environment and ecology – Page 211

Still talkin’ (open thread #2)

Here’s another open thread, for discussion of anything not covered in recent posts. In response to a few requests, I have ditched the Intense Debate comment service, and reverted to the WordPress built-in system. I’ve installed a couple of plug-ins to allow comment editing and rating (which caused some weirdness with the blog theme and a late night for me until I worked out a temporary fix). I’ve also switched off comment nesting/threading, so your comments will appear in the order they’re posted. If you’re replying to a particular comment, please use the comment number or link to it (the link is under the number). As before, you’ll need to register and log-in to make a comment. If anyone has any problems with their log-ins contact me (gareth@ the site domain) and I’ll see what can be done.

A note on the comment rating scheme: four positive votes or three negative votes, or more than eight votes in total will give comments distinctive styles. Please try it out — I want to see what they look like! I could change this to make unpopular comments invisible, but only with tweaking. Let me know if it’s something you really want. Feedback on other aspects of the blog would also be welcome.

The King will come

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, has not retired into quiet obscurity since leaving that position. He co-authored the book The Hot Topic (reviewed here) in 2008 and works as director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford, which addresses the major environmental threats and opportunities facing the world. He’s written two articles in recent days which seemed to me worthy of mention. Yesterday in New Scientisthe urged readers not to despair despite the apparent lack of progress at the recent Bonn talks.

He acknowledges that there’s reason for gloom at the failure of December’s Copenhagen summit to come up with a successor to Kyoto — failure which he puts down to a combination of serious organisational issues and glaring, often naïve, political errors. He describes the end result as “the victory of unambitious realpolitik over correct, but wishful, thinking.” But some positives resulted.

First, climate change now has the full attention of the world. “The anger of poorer nations is a powerful and lucid expression of their full appreciation of the scale of the problem.” Second, we realise that a single collective leap won’t bring a successor to Kyoto. Third, we now have global agreement to avoid a dangerous 2 degree temperature rise and deforestation is now part of agreements.

However, the main reason for his optimism is that he sees alternative ways to regulate carbon through national and regional commitments to emissions trading.

He points to the European Union whose Emission Trading System is the largest of its kind in the world. If the US introduces its own version, Mexico’s president is keen to join and wants to see Canada sign up too, forming a North American trading group. Another emissions trading market may emerge among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Harmonising such parallel markets would be a challenge, especially for international trade policy, but co-ordinating across a small number of commodity markets is likely to be easier than across a large number of sovereign states. There is the issue of regional schemes initially leading to industries in different parts of the world paying different prices for emitting carbon and thus giving an advantage to manufacturers in regions where the price of polluting is low. King’s reply is that high-price countries would impose tariffs on imports from low-price regions to level things up. He has said elsewhere that if this causes trouble with the WTO it also presents an opportunity for the WTO to step in and “persuade nations to get their act together”.

He is sceptical about attempts to create multibillion-dollar funds to help poorer nations adapt to climate change, since he’s not sure that the pledges of the developed world are credible. A better approach in his view would be to extend existing trading schemes to these nations.

“This would encourage them to develop lower-carbon economies and generate income through taxes on high-carbon imports. It would also unify emissions trading, overtaking troubled efforts to devise a global trading scheme with a single carbon dioxide price. Regardless of the details of the mechanism, it is plain that one of the central challenges for climate policy is to find a credible way to meet the concerns of the poorest countries while offering the right development incentives.”

Add to these factors the increasing confidence of the growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, and King sees hope ahead by the time of the meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit in the same city that started the Kyoto process.

“We are all custodians of a global commons, and we have moral responsibility to future generations to curb our greenhouse emissions. I am optimistic that Rio can deliver.”

On Sunday, King wrote in the Observer about the different but closely related question of oil supply and demand, under the heading We must abandon oil before it’s too late. In the context of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster he presses the point that demand for oil may outstrip supply sooner than people realise. Analysis undertaken at Oxford suggests that the IEA is overestimating the reserves in fields yet to be developed by some 30%. He expects oil prices to rise very considerably soon to be more than $100 a barrel, peaking at $130 a barrel by 2015.

The effect of this on importing countries will be harsh, especially on developing countries. King is scientific adviser to the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, and has recommended that the country do all it can to decouple its currently rapidly growing economy from oil.

