Tag: carbon

Fairytale Of New York

homer.jpg New Zealand’s climate cranks have been out in force in recent weeks. I’ve got a number of posts I’d like to make discussing what they have to say, but those got pushed down the queue by a column by Garth George in today’s Herald, helpfully headlined “Climate change warriors, throw down your weapons”. Garth devotes himself to a discussion of the “Manhattan Declaration“, the statement issued by the Heartland Institute‘s crank conference in New York last month, and then wonders:

Now why this forthright declaration did not receive prominent coverage in the press anywhere in New Zealand, including this newspaper’s vaunted Green Pages, I have no idea. It was, after all, a Kiwi initiative.

Perhaps, Garth, it’s because the “declaration” is nonsense, and the involvement of New Zealanders more a matter for national shame than pride? Let’s have a look at this declaration in a little more detail…

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Winter wonderland

205188main_2007ice_anomaly.jpg Climate cranks are keen to paint the last northern hemisphere (boreal) winter as unusually cold – a clear sign, they say, that “global warming is over”, and that global cooling has begun. Every crank’s at it: Bob Carter at Muriel’s place, Gerrit van der Lingen in an article in a Christchurch magazine and Vincent Gray in a submission to the select committee looking into the Emissions Trading Bill. It’s nonsense. The winter was cooler than many recent ones – but still 16th warmest, according to NOAA. A strong La Niña is cooling the tropical Pacific, and dragging the global average down, the precise converse of the strong El Niño that made 1998 so hot. In other words it’s weather noise, not long term change, as Stu Ostro explains at the Weather Channel. However, the cranks are right about one thing: last winter was unusual, but not for the reasons they think. In this post, I want to explore some of the reasons why this winter was out of the ordinary, and why I think it may demonstrate that rapid climate change is happening now. It’s an expanded version of how I began my last two talks…

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The law won

hot-topic-cover.jpg The LexisNexis legal symposium on climate change was an interesting couple of days. Some excellent presentations – including a particularly fine exposition of the science of climate from NIWA’s Katja Riedel, and a very good summary of the post-Kyoto options from Jonathon Boston. Peter Weir from the Forest Owners Association presented a characteristically direct assessment of the role of forestry in the ETS – and demonstrated just how challenging the business of forestry has just become. My own short talk covered New Zealand’s vulnerabilities to climate change, looking at potential winners in losers in a world where there’s a risk that rapid climate change is happening now. [PDF here – 4.5MB] One take home message: do not expect the price of carbon to go down. I’m not sure that investing in carbon is exactly a safe haven for retirement funds, but if I were a Treasury official considering whether to hedge against NZ’s 2008-12 Kyoto CP1 liability, I’d be buying now.

There will never be any peace (until God is seated at the conference table)

hot-topic-cover.jpg Some notes from Saturday’s conference. God may not have been at the conference table, but there was Swamiji, who is certainly revered amongst his followers. My presentation [PDF here: warning – 7MB] followed two Nobel prizewinners – David Wratt (NZ’s representative on the IPCC, who covered the basic AR4 findings) and Pene Lefale (lead author of the WG2 chapter on impacts in the Pacific). Pene’s talk was fascinating, based on a paper he’s preparing on what he’s called the “perfect political problem” – reconciling the differences between developed and developing countries views on how to approach climate change. All the other speakers were good, but it was Andrew West, CEO of AgResearch who made – for me – the most telling comments. Drawing on his background as an ecologist, he looked at the big issue – coping with 9 billion people. Not all of them will be able to eat a meat-rich diet… Andrew shares my enthusiasm for topoclimate studies as a means of adapting to climate change. Are you reading this MfE? Time for a full topoclimate survey of NZ…

Notes on my talk below the fold…

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Emissions trading: baby steps not big enough

NZETS.jpg As parliament starts to get stuck into the serious business of legislating for the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS), the tempo of criticism (from all sides) is increasing. Owners of pre-1990 forests have weighed in, and in the past week Greenpeace has launched a broadside:

“The current proposal for the structure of the ETS will deliver no significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, will act as an impediment to the rapid implementation of less carbon intensive production technologies in the manufacturing industry and will do nothing to slow the destruction of forests to make way for increasingly greenhouse gas intensive forms of dairy farming.” (Full report here [PDF])

At the same time, the New Zealand Institute has produced its second report on climate change policy (Actions speak louder than words: Adjusting the New Zealand economy to a low emissions world [PDF]), and isn’t impressed either…

Overall, however, we estimate that the various policies will only serve to reduce New Zealand’s domestic emissions in 2050 to about their 1990 level. The level of emissions reduction is not sufficient to adjust the New Zealand economy so that it is well positioned to compete in a low-emissions world.

Herald report here. Meanwhile Brian Fallow considers some more complex fishhooks in the proposed ETS, particularly as they affect cement manufacturers Holcim.
Both new reports make good points (and are well worth reading), but both also suffer from real problems, some general and some particular.

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