Author: Bryan Walker

We want to survive

“We are facing the end of history. We don’t want to be the sacrificed countries of the 21st century. We want to survive.” These were the words of Antonio Lima, ambassador of Cape Verde to the UN, speaking at the start of the Cancún conference, where he is one of the delegates representing the 43 members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

They’re heartfelt words. They’re also knowing. The realities of climate change at this early stage are much closer to some countries than to others. Small island states are among them. Hot Topic has drawn attention to some of the most threatened such as Kiribati, the Maldives, and Tuvalu. To them can be added most of the Cook Islands and the Marshall Islands as nations which Lima said will be washed away by sea level rise (SLR).

 

The effect of SLR on Caribbean islands will be less total but a new report nevertheless reveals highly alarming prospects. Commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme, the UK’s Department for International Development and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, the report has been produced by Caribsave, a partnership between the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre and the University of Oxford. There’s an excellent survey in this week’s Independent, written by the environment editor Michael McCarthy. The report itself is accompanied by a convenient publication which provides the key points and a summary for policy makers.

It carefully analyses the impacts of a one metre SLR this century. They include the loss of nearly 1300 km2 of land, the displacement of over 110,000 people, damage to or loss of at least 149 multi-million dollar tourism resorts, beach assets lost or greatly degraded at many more resorts, and the severe disruption of transportation networks. Severe storms would exacerbate these effects, as would the coastal erosion which will accompany SLR. The study also details the even worse impacts of a 2 metre SLR, which many scientists now consider cannot be ruled out.

The likely costs of adaptation are detailed in the report. Suffice to say here that they rise to very large percentages of GDP by the end of the century. The figures are staggering for developing countries.

AOSIS makes two pleas to the developed world. The first is not to accept a 2 degree rise in global temperature as safe for humanity. 1.5 degrees is the maximum we should settle for.  They are not on their own with such a claim. Indeed where the science is concerned it is becoming increasingly clear that 2 degrees cannot be considered a safe limit. As Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows put it in their recent paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, “the impacts associated with 2◦C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2◦C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change.”

I’ll briefly detour to note that Anderson’s and Bow’s paper, Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world, is one in a series in a Theme Issue of the Philosophical Transactions which considers the probability and consequences of a warming of 4 degrees or higher, as a not unlikely result if the present trajectory of emissions is not reversed more drastically than so far indicated. Their article speaks of a “pivotal disjuncture between high level aspirations and the policy reality”.

So if there’s little as yet to suggest that even the 2 degree guardrail is likely to be achieved, how much less likely is the 1.5 degrees that AOSIS pleads for?  One can almost hear the “get real” response from the big guys. But AOSIS are dealing in a physical reality:  ”The difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees is the difference between survival and collapse,” said Lima. It may not be a political reality, but it’s hardly their task to trim the science to fit what negotiators consider politically possible.

The second plea from AOSIS is for assistance in coping with the future effects of climate change. The Telegraph reports that they are calling for a global insurance fund to be set up.

“Poor nations at risk of sea level rise would pay an annual premium, but a large chunk of the money would come from climate change aid provided by rich nations. Like a normal insurance fund, the money would be invested privately so that there are hundreds of billions of pounds available in the event of a crisis.

“The fund would pay out according to damage, as it is impossible to prove weather is directly caused by climate change. However the insurance would only be available to nations that are affected by global warming and do not have the capacity to protect themselves. Also they would have to first take reasonable preventative measures, such as building coastal defences, so that the money is only used for extreme events.

“The insurance pay-outs could help whole nations pay for a new ‘homeland’ if sea level rise means it becomes impossible to live on their own island. It could also be used to repair airports, roads and hotels.”

The plea for assistance should not fall on such deaf ears as the plea for mitigation action is likely to. The Copenhagen Accord agreed that developed countries will support the implementation of adaptation action in developing countries, and that such funding “will be prioritized for the most vulnerable developing countries, such as the least developed countries, small island developing States and Africa.”

The closer we draw to the unfolding effects of global warming the more apparent it becomes that the costs of adapting to it will stretch our economic capacity. Beyond breaking point in the case of some developing countries if they do not receive assistance. Reports such as that on the Caribbean will be invaluable in identifying with more precision the adaptation needs in specific regions and prompting the preparations which simple prudence demands. They may also serve to jolt us into more serious endeavours to cut emissions. We don’t have to construct such a dangerous future.

