Category Archives: climate change

Crimes against humanity: The genocidal campaign of the climate change contrarians

Robert L. Nadeau and Donald A. Brown write: When scientists make presentations at meetings or conferences on the existing and projected impacts of climate change, they describe in jargon laden language and in emotionally neutral terms what their research has revealed about these impacts. But during informal conversations over a few beers during the evening or late at night, these scientists no longer feel obliged to divorce their scientific heads from their human hearts. On these occasions, they use colorful and often profane language to express their disdain and contempt for the small number of scientists known as global warming skeptics who are well compensated by conservative think tanks for misinterpreting and abusing scientific knowledge.

The scientists involved in these conversations also vent their anger toward the oil and energy companies that sponsor massive disinformation campaigns on radio and television designed to convince Americans that their security, peace and economic well-being are utterly dependent on the consumption of increasing amounts of “clean and plentiful” fossil fuels. They say unkind things about the mangers of the American news media for running endless stories about the human suffering and financial losses caused by extreme weather events and saying nothing about the fact that climate change is contributing to the frequency and intensity of these events. But if the conversation goes on long enough and the hour is late, one or more of these scientists will say what the others firmly believe but are reluctant to admit—the fate of the Earth is sealed by the ignorance, lack of compassion, and inexhaustible greed of its human inhabitants and life on this planet for our children and grandchildren will be little more than a brutal struggle for survival.

The reasons why these empirically oriented rational thinkers have come to this dire conclusion are abundantly obvious in recent scientific research on the existing and projected impacts of climate change. This research has not only shown that massive reductions in worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases over the next two decades will be required to prevent the most disastrous impacts of climate change. It has also revealed that if we fail, as now seems likely, to accomplish this feat, there is a high probability that life on this planet for our children and grandchildren will be little more than a brutal struggle for survival. (Hansen et al. 2013) But as the scientists involved in the late night conversations know all too well, this research is largely ignored by the mainstream media, rarely discussed by political leaders and economic planners, and conspicuously missing in the rancorous public debate about climate change.

The usual explanation why this insane situation exists, as climate scientist Michael Mann put it in a recent article in the New York Times, is that there is a “violent strain of anti-science” in this country which “infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on television.” (Mann, 2014) What Mann did not say in this article but knows very well is that the primary source of this infection is the well-financed, highly coordinated, and very effective campaign of the climate change contrarians.

This campaign began in the 1980s when some of the same scientists that had been paid by the tobacco industry to challenge the scientific evidence that smoking is harmful to human health were hired by oil and energy companies to challenge the scientific evidence about climate change. [Continue reading…]

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Mitigating climate change must proceed regardless of cost

Climate News Network reports: Two researchers who tried to work out the economics of reducing global climate change to a tolerable level have come up with a perhaps surprising answer: essentially, we do not and cannot know what it would cost.

Even more surprising, probably, is their conclusion: not knowing is no excuse for not acting. “Mitigating climate change must proceed regardless of long-run economic analyses”, they conclude, “or risk making the world uninhabitable.”

Their report, entitled The economics of mitigating climate change: What can we know?, is published online in Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

The pair are Dr Rich Rosen, who specialises in energy system planning and is a senior fellow of the Tellus Institute, based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Edeltraud Guenther, professor of environmental management and accounting at Dresden University of Technology in Germany.

In a densely-argued analysis of the long-term economics of mitigating climate change they say various kinds of uncertainties raise serious questions about whether or not the net costs and benefits of mitigation over periods as long as 50 years or a century can be known accurately enough to be useful to policymakers and citizens.

Technological change, especially for energy efficiency technologies, is a key factor in making the net economic results of mitigation unknowable over the long term, they argue. So policymakers should not base mitigation policy on the estimated net economic impacts computed by integrated assessment models (IAM – models which combine scientific and economic insights).

Instead, “mitigation policies must be forcefully implemented anyway given the actual physical climate change crisis, in spite of the many uncertainties involved in trying to predict the net economics of doing so”.

This argument directly challenges the many politicians and others who insist that governments should adopt policies designed to limit climate change only if they can make a strong economic case for doing so. Essentially, it shifts the ground of the debate from “what is affordable?” to “what is survivable?” [Continue reading…]

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Methane-producing microbes may have triggered the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history

MIT News Office: Evidence left at the crime scene is abundant and global: Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet’s five known mass extinctions. But pinpointing the culprit has been difficult, and controversial.

