Global warming and the future of New Zealand
New Zealand company Aquaflow, which I wrote about in this post, has received praise in an article in Yale Environment 360 describing a project to use the city of Minneapolis’s sewage as a feedstock for algae from which biofuel can be derived. A University of Minnesota professor, Roger Ruan, is engaged in the research and speaks optimistically of its prospects. Early in the article comes this acknowledgement:
Continue reading “Go with the flow: NZ algae pioneers spark US interest”
Climate minister Nick Smith and international negotiator Tim Groser have published the schedule for their recently announced consultation exercise on a 2020 emissions target for New Zealand. The hastily arranged exercise (announced only last month, and a surprise to many) has already drawn calls for an interim target of 40% by 2020 from the recently-formed NZ Climate Action Partnership and Greenpeace. In an interesting development, Carbon News is reporting that Green Party climate change spokeswoman Jeanette Fitzsimons has floated the idea that NZ could adopt a split target — setting separate 2020 targets for carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane:
Fitzsimons says that with the technology not yet available to reduce methane emissions from farmed animals – responsible for half of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions – this country should be thinking about setting separate targets for carbon, nitrous oxide and methane for 2020.
“If we set an overall target that is mainly determined by the difficulty of reducing agricultural emissions, it looks to the rest of the world like we are doing nothing,†she said.
It’s an interesting concept, at the very least, though I have to say I’m not keen on giving agriculture a wholly free ride. Federated Farmers like to insist that the “technology is not available”, but there are a range of options farms can use to reduce emissions, from the use of nitrification inhibitors to better handling of manure (not to mention shifting to low-carbon crops or carbon farming).
Full details of the public meetings below the fold. I’ll be making an effort to attend the Christchurch meeting next Wednesday evening.
Followers of Hot Topic’s new Twitter feed might have noticed this link, posted this morning. It’s a Guardian report of a select committee hearing in the UK Parliament, in which the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change (at Manchester University) took the Labour government to task for the “dangerously optimistic” nature of the targets it has adopted.
Professor Kevin Anderson, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the government’s planned carbon cuts – if followed internationally – would have a “50-50 chance” of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2C. This is the threshold that the EU defines as leading to “dangerous” climate change. Anderson also said that the two government departments most directly involved with climate change policy, were like “small dogs yapping at the heels” of more powerful departments such as that run by the business secretary, Lord Mandelson. He said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), run by Ed Miliband, should be given more power.
What are the British targets that so concern Professor Anderson? In the April budget, Gordon Brown’s government formally adopted the target suggested by the committee it established to advise on the matter — a 34 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 from a 1990 baseline. Anderson wants that tightened to 40% before the Copenhagen meeting in December, in order to get a reasonable deal out of the process.
… without more ambitious action he feared that a significant deal at Copenhagen would not be achieved. “No one I talk to thinks there is going to be anything significant to come out of Copenhagen,” he said. “We are going to come out and recover the deck-chairs in preparation for moving them as the Titanic sinks. We’re not even at the stage of rearranging them,” he added.
There’s a message here for New Zealand’s politicians and scientists, and it’s not a comfortable one for either group.
Back in March climate change minister Nick Smith decided it was time to sort out whether the Emissions Trading Scheme was a recipe for economic disaster, as ACT and big emitters were insisting (using figures from a shonky report by NZIER), or affordable, as Treasury modelling (conducted by Infometrics) showed. Smith commissioned both economic consultancies to work together to arrive at a consensus, which they were happy to do (at a cost of $79,200 + GST). The result of this ministerial banging of heads was released yesterday [PDF], and it is simultaneously interesting, encouraging and profoundly disappointing.
There are chilly weeks ahead for a team of six scientists — two New Zealanders, two Chinese and and two from the USA — who are heading into the Southern Alps around Mt Cook for a winter ice core drilling project organised by GNS Science. Winter drilling is necessary to avoid the cores melting on extraction — daytime temperatures will be around freezing, but could drop to -20ºC at night. Julian Thomson (blog — worth a read) of GNS explains how they will select sites:
“Ideal ice core sites are flat, at high altitude, with a slow-moving glacier and moderate snow accumulation. These sites enable good preservation of a long continuous record of annual ice core layers,†he said. “Such sites are rare in the Southern Alps where the highest areas are typically steep and with very high snow accumulation rates. New Zealand glaciers are therefore fast moving and dynamic.†Weather permitting, the scientists plan to retrieve ice cores from several sites.with altitudes ranging from 2200m to 3000m.
The logistics are a challenge:
The cores will be brought to the surface in 1m lengths, bagged in clear polythene and stored in purpose-built insulated boxes. Typically, it can take up to 12 hours to retrieve 50m of core from a site. The ice cores will be air-lifted off the glacier and taken to Mt Cook Village and stored in a walk-in freezer at The Hermitage Hotel. From there they will be taken in a refrigerated truck to the New Zealand Ice Core Research Laboratory at GNS Science in Lower Hutt.
Retrieving the climate records in the cores is becoming urgent because NZ’s glaciers have lost 60% of their volume since the 1850s. The Press coverage quotes Thomson:
“There is definitely a feeling that these glaciers are not going to come back for a good while. It is a priority to get the ice cores out as soon as we can,” Thomson said. “We’re not sure how old the ice is at the bottom. If we’re really lucky, we hope to go back a few hundred years. “That takes us back further than instrument weather stations, which have been around for about 150 years. If we went back into the thousands of years we’d be absolutely gobsmacked.”
We have to hope that the staff at The Hermitage resist the temptation to serve the ice with whiskey at the bar…
[Update: RNZ National’s Jim Mora interviewed Julian Thomson this afternoon: audio here at 14:10.]
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