Warm oceans killing coral

This has not only been a bad year for the Amazon rainforest, it has also been a year in which coral reefs, the rainforests of the ocean as they are sometimes called, have suffered severe bleaching because of raised ocean temperatures. Not a matter likely to strike the public consciousness. A recent Yale University survey found 75 percent of Americans have not heard of coral bleaching. But the reefs are one of the world’s great ecosystems and they matter enormously.

Mark Eakin, who coordinates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch and is frequently quoted in reports on this year’s bleaching events, explains that coral bleaching happens when ocean temperatures get too warm and stay warm for too long, and the relationship between the coral and the algae gets stressed. This thermal stress to corals, he said, is the highest it’s been since 1998, when 15% of the world’s coral reefs died.

 

“When you have high temperatures, in conjunction with normal high light conditions, the photosynthetic apparatus in the algae starts to poison the coral. They’ll spit them out into the water. When they do this, they lose their colour, look white, which is why they’re called bleached. If that persists for a long time, it can cause the corals to die.”

In July an article in the Telegraph on the coral bleaching events becoming apparent quoted Eakin:

“The bleaching is very strong throughout south east Asia and the central Indian Ocean. The reports are that it is the worst since 1997/1998. This is a really huge event and we are going to see a lot of corals dying.”

Indonesian reefs were badly affected. Some detail is provided in a report from the International Coral Reef Initiative which indicated the extent and severity of bleaching in different areas, and commented on the high rate of coral mortality following the bleaching.

In September Pierre Fidenci, president of Endangered Species International, wrote in a Mongabay article of severe wide-scale bleaching in the Philippines. The bleaching has been observed at many sites around the Philippines featuring mass mortality of corals including the coral triangle outside the Philippines. He considers this environmental catastrophe will probably be considered the most damaging bleaching event ever recorded in the Philippines, surpassing the big one of 1998.

“Prior to this year’s bleaching, it was estimated that about 85 percent of the reefs have been damaged or destroyed in the Philippines, now the current estimate is likely to be close to 95 percent.”

The Telegraph article noted scientists in Thailand have reported reefs suffering 90% of their corals being bleached and up to 20% of the corals dead. Olivia Durkin, who is leading the bleaching monitoring at the Centre for Biodiversity in Peninsular Thailand, said: “This year’s severe coral bleaching has the potential to be the worst on record.”

In June The Maldives reported the most serious incidence of coral bleaching since the major 1998 El Niño-event that destroyed most of the country’s shallow reef coral. Since then there has been gradual reef recovery but the 2010 event will be at least a major setback.

Eakin warned in September that this year had the potential to be also one of the worst bleaching seasons for some reefs in the Caribbean. It follows hard on the heels of the 2005 bleaching which caused record losses to Caribbean reefs, according to a collaborative study published a couple of weeks ago.  More than 80 percent of surveyed corals bleached and over 40 percent of the total surveyed died as a result of the 2005 event. It will be a while before the effects of this year’s bleaching can be measured, but it is already apparent that in some locations this year’s event is worse than the event in 2005. Not only are temperatures causing further damage to reefs hit hard during the 2005 event, but new locations have also been impacted.

Eakin’s comment on the release of the study of the 2005 impacts:

“This severe, widespread bleaching and mortality will undoubtedly have long-term consequences for reef ecosystems, and events like this are likely to become more common as the climate warms.”

Bleaching is a consequence of a warming ocean, but it’s not the only adverse effect of global warming on corals. The other major impact is from the increase in ocean acidification as carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise. The double whammy is very clearly explained by Australian scientist and coral reef expert John Veron in his 2009 lecture to the Royal Society. I summarised his content in this post last year, and suggest any readers who’d like a longer explanation of what bleaching and acidification mean for the future of coral reefs take a look at it. The link to the video of the lecture provided in the post is outdated, but this link will get you there if you want to hear him in person. He is sombre about the outlook for coral reefs if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise, and nothing that has happened this year suggests he is getting it wrong.