Now, a team of MIT researchers may have found enough evidence to convict the guilty parties — but you’ll need a microscope to see the killers.

The perpetrators, this new work suggests, were not asteroids, volcanoes, or raging coal fires, all of which have been implicated previously. Rather, they were a form of microbes — specifically, methane-producing archaea called Methanosarcina — that suddenly bloomed explosively in the oceans, spewing prodigious amounts of methane into the atmosphere and dramatically changing the climate and the chemistry of the oceans.

Volcanoes are not entirely off the hook, according to this new scenario; they have simply been demoted to accessories to the crime. The reason for the sudden, explosive growth of the microbes, new evidence shows, may have been their novel ability to use a rich source of organic carbon, aided by a sudden influx of a nutrient required for their growth: the element nickel, emitted by massive volcanism at just that time.

The new solution to this mystery is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by MIT professor of geophysics Daniel Rothman, postdoc Gregory Fournier, and five other researchers at MIT and in China.

The researchers’ case builds upon three independent sets of evidence. First, geochemical evidence shows an exponential (or even faster) increase of carbon dioxide in the oceans at the time of the so-called end-Permian extinction. Second, genetic evidence shows a change in Methanosarcina at that time, allowing it to become a major producer of methane from an accumulation of organic carbon in the water. Finally, sediments show a sudden increase in the amount of nickel deposited at exactly this time. [Continue reading…]

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The gospel of consumption

Jeffrey Kaplan writes: Private cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work — more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption” — the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. [Continue reading…]

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Michael Klare: Shooting up on Big Energy

Pssst, buddy, you want a report?  

Hey, I’ve got three for you, all in the news last week! There was a rare intervention by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which issued a report warning that “the rate of climate change now may be as fast as any extended warming period over the past 65 million years, and it is projected to accelerate in the coming decades.” There was a risk, it added, “of abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes in the earth’s climate system with massively disruptive impacts,” including the possible “large scale collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, collapse of part of the Gulf Stream, loss of the Amazon rain forest, die-off of coral reefs, and mass extinctions.” Then there was the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest grim assessment, whose key message is: “It’s not just about melting ice, threatened animals, and plants. It’s about the human problems of hunger, disease, drought, flooding, refugees, and war becoming worse,” or as one of the scientists writing the report put it, “The polar bear is us.” And, of course, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization released its annual report last week, pointing out that, though we are only 14 years into a new century, 13 of them fall into the category of warmest ever recorded.

Not enough bad news for you?  Rest assured that there will be prodigious new reports on climate change in the coming years, all from teams of sober, respectable scientists assuring us (yet again) that the next set of findings indicate the planet is going to get hotter (much hotter!), that extreme weather conditions are going to worsen, that drought is going to be endemic, that food production is going to suffer disastrously, that sea levels are going to rise, that chaos is going to ensue, etc., etc. 

By now, this is painfully predictable stuff rather than breakthrough science.  It’s middle of the road, ho-hum, world’s-going-down-the-drain material, and not even the worst version of what might happen either.  By now, this has essentially passed out of the realm of pioneering science and, for those across the planet who are experiencing heat records in Australia, drought in the Western U.S., or horrific superstorms from New York City to the Philippines, onrushing daily life on planet Earth.

The message couldn’t be clearer.  Individual scientists and groups of them continue to weigh in repeatedly.  Climate scientist Michael Mann, for instance, recently suggested that “if the world keeps burning fossil fuels at the current rate, it will cross a threshold into environmental ruin by 2036.”  Sadly, if we had 100 new reports this month, offering versions of the usual findings, it largely wouldn’t matter because we seem intent on doing the one thing that all the scientists say will make this so much worse.  We’re burning fossil fuels as if — excuse the phrase — there were no tomorrow, while the Big Energy companies are finding new ways to release ever more of the ever-tougher variety of fossil fuels from their underground reserves.  They’re building pipelines in profusion to ensure, for instance, that particularly carbon-dirty Canadian tar sands will sooner or later flood the market.  They’re drilling with increased intensity in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Arctic, in ever-deeper ocean waters.  Sarah Palin may be in retirement, but it’s her world and welcome to it.  We’re now on a drill, baby, drill and frack, baby, frack planet, where the prevailing state of mind is what TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left, calls “carbon delirium.”  It’s a far better term for the mentality that simply refuses to absorb all those reports than the more rational-sounding “climate denialism.” Tom Engelhardt

