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Bonn Climate Talks End in Discord and Disappointment

2012-05-26T11:30:48+00:00

By Fiona Harvey, The Guardian

The latest round of international climate change talks finished on Friday in discord and disappointment, with some participants concerned that important progress made last year was being unpicked.

At the talks, countries were supposed to set out a work plan on negotiations that should result in a new global climate treaty, to be drafted by the end of 2015 and to come into force in 2020. But participants told the Guardian they were downbeat, disappointed and frustrated that the decision to work on a new treaty – reached after marathon late-running talks last December in Durban – was being questioned.

China and India, both rapidly growing economies with an increasing share of global emissions, have tried to delay talks on such a treaty. Instead of a work plan for the next three years to achieve the objective of a new pact, governments have only managed to draw up a partial agenda. "It's incredibly frustrating to have achieved so little," said one developed country participant. "We're stepping backwards, not forwards."

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), gives a press conference on May 25, 2012, at the end of a UN climate conference in Bonn, western Germany. Credit: Henning Kaiser/AFP/Getty Images

Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate chief, said: "The world cannot afford that a few want to backtrack from what was agreed in Durban only five months ago. Durban was – and is – a delicately balanced package where all elements must be delivered at the same pace. It is not a pick and choose menu. It is very worrisome that attempts to backtrack have been so obvious and time-consuming in the Bonn talks over the last two weeks."

There was also little progress on the key issue of the financing by rich countries of actions in the developing world. Meeting in Bonn, negotiators and officials from around the world haggled over the set-up of a 'Green Climate Fund' that would channel cash from the developed world to poorer countries, to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the effects of climate change.

However, they agreed much of the detail that will be needed to extend the Kyoto protocol – currently the world's only legally binding treaty on emissions cuts – beyond 2012 when its current provisions expire. That extension should be finalized at a conference in Doha, Qatar, this November – but may not be if the EU does not see sufficient progress in negotiations on the proposed new post-2020 treaty.

Chrisiana Figueres, the top climate change official at the United Nations, who presided over the two weeks of talks, said: "Work at this session has been productive. Countries can now press on to ensure elements are in place to adopt the Doha amendment to the Kyoto protocol. I am pleased to say that the Bonn meeting produced more clarity on the protocol's technical and legal details and options to enable a smooth transition between the two commitment periods of the protocol."

However, the only major developed countries that have agreed to continue the Kyoto protocol are those of the European Union. Canada and Japan have dropped out, and the U.S. never ratified the 1997 accord.

A plenary session at the UN climate talks in Bonn, where talks of a rift over the future of the Kyoto protocol were downplayed. Credit: UNFCCC

The two week-long talks in Bonn followed an unexpected last-ditch agreement in December at a meeting in Durban, when countries resolved to spend the next three to four years thrashing out the terms of a new global treaty on climate change and emissions cuts, which would come into force from 2020. Such a treaty would follow on from the Kyoto protocol and from the Copenhagen pledges made at a 2009 summit, in which both developed and developing countries agreed for the first time jointly to curb emissions by 2020. Those pledges do not have the legal force of a full treaty, however, and have been shown in a variety of studies to be inadequate to stave off dangerous levels of climate change.

One of the main tasks for the fortnight-long meeting in Bonn was to flesh out a program of work towards a new post-2020 treaty. That has been partially achieved, but participants said more needed to be done to draft a clear negotiating timetable. The last major international treaty on the climate that had full legal force - the Kyoto protocol - took five years to negotiate, so the current round of talks will be on a tight deadline if they are to finish in a fully drafted agreement by the end of 2015, as planned.

Countries also discussed at Bonn whether they should try to cut emissions faster than currently planned within the next eight years. That question will be discussed further in the November talks. Green groups were pleased that the possibility of strengthening the 2020 targets was still on the table. However, some participants worried that it could prove a distraction to the difficult task of crafting a whole new post-2020 treaty by 2015.

Celine Charveriat, advocacy and campaigns director at Oxfam, said: "No progress was made to deliver the financial support that the world's poorest and most vulnerable need to deal with the growing impacts of climate change. It is now vital that, at the next UN climate summit in Qatar in November, rich countries commit to an initial U.S. $10-15 billion to the Green Climate Fund between 2013 and 2015, as part of a broader financial package.

"At a time when ambitious emission reductions are more urgent than ever, developed countries in Bonn made no progress to close the gap between current climate targets and what is required to avoid the worst of climate change. Developed countries must improve on their current low level of ambition and accept higher reduction targets no later than at the Qatar summit."

Tove Maria Ryding, coordinator for climate policy at Greenpeace International, said: "Here in Bonn we've clearly seen that the climate crisis is not caused by lack of options and solutions, but lack of political action. It's absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change and the fact that we have all the technology we need to solve the problem while creating new green jobs."

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian

Greenhouse-Gas Emissions Across Globe Hit Record High

2012-05-25T19:42:10+00:00

Thanks to developing countries like China, greenhouse-gas emissions across the globe hit record highs in 2011, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

While the IEA’s report is a preliminary estimate of carbon dioxide emissions for 2011, the news as a whole is not good. The total weight of CO₂that entered the atmosphere thanks to fossil-fuel burning last year was 31.6 billion metric tons (or nearly 35 billion old-fashioned tons). That’s a 3.2 percent increase over 2010, setting an all-time record. To see what that looks like in real time, you can check out Deutche Bank’s carbon counter, which pegs the accumulate weight at more than 3.7 trillion metric tons.

This spells bad news for those who hope to limit the overall rise in global temperature to 2°C (3.6°F) above where the pre-industrial average (it’s already gone up by about .7°C (1.3°F). It’s not as though the world will be just fine below that threshold and in deep trouble above it; when it comes to global warming, there’s no magic number; it’s just that during the UN’s 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, delegates agreed that 2° was achievable in theory.

That theory is looking a lot shakier now. The IEA says that even to have a 50-50 chance of keeping things under the 2° threshold, CO₂emissions would have to peak at just 32.6 billion metric tons, no later than 2017 — or just one ton higher than 2011 emissions. Give that 2011 was a ton higher than 2010, this seems awfully unlikely.

"I think it would be unrealistic to think that there will be major breakthroughs very soon,” IEA chief economist Faith Birol told Reuters. She also said, soberingly, that “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet."

Helping fuel the record-high was China -- the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases -- which saw its emissions rise 9.2 percent from a year ago. That increase would have been much higher if the country hadn’t improved energy efficiency and started deploying clean energy technology like wind and solar in recent years.

India’s emissions rose by 8.7 percent, vaulting it ahead of Russia to be come the world’s fourth-largest CO₂ emitter after China, the U.S. and the European Union.

Emissions in the U.S. actually fell by 1.7 percent, in part because of a continuing switchover from coal to natural gas in power plants and in part due to an unusually mild winter.

Japan’s emissions spiked by 2.4 percent as fossil fuels have taken over much of the nation’s energy load in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.

Coal accounted for 45 percent of emissions, oil 35 percent and natural gas 20 percent.

Co-operative Wind Harvesting in the Netherlands

2012-05-25T11:30:13+00:00

By Robert van Waarden

Part 4 in a series

Cycling along the country roads of Flevoland, you can’t help but notice the wind. If one is lucky, it is behind you, if it isn’t . . . well, good luck. It is no wonder that windmills haphazardly dot the landscape. They fit. This is the Netherlands, a country where wooden windmills have dotted the landscape for hundreds of years. Now instead of pumping water, modern windmills are powering thousands of homes.

