The Bali conference ended with a cliffhanger, but as I was cocooned in a kayak paddling up the coast of the Abel Tasman it passed me by like a fur seal in the night. I did notice a fishy smell, but I don’t think it emanated from Nusa Dua. The big news, of course, was the US climbdown at the last minute, memorably blogged by David Sassoon at Solve Climate. He extensively quotes an eye witness account by Peter Riggs, Director of the Forum on Democracy and Trade:
Tag: IPCC
The canary croaked
From AP (via CNN): “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.” The annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco is bringing bad news about the Arctic – most of it listed in the foregoing linked article. One paragraph is particularly shocking:
Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004’s total.
In three years, half of the summer ice has gone. In Hot Topic I suggest that it might all be gone in my lifetime – and I thought I was being pretty daring, given that the IPCC talks about the end of the century. One ice modeller who has been predicting an early demise for the summer sea ice is the US Navy’s Wieslaw Maslowski. From the BBC:
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
RealClimate is providing coverage of AGU highlights (here, here, here and (update – sea ice specific) here. The Herald runs with a very US-angled Reuters story. As I’ve pointed out before, the consequences of the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic for northern hemisphere climate is not known, but I would expect that there’s some urgent work being done to find out. We’re into the land of the unknown unknowns, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Something 4 The Weekend
Bali continues to make headlines. The rough positions are becoming clear. China’s playing hardball – no mandatory cuts, West has to cut first and most deeply. The New York Times‘ Andy Revkin has a couple of good Bali posts on his blog: the first suggests that the IPCC may have to revise its goal for the next report – updating AR4 for the conclusion of the post-Kyoto process in 2009, while the second looks at what’s going on around the negotiations. Meanwhile, 200 scientists from around the world, coordinated by the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, issued a statement calling on the conference to aim for emissions cuts of at least 50% by 2050 [Herald, Globe & Mail (Canada)].
Meanwhile, there’s lots more below the fold (as they say on the broadsheets)….
The Press: head buried deep in Brighton beach
The Press is my local newspaper. It’s one of New Zealand’s top four daily papers. I read it, on the web and on paper. It is a very important part of South Island, and especially Canterbury life. It even published a letter from me earlier this week, in which I pointed out a few factual errors in an opinion column in last Saturday’s paper (an economist getting his climate science wrong). I was therefore a trifle concerned to read its editorial today, which chastises the world’s diplomats for their high carbon antics in Bali (there are 15,000 of them, from all over the world, after all), and then concludes with this choice paragraph:
But failure to agree in the end may not be a bad thing. There are some who argue that muddling through with more ad hoc adjustments to climate change may be all that is needed. A major worry in the debate over climate change is that, where so much is contentious, any proposed overall “solution” may wind up doing more harm than good. The confusion of thought that led the UN to hold what looks like a jamboree for bureaucrats on a tropical island shows why that worry can sometimes seem justified.
Newspapers, like people (even economists) are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. Failure in Bali may be inevitable. To believe that the world will work together to beat a global problem requires a leap of faith that flies in the face of historical precedent, but if we get no deal on emissions reductions, or a deal that delivers meaningless or insufficient cuts, the prospect for the world is not rosy. “Muddling through” is not an option to be preferred. The science does not support that contention. The editorial writer must have ignored his own paper’s news coverage of the issue and preferred to take the advice of the sceptical rump – Lawson, de Freitas and their sponsors. To further suggest that the solution could do more harm than good simply flies in the face of the evidence – from the IPCC, Stern, even the NZ Treasury.
If The Press expects its views to have influence and command respect, it will need to ensure that its opinion writers demonstrate some acquaintance with reality before they commit words to paper. The politics belongs in the response to the problem, not in denying that it exists.
(Pod)Cast Your Fate To The Wind
Two good podcasts to catch up on before the avalanche of Bali-related news hits. Nature Reports Climate Change launches a new podcast hosted by editor Olive Heffernan (RSS, mp3), using Nature’s clout to get interviews with key scientists. Should be worth a regular listen. And Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday Morning programme included an excellent pre-Bali interview with Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s head honcho, and David Wratt from NIWA (stream, RSS). Chris makes up for his gentle Lawson interview by suggesting that the good lord might have been living in a fool’s paradise. Indeed.