Kicking the oil habit is increasingly necessary for economic reasons, but when added to the imperative to reduce carbon emissions and prevent dangerous climate change he considers the case for change is overwhelming.

He briefly sketches the kind of measures that will need to be taken. The efficiency of transport will need to be increased by reducing air friction, improving engines and running smaller, lighter vehicles. Alternative fuels will be important, moving from petrol to new generations of biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles. We will also need to go beyond the designs of the vehicles and fuels and look at changing urban design, at building and improving mass transportation systems, and changing the ways that people drive.

His organisation is holding a World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment between 27-29 June in Oxford on the theme of low carbon mobility. There’s an interesting short video clip launching the forum here.

[Wishbone Ash]

Terry keeps his clips on

As predicted, New Zealand’s tame band of climate cranks have waxed all pompous and upset about Sir Peter Gluckman’s perceptive comments on climate change denial. But I was wrong about one thing. Instead of Barry Brill stepping up to the plate, it’s the grand dame of NZ denial, Terry Dunleavy, “honorary secretary and webmaster”and co-founder of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition who does the honours.

Terry’s piece is nothing new. Certainly nothing newsworthy. But I can’t resist quoting Richard Treadgold on the subject, because it made my day. Under the heading PM’s Chief Science Adviser must change — or go, Treadgold reproduces Dunleavy’s thoughts verbatim. But he can’t resist adding a final thought of his own:

I would suggest that our highly respected Sir Pete ought to acquaint himself with some real climate science if he wants to be taken seriously by the scientists in the NZCSC.

Gave me the best laugh of the day… “Sir Pete” is, I imagine, rather uninterested in what scientists of the calibre of — who, Vince Gray? — think of him. And the scientists in the C”S”C would do well to try to be taken seriously by — well, anyone, really…

[Former greatest living Englishman Viv Stanshall]

Climate Refugees

Eleven French journalists – writers and photographers of Collectif Argos – visited some of the people who live on the front line of climate change. Their report was first published in France in 2007, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has now published an English version: Climate Refugees. It invites reading. The written narratives are engaging and immediately informative. The related photographic sections are strikingly alive and stir the imagination. But it’s not lightly done -– the journalists spent time staying with the people whose lives they describe and there’s satisfying depth to the stories and the pictures.

Nine places were visited: Alaska and New Orleans in the US, the low-lying halligen on the North Sea coast of Germany, Lake Chad in Africa, the village of Longbaoshan near Beijing in China, Himalayan Nepal, the small town of Mushiganj in the south west corner of Bangladesh, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific.

Shishmaref is a village of 600 people on the small island of Sarichef off the coast of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean. As their village slowly crumbles into the sea and the whole island moves towards becoming inhabitable by 2050 the issue is not whether they will have to relocate. It’s where they will go. On offer is a move to towns 200 miles away to take advantage of the urban infrastructure. But the Shishmaref Inupiaq are convinced that relocating to a city would be tantamount to “burying their culture, soul, uniqueness and future”. What many would prefer is to recreate the village on a mainland site only 12 miles away. But it would be double the cost – $200 million as against $100 million – and the fear is that the state will not pay the extra.

The village of Longbaoshan, just 38 kilometres north-west of the Beijing suburbs, is not falling into the sea but being slowly buried by advancing sand. Only 700 people now remain. In recent years 200 have already left for the capital.

“My fields are nothing but stones and sand, sand and stones. Where’s the soil? Where’s the rain? The sky is my only hope, the only way we are able to eat. After the big storm in the spring of 2000, my son had to leave. He became a cook at a restaurant in a Beijing suburb. We don’t see him any more.”

The journalists went to the city to track down a couple who made the move, leaving their young son with his grandfather. They found them working very long hours and living in a nine-square-metre single room.

Around the town of Mushiganj in Bangladesh it’s too much water which is driving people away from their homes. Bangladeshis are accustomed to flooding and have learned to use it to their benefit. But global warming has added a scope and duration to floods which are destroying that balance. In the area the journalists visited the salinity of the soil has increased and crops have been replaced by shrimp farms, which bring far fewer jobs than rice paddies. Drinking water has to be fetched in exhausting trips. The nearby mangrove forests of the Sundarbans offer some fishing and other resources but are infested with pirates and are the refuge of the dangerous Bengal tiger. So for many it’s Dhaka for employment and income, albeit in demanding and exhausting work such as rickshaw driving.

