Category: Climate science

Clearing the decks

A few quick links before I post on the government’s just announced energy strategy: cleaning out the tabs in my web browser…

  • Professor Graham Harris of the University of Tasmania addresses the issues I raised in my “ecological overdraft” post a few days ago, in Sleepwalking Into Danger – an article for ScienceAlert: “It is time to admit how little we know and face the risks of planetary degradation – this goes way beyond climate change. Biodiversity isn’t just birds, primates and whales; it is planetary function and resilience.”
  • The Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds is planning [Guardian, BBC] to allow the sea to reclaim 728 hectares of coastal land in the Essex marshes on Britain’s east coast to restore habitat for wildlife – and as a pragmatic adaptation to rising sea levels. Could we see the same sort of thing here?
  • The Andrill project – a sea floor drilling effort under the Ross Ice Shelf involving NZ and US scientists – is using nifty Apple computers, so Apple has posted an interesting perspective on the work being done. New drilling season starts soon.
  • Brian Fallow in the Herald takes a look at the cost of carbon in the new ETS and speculates about ongoing impacts on the government’s accounts.
  • Carbon emissions from shipping may be much higher than previously thought, according to The Independent (UK).
  • German solar power company Conergy is planning a 500 turbine windfarm near Broken Hill in New South Wales. Meanwhile, BusinessWeek (US) profiles entrepreneur John O’Donnell, who has bought into Aussie scientist David Mills solar thermal designs, and plans to build a lot of generation at costs competitive with coal. With Silicon Valley money, and soon.
  • The Dominion Post digs up some advice to government on dealing with “environmental refugees”. NZ will probably want to help small Pacific nations, but refugees from the Asian megadeltas might be another matter.

Into ecological overdraft

Globe07In the final chapter of Hot Topic, I refer to the concept of global overshoot: the idea that human activities are exceeding the planet’s ability to regenerate resources. It’s the ultimate meaning of sustainability – living within our planetary means. This year we started eating into our ecological overdraft on October 6th – three days ahead of last year, and the best part of month earlier than in 2000. The Global Footprint Network calculates Ecological Debt Day:

As humanity’s consumption of resources increases, Ecological Debt Day creeps earlier on the calendar. According to current calculations, humanity’s first Ecological Debt Day was December 19, 1987. By 1995 it had jumped back a month to 21 November. In 2007, with Ecological Debt on October 6, humanity’s Ecological Footprint is almost thirty per cent larger than the planet’s productivity this year. In other words, it now takes more than one year and three months for the Earth to regenerate what we use in a single year.

Continue reading “Into ecological overdraft”

Biofuels to fly, and other stories

747Air New Zealand is carefully positioning itself as a climate-friendly airline with its latest announcement that it is to trial biofuels in a 747 flight from Auckland in the next couple of years. Working with Boeing, Air NZ will be part of the first commercial trial of biofuel, in a Rolls-Royce-powered jumbo in the next 18 months . The flight will only use biofuel in one engine, and will not carry customers. [Stuff, Herald, BBC, June HT blog on aviation biofuels].

  • Consents are close on a tidal energy trial in the Cook Strait, while Orkney is establishing itself as European leader for tidal and wave power research.
  • The NSIDC provides a roundup on this season’s Arctic sea ice collapse, while NASA finds that the loss of multi-year ice plays a large role in ice loss, and warns that sea ice modelling needs some rapid revision. Meanwhile James Hansen suggests to Reuters that a crucial trigger point may have been passed in the Arctic, and a perceptive journalist on the San Diego Union-Tribune notices that loss of sea ice has big implications for the SW USA. [Update 3/10: Andy Revkin has a very good piece in today’s New York Times: the interactive graphic of the Arctic is especially good.]
  • A warming world is bad news for rice production, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute has found. Crop yields would be reduced by 10% for every 1ºC temperature increase during the growing season.
  • British PM Gordon Brown and Helen Clark have agreed to work together to ensure that the NZ and European carbon markets are “compatible

Aussie forecast: drier and hotter

Wp-Content Uploads 2007 07 AusssiesmallAustralians are going to have to come to terms with climate commitment. They face a rise in average temperature of 1ºC by 2030, and a significant increase in drought. The latest research on Australia’s future climate (Climate Change in Australia [PDFs here], by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology) was released yesterday at the Greenhouse 2007 conference in Sydney. According to one of the authors, CSIRO scientist Dr Penny Whetton:

“The probability of warming exceeding 1°C is 10-20 per cent for coastal areas and more than 50 per cent for inland regions.

Full IPCC reports now available

The full text of the Working Group One, Two and Three sections of the IPCC‘s Fourth Report are all now available for free download:

The final section, the Synthesis Report, is in the final stages of government review, and will be adopted at a meeting in Valencia in mid November. Put together, the three reports amount to a compendium of the state of our knowledge about climate change, and our options for dealing with it. The WG2 chapter on impacts in Australia and New Zealand [PDF] is particularly important reading.