Global warming and the future of New Zealand
There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no doubt make its way over here eventually.
[Much more below the fold]
Continue reading “Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.”
Hot Topic has devoted a lot of posts to events in the Arctic over the last northern hemisphere summer. The loss of sea ice was dramatic – there was 25% less ice in September than the previous record, set in 2005. The little graph to the left shows just far off the trend line last year’s September area really was. And as I posted yesterday, recent studies suggest that the Arctic is primed for more significant losses in the near future. If the reduction in summer sea ice continues, there are some pretty major implications for the climate of the northern hemisphere and for our modelling of the global climate, and it’s those things that I want to consider in this post. Please note: I am not a climate scientist, and there are a lot of ifs and handwaves in this argument, but bear with me…
Time for an ice update. There’s more bad news about the Arctic sea ice, some interesting video from Greenland, and confirmation that the Antarctic is losing significant amounts of ice. A team lead by James Maslanik of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Astrodynamics Research has tracked the age of perennial Arctic sea ice (the stuff that survives through summer), and found that since the 1980s the ice has become thinner and younger. Of the ice that survived last year’s melt back, 58% is thin and only 2 to 3 years old:
The portion of ice more than five years old within the multi-year Arctic icepack decreased from 31 percent in 1988 to 10 percent in 2007, according to the study. Ice 7 years or older, which made up 21 percent of the multi-year Arctic ice cover in 1988, made up only 5 percent in 2007, the research team reported. [Science Daily, UC release]
This sets the Arctic up for more rapid ice loss, and makes it much harder for the sea ice to recover to its historic size. Meanwhile, Andy Revkin at the New York Times describes what’s been happening in Greenland [you might have to register, but it’s worth it]. The video from a camera being lowered down a moulin is amazing. That’s our world going down the gurgler (as I said at the HT launch). More from Revkin (and more video) at his Dot Earth blog supporting the article.
In our neck of the woods the news isn’t flash, either. A new study confirms that Antarctica has been losing ice over the last 10 years, and finds that the rate of loss has increased by 75% over that time [Herald]. The East Antarctic ice sheet remains more or less stable, but the West Antarctic and Antarctic Peninsula are losing significant amounts of ice mass – a total of 192 billion tonnes of ice in 2006. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that the mass loss is down to increased glacier flow:
Changes in glacier dynamics are significant and may in fact dominate the ice sheet mass budget. This conclusion is contrary to model simulations of the response of the ice sheet to future climate change, which conclude that it will grow due to increased snowfall.
The Christian Science Monitor provides a good overview of what’s going on south of us here.
Meanwhile, to quote a Prebble, I’ve been thinking, and before too long I shall blog about the implications of what’s happening in the Arctic. More questions than answers – but perhaps we can start thinking about how to get the answers we need. More soon…
Two Otago University physicists, Inga Smith and Craig Rodger, have calculated the CO2 equivalent emissions generated by international tourist visits to NZ, and find that in 2005 the return flights accounted for almost 8 million tonnes of CO2e – about the same as emissions by the country’s entire power sector – around 10 percent of total NZ emissions. They then calculated what it would take to offset those emissions in NZ, and found that most approaches were either not feasible or too expensive. Not suprisingly, this has got quite a few people in a tizzy (Herald & Herald, NBR, Stuff, NZ News UK), because if international travellers begin to worry about their carbon footprints, then 20 percent of our export earnings are at risk.
This is not news. I drew attention to this vulnerability in Hot Topic. Air New Zealand has been very keen to establish its green credentials by working with Boeing on biofuels for avation, and looking at offset schemes in the conservation estate with DOC. In fact the whole tourism sector has seen this coming for some time. What’s interesting is the numbers, and I won’t be commenting on those until I’ve had a chance to see the paper. There are a lot of open questions, too, about how to approach offsetting our tourism business. The authors appear to assume that this should all be done in NZ, and therefore make Helen Clark’s “carbon neutral country” ambition harder to achieve – in fact the NBR (and David Farrar) seem keen to spin this as a government policy problem. The NBR’s intro (above an otherwise fine story) is particularly egregious:
New Zealand’s adoption of a carbon neutrality policy, and the world’s toughest emission reduction targets, will have a disastrous effect on its biggest foreign exchange earner, tourism, and there are no solutions in sight, university experts say.
Now I don’t think that’s what Smith & Rodger were saying at all, but I’ll wait until I see the paper…
There are lots of things to consider. First, the global aviation industry is working on its own emissions regulation framework in part to try and forestall the sort of mandatory scheme threatened by Europe, and as a PR exercise to keep valuable long distance travellers flying. So airlines are likely to be looking at an international offset scheme. Within that, there will have to be some rules about where the emissions generated by travelling are accounted for. All incoming flights in the destination nation, perhaps? Not good news for NZ because of the length of our flights, but there’s nothing to say that the offsets have to be created in that country. Officials looking at ways of achieving Helen Clark’s carbon neutral ambition are already considering that it might be achieved by buying reductions in other countries. And if that’s the cheapest way to do it, why not?
But the fact remains that tourism in NZ is exquisitely vulnerable to consumer perceptions in our prime markets. If long distance flights become uncool, business here will suffer. Like the food miles issue, this is not something we can dodge – it has to be confronted head on. It’s not a problem of the government’s making, but it is one this government (and the next one) will have to help with.
Time to catch up with some climate stuff that I’ve accumulated over the last couple of weeks.
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