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Arctic seas turn to acid, putting vital food chain at risk
Robin McKie, The Guardian
Carbon-dioxide emissions are turning the waters of the Arctic Ocean into acid at an unprecedented rate, scientists have discovered. Research carried out in the archipelago of Svalbard has shown in many regions around the north pole seawater is likely to reach corrosive levels within 10 years. The water will then start to dissolve the shells of mussels and other shellfish and cause major disruption to the food chain. By the end of the century, the entire Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic.

"This is extremely worrying," Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso, of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, told an international oceanography conference last week. "We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish."

Just as an acid descaler breaks apart limescale inside a kettle, so the shells that protect molluscs and other creatures will be dissolved. "This will affect the whole food chain, including the North Atlantic salmon, which feeds on molluscs," said Gattuso, speaking at a European commission conference, Oceans of Tomorrow, in Barcelona last week. The oceanographer told delegates that the problem of ocean acidification was worse in high latitudes, in the Arctic and around Antarctica, than it was nearer the equator...
(4 Oct 2009)

New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

"We don't want to go there," said Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org...
(25 Sept 2009)

Imagining Climate Solutions
Larry Lohman, Canadian Dimension via the corner house
Being a climate activist can be dangerous. The police may break up your demonstrations with truncheons and horses. The government may start spying on you for daring to call into question the need for another coal-fired power plant. You may even be branded an eco-terrorist.

But the biggest danger for climate activists, especially in industrialized countries, is something less predictable – their own imagination.

Imagination is a wonderful thing. People use it all the time – accountants as well as painters, politicians as well as astronomers. Whatever the field, you can find people making striking breakthroughs and demonstrating unexpected artistry. Environmental activism is no exception. Activists are constantly exercising ingenuity and making inspired leaps – whether in understanding politics, formulating strategy, or communicating with friends and enemies.

But if people’s limitless capacity to create new and beautiful things can be used for good, it can also be used in ways that are scarier than a dinosaur. It all depends on whether you are persuaded to expend your imagination on sterile fantasies or fertile futures. It’s easy to go either way. You can use as much imagination pursuing genetic engineering and nuclear waste disposal as you can exploring permaculture and renewable energy...
(X Sept 2009)

Rich countries 'must slash living standards' to fight climate change
Ben Webster, Times online
Living standards in Britain and other rich countries must fall sharply over the next decade if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a leading climate research centre.

Consumption of energy-intensive goods and services should be cut and remain capped until low-carbon alternatives are available, said the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

The study says that Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions need to fall twice as fast as planned by the Government. It concludes that global greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster than previously thought.

It says that Britain should commit to making all energy, including for electricity, heating and cars, zero-carbon by 2025, at least 25 years earlier than planned...
(2 Oct 2009)

Tipping towards the unknown
Sturle Hauge Simonsen, Stockholm Resilience Center
Researchers propose critical planetary boundaries, transgressing them could be catastrophic. But there is hope.

New approaches are needed to help humanity deal with climate change and other global environmental threats that lie ahead in the 21st century. A group of 28 internationally renowned scientists propose that global biophysical boundaries, identified on the basis of the scientific understanding of the Earth System, can define a ‘safe planetary operating space´ that will allow humanity to continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.

This new approach to sustainable development is conveyed in the coming issue of Nature where the scientists have made a first attempt to identify and quantify a set of nine planetary boundaries.

- The human pressure on the Earth System has reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. To continue to live and operate safely, humanity has to stay away from critical ‘hard-wired´ thresholds in Earth´s environment, and respect the nature of planet's climatic, geophysical, atmospheric and ecological processes, says lead author Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre...
(23 Sept 2009)

No rainforest, no monsoon: get ready for a warmer world
Shanta Barley, Nigel Hawtin, Catherine Brahic and Tom Simonite, New Scientist
BY 2055, climate change is likely to have warmed the world by a dangerous 4 °C unles..s we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the way we do now. This is the startling conclusion of a study by the UK Met Office, unveiled at a conference in Oxford this week.

Why so soon? Because temperature rises caused by greenhouse gas emissions are expected to trigger dangerous feedback loops, which will release ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. The nature and scale of these feedback loops is a subject of vigorous debate among climate scientists, but warmer oceans, for instance, may liberate more dissolved CO2, and plants may decay faster in a warmer climate. The Met Office ran 17 different models with these feedbacks. All concluded a 4 °C world by 2055 was likely if emissions continue to rise. Even if we are lucky, we are still likely to hit 4 °C by 2070.

What will a 4 °C world look like? Brace yourself: the picture painted by the 130 climate researchers at the Oxford conference is not pretty. An average global increase of 4 °C translates to a rise of up to 15 °C at the North Pole. Summers in parts of the Arctic would be as balmy as California's Napa valley. Sea levels would rise by up to 1.4 metres, according to Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. Even the less pessimistic estimate of a 0.65-metre rise by 2100 would put at least 190 million people a year at risk from floods, says Rahmstorf's colleague Jochen Hinkel.

The glimmer of hope? It doesn't have to be this way. If politicians at the UN climate change talks in December agree to cut emissions by 3 per cent every year, the world can limit temperature rise to a "safe" 2 °C, the Met Office says.
(30 Sept 2009)