Polar warming, Amazon drought, coral reefs bleaching and dying: I’ve gathered material for posts on all three of them within the past week. They are all sending out danger signals. They all threaten massive effects which cannot but have drastic consequences for humanity if they continue. And they’re only part of what threatens from climate change. They ought to have us scurrying to do what we are still able to do to prevent them developing further. The Cancún conference should be charged with a sense of high urgency.

I found myself applauding our Prime Minister when he said on Sunday that nothing less than the future of underground coal mining in New Zealand rests on the investigation into the Pike River tragedy. “We can’t put people into mines that are dangerous.” I also found myself wondering how that sentiment would go down with some of our economic interests. I thought John Key was absolutely right, and I presume in saying it he was not unaware of the economic implications. I guess I needn’t spell out the obvious parallel with the dangers from climate change and the perspective they put on the protests that economic interests mustn’t be harmed by climate change measures.

Johann Hari, in the eloquent article Gareth has already drawn attention to, wrote, “At Cancún, the real question will be carefully ignored by delegates keen to preserve big business as usual.”  It’s the wrong choice, Hari points out. But as he also says it’s not too late to change.

I wish it would rain

We (or at least some of us) rightly feel apprehension and alarm at the prospect of melting glacial and polar ice. There are new reminders that we should be equally alarmed at the prospect of Amazonian drought. Joe Romm has written a lengthy post on Climate Progress drawing attention to the 2010 drought which may prove more widespread and severe than the 2005 drought, itself identified as a 1-in-100-year type event.  He quotes an email to that effect from forest scientist and Amazon expert Simon Lewis (he of the Sunday Times fightback and subsequently granted apology).

Lewis recommends an article in the Global Post which is well worth reading.  It refers to three scientists. Oliver Phillips, a tropical ecology professor at the University of Leeds, speaks of his concern that parts of the Amazon may be approaching a threshold point beyond which the eco-system can’t go. He led a team of researchers who studied the damage caused by the 2005 drought which caused a massive die-off of trees and led to the forest expelling carbon dioxide rather than absorbing it. He’s worried that another severe drought is following so soon after the last one.  Greg Asner, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, points out that some tropical forests in the world now are starting to be exposed to temperatures they’ve never experienced. His studies show that higher temperatures and shifts in rainfall could leave as much as 37 percent of the Amazon so radically altered that the plants and animals living there now would be forced to adapt, move or die. Foster Brown, an environmental scientist at the federal university in the Brazilian state of Acre, comments that drought has made ecosystems so dry that instead of a being a barrier to fire, the forest became kindling.

Nikolas Kozloff’s book No Rain in the Amazon which I reviewed earlier this year refers to much-cited scientist Philip Fearnside of Brazil’s National Institute for Research in the Amazon, who for some years has observed the connection between drought and El Niño-like conditions which are expected to become more frequent with continued global warming. He too is concerned that the Amazon might dry out and be placed in jeopardy as a result of climate change. Kozloff also reports the belief of some researchers that warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean are linked to Amazon drought.

In an October press release Brazil’s Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) comments:

“The drought of 2010 still hasn’t ended in the Amazon and could surpass that of 2005 as the region’s worst during the past four decades… Even if this doesn’t occur, the forest will have already experienced three extreme dry spells in just 12 years, two of which occurred during the past five years: 1998, 2005 and 2010. And this is not including the drought of 2007, which affected only the Southeastern Amazon and left 10 thousand sq. km. of forest scorched in the region…`The Amazon that had wet seasons so well-defined that you could set your calendar to them – that Amazon is gone,’ says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of IPAM…”

Deforestation of the Amazon by humans has long been a major international concern, and Simon Lewis’s communication with Jo Romm indicates that there is a degree of good news on that front in that since 2005 deforestation rates have been radically reduced. But the droughts are bad news. They kill trees and promote damaging fires, “potentially leading to a drought-fire-carbon emissions feedback and widespread forest collapse”. Lewis expresses particular concern that while two unusual droughts clearly don’t make a trend, they are consistent with some model projections made well before 2005: “that higher sea surface temperatures increase drought frequency and intensity, leading later this century to substantial Amazon forest die-back.”