Stephan de Clerck and his brother, Ralph, live within a few kilometres of each other in Flevoland, and they are no strangers to wind. They have been harvesting wind energy for 10 years. In the beginning they were looking for ways to diversify their farms and incomes. They love how wind energy perfectly complements their other crops, like potatoes, onions or sugar beets. Once installed, the windmills turn steadily in the background, while the day-to-day life of a farmer continues. For them, wind energy is a valuable crop, and one that gets better the stormier the weather.

Together, Stephan and Ralph produce enough wind energy to power 5,000 homes. Their energy is sold through WindUnie, a co-operative that sources and sells wind power to residents of the Netherlands. Ten years ago, WindUnie was a small start-up, but through the engagement of landowners like Stephan and Ralph, this co-operative has grown to be a major player in wind energy market in the Netherlands.

Connecting residential customers with small-scale producers, the WindUnie website allows you to explore the suppliers of wind energy, meet their families and see where your wind is coming from. In the case of Stephan and Ralph, you find out that they have 3 and 4 kids, respectively, and love skiing and walking on their holidays.

Stephan was very happy with the first set of windmills, so much so that he wished to build more. But, by then, the zoning laws had changed and regulations were now requiring windmills to be built in a line rather then individually. Stephan realized that he couldn’t do it on his own. So he went knocking on his neighbours doors and together, five of them launched Samen voor de Wind, (Together for the Wind), a co-operative farm of seven windmills.

Samen voor de Wind has substantially contributed to the financial well-being and health of the families. All the members have young families and they are naturally happy to have the extra income. Furthermore, the co-operative has built a stronger community between the neighbours.

Stephan believes that for renewable energy to succeed, we desperately need to level the subsidy playing field. With the removal of fossil and nuclear fuel subsidies, the market would take over and clean energy would rise to top.

“In the future, instead of all of us being energy users, we will all become energy producers,” says Stephan.

This blog post is Part 4 of a series of wind energy stories from photographer Robert van Waarden. Next up is Petr Pavek, an influential character in Czech Republic politics who has retired to his organic farm to live life more simply.

Part 1: Roman Jurgi in the Czech Republic

Part 2: Piet Willem Chevalier in Mali

Part 3: Amrit Singh Thapa in the shadows of the Himalayas

Part 4: The De Clerck family in the Netherlands.

Storms Ahead: NOAA’s Outlook for 2012 Hurricane Season

2012-05-24T16:13:01+00:00

The 2012 hurricane season, which has already gotten off to an early start, is likely to feature “near-normal” storm activity, government officials said on Thursday. The hurricane season outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) calls for a 70 percent chance that there will be between nine to 15 named storms with winds of 39 mph or higher, of which four to eight will strengthen to a hurricane with top winds of 74 mph or higher.

Of those hurricanes, the NOAA is forecasting one to three of them will become a major hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 111 mph or higher.

Based on the period 1981-2010, an average season produces 12 named storms with six hurricanes, including three major hurricanes. A major hurricane of Category 3 intensity or greater has not struck the U.S. since 2005’s Wilma made landfall in Florida, a record gap for the U.S., which suggests that luck may run out sooner rather than later.

Forecasters cautioned that the outlook of a near-normal season does not mean that it will be a less costly one in terms of lives lost and property destroyed.

“That’s still a lot of activity . . . just because we’re predicting a near normal season doesn’t mean anybody’s off the hook,” said Gerry Bell, NOAA’s lead seasonal hurricane forecaster.

NOAA officials reminded reporters of a hurricane season 20 years ago that was below average in terms of overall storm activity, but it took just one storm — Category 5 Hurricane Andrew, which tore across southern Florida — to make it a historically deadly and damaging season.

Bill Read, the outgoing head of the National Hurricane Center in Miami told reporters that Hurricane Irene serves as a reminder that hurricanes are not just a concern for coastal residents. Much of that storm’s damage took place due to inland flooding in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. “This is not the first time that Mother Nature has taught us this lesson.”

The 2012 hurricane season doesn’t officially start until June 1, but there has already been one tropical storm, Alberto, a compact storm that meandered off the coast of South Carolina in mid-May before dissipating.

The hurricane outlook reflects competing factors. Although the North Atlantic is still in an active hurricane phase that began in 1995 -- 12 of the past 17 seasons have been above normal — there is a possibility that conditions will become less favorable for tropical storms and hurricanes to develop later in the season due to the projected development of El Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean.

El Nino events tend to increase winds in the upper atmosphere over the Atlantic, and these winds can tear apart nascent storms.

This year, forecasters will enter the season with two new assets at their disposal, both of them the result of applying military technology for civilian purposes. NASA and NOAA are collaborating on a project to fly two Global Hawk aerial drones into and above Atlantic storms to observe them, and NOAA is also planning to steer small robotic boats into the heart of the powerful storms in order to get observations from areas that are too dangerous for people to venture.

Frank Marks, the director of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, said the drones have instruments that are similar to NOAA’s famous manned “hurricane hunter” aircraft, but it’s not yet clear how beneficial they will be for improving forecast accuracy.

NOAA’s seasonal outlook is similar to those issued by private forecasting firms and university researchers, with an emerging consensus that this is not likely to be a blockbuster season in terms of the number of storms. But much depends on where any storms make landfall.

It’s Beach Season; Enjoy it While You Can

2012-05-24T10:30:24+00:00

School’s not out yet for all kids, and summer doesn’t technically start for another month, but for anyone living within striking distance of the ocean — especially in places that experience cold winters — the upcoming Memorial Day holiday this weekend marks the traditional start of beach season. It’s time to check whether last year’s sunscreen is past its expiration date, dig the bathing suit out of the bottom drawer, and wonder why you didn’t get back to the gym months ago to get into some semblance of shape before venturing out onto the sand.

Most beachgoers don’t stop to wonder, though, whether the sand will be there when they arrive. But beaches are a lot more transient than they appear. The constant pounding of waves, especially during storms, plus the scouring action of currents, constantly washes sand away from some stretches of coastline and deposits it somewhere else. Some beaches naturally tend to shrink, while others grow.

A beach in Baldwin County, AL prior beach renourishment.

Over time, things tend to even out, but in recent years, for many parts of the U.S., the trend has been toward shrinkage: a recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey, for example, found that 68 percent of the beaches in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states are eroding; USGS studies further south along the Atlantic and around the Gulf of Mexico are still ongoing, but according to Asbury Sallenger, who is overseeing those studies, “some barrier beaches in Louisiana are eroding by 20-plus meters [65 feet] per year. Not all of them, but enough to get your attention.”

While beach erosion is perfectly natural, human activity has made it worse. When sand dunes are bulldozed to make way for condos, for example, or when the grasses that keep them intact are trampled by sun worshipers, waves that would normally break harmlessly can wash further inland, sweeping away sand at a greater rate. Sea walls can protect inland areas, but their rigid structure accentuates the waves’ scouring behavior, which can up the rate of beach erosion.

Groins (pier-like structures made of rock that extend from the beach out into the water) can keep sand from drifting down the coast, but at the expense of the beaches downcurrent. And the more massive constructions known as jetties, built to keep sand from clogging harbors, can starve beaches even more severely. Folly Beach, in South Carolina, has lost enormous amounts of sand thanks to two long jetties constructed in nearby Charleston more than 100 years ago.

And then there’s the growing danger of sea level rise, caused by climate change. “Even 25 years ago, sea level was rising,” Sallenger said in a recent interview, “but not a heck of a lot.” But that’s changing as the planet’s temperature keeps going up, sea water keeps expanding and ice is flowing faster to the ocean, especially in Greenland and Antarctica. “If sea level rises another foot,” said Duke University beach expert Orrin Pilkey in an interview, “the shoreline in northeastern North Carolina could be pushed back 5 or 6 miles. And all of the projections I’ve seen suggest it will be more like 3 feet by 2100.”

Siesta Key Beach Renourishment, Florida.