Carbon delirium
The last stage of fossil-fuel addiction and its hazardous impact on American Foreign policy
By Michael Klare

Of all the preposterous, irresponsible headlines that have appeared on the front page of the New York Times in recent years, few have exceeded the inanity of this one from early March: “U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin.”  The article by normally reliable reporters Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger suggested that, by sending our surplus natural gas to Europe and Ukraine in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the United States could help reduce the region’s heavy reliance on Russian gas and thereby stiffen its resistance to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior. 

Forget that the United States currently lacks a capacity to export LNG to Europe, and will not be able to do so on a significant scale until the 2020s.  Forget that Ukraine lacks any LNG receiving facilities and is unlikely to acquire any, as its only coastline is on the Black Sea, in areas dominated by Russian speakers with loyalties to Moscow.  Forget as well that any future U.S. exports will be funneled into the international marketplace, and so will favor sales to Asia where gas prices are 50% higher than in Europe.  Just focus on the article’s central reportorial flaw: it fails to identify a single reason why future American LNG exports (which could wind up anywhere) would have any influence whatsoever on the Russian president’s behavior.

The only way to understand the strangeness of this is to assume that the editors of the Times, like senior politicians in both parties, have become so intoxicated by the idea of an American surge in oil and gas production that they have lost their senses.

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How climate pain is being spun into corporate gain

Fred Pearce writes: Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by journalist McKenzie Funk tells the story of the people and corporations trying to profit from climate change. Many of them don’t want to halt its progress, they want to bring it on.

Here we meet private fire-fighters in drought-hit Los Angeles, selling their services to insurance companies, Russian shipping lines eyeing new routes opened up by the melting Arctic, Dutchmen rebuilding flooded islands in the Maldives, and manufacturers of snow-making machines selling their products to distressed winter resorts.

They all have an interest in global warming’s destructive progress. Funk lays bare their vanities and insanities while also exposing the magic of markets that can profit from anything.”I’m interested in climate change as a driver of human behaviour,” says Funk. “It’s a window into our collective state of mind.”

Many environmentalists have been gratified recently to discover that corporations feature climate change in their annual reports, and entrepreneurs make pitches to bankers and hedge-fund managers that read like back-issues of the environmentalists’ own doomsday scenarios.

The case seems to be won that climate change, rising population, and declining resources – from metals to water and land – are brewing up an environmental apocalypse. Gordon Gekko and the wolves of Wall Street have finally got climate change.

But not so fast. While greens fear the collapsing ecosystems, rising tides, climate migrations and mega-famines, the corporates and speculators see opportunity. Environmental pain can be corporate gain. In this synthesis of some of his great magazine journalism over a number of years, Funk brings the “booming business of global warming” spectacularly to life.

Some of his climate profit-takers do something useful to stem the problem at source – by building bigger and better wind turbines, for instance. But they are a small minority. Most of the windfalls are elsewhere. Seed companies like Syngenta and Monsanto develop more drought-resistant crops. Engineers ship air-conditioners or seek contracts to build sea walls round coastal cities. [Continue reading…]

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So, after the IPCC report, which bit of the world are you prepared to lose?

George Monbiot writes: To understand what is happening to the living planet, the great conservationist Aldo Leopold remarked, is to live “in a world of wounds … An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

The metaphor suggests that he might have seen Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Thomas Stockmann is a doctor in a small Norwegian town, and medical officer at the public baths whose construction has been overseen by his brother, the mayor. The baths, the mayor boasts, “will become the focus of our municipal life! … Houses and landed property are rising in value every day.”

But Stockmann discovers that the pipes have been built in the wrong place, and the water feeding the baths is contaminated. “The source is poisoned … We are making our living by retailing filth and corruption! The whole of our flourishing municipal life derives its sustenance from a lie!” People bathing in the water to improve their health are instead falling ill.

Stockmann expects to be treated as a hero for exposing this deadly threat. After the mayor discovers that re-laying the pipes would cost a fortune and probably sink the whole project, he decides that his brother’s report “has not convinced me that the condition of the water at the baths is as bad as you represent it to be”.