Hot Topic commenter Tony on a previous post linked to an Al Jazeera video clip (which I’ve posted below), with the observation that if anything should motivate a sense of urgency in Cancun, what it portrayed should. Simon Lewis also linked what may be happening in the Amazon to the Cancun conference. Not with any great expectation, but with a dry reminder that the risks to which we are exposing humanity don’t diminish because we ignore them. “While little is expected of the climate change talks in Cancun next week, the stakes, in terms of the fate of the Amazon are much higher than they were a year ago in Copenhagen.”

I hope it doesn’t appear as incidental if I note before concluding that the droughts affect not only the forest and through it the welfare of the whole planet but also the local populations whose livelihood and wellbeing is jeopardised. The Global Post article reports the anxiety of village chief Mariazinha Yawanawa. Her people are sustained by the forest. They hunt in the woods, fish the rivers and grow crops in the clearings where they live.  “Everything has changed. We don’t know when we can plant. We plant and then the sun kills everything. If it continues like this, we expect a tragedy

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[The Temptations]

China: ready to pay the price

ames Hansen was in China when the American midterm elections were held, and he reports that while the rest of us were feeling pessimistic he was becoming optimistic. Not because of what was happening in the US, but because of China. He found two reasons for optimism, the first of which he has explained in a poston his website. The second will follow, but there’s enough in the first to warrant notice here.

In the activist dimension of his life – which he always makes clear is an expression of personal opinion and in this respect differentiated from his scientific work – Hansen opposes cap and trade approaches to limiting carbon emissions as ineffective and instead advocates a steadily rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and returned to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations.

 

He considers there are signs that China is ready to consider a rising carbon price as part of a clean energy transition. At the Beijing Forum he attended he was impressed by what he described as the focused rational approach to dealing with the challenges, epitomized by Dr. Jiang Kejun (pictured), the lead speaker in the session “Global Environmental Policies and National Strategies”.

“Jiang Kejun laid out sector-by-sector projections of transitions to low-carbon and no-carbon energies and improved energy efficiency that would allow CO2 emission growth to be slowed and then reversed over the next few decades. Technology development is supported, and, when lower carbon technology becomes available, efficiency standards are promptly ratcheted downward. Most encouragingly, there is recognition that this strategy requires a rising carbon price for most successful results. The Chinese authorities appear to grasp that rapid attainment of the tipping points at which clean energies quickly displace dirty energy requires an economic incentive.”

Hansen remarks the advantages of the scale of manufacturing in China. It is so great that the unit price of new technologies can be quickly brought down, putting China in a position to sell carbon-efficient technologies to the rest of the world.

He compares the prevention of effective legislation by vested interests in the US with his impression that China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. He notes that the leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient. The power of fossil fuel interests is not as strong as in the US.

Hansen’s earlier view was that global action to stem climate change required agreement between China and the United States for a rising carbon fee. He acknowledges this is not realistic as the dysfunctional Congress would not approve such a treaty.

However, he sees a way around that. He envisages China finding agreement with other nations such as the European Union to impose rising internal carbon fees. And here’s the crunch:

“Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.”

And the consequence:

“The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil fuel addiction with a rising carbon fee and supportive national investment policies or it could accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being. The United States has great potential for innovation, but it will not be unleashed as long as fossil fuel interests have a stranglehold on U.S. energy policies.”

Nicholas Stern doesn’t share Hansen’s impatience with emissions trading schemes, but it is worth noting that he sounded very similar trade warnings in Auckland in September where he was delivering the Douglas Robb lectures. The world is embarking on a “new industrial revolution” of renewable energy and cleaner innovation, he told the Herald. Countries which don’t embrace it will find other countries reluctant to trade with them. Ten or fifteen years from now, those that produce in dirty ways are likely to face trade barriers.

However it is obtained, a rising price on carbon is an essential element in the transition to clean energy, and trade concerns may well play a part in making it global. Hansen insists that only a tax can achieve it, but there are indications that China is also considering a cap-and-trade system. Either way contributes to the seriousness Hansen discerns in China’s planning towards the transformation of its currently carbon-dependent economy.

Warming at the walls of the “citadel of ice”

Australian-born writer Meredith  Hooper was looking for “a route into the complex business of the Earth’s changing climate” when she spent January to March 2002 at Palmer Station on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. She watched and chronicled the work of scientist Bill Fraser and his team who for years have studied the Adélie penguins breeding on nearby islands over the summer months.