Even without this added factor, beach erosion has proven to be a big problem for those who own oceanfront property or work in industries related to beach tourism. In response, cities and towns up and down the coast have resorted for years to what’s known as beach nourishment or beach replenishment — bringing in new sand to replace the sand that’s disappeared.

During the first week of June, for example, the village of Key Biscayne, Fla., will start trucking in 44,000 tons of sand to build its beaches, at a cost of $1.67 million. In March, Atlantic City, N.J., beefed up 5.1 miles’ worth of beach in an $18 million operation. In Port Saint Joe, Fla., a beach-replenishment project was completed in 2009 at a cost of $22 million, but a quarter of the sand is already gone. Officials have petitioned the federal government for another $15 million to repair the damage. A study published more than a decade ago pegged the annual cost of beach replenishment at $100 million — but it didn’t include the West Coast, and costs have gone up since then.

That figure, plus the untold millions more poured into sea walls and other beach-preservation measures, would be drastically lower if people didn’t love the seashore so much. “It’s beautiful,” Sallenger said. “Everybody wants to live there. So you build a structure, and it turns into a whole line of condos.” Then, he said, a storm or two comes along, the beach is partially washed away, and the condo owners demand action. “Once you build a fixed structure,” Sallenger said, “you have problems.”

Those problems have gotten dramatically larger over time. If you look at hurricane-prone stretches of coastline alone, about 14 million Americans lived in harm’s way in 1960; by 2009, the number had tripled. “In a lot of places,” Sallenger said, “it’s becoming difficult to find enough nearby, high quality sand to meet the demand.”

As the ocean rises, beach replenishment will get even harder. “With even a 2-foot rise,” Pilkey said, “there will be just too great a rate of loss. Then the question becomes, ‘should I buy a house on the shore? Should I build one? Will my children inherit it?’ Probably not, in my view.”

For now, however, the prospect of rising seas, along with the climate-change-related expectation that Atlantic hurricanes could become more powerful in coming decades, hasn’t had any discernible effect on coastal development. “It’s kind of frightening,” Pilkey said, “to think of the possibilities.”

So if you’re heading for the beach this weekend, or any time this summer, it might be a good idea to take a good, hard look at the expanse of sand that surrounds you. It could be something you’ll want tell your grandchildren about.

A River Runs Through It: Scientists Explain Arctic Mercury

2012-05-23T19:02:30+00:00

Scientists have been explaining for years that the Arctic is a key region when it comes to climate change, what with thinning ice, melting permafrost and the loss of habitat crucial to the survival of major species including seals, walruses and polar bears.

Now, says a study just published in Nature Geoscience, we can add one more insult to the Arctic ecosystem that may well be at least partly climate-related: significant amounts of toxic mercury flushed into the Arctic Ocean every spring by three mighty rivers most Americans have probably never heard of: the Lena, the Ob, and the Yenisei, all of which flow north through Siberia.

“We’ve known for a long time that there’s a high concentration of mercury in Arctic biota,” said the study’s lead author, Jenny Fisher, a postdoctoral fellow with Harvard’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group in an interview. Once the neurotoxic (nerve-killing) heavy metal gets into the food supply, it doesn’t break down. Instead, it gets concentrated as bigger animals eat smaller animals on up the food chain, from plankton to fish to seals on up to polar bears, and also the indigenous Inuit, who get much of their nourishment through hunting.

Satellite view of the Lena River Delta. Credit: NASA.

Environmental experts have assumed that the mercury gets up to high latitudes through the atmosphere. It’s belched out through smokestacks of coal-burning power plants and other industrial sources and wafts up into the air, where it can circulate for a year or more before being washed out by precipitation. It all made sense in a general sort of way.

But when Harvard atmospheric chemist Elsie Sunderland and a team of researchers began looking into the details, Fisher said, the atmospheric explanation didn’t hang together. Mercury levels tend to peak in the Arctic atmosphere in summer, but power-plant emissions are also highest in summer, when air conditioning sends the demand for electricity soaring. “It didn’t make sense,” Fisher said, because it should take time for the mercury to make its way north.

So the scientists looked at other phenomena that might explain the summertime Arctic mercury spike. “The only thing that had the right signature is rivers,” Fisher said. The Lena, Yenisei and Ob are all frozen during the long Siberian winter; when the ice finally breaks up in spring, a massive surge of water pours into the Arctic ocean — at just the time when mercury levels tend to spike. With ice cover melting back in the ocean as well, the mercury is free to enter the atmosphere, boosting concentrations far higher than they’d otherwise be. In fact, argue Fisher, Sunderland and the other scientists on the team, it looks as though twice as much mercury comes from Siberian rivers as comes from northward-drifting air.

That raises an obvious question: how does mercury get into Siberian rivers? “There’s a lot of uncertainty about that,” Fisher said. One possibility is waste from Russian mining operations in the region. But another — or, rather, two others — may be a result of climate change. As the Siberian permafrost softens and melts during the increasingly warm Arctic summers, naturally occurring mercury may be leaching of the soil where it’s been frozen in place for tens of thousands of years.

The second possibility: scientists have already noted that rising global temperatures have begun to alter the hydrologic cycle, which circulates water from the oceans to the atmosphere and back. The main effect is to make rainstorms more intense in some places and droughts more intense in others. That could tend to wash more mercury from melting permafrost into the rivers.

It’s still just a hypothesis, Fisher said. “We really have limited knowledge of what’s really going on, and we’re hoping this work inspires more research. But it may be,” she said, “that climate change affects the Arctic in more ways than we thought.”

Western U.S. Faces ‘Extreme’ Wildfire Risk Now and Later

2012-05-23T15:40:03+00:00

Firefighters on Thursday were keeping a watchful eye on Arizona and New Mexico, as the triple threat of high heat, low humidity, and strong winds elevated the fire danger to “critical” levels, according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. Already this spring, several large fires have charred the southwestern landscape, and an expanding drought suggests that this summer is going to be a busy one for the nation’s 2,000 elite hotshot crew members who are specially trained to fight Mother Nature’s most fearsome blazes.

Currently, large fires are burning in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. The Gladiator Fire, near Crown King, Ariz., has already burned more than 16,000 acres, and was just 30 percent contained as of Thursday.

The national significant wildfire outlook for the summer, issued by the Interagency Fire Center. Click on image for a larger version. Credit: NIFC.

While the Southwest fire season has gotten off to an early start, the total number of fires and acreage burned nationally to date is running below average, according to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). Summer climate outlooks from the federal government and a private weather forecasting firm both suggest that the Rocky Mountains and Southwest are going to have a warmer summer than average.

The Climate Prediction Center (CPC), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is forecasting that a huge swath of the Lower 48 states, from northern California eastward to southern New Jersey, are likely to be warmer than average this summer. The region most likely to see warmer-than-average weather is the Southwest, where summer temperatures have exceeded the 30-year norm for about the past decade, according to Jon Gottschalk, CPC’s head of forecasting operations.

Gottschalk said that in addition to recent trends, there is also “overwhelming support” for a warmer-than-average forecast across the Southwest based on computer model projections as well.

As the start of summer rapidly approaches, drought conditions have already been expanding throughout much of the West, and unusually warm conditions mean that the drought is likely to intensify.

“The drought and warmer-than-normal weather are essentially two crucial ingredients in the making of fire danger,” said Greg Carbin, a warning coordination meteorologist with NOAA's Storm Prediction Center in Norman in an email interview. “. . . We already have some of the ingredients in place, especially across the West, that give us reason to be concerned about an increasing fire weather danger in the months ahead.”

Sunlight seen through smoke from the Gladiator Fire in Arizona. Credit: Flickr/azmichelle.