The mayor proposes to ignore the problem, make some cosmetic adjustments and carry on as before. After all, “the matter in hand is not simply a scientific one. It is a complicated matter, and has its economic as well as its technical side.” The local paper, the baths committee and the business people side with the mayor against the doctor’s “unreliable and exaggerated accounts”.

Astonished and enraged, Stockmann lashes out madly at everyone. He attacks the town as a nest of imbeciles, and finds himself, in turn, denounced as an enemy of the people. His windows are broken, his clothes are torn, he’s evicted and ruined. [Continue reading…]

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The grim future is already here for many of the world’s farmers

Richard Schiffman writes: [A]s I found out in east Africa last month, the future is already here for too many of the world’s farmers. In Tanzania, the twice yearly seasonal rains upon which so many growers depend no longer come on time – and they’re sporadic, drenching downpours at that, alternating with prolonged dry spells. Heat spikes have also been withering maize crop, and wells and streams are increasingly drying up.

The area where Dephath Omondi farms in southern Kenya looks lush, with emerald maize fields bordered by towering acacias. But he tells me that appearances are deceptive.

Twenty-five years ago the weather here was predictable – the long rains started mid-March to mid-May, then the short rains started in late August, early September. In the last decade, these rains never come on time. We have had floods and week upon week, with no rain at all. Farmers are confused about when and what to plant. It is all very worrying.

Similar disruptions are already challenging farmers worldwide. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, rural people are losing ground as higher sea levels turn rivers too salty to grow rice. In Nicaragua, rising temperatures are spreading “coffee rust fungus”, a disease which is killing thousands of trees and may render 80% of its the nation’s coffee-growing areas unusable by 2050. And in the central Philippines, coconut farmers are struggling to recover from November’s Typhoon Haiyan, which badly damaged or tore out an estimated 33m trees. [Continue reading…]

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Earth is in deep trouble, says IPCC report

WWF: A UN climate impact report, released today, gives the clearest and most comprehensive evidence yet that the earth we call home is in deep trouble. It reinforces the sobering view that climate change is real, it’s happening now and it’s affecting the lives and the livelihoods of people as well as the sensitive ecosystems that sustain life.

This is the second in a series of four reports being prepared by the world’s leading climate authorities in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It assesses the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability of human and natural systems, the observed impacts and future risks of climate change, and the potential for and limits to adaptation.

Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF Global Climate & Energy Initiative says the report highlights, for the first time, the dramatic difference of impacts between a world where we act now to cut emissions, which now come mostly from using fossil fuels; and a world where we fail to act quickly and at scale.

“This report tells us that we have two clear choices: cut emissions now and invest in adaption – and have a world that has challenging and just barely manageable risks; or do nothing and face a world of devastating and unmanageable risks and impacts.”

“The report makes it clear that we still have time to act. We can limit climate instability and adapt to some of the changes we see now. But without immediate and specific action, we are in danger of going far beyond the limits of adaptation. With this risk posed so clearly, we have to hope that the next IPCC report which is being released in Berlin in April, will provide us with strong statements on the solutions that we know exist,” she says.

Despite the warnings given by the IPCC in its reports over the past 20 years – reinforced by the release of the report today – the gap between the science and what governments are doing remains huge, says Sandeep Chamling Rai, head of the WWF delegation to the meeting.

“The science is clear and the debate is over. Climate change is happening and humans are the major cause of emissions, driven mainly by our dependence on fossil fuels. This is driving global warming. This report sets out the impacts we already see, the risks we face in the future, and the opportunities to act. It has been accepted by the member governments of the IPCC. Now it is up to people to hold their governments to account, to get them to act purposefully and immediately,” he says.

The risks of collective inaction are greatest for developing countries, says Chamling Rai. “All countries are vulnerable but developing countries have a greater sensitivity, with more people living in poverty and fewer resources to respond to climate disasters. We need to put in place those measures that will slow down warming and put us on a fair and just transition to a sustainable world. The report shows that ambitious emissions cuts now can reduce the risk of climate change in the second half of this century.”

And the regional assessments – given in depth in this report – show with a great degree of certainty what the impacts will be in the key regions of the world.