The climate change pressures on Bangladesh will only increase and Dhaka will simply be unable to absorb the large-scale rural exodus anticipated. Where will people go? The journalists spoke with a geography professor who rules out neighbouring India and Myanmar as destinations for political and climate change reasons. He looks for cooperation outside southern Asia in preparing for the massive migrations anticipated.

“I think that countries with larger land areas will have to change their immigration policies. If we believe climate change is a global problem. then we must look for global solutions. Trying to solve it at national level is a mistake.”

Another researcher put it this way:

“For a long time now, I’ve been proposing the following solution. Each country must take responsibility for – in other words transport and accommodate – a quota of climate refugees proportional to its past and present greenhouse gas emissions.”

The water problem in Lake Chad is quite a different one. The lake is disappearing and taking life with it. Over the past 40 years it has lost 90% of its area, shrinking from 25,000 to 2500 square kilometres. A UNESCO statement describes the gradual drying up of the lake as the most spectacular example of the effects of climate change in tropical Africa, attributing it to low amounts of rainfall, evapotranspiration from high temperatures and a series of severe droughts. The effects on the surrounding populations are harsh. “God needs to send us a miracle because there’s too much suffering involved in living on the lake.”

When the journalists began their stay in Tuvalu they record that they couldn’t help feeling some irritation at what they saw as the carefree attitude and love of the easy life of the Tuvaluans. However further acquaintance revealed a pragmatic people fully aware of their inevitable fate and wanting to do everything in their power to stay on their land as long as possible, though involved in a global struggle to negotiate their relocation under optimal conditions. The Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

“We asked the governments of Australia and New Zealand to acknowledge the concept of climate refugees. They refused, saying that, according to international law, refugees can only be people subject to persecution or political, ideological, ethnic or religious pressure – a narrow definition that suits them just fine.”

The journalists, however, wonder whether, based on current scientific knowledge, the existence of climate refugees may give rise to the concept of ‘environmental persecution’ of the most vulnerable populations by the major greenhouse-gas emitters. This could be, they suggest, the beginning of climate justice in which the biggest polluters per inhabitant would not be able to turn away Tuvaluans forced to flee their land.

The Maldives face a similar prospect to the Tuvaluans. The valley residents of Nepal are seriously threatened by growing number of glacial lakes high above them that are becoming engorged with water from receding glaciers and may explode in outburst floods. Many former residents of New Orleans have been relocated in Houston and elsewhere in the US. The sparse population of the halligen in the meantime have a great deal of government money spent on keeping them in their threatened enironment because protecting the halligen means helping protect the mainland.

What is the rest of the world going to do if under the pressures of climate change it becomes apparent that large numbers of people must move from where they now live and work? The book puts that question squarely in front of us. Some of the migration will be within national borders. That will be demanding enough. But some will have to be beyond those borders. Will the rich nations face up to the responsibility they have incurred? Will ethical imperatives survive the crunch times ahead? It would be a hard heart which looked at the photographs in this book and didn’t hope so.

[Buy via Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]

Don’t watch that, watch this!

If you’ve got any interest at all in the state of the Arctic Sea Ice, resist the temptation to watch the World Cup, or the start of the All Black’s winter season, and take a look at David Barber’s talk at the International Polar Year’s Oslo Science Conference. Go to the “Web TV” page, then scroll through the videos on offer until you see Barber’s talk — On Thin Ice: The Arctic and Climate Change (or use the direct link). Barber’s a good lecturer — he gave yesterday’s (Friday) morning plenary talk at the conference — and he delivers a fascinating overview of his work on the Circumpolar Flaw Project, one of the biggest components of the 2007-8 IPY. Most interesting of all is his description of the state of the sea ice last autumn, as the icebreaker Amundsen went in search of multi-year ice in the Beaufort Sea. He gives a graphic description (involving pyjamas) of the ice breaker discovering that what the Canadian Ice Service maps were suggesting was thick multi-year ice was nothing of the sort — the Amundsen was making a comfortable 13 knots through it, not far short of its top speed of 13.7 knots. That section of his talk starts at about 20 minutes in (by the timer on the player), but it’s worth watching the whole thing. The press release for Barber’s talk is here.

Continue reading “Don’t watch that, watch this!”