According to NIFC, a federal center that coordinates wildland firefighting efforts, there is an above-normal potential for significant wildland fires this summer in much of Arizona and New Mexico, prior to the arrival of seasonal monsoon rains, which typically begin during July. The monsoon, which is characterized by daily rounds of showers and thunderstorms, also brings with it the threat of lightning strikes, which can ignite forest fires.

In fact, although human activities are the No. 1 cause of forest fires, lightning strikes are responsible for burning more acres, since they often ignite fires in areas that are harder for firefighters to reach, according to Ken Frederick, an NIFC spokesman.

In addition, potential hot spots this summer include Colorado, southern Montana, the mountains of Utah, California, Idaho, and Nevada. The Big Island of Hawaii also has an above-normal risk of significant wildfires, according to NIFC.

The fire danger across large parts of southern and central California, along with forests throughout the Sierra Nevada, is likely to increase later this summer, according to NIFC’s outlook. As Climate Central reported on May 11, an above-average year for wildfires in California would come on the heels of a few years of relative quiet, compared to two devastatingly dry years in 2007 and 2008, when more than 800,000 acres burned.

Climate studies have shown that warmer winters, reduced snowpack, earlier snowmelts, and hotter, drier summers will likely lead to more California wildfires in coming decades. Other studies have shown similar jumps in wildfire activity may occur in parts of the Rocky Mountains as the climate continues to warm, largely in response to manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

From La Niña to El Niño?

The current drought conditions are partly a legacy of back-to-back La Niña events in the tropical Pacific Ocean. La Niña events are characterized by cooler-than-average water temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific, which can have a major influence on weather patterns worldwide. During the winter of 2011-12, La Niña favored a dry weather pattern across the southern states, as well as reduced mountain snowpack in much of the West.

“The Southwestern U.S. got through the winter of 2011-2012 without a lot of precipitation because of the La Niña weather pattern,” Frederick said. He said that drought conditions don’t necessarily mean there will be more wildfires, but it “increases the probability.”

La Niña conditions ended in April, but there are some signs that an El Niño event, which is the opposite of La Nina and features unusually warm conditions in the Pacific, may develop later this summer. Such a scenario would alter the late summer fire outlook for some parts of the West.

If the U.S. does have a scorching summer, it would be consistent with recent trends. Last summer was the second-hottest on record, and the winter was the fourth-warmest.

The Lower 48 states just recorded its warmest 12-month period on record, which came on the heels of the hottest March and third warmest April on record. In addition, the January to April period was the warmest since record keeping began in 1895.

Notably, the top 10 warmest 12-month periods in the Lower 48 states have all occurred since 1999.

G-8 Leaders Agree to Cut Short-Lived Greenhouse Gases

2012-05-22T15:42:54+00:00

The Group of Eight (G-8) leading industrialized nations formally joined a coalition that is working to reduce emissions of short-lived global warming pollutants. The action took place during the G-8 summit meeting at the Camp David presidential retreat in northwest Maryland, which served as the annual gathering for the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.

The Climate and Clean Air Coalition for Reducing Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, which was formed in mid-February, is now made up of 18 members in the developing and developed world. The coalition's goal is to cut emissions of climate warming pollution that acts on shorter timescales than carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

President Barack Obama and the G-8 leaders worked on global and economic issues in the dining room of Laurel Cabin at Camp David, Md.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Pollutants like black carbon, methane, and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs) help trap heat in Earth's atmosphere, warming the planet. Unlike CO₂, though, they only remain in the atmosphere for a short time period, from days to weeks, in the case of black carbon, to about a decade for methane. By contrast, CO₂ can remain in the atmosphere for a century or more.

In a fact sheet released on May 19, G-8 members said the reduction of short-lived global warming pollutants would "enhance our collective ambition in addressing climate change by complementing efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions."

Recent studies have identified the potential benefits of tackling short-lived global warming agents in addition to the long-lived pollutants. In a study published in January in the journal Science, researchers found that cutting black carbon emissions would reduce warming in the Himalayas and the Arctic during the next 30 years by as much as two-thirds, and would even help maintain the current South Asian monsoon. Black carbon, also known as soot, warms the air by absorbing radiation from the sun, and when it lands on snow and ice it darkens the surface, causing more melting. Another assessment from the U.N. Environment Programme also found major benefits to reducing emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases.

Black carbon also harms public health, especially in developing countries, where wood, dung and other fuels that emit soot when burned are used for cooking. Implementing soot-reduction policies would avoid 373,000 premature deaths each year in India and China alone.

"The President's announcement puts the short-lived climate pollutant strategy where it belongs — firmly in the hands of the leaders of the world's largest economies," said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington.

The G8 leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to limit global warming to less than 2°C, or 3.6°F, above pre-industrial levels. This goal, though, is looking less and less achievable, according to recent studies. Climate negotiators meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week are working to hammer out details of a process that is intended to result in a new global climate treaty by 2015, which would go into effect by 2020. However, emissions reduction pledges are still running well short of what would be needed to achieve the 2°C target.

Digging into Climate Change, Students Find Much More

2012-05-22T11:30:18+00:00

By Lisa Palmer, The Daily Climate

BERLIN, Md. – Fifth grader Aman Shahzad looked closely at the level attached to the plumb line. "Lower, lower," she called out. "OK! The bubble is in the middle." Her classmate, holding the wooden surveyor's pole, read the measurement: 14 centimeters.

The two students were from Pemberton Elementary School in nearby Salisbury, Md., the first to participate in a new, three-month interdisciplinary unit called "Investigating Climate Science" that spans science, math, economics and government. On this day in early spring on Maryland's eastern shore, they were on a field trip to Assateague Island, measuring the slope of the beach as the first step in a lesson on sea-level rise.

The unit represents the vanguard of a nationwide effort, pushed by education and science groups, to broaden climate change education into a variety of physical and social science classes in public school curricula.

Yet even here, in one the most sophisticated climate change education units in the nation, teachers still feel the need to balance what the world's scientific bodies know about climate change with what is represented in the public dialogue, avoiding terms like "global warming" and including a lesson questioning humanity's impact on the problem.

Honing critical thinking

The three-month unit is designed for middle school and high-achieving elementary students. It was developed by four teachers in the Wicomico County Public Schools' gifted and talented program, with help from environmental educator Carrie Samis of the Maryland Coastal Bays Program. Lessons focus on climate science and hone critical thinking skills.

In one lesson, students examined and analyzed editorial cartoons related to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of building a pipeline to ferry crude oil from Alberta's tarsands to the United States.

Another lesson examined the possible causes of changing climates, differentiating between anthropogenic and natural ones. Students studied greenhouse gases, climate indicators, and carbon foot prints, then predicted positive and negative effects climate change may have on agriculture, the economy, infrastructure and wildlife.

The full-day field trip to Assateague Island showed students how vulnerable the barrier island is to sea-level rise. They conducted a mock debate, acting as local stakeholders, on the impacts of salt marsh migration.

One lesson, called "the controversy," probes "both sides of the story." It examines uncertainties in historic data, fossil records, ice core samples and tree rings, posing the questions, "How do we know?" and "Where is the proof?"

The diversified approach reaches and engages students via a number of different avenues. Gabe Dunn, a fifth grader at Westside Intermediate School, in Hebron, Md., liked the unit's hands-on science and civics activities, especially debating the viability of land development amid marsh migration and sea-level rise. Cade Stone, a fifth grader at Pemberton Elementary, found the editorial cartoons appealing.

A need for 'balance'

The unit has generated controversy.

Months before the lessons began, parents voiced concern over the contents and stressed a need for "balance." Virtually every scientist studying atmospheric and earth sciences says climate change is real and that humans are the cause. But some parents sought inclusion of opposing theories, such as other causes and doubts that climate change is occurring.