“We now have a better understanding of how climate impacts will affect people and nature in different regions. International adaptation efforts need to be intensified to adequately respond to such varied impacts,” says Chamling Rai. [Continue reading…]

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No one will be immune to the impact of climate change

The Guardian reports: Pensioners left on their own during a heatwave in industrialised countries. Single mothers in rural areas. Workers who spend most of their days outdoors. Slum dwellers in the megacities of the developing world.

These are some of the vulnerable groups who will feel the brunt of climate change as its effects become more pronounced in the coming decades, according to a game-changing report from the UN’s climate panel released on Monday. Climate change is occurring on all continents and in the oceans, the authors say, driving heatwaves and other weather-related disasters.

And the changes to the Earth’s climate are fuelling violent conflicts. The UN for the first time in this report has designated climate change a threat to human security.

The overriding lesson of this report, the scientists said, was that unless governments acted now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adopt measures to protect their people, nobody would be immune to climate change. [Continue reading…]

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The hellish monotony of 25 years of IPCC climate change warnings

Graham Readfearn writes: Entire island nations “rendered uninhabitable”, millions of people to be displaced by floods and rising seas, uncertainties over global food supplies and severe impacts on human health across the world.

The news from the United Nations on the likely impacts of climate change is dire, especially for the poorest people on the planet.

There will likely be more floods, more droughts and more intense heatwaves, says the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

As human emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, natural ecosystems come under extreme stress with “significant” knock-on effects for societies.

“Changes in the availability of food, fuel, medicine, construction materials and income are possible as these ecosystems are changed,” says the report.

But in the words of that great British band The Smiths, you can now stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.

That’s because all of the above comes not from today’s blockbuster IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, but from the first one started in 1988 and published in 1990. Much of the science it drew on was older still.

Just so we can calibrate our memories here, 1990 was the year Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, Nelson Mandela got out of jail and MC Hammer wore those pantaloons (U Can’t Touch This).

Now more than 25 years after scientists started compiling that first report, the latest report is similarly alarming – just with added impacts and greater certainty. [Continue reading…]

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When it comes to sharing a planet, we are the neighbours from hell

Robin McKie reviews The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert: Brown tree snakes come from Papua New Guinea and Australia, where they survive on diets of lizards, bats and rats. They were considered unremarkable until the 1940s when some found their way to Guam, probably on a military ship.

The impact of Boiga irregularis was staggering. The little Pacific island’s only indigenous snake was a sightless creature the size of a worm. As a result, Guam’s fauna were unprepared for the predatory brown tree snake that began to eat its way through the island’s native birds, including the Guam flycatcher and the Mariana fruit-dove, as well as its three native mammals, all bats. Only one of the latter survives: the Marianas flying fox, which is now considered highly endangered.

It is a sad, familiar story. In colonising our planet’s nooks and crannies, most new species that we have encountered have either been wiped out directly – like the mastodons, mammoths and Neanderthals laid low by our stone age ancestors – or indirectly by the pests we introduced in our wake, like the brown tree snake or the Central American wolfsnail, introduced to Hawaii in the 1950s, which has since killed off around 90% of the islands’ 700 native snail species.

Then there are the coral reefs, homes to vast numbers of marine animals, that have been dynamited by fishermen and bleached by our acidifying oceans. Or consider the swaths of the Amazon basin ploughed up for farming, thus destroying the homes of countless rainforest denizens. And for good measure, there are the fungal diseases, spread by humans, that now threaten every bat species in America and every amphibian species on the planet. When it comes to sharing a planet, we are the neighbours from hell.

“One-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion,” states Elizabeth Kolbert in this compelling account of human-inspired devastation. “And the losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific, in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and in the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.” [Continue reading…]

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How are IPCC reports written?

David Karoly writes: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to undertake comprehensive assessments of the scientific basis of climate change and the impacts and future risks to different sectors and regions. It also assesses the options for adapting to these impacts, and opportunities to mitigate climate change.

The IPCC is the accepted global authority on climate change. A recent explainer on The Conversation has described the structure of the IPCC and how it works.

It has three “Working Groups”: one on Climate Change Science; one on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; and one that deals with Mitigation of Climate Change. They work together to prepare comprehensive Assessment Reports roughly once every six years. The IPCC Third Assessment Report was released in 2001 and the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

Now we are in the middle of the release of the various parts of the Fifth Assessment Report, one from each Working Group and finally the Synthesis Report, to be released later this year.

