Leaders plan a 'two-step' environment deal
David Usborne, US Editor, The Independent
President Barack Obama joined other leaders of the Asia-Pacific nations yesterday in accepting that a long-planned summit in Copenhagen next month on climate change will be unable to forge a new global treaty on cutting greenhouse emissions and will have to put off reaching a final deal until next year or even later.

Meeting for their regional Apec summit in Copenhagen, the leaders accepted the delay after being briefed at a hastily-arranged breakfast by Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, who will chair the Copenhagen talks that begin on 7 December. He made it plain that insufficient progress had been made on this point between the main players to make a final pact possible next month.

He said that the 191 nations expected to attend Copenhagen should settle instead for a binding political accord reiterating their commitment to a comprehensive deal that will succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol on emissions. The haggling on the very difficult specifics, including emission reduction goals and finance transfers to poorer countries to help them reach targets, would be finished later.

The unexpected intervention will anger environmental groups as well as some developing countries that are anxious for a replacement for Kyoto as quickly as possible. If the timetable is allowed to slip now, what will stop it sliding again, maybe even beyond next year, they will demand to know.

However, it reflects the reality that nations remain far apart in several key areas and the chances of a pact being finalised next month had already become very slim. Among the unknowns is how the two biggest emitters of CO2 plan to meet new reduction goals – the United States and China...
(16 Nov 2009)

The psychology of climate change
Margot O'Neill, ABC news
Organisers of a youth rally told me earlier this year that climate change was the activist issue for their generation and that young people would turn out to protest in record numbers.

When hundreds of young people showed up on the anointed day I thought - where are the rest? If this is the issue, where is the mass demonstration of dissent?

You know that public movements must be struggling when incumbent politicians are forced to urge them on. UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, and his brother, Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, have both called for more public mobilisation on climate change, although the UK government has also used anti-terror powers against some climate activists as I described in this blog last week.

Former US vice-president, Nobel Laureate and prominent global warming activist, Al Gore, has called for young people to engage in civil disobedience over the issue.

Now in his new book, Our Choice - A Plan To Solve The Climate Crisis, Mr Gore devotes a chapter to analysing why climate change has failed to prompt a greater public outcry.

In it he asks "Why is it that humanity is failing to confront this unprecedented mortal threat? What is it about the way we human beings process information and make choices that promotes global procrastination?"

...Harvard University's Daniel Gilbert has provided a sharply amusing account of how global warming challenges our evolutionary psychology - if it doesn't make us duck or twitch or even feel repulsed, can it really be so bad?

Behavioural scientists also told him that "Simply laying out the facts won't work … The barrage of negative, even terrifying, information can trigger denial or paralysis or, at the very least, procrastination." Sounds like a bad rap for his Academy Award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, which helped raise global awareness of the issue.

But scientists told Mr Gore that the human brain can commit to multigenerational goals although this can be undermined by constant stress and excessive distraction, both of which abound in modern society...
(6 Nov 2009)

Greenland's Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever
Christoph Seidler, Spiegel
The dimensions of this frosty giant go way beyond human imagination. With a surface area spanning some 1.7 million square kilometers (656,000 square miles), a view of Greenland's ice above the Sermeq-Kujalleq glacier near Ilulisat makes it seem endless. The idea that this sheet of ice, which is up to three kilometers thick in parts, is melting seems absurd in the extreme.

But the large number of gigantic icebergs -- and the valley into which they are slowly sliding -- tell a different story. Here, as elsewhere in Greenland, a gigantic upheaval is underway. In recent years, the glacier has receded by around 15 kilometers; the ongoing meltdown appears unstoppable. Just how quickly Greenland's ice is melting remains a matter of some debate, but the melting ice is contributing to rising ocean levels -- with potentially dramatic consequences for millions across the globe.

Were Greenland to lose all of its ice, sea levels would rise some seven meters higher than today's levels. Such a scenario will not become reality overnight -- indeed the process could last hundreds of years. But new results from a team of Dutch researchers suggest that conservative estimates as to the speed with which the ice is melting should be shelved. According to the study, the rate at which Greenland's ice is melting has accelerated substantially in recent years.

There are, strictly speaking, two parallel processes responsible for the ice's retreat. On the one hand, rising temperatures melt the ice on land while warmer ocean currents eat away at the glaciers that jut out into the ocean. A research team led by Michiel van den Broeke from the University of Utrecht reported in the most recent edition of the journal Science that the two processes are contributing equally to the disappearance of the ice sheet.

...It is still not clear when this might happen -- nor is it clear just how high sea levels might rise in the future. "We will use the same model to predict future Greenland mass loss, but you have to give us some time to come up with those results," van den Broeke said. To this end, the European Union last year launched a major research project called "Ice2Sea."

The researchers consider these new results to be an important signal to the climate summit in December. Many observers do not expect the meeting to bring about a particularly ambitious climate agreement -- much to the displeasure of van den Broeke: "All signs are pointing towards continued Greenland mass loss at rates we did not think possible ten years ago. Surely something to consider as a policy maker, I would say."
(13 Nov 2009)

Rainforests could be traded on world market
Damian Kahya, BBC news
American Electric Power and BP invested in the pilot project alongside environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy to find out if protecting forests compensates for their own pollution.

The burning of tropical forests emits more carbon dioxide every year than all the cars, planes, and boats on the planet - between 15 and 20% of global emissions.

A deal at Copenhagen could mean both governments and businesses paying billions to keep the forests standing.

With agreement looking unlikely on many other areas, some negotiators feel a deal aimed at preventing deforestation may be the most concrete outcome from the talks.

..."Basically the mechanism we've come up with is the following; countries reduce their rates of deforestation below what they historically have been and in exchange for that, they get carbon credits which they can sell on world carbon markets," says Heal.
To work out exactly how much money each country would get, they needed to calculate how much carbon was released by burning their forest. They get paid for every tonne they keep trapped.

Different forests contain different amounts of carbon.

So teams of conservationists turned economists are being dispatched around the world to work out a forest's value...
(16 Nov 2009)

Leaders agree Copenhagen will focus on principles, not concrete goals
John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail
Asia-Pacific leaders have agreed to abandon any concrete goals for next month’s Copenhagen summit on climate change, settling instead for broad statements of principle, Stephen Harper confirmed Sunday.

At the conclusion of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, the Prime Minister said that December’s meeting would not generate any specific targets among nations for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

“There are obviously significant areas of disagreement,” he told reporters at the conclusion of the summit.

But “a broader political agreement is still achievable at Copenhagen, and that’s what everybody’s aiming for at this point.”

APEC leaders adopted a cup-partly-full (or mostly-empty) approach to a Copenhagen accord at an improvised breakfast Sunday morning, hosted by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd...
(16 Nov 2009)

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists
Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy, The Independent

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project.

Although the 6C rise and its potential disastrous effects have been speculated upon before, this is the first time that scientists have said that society is now on a path to meet it.

Their chilling and remarkable prediction throws into sharp relief the importance of next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen, where the world community will come together to try to construct a new agreement to bring the warming under control...
(18 Nov 2009)
Will this stiffen the backs of the negotiators at Copenhagen? Obama's and Hu's joint communique issued yesterday was supposed to "breathe new life" into the negotiations again after the earlier announcement that a legal agreement cannot be a major goal of the talks. -KS