In response, Nancy Rowe, one of four teachers developing the unit, devised lessons to show that climate change is not all caused by humans. "We want to be balanced," Rowe said.

That desire of balance lead the program's creators to avoid terms like "climate change" or "global warming" in lesson plans, Rowe said, "which would have sent a biased point of view."

Scientists and educators who conduct workshops for teachers on climate change say this "false-balance" is not the correct approach.

"Human activities are the drivers of recent climate change," said Susan Buhr, a climate scientist and director of the education and outreach program of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado. "Teachers need to discern what is credible and not credible, and part of the job of teachers is to provide signposts to that end."

'Science has to lead'

Debate over the tradeoffs and values of how to respond to climate change is appropriate for environmental education, Buhr and other educators say. However, the strong evidence that supports the climate science and human causation of climate change doesn't warrant equal weight with minority claims, often disputed by other research, that are not credible, they add. "Science has to lead," Buhr said.

Teachers drafting the program said criticism – or the desire to avoid it – influenced their decision to include alternate views. Parental opposition may have been small, said Samis, who helped write the climate curriculum for the Wicomico students. But it "has been at the forefront of my mind the whole time."

After a local newspaper reported a front-page news story of the Wicomico County schools' field trip to Assateague, readers accused the teachers of "brainwashing the kids with biased information" that climate change is occurring. "That hurt," Rowe said. "We are really trying to expose them to both sides so that they can make their own decision about what to think."

Lively lessons

Buhr disagrees with efforts that allow kids to make their own decisions about established scientific conclusions. "We don't ask students in science class to make up their own minds over whether they believe in photosynthesis or if the earth is round," she said. "Why would we be doing that here?"

Still, the teachers note that teaching the controversy has made for lively lessons in civics, politics and skeptical thinking – part of the goal of the whole unit. And the science is getting through.

The field trip was proof of that.

On this unseasonably warm March day, 160 students on a field trip from the Wicomico County gifted and talented program learned how climate change, sea level rise, and salt marsh migration will affect Maryland's coastal areas. They also learned about economic, cultural, and social policies and decisions that local land owners, farmers, watermen, developers, and elected officials may have to make as the climate changes.

Science is really a process of discovery, of skepticism, of challenging long-held constructs, and controversy. By addressing parental concerns, discussing the different newspaper stories and linking student experiments to real-world situations, Rowe and her colleagues are, in effect, teaching the kids how to do science.

"We aren't hiding anything," Rowe said. "The kids love seeing both sides of a story."

See Part One: Climate Science Education Graduates to the Next Level

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner.

The Joplin Tornado, One Year Later: Where Does it Rank?

2012-05-22T10:30:55+00:00

The ferocious tornado that tore the city of Joplin, Mo., apart exactly one year ago today stunned the nation with its tragic death toll and staggering damage. The twister’s winds were estimated to be more than 200 mph, making the tornado an EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which measures a tornado’s intensity. It devastated the city of 50,000, killing 161 and injuring more than 1,000. The Joplin tornado was the first single tornado in the U.S. to result in more than 100 fatalities since a tornado struck Flint, Mich., in 1953.

Tornado damage in Joplin, Mo. Credit: National Weather Service.

It also ranks as the seventh deadliest in U.S. history, and the deadliest since 1947. Additionlly, the Joplin tornado was also one of the most expensive tornadoes on record, having caused direct insured losses of $1.9 billion, according to Missouri officials. Others have estimated losses at closer to $3 billion.

Joplin is being rebuilt using state and federal funds, and the morale of the community received a boost when President Obama delivered the commencement address at Joplin High School on Monday evening. The High School itself was destroyed during the tornado, and students spent the past year taking classes in a temporary facility.

The Joplin tornado's death toll was especially shocking to weather forecasters, since during the past two decades billions of dollars have been spent upgrading the nation’s weather warning systems to provide timely tornado watches and warnings. A national network of Doppler radars scans the skies for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, and scientists’ understanding of the factors that lead to tornadoes has improved dramatically during the past two decades. A tornado warning was in effect for Joplin at the time the storm struck, yet it was not enough to prevent so many deaths.

Given all the advances that have been made, the high death toll in Joplin has prompted many in the meteorological and emergency management communities to rethink how they issue tornado warnings.

One of the major lessons stemming from Joplin is that more attention needs to be paid to ensuring that tornado warnings encourage people to take protective action. A post-tornado survey report by a National Weather Service team found that most Joplin residents did not take shelter when they heard the tornado sirens. Instead, they waited until they received additional information confirming the threat. In part, this was because of the prevalence of false alarms.

In the wake of Joplin, and other deadly tornadoes that struck during the 2011 season, the National Weather Service is experimenting with issuing tornado warnings that contain enhanced wording in order to help encourage people to act.

While the tornado that devastated Joplin was the seventh deadliest in U.S. history, there have been far deadlier tornadoes. Here’s a look at the Top Six all-time twisters:

No. 6
The Woodward, Okla., Tornado, April 9, 1947

The scene in Woodward, Okla., after a deadly tornado struck in 1947. Credit: National Weather Service.

The deadliest tornado on record in the tornado-prone state of Oklahoma had a path length of 100 miles. According to the National Weather Service, the tornado had a maximum width of 1.8 miles, and a forward speed of about 50 mph. The tornado was ranked as an F-5 on the Fujita Scale, and it slammed into Woodward without warning at 8:42 pm on April 9, 1947. More than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed and 1,000 people injured. The Weather Service said the bodies of three children were never identified, and one child who survived the tornado was never reunited with her family.

The death toll from this event stands at 181, with at least 116 lives lost in Oklahoma.

No. 5
The Gainesville, Ga., Tornado, April 6, 1936

Downtown Gainesville, Ga., following the devastating tornado that struck without warning in 1936. Credit: Digital Library of Georgia.

The tornado that hit Gainesville, which occurred a day after the Tupelo event (see No. 4 below), was actually a pair of tornadoes that converged on the center of the town at the height of the business day. According to the Digital Library of Georgia, 60 people died in just one building when the Cooper Pants Factory, a two-story garment factory, collapsed and burned after being struck. Many of the victims were young women and girls. In all, 203 were reported killed.

Tornado damage "immobilized the Gainesville Fire Department and forced rescuers to dynamite buildings on the Public Square as a means of controlling the rapid spread of fire," the website said.

Letters from Gainesville reportedly fell from the sky across state lines in South Carolina.

No. 4
Tupelo, Miss., April 5, 1936

This tornado was part of a group of twisters that struck Mississippi that day, and although it missed downtown Tupelo, it flattened residential areas around the town. In some cases the tornado wiped out entire families.

The official death toll stands at 216, although other estimates put it higher. This is due in part to differences between counting white vs. black victims at that time in the segregated South.

No. 3
The St. Louis/East St. Louis Tornado, May 27, 1896

The scene in St. Louis following the F-4 tornado there in 1896. Credit: NOAA Image Library.

The St. Louis tornado, which was later estimated to be of F-4 intensity on the Fujita Scale, caused 255 fatalities, and about $2.9 billion in damage when adjusted for inflation, according to one estimate.

The tornado struck the core of downtown St. Louis, damaging or destroying factories, hospitals, homes, railroad yards, churches and other facilities. About 35 people were killed at the Vandalia railroad freight yards in East St. Louis.

Considering how many more people live in St. Louis and East St. Louis today, and how much more developed it is than 100 years ago, if the same tornado struck today, the numbers of fatalities and damage would, in all likelihood, skyrocket.