I read the account of her time there in her book The Ferocious Summer. It was the summer when the Larsen B ice shelf on the eastern side of the Peninsula spectacularly disintegrated. Her often poignant story tells of diminished numbers of penguins arriving for breeding, weather conditions inappropriate for their nesting, poor nutrition levels and low fledgling survival rates.

The book was also an illuminating account of the working and thinking of the scientists as they gradually amass and interpret the years of data needed for a proper understanding of what is happening to wildlife populations under the inexorable processes of climate change.

Hooper wrote for any who want to understand what global warming might mean for specific places and the life which has developed in close relationship with them. She observes that “climate change isn’t a blanket thrown evenly over the surface of the Earth”. Its impacts are variable and often need to be understood locally.

In the vulnerability of the Adélie penguins she saw a small example of a potentially vast reality ahead. “In one sense, they had become surrogate humans.” Her book was yet another solemn warning from the world of science.

Now another book has appeared by a writer who also spent several months with Bill Fraser’s team. Fraser’s Penguins is written by Fen Montaigne, senior editor of the online Yale 360. I hope to be reading and reviewing it in the near future. But in the meantime I wanted to draw attention to a report he has just written for Yale 360, The Warming of Antarctica: A Citadel of Ice Begins to Melt. Its focus is much wider than the Adélie penguins, though they figure in it: amongst other things he notes that their population has declined from 30,000 breeding pairs in 1975 to 5,600 pairs today.

On the broader Antarctic picture Montaigne explains helpfully for the general reader the developing scientific understanding of the effects of warming on the ice. He begins with a prescient quote from a geologist, John H. Mercer, writing in Nature in 1978.

“If present trends in fossil fuel consumption continue, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress… One of the warning signs that a dangerous warming trend is under way in Antarctica will be the breakup of ice shelves on both coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula, starting with the northernmost and extending gradually southward.”

Montaigne observes that Mercer’s prediction has come true, a couple of decades earlier than he anticipated. Since Mercer wrote those words eight ice shelves have fully or partially collapsed along the Antarctic Peninsula, and the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than virtually any place on Earth.

Montaigne continues:

“The question now, as humanity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly. The melting of Antarctica’s northernmost region – the Antarctic Peninsula – is already well underway, representing the first breach in an enormous citadel of cold that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice.

He acknowledges the vastness and coldness of the Antarctic ice dome, the heart of which is not likely to begin to melt any time soon.  But the periphery is another matter, and on that periphery the Antarctic peninsula has warmed faster than any other place. A 60-year temperature record at a research base on the northwest shows winter temperatures 11 degrees F higher and annual average temperatures 5 degrees F higher.

Ninety percent of 244 glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since 1940. Sea ice covers the Southern Ocean off the western Antarctic Peninsula three fewer months a year than in 1979, according to satellite data. In addition, ice shelves have been disintegrating up and down the peninsula.

He quotes Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“We are already at the point where the changes we’re seeing in this part of Antarctica are unprecedented throughout the entire period of human civilization.”

Turning to the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers further south, Montaigne discusses the effect of warming water. Changing atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns have caused the water of the deep Antarctic Circumpolar Current to be funnelled up onto the continental shelf in western Antarctica. At 37 degrees F in winter, it is warmer than the surface water and much warmer than air temperatures. It’s a huge volume and is having an enormous impact. In relative terms it is described as “blisteringly hot” by Douglas Martinson, an oceanographer and Antarctic specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The thinking of Robert Bindschadler, a senior fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center and an expert on Antarctic ice, is that the warmer waters are melting the submerged undersides of the ice shelves attached to the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, causing them to grow thinner. The melting is effectively loosening the grip of the Pine Island Glacier on the sea floor, causing the vast river of ice behind it to accelerate into the sea. It is now moving at a rate of about two miles a year.

Montaigne reports Bindschadler as saying that if all the ice from the ice streams feeding the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers were to flow into the Southern Ocean, global sea levels could increase by five feet, inundating low-lying coastal areas from Florida to Bangladesh. “Such an event, said Bindschadler, “could happen in the next half-century.”

The warming of the Antarctic is already bad news for ice-dependent penguin species.  It will also be bad news for humanity if we mindlessly continue our assault on the citadel of ice.