The IPCC assessments are written by hundreds of leading scientists who volunteer their time. They undertake comprehensive assessments of the scientific literature across a very wide range of topics relevant to climate change. The reports are required to present policy-relevant information, but it must be presented in a policy-neutral manner, so there are no recommendations in any IPCC assessment.

Each part of the report goes through three stages of drafting and review by experts and governments. All review comments and the responses from the authors on how they addressed the comments are made public. This review process is more open and comprehensive than for any other scientific publication or assessment, including the peer-reviewed science publications on which the reports are based. [Continue reading…]

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IPCC report: climate change felt ‘on all continents and across the oceans’

n13-iconThe Guardian reports: Climate change has already left its mark “on all continents and across the oceans”, damaging food crops, spreading disease, and melting glaciers, according to the leaked text of a blockbuster UN climate science report due out on Monday.

Government officials and scientists are gathered in Yokohama this week to wrangle over every line of a summary of the report before the final wording is released on Monday – the first update in seven years.

Nearly 500 people must sign off on the exact wording of the summary, including the 66 expert authors, 271 officials from 115 countries, and 57 observers.

But governments have already signed off on the critical finding that climate change is already having an effect, and that even a small amount of warming in the future could lead to “abrupt and irreversible changes”, according to documents seen by the Guardian. [Continue reading…]

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Facing rising seas, Bangladesh confronts the effects of climate change

f13-iconThe New York Times reports: When a powerful storm destroyed her riverside home in 2009, Jahanara Khatun lost more than the modest roof over her head. In the aftermath, her husband died and she became so destitute that she sold her son and daughter into bonded servitude. And she may lose yet more.

Ms. Khatun now lives in a bamboo shack that sits below sea level about 50 yards from a sagging berm. She spends her days collecting cow dung for fuel and struggling to grow vegetables in soil poisoned by salt water. Climate scientists predict that this area will be inundated as sea levels rise and storm surges increase, and a cyclone or another disaster could easily wipe away her rebuilt life. But Ms. Khatun is trying to hold out at least for a while — one of millions living on borrowed time in this vast landscape of river islands, bamboo huts, heartbreaking choices and impossible hopes.

As the world’s top scientists meet in Yokohama, Japan, this week, at the top of the agenda is the prediction that global sea levels could rise as much as three feet by 2100. Higher seas and warmer weather will cause profound changes.

Climate scientists have concluded that widespread burning of fossil fuels is releasing heat-trapping gases that are warming the planet. While this will produce a host of effects, the most worrisome may be the melting of much of the earth’s ice, which is likely to raise sea levels and flood coastal regions.

Such a rise will be uneven because of gravitational effects and human intervention, so predicting its outcome in any one place is difficult. But island nations like the Maldives, Kiribati and Fiji may lose much of their land area, and millions of Bangladeshis will be displaced. [Continue reading…]

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13 of 14 warmest years on record occurred in 21st century

The Guardian reports: 13 of the 14 warmest years on record occurred this century, according to the UN.

Publishing its annual climate report, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation said that last year continued a long-term warming trend, with the hottest year ever in Australia and floods, droughts and extreme weather elsewhere around the world.

Michel Jarraud, the WMO’s secretary-general, also said there had been no ‘pause’ in global warming, as has been alleged by climate change sceptics. “There is no standstill in global warming,” Jarraud said.

2001-2010 was the warmest decade on record, the WMO noted, and added that the last three decades had been warmer than the previous one. [Continue reading…]

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Climate change deniers: The growing strength of the opponents of science

o13-iconNick Cohen writes: The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm last week. “As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do,” it said as it began one of those sentences that you know will build to a “but”. “But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes.”

In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world’s pre-eminent educational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren’t their warnings leading the news?

In one sense, the association’s appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% said that humans were causing it.

When the glib talk about the “scientific debate on global warming”, they either don’t know or will not accept that there is no scientific debate. The suggestion first made by Eugene F Stoermer that the planet has moved from the Holocene, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the manmade Anthropocene, in which we now live, is everywhere gaining support. Man-made global warming and the man-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and (let us hope) brief epoch in the world’s history.

If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the American association’s warning the British government’s budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it. [Continue reading…]

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