No. 2
The Natchez, Miss., Tornado, May 6, 1840

According to the Tornado Project, which maintains an extensive database of U.S. tornadoes, the Natchez tornado touched down about 20 miles southwest of Natchez, Miss., on May 6, 1840. The funnel grew to a mile wide, and it moved along the Mississippi River, rather than crossing it quickly. This allowed it to sink numerous river-going vessels. In fact, the death toll was higher on the river than on land. A piece of a steamboat window was reportedly carried for 30 miles.

While the official death toll stands at 317, it’s possible that more were killed, particularly on plantations where deaths were not always accurately reported.

No. 1
The Tri-State Tornado, March 18, 1925

Damage in Murphysboro, Ill., following the Tri-State Tornado in 1925. The tornado killed 234 in this town as it traversed across three states. Credit: NOAA Image Library.

The deadliest tornado on record in the U.S. is the infamous Tri-State Tornado that carved out a 219-mile path across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana on March 18, 1925. The tornado killed 695, and was estimated to be about three-quarters of a mile wide at times. The tornado traveled at an extraordinary speed — making it more difficult for people to seek shelter. At times its forward speed was clocked at more than 70 mph.

The Tri-State Tornado caused the largest death toll on record in a single U.S. city when it blasted through Murphysboro, Ill., killing 234, including many children who were in school at the time. At just one school — the De Soto school — 33 children were killed.

The tornado remained on the ground for a remarkable three and a half hours, during which time it destroyed 15,000 homes and injured more than 2,000, according to a National Weather Service website about this historic event.

Heartland Facing Uncertain Future as Staff, Cash Dries Up

2012-05-21T14:07:20+00:00

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

The first Heartland Institute conference on climate change in 2008 had all the trappings of a major scientific conclave — minus large numbers of real scientists. Hundreds of climate change contrarians, with a few academics among them, descended into the banquet rooms of a lavish Times Square hotel for what was purported to be a reasoned debate about climate change.

But as the latest Heartland climate conference opens in a Chicago hotel on Monday, the thinktank's claims to reasoned debate lie in shreds and its financial future remains uncertain.

Heartland's claims to "stay above the fray" of the climate wars was exploded by a billboard campaign earlier this month comparing climate change believers to the Unabomer Ted Kaczynski, and a document sting last February that revealed a plan to spread doubt among kindergarteners on the existence of climate change.

Along with the damage to its reputation, Heartland's financial future is also threatened by an exodus of corporate donors as well as key members of staff.

In a fiery blogpost on the Heartland website, the organisation's president Joseph Bast admitted Heartland's defectors were "abandoning us in this moment of need".

Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organization.

The organization has been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week's conference, undermining Heartland's claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.

Its entire Washington D.C. office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland's biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.

Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.

"It's hemorrhaging," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, who has spent years tracking climate contrarian outfits. "Heartland's true colors finally came through, and now people are jumping ship in quick order."

It does not look like Heartland is about to adopt a corrective course of action.

In his post, Bast defended the ads, writing: "Our billboard was factual: the Unabomber was motivated by concern over man-made global warming to do the terrible crimes he committed." He went on to describe climate scientist Michael Mann and activist Bill McKibben as "madmen".

The public unravelling of Heartland began last February when the scientist Peter Gleick lied to obtain highly sensitive materials, including a list of donors.

The publicity around the donors' list made it difficult for companies with public commitment to sustainability, such as the General Motors Foundation, to continue funding Heartland. The GM Foundation soon announced it was ending its support of $15,000 a year.

But what had been a gradual collapse gathered pace when Heartland advertised its climate conference with a billboard on a Chicago expressway comparing believers in climate science to the Unabomber.

The slow trickle of departing corporate donors turned into a gusher.

Even Heartland insiders, such as Eli Lehrer, who headed the organization's Washington group, found the billboard too extreme. Lehrer, who headed the biggest project within Heartland, on insurance, immediately announced his departure along with six other staff.

"The ad was ill advised," he said. "I'm a free-market conservative with a long rightwing resumé and most, if not all, of my team fits the same description and of us found it very problematic. Staying with Heartland was simply not workable in the wake of this billboard."

Heartland took down the billboard within 24 hours, but by then the ad had gone viral.

Lehrer, who maintains the split was amicable, said the billboard had undermined Heartland's claims to be a serious conservative thinktank.

"It didn't reflect the seriousness which I want to bring to public policy," Lehrer said in the telephone interview. "As somebody who deals mostly with insurance I believe all risk have to be taken seriously and there certainly are some important climate and global warming related risks that must be taken account of in the insurance market. Trivialising them is not consistent with free-market thought. Suggesting they are only thought about by people who are crazy is not good for the free market."

Other Heartland allies came to a similar conclusion. In a letter to Heartland announcing he was backing out from the conference, Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist wrote: "You can not simultaneously say that you want to promote a debate while equating the other side to terrorists and mass murderers."

A number of other experts meanwhile began cutting their ties with Heartland, according to a tally kept by a Canadian blogger BigCityLiberal.

Meanwhile, there was growing anger that Bast failed to consult with colleagues before ordering up the Kaczynski attack ads.

Four board members told the Guardian they had not been consulted in advance about the ad. "I did not have prior approval of the billboard and was in favor of discontinuing the billboard when I was made aware of it," Jeff Judson, a Texas lobbyist and board member wrote in an email.

Could the turmoil and discontent at Heartland eventually prove its undoing? Campaigners would certainly hope so. "We are watching the consequences of organization that acts quite randomly and that is actually an extremist organization in the end," said Davies. "They are not built to be at the hump of the climate denial movement."

But while more mainstream corporate entities are deserting Heartland, others are stepping into the breach, including the coal lobby and conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation.

Both the Illinois Coal Association and Heritage stepped in to fund this week's conference, after other corporate donors began backing out in protest at the offensive Kaczynski ad.

Meanwhile, a Greenpeace analysis of the other smaller conference sponsors suggests they have collectively received $5 million in funds from Exxon and other oil companies.

The Coal Association and Heritage were not listed on the original conference sponsor list, but appeared to come in about a week or so after the appearance of the offending Kaczynski ad.

Phil Gonet, the chief lobbyist for the 20 coal companies in the association, said he had no qualms about stepping in to fund the Heartland conference.

"We support the work they are doing and so we thought we would finally make a contribution to the organization," he said, calling criticism of the ad "moot", "pointless" and "absurd".

Gonet went on: "I made a contribution mainly in support of a conference that is designed to make balanced information available to the public on the issue of global warming … In general, the message of the Heartland Institute is something the Illinois Coal Association supports."

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian.

Climate Science Education Graduates to the Next Level

2012-05-21T11:30:45+00:00

By Lisa Palmer, The Daily Climate

BALTIMORE – Ninth grade science at the Academy for Career and College Education began the usual way last fall. Victoria Matthew's students learned the difference between biotic and abiotic characteristics, then progressed to the basics of scientific method. By Thanksgiving, they were ready for climate change. That's when Matthew braced herself.

"Initially, I thought I was going to get a lot of pushback from the kids, said Matthew, a teacher at the inner-city charter school for grades six through 12. "But I didn't encounter any. I was surprised."

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick watches on as students perform an experiment in a 5th grade classroom in New Bedford, Mass in 2011. Credit: Matt Bennett/Gov. Patrick's office, via flickr.

Like teaching evolution, efforts to improve climate science lessons have opened rifts in classrooms and school districts across the United States. Parents have pressured teachers not to teach the subject. Teachers have watered down the science. Special interests – from the Heartland Institute on the right to Facing the Future on the left – have vied to influence curriculum. Some states and districts have ignored the topic altogether. Others insist on a "balanced" debate that pits a small minority of scientists who deny human-driven climate change against the findings of nearly all earth and atmospheric scientists.

But the landscape is changing rapidly and profoundly in public schools.

