher-CO2 environments will mean less nutritional crops, so that "increased quantity is at the expense of quality."
CO2 enrichment experiments at Long's university have also shown that rising CO2 levels lower crops' resistance to pests. By exposing the plants to levels of CO2 similar to those used in the Harvard-led study, says Long, crop damage from three major crop pests doubled.
Myers and his colleagues suggest there should be a global effort to develop new breeds of wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans that show resistance to higher CO2 levels. While the various cultivars of wheat, peas, and soybeans in their study all suffered similar nutrient losses in response to higher CO2, rice offered a ray of hope: Its cultivars varied wildly in their response. "So there may be some basis for breeding rice and potentially other strains that are less sensitive to this effect," says Myers.
Recent efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to breed rice and other crops with enhanced nutrition under current atmospheric CO2 levels have shown some success, he notes. But those efforts haven't been without setbacks. "There's been some indications that when you do that, you often suffer yield declines," Myers says. "So it's not entirely clear that you can have your cake and eat it too."
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