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UK plans to cut CO2 doomed to fail – scientists
James Randerson, Guardian
An independent scientific audit of the UK’s climate change policies predicts that the government will fall well below its target of a 30% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 – which means that the country will not reach its 2020 milestone until 2050.
The report condemns government forecasts on greenhouse gas emissions as “very optimistic” and projects that the true reduction will be between 12 and 17%, making little difference to current CO2 emission levels.
The report is based on an analysis of the government’s attempts to meet climate change targets. The authors argue that because much policy is based on voluntary measures, the predicted outcomes cannot be relied upon. It is released on the day the environment minister, David Miliband, delivers a speech on the UK’s transition to a “post-oil economy”.
He will tell an audience at the University of Cambridge: “Al Gore says climate change is a planetary emergency. It is. But it is more than that. It is a humanitarian emergency – a threat to the security and survival of people, not just nature.
“The time is right to look at what it would mean for the UK over the period of 15 to 20 years to create a post-oil economy – a declaration less of ‘oil independence’ and more the end of oil dependence.”
But critics of the government’s record on climate change argue that despite the green-friendly rhetoric, it has failed to deliver sufficient reductions.
(5 March 2007)
Also posted at Common Dreams.
Related Guardian commentary by George Monbiot: “Just a lot of hot air”.
Hurricane Heat
Gavin, Real Climate
The big problem with much of the discussions about trends in hurricane activity is that the databases that everyone is working from are known to have significant inhomogeneities due to changes in observing practice and technology over the years.
So it’s not surprising that a new re-analysis (Kossin et al, published yesterday) has been generating significant interest and controversy among the hurricane research community (see e.g. Prometheus or Chris Mooney).
However, rather than this study being taken for what it is – a preliminary and useful attempt to make homogeneous a part of the data (1983 to 2005) – it is unfortunately being treated as if it was the definitive last word. We’ve often made the point that single papers are not generally the breakthroughs that are sometimes implied in press releases or commentary sites and this case is a good example of that. ..
(1 Mar 2007)
India’s ‘wet desert’ hit by global climate change: scientists
Raymond Raplang Kharmujai, AFP
Rainfall in the unique “wet desert” of India’s northeast has become unpredictable and the dry season longer in a disturbing sign of major changes in global weather patterns, scientists say.
Cherrapunji, in northeast India’s tiny Meghalaya state, has long been a top contender for the world’s wettest spot, with approximately 12 metres (40 feet) of rainfall annually, most of it in the summer monsoon season.
But a group of Polish and Indian scientists who have been studying the unusual ecosystem — it falls on a latitude known for some of the world’s driest areas, including the Sahara and Gobi deserts — said that was changing.
Rainfall steadily lessened in the last half of the 20th century, they said.
At the same time, fluctuations increased, meaning the wet years were frequently wetter and the dry years dryer.
(3 March 2007)
The Climate-Change Precipice
David Ignatius, Washington Post
…The question now is what to do about global warming. This is a political problem more than a scientific one. The solutions (if we can agree on any) will require political will and imagination — and also pain.
These issues come into focus in a startling new report by futurist Peter Schwartz. He turns the usual discussions upside down: Rather than starting with detailed estimates of climate change (how much temperatures will increase; how much sea levels will rise; what new diseases will be spawned), he looks instead at systems that already are vulnerable to such stresses.
What Schwartz discovers with his stress-testing makes climate change even scarier: The world already is precarious; the networks that maintain political and social order already are fragile, especially in urban areas; the dividing line between civilized life and anarchy is frighteningly easy to breach, as the daily news from Iraq reminds us. We look at the behaviors of butterflies and migratory birds as harbingers of climate change. But what about early effects on human beings? “The steady escalation of climate pressure will stretch the resiliency of natural and human systems,” writes Schwartz. “In short, climate change pushes systems everywhere toward their tipping point.”
(2 March 2007)
Quite a change for a WaPo columnist to bring up the subject of collapse. However, Dryki at TOD is unimpressed:
I just finished the GBN study linked to in Ignatius’ WaPo article in Drumbeat. While claiming to be a systems study of already stressed critical systems – and dire enough – energy gets no discussion. The study begins with a quote from Homer-Dixon’s “Upside of Down” and then goes on to skip all of the energy considerations except in regard to additional air conditioning. Same old.