A key role

Earlier this month, the education-based nonprofit Achieve, Inc. released draft "next generation science standards" for elementary, middle- and high-school classrooms. Developed from recommendations by the National Research Council, the standards represent the first comprehensive revision of U.S. science curricula in 15 years. They highlight "cross-cutting" concepts that touch various disciplines, giving students a "cumulative, coherent and usable understanding" of science and engineering. Climate change plays a key role.

Groups are stepping forward to buttress climate science in schools, pushing to ensure the topic is well-represented in new national science standards. Science and education leaders are seeking ways to broaden climate science from a narrow unit of earth science curriculum into an interdisciplinary subject taught across a variety of physical and social science classes.

The hope is that, if educators can effectively teach the nuance and complexity of climate change, the gains would bolster larger efforts to improve science education overall, aiding literacy and critical thinking.

"The reality of climate change is that it’s utterly interdisciplinary," said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Effective climate change education ... has to have strong earth science, biology and physics components, and it has to connect to social science, history, psychology and economics."

"It has to answer 'How did we get into this pickle?'"

Loath to teach

Two problems with climate change make it a subject teachers are loath to teach: Climate change is complex – touching on economic, social, political and scientific issues to a far greater degree than most other science topics. And climate change politics put teachers square in the middle of an ideological battle.

Climate science is now taught in many districts in the earth science curriculum, mostly in middle school grades. Left there, it's doomed for failure, Niepold said. As students advance to high school, core science becomes specialized, displacing interdisciplinary, predominantly earth science-based concepts like climate change.

Statistics show that 83 percent of U.S. high school students take biology, 50 percent take chemistry, 20 percent take physics, and just 20 percent take earth science courses, said Niepold. "Even if the earth science classes were amazingly effective, we're only reaching 20 percent of all high school students."

More troubling, earth science is frequently reserved for kids not destined for college, said Niepold. Many college-bound high school students are fast-tracked through biology, chemistry, physics, and advanced placement science classes, skipping the topic. As a result, college-bound seniors can emerge from high school without much exposure to climate science.

"Climate change should be everywhere in the curriculum, but as a result of its complexity it is nowhere," said Jill Karsten, program director for education and diversity at the geosciences directorate of the National Science Foundation.

Politicizing the classroom

The push to broaden climate science curricula brings up the second problem: By embedding climate change into an economics or ecology lesson, schools and teachers expose themselves to charges that they're politicizing the classroom.

Roberta Johnson, executive director of Boulder, Colo.-based National Earth Science Teachers Association, recalls an incident reported by an Indiana teacher on a recent survey: The teacher had started a climate change unit. A parent, angry at the lesson plan, threatened to commandeer the classroom and dispute the legitimacy of the science. The teacher, thinking the dispute could lead to a useful discussion on science and truth, welcomed a debate. But before any such thing could happen, school administrators killed the entire unit.

That teacher's struggle is not unique, Johnson noted. Last fall the association surveyed 555 kindergarten through 12th grade teachers across the United States who teach climate change. Forty percent said they were pressured not to teach climate change at all. A separate poll conducted by the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, Va., found that 82 percent of high school and middle school science educators have faced skepticism about climate change from their students.

"It is disheartening to see the struggle teachers are having in the classroom," Johnson said.

State standards

As of 2008, the latest year available, 29 states taught climate change directly, via a course that specifically covered it, according to an analysis by NOAA and the Technical Education Research Center for earth and space science education. Twelve others taught it indirectly – mentioning it, for example, in a chemistry lesson on greenhouse gases. Eight states failed to adequately address atmosphere, weather or climate concepts: Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Iowa had no state standards.

State laws in Texas, South Dakota, and Louisiana require that any lesson on climate science be balanced equally with instruction that other scientists dispute the consensus findings that society's greenhouse gas emissions are altering planetary systems such as the atmosphere and oceans.

The newest is in Tennessee, where state law, enacted in April, allows teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction. Gov. Bill Haslam, noting the bill passed the Legislature by a three-to-one margin, allowed the measure to become law despite misgivings, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."

Tennessee, Texas and South Dakota aren't alone.

In state legislatures and before local school boards across the country – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Washington State, Wyoming, Colorado, California, among others – political battles over the teaching of climate change in public schools have flared.

In many ways the political debate over climate science mirrors the fight to teach evolution theory, a battle that has been waged in the nation's classrooms and courts since the Scopes' Trial in 1925. But there is a key difference. The teaching of evolution today enjoys constitutional protections separating church from state. Unless all elements of the causes and impacts of climate change are clearly laid out in state standards, no legal mechanisms require that climate science be taught accurately.

Teaching 'both sides'

Across the country, scientific accuracy is being compromised in schools, say science educators. Even when teachers and school districts include lessons on climate change, earnest teachers think teaching "both sides" of the climate debate is scientifically valid. The Earth Science Teachers Association survey found 36 percent of the teachers polled nationally had been urged to teach "both sides." In southern states, 12 percent of those teachers said they were required to do so, whereas just 1 percent of teachers in the Northeast reported such a mandate.

"They tell us they need resources to teach 'both sides' of climate change well," said Susan Buhr, who runs teacher workshops as director of the education and outreach program of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado.

"From our perspective, there aren't 'both sides,'" she added. "There is the scientifically credible side, and then there is the misrepresentation side in the public dialogue."

But other regions and states, including some with conservative-leaning politics such as West Virginia, have strong standards for earth science, said Mark McCaffrey, program director of the National Center for Science Education, which has long defended the teaching of evolution in public schools and earlier this year announced it would start doing the same for climate science. California and Massachusetts are among states viewed as progressive in climate science because they integrate climate literacy principles into the state standards.

In a California ninth grade ecology unit within biology class, for example, students might examine a 100-year survey of the state’s wildlife population to illustrate the impact climate change is having on animals today.

Hands-on activity

In Victoria Matthew’s biology class in Baltimore, students examined global ocean water temperatures and coral bleaching, and how that relates to climate change. A hands-on activity included an oyster dissection, and Matthew discussed how climate change is expected to impact oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay.

Efforts are underway to expand curriculum in classrooms. Among the most promising is an initiative underway in Maryland and Delaware, one of 15 test cases funded by the National Science Foundation to research ways to improve climate education.

The test program encourages scientists and educators to work together to address local impacts – sea-level rise in the Chesapeake Bay, or rising temperatures in urban areas – and develop lessons that could apply elsewhere in the curriculum, said the study's principal investigator Donald Boesch, of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Most information for educators focuses on global climate change, but Boesch said greater learning takes place when climate impacts are examined at the local level.

Similar climate education research programs focused on local impacts are being developed for Great Lakes and southeastern states.

Cross-cutting themes

But there is a larger goal here, educators say.

On May 11, the National Research Council, in coordination with the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Achieve released the draft Next Generation Science Standards, laying out key scientific ideas and practices all students should learn by the end of high school. Replacing standards issued more than a decade ago, the framework aims to connect knowledge from various disciplines into a "coherent and scientifically based" world view.

Climate change factors highly in the effort, which emphasizes earth and space content as well as cross-cutting themes such as modeling, systems behavior, and uncertainty.

Educators say the push to improve the quality of climate change education would directly affect the 26 states that have partnered to develop the standards and could ripple through the entire educational system. Climate change, in effect, has become the poster child for what the National Academy of Sciences hopes to accomplish with science education.

"If we can get the standards ... climate-rich, then that's going to have a domino effect in getting into state standards, and getting into textbooks and curricula," said Karsten at the National Science Foundation.

"That could be pretty catalytic."

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner.

Australasia Has Hottest 60 Years in a Millennium

2012-05-20T11:00:09+00:00

By Alison Rourke, The Guardian

The last 60 years have been the hottest in Australasia for a millennium and cannot be explained by natural causes, according to a new report by scientists that supports the case for a reduction in manmade carbon emissions.

In the first major study of its kind in the region, scientists at the University of Melbourne used natural data from 27 climate indicators, including tree rings, corals and ice cores to map temperature trends over the past 1,000 years.

Red dust blown in from Australia's parched interior blankets Sydney in 2009. Australia and its region are experiencing the hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists have determined. Credit: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty

"Our study revealed that recent warming in a 1,000-year context is highly unusual and cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the Australasian region," said the study's lead researcher, Dr. Joelle Gergis.

The climate reconstruction was done in 3,000 different ways and concluded with 95 percent accuracy that no other period in the past 1,000 years match or exceeded post-1950 warming in Australia.

The study, published in the Journal of Climate, will be part of Australia's contribution to the fifth Intergovernmetal Panel on Climate Change report, due in 2014.

As part of the study, climate modellers used the natural data to analyze the impact of both natural events, like volcanic eruptions in the pre-industrial era, and the impact of human-induced climate change such as greenhouse gasses emissions on temperatures in the last millennium.

Dr. Steven Phipps, from the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who carried out the modeling, said the study demonstrated strong human influence on the climate in the region.

Credit: flickr/incite

"The models showed that prior to 1850 there were not any long-term trends and temperature variations were likely to be caused by natural climate variability which is a random process," he said.

"But [the modeling showed] 20th-century warming significantly exceeds the amplitude of natural climate variability and demonstrates that the recent warming experience in Australia is unprecedented within the context of the last millennium."

Annual average daily maximum temperatures in Australia have increased by 33.35 F since 1910. Since the 1950s each decade has been warmer than the one before it.

Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO, has said temperatures will rise by between 33F and 41F by 2070 when compared with recent decades. It predicts the number of droughts in southern Australia will increase in the future and that there will be an increase in intense rainfall in many areas.

Reprinted from The Guardian with permission.

Australian Project Simulates Runaway Climate Change

2012-05-19T12:00:31+00:00

By Oliver Milman, The Guardian

An Australian university has embarked upon an ambitious project — hailed as the first of its kind in the world — to simulate how the environment would cope with runaway climate change.

The decade-long study, at the University of Western Sydney's Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, will subject Australian bushland to heightened CO2 levels and altered rainfall patterns consistent with a "business as usual" global increase in greenhouse gases.

The centerpiece of the study is the Eucalyptus Free Air CO2 Enrichment experiment, which has involved the construction of six fiber glass and steel ring structures 92 feet high and 82 feet in diameter in native woodland in Richmond, New South Wales. The structures contain an array of sensors that will deliver a concentration of CO2 to the trees within the rings.

This, scientists say, will recreate an atmosphere where CO2 is at 550 ppm — about 40% higher than current levels — to see how the environment would change for living things, including humans.

This level of CO2 has been chosen to mimic how the environment would react in a world where no significant action is taken to reduce carbon emissions over the next 35 years.

It has been predicted that a 40% increase in CO2 would result in an average global temperature increase of about three degrees centigrade.

An automated computer-controlled system will modulate the amount of CO2 pumped from the rings, to account for environmental variability.

Scientists will use a giant 141 foot high crane to study the impact on all parts of the towering eucalypt trees, such as soil bacteria and fungi, the growth patterns of the tree canopy and the insects that dwell in the foliage.

Credit: Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment.

The sprawling facilities at the institute have been funded via a $40 million grant from the federal government, bolstering a $15 million investment by the University of Western Sydney.

Prof David Ellsworth, who is leading the "free air" experiment, was involved in a similar study at Duke University in the U.S.

"That study was with plantation trees and we found there was less [growth] enhancement than we expected with the higher CO2 levels," he said.

"But there's been nothing like this before, on this scale. We're dealing with native woodland and poorer soils. It's an area with impoverished phosphorus and nutrition in the soil, which is the same as the environment in many areas of the world in the tropics and sub tropics.

"It will give us a window into how biodiversity will behave in futuristic conditions."

The first results from the study, which is due to launch in September, will be published next year.

However, the institute has already conducted preliminary research — the findings can be read here and here — on a small collection of trees over the past 18 months, to test their responses to heightened CO2 and warmer temperatures.

"The outcome was that the trees had a limited ability to adjust," said Ellsworth. "They didn't cope well with a warm Sydney summer. Photosynthesis decreased. They stopped growing, basically.

"Heightened CO2 levels have been shown to initially aid plant growth, but previous studies have shown this can last as little as a few months.

"To put it crudely, plants want a balanced diet. CO2 is part of that diet, but they also need nutrients that aren't depleted."

Trees in New South Wales, Australia. Credit: kevincure/flickr

The institute insists its work isn't only of interest to Australia, where modelling has predicted a temperature rise of as much as 5°C, coupled with more frequent droughts, by 2070 if no action on emissions is taken.

Prof Ian Anderson, director of research at the institute, said scientists from the UK, Brazil and South Africa had already contacted the institute about the research.

"The soils are very different here to the northern hemisphere, but plants there rely on the same equation of CO2, nitrogen and phosphorus as they do here," he said.

"We are also looking at the impact of drought and because we will potentially see big water reductions in the future, the results here will be very important for the rest of the world."

Ellsworth said: "I really hope the big players, like China and the U.S., are paying attention to research like this.

"If we don't want to be saturated by carbon in 2040 or 2050, the international community really needs to be in its final run of cutting of emissions right now."

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian.

Weather Channel Expert Tabbed to Lead Hurricane Center

2012-05-18T20:25:10+00:00

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has chosen Rick Knabb, currently the tropical weather expert for The Weather Channel (TWC), as the next director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. He will take over from retiring director Bill Read as of June 4 — three days after the start of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season. Read served for more than four years, tracking 63 different tropical weather systems.

Rick Knabb. Credit: NOAA.

Knabb, 43, was formerly a NOAA researcher and manager prior to joining The Weather Channel as the on-air hurricane expert in 2010. He was deputy director of NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, and before that, he was a senior hurricane specialist and the science and operations officer at the Hurricane Center.

The position of hurricane center director is a high-profile assignment, requiring a mix of communications skills and scientific expertise that is unique in meteorology.

“When hurricanes threaten our coastal communities, those in harm’s way look to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center for life-saving information,” said NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco during a conference call with reporters. “Rick personifies that calm, clear and trusted voice that the nation has come to rely on. Rick will also lead our hurricane center team and work closely with federal, state and local emergency management authorities to ensure the public is prepared to weather the storm.”

Hurricane Irene as it approached the Southeast Coast in 2011. Credit: NASA.

Knabb earned a bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Science from Purdue University and holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Meteorology from Florida State University.

"I know what the job entails and I know what is in store and what we have to accomplish,” Knabb said. He noted that researchers and forecasters need to make improvements in hurricane intensity forecasts, as well as refining track forecasts, which have shown greater accuracy in recent years.

NOAA is scheduled to release its 2012 Atlantic hurricane outlook on May 24. Outlooks from research groups and private companies have called for an average to below-average season.

Get Ready for a Rare Solar Eclipse

2012-05-18T11:00:40+00:00

The moon is endlessly creative in finding ways to amuse us. Just two weeks ago, the Earth’s only natural satellite was unusually close to us, and looked bigger and brighter than normal. The result was a Supermoon, which dazzled skywatchers across the U.S.

Now its orbit has taken the moon farther away than average, just in time it to pass directly in front of the sun on Sunday, fittingly enough. Ordinarily, that would cause a total solar eclipse, with the moon blotting out the sun entirely for a few minutes. But the moon appears smaller than normal — small enough, in fact, that it can’t block the entire sun, even when they’re lined up perfectly.

During the annular eclipse, the moon passes directly in front of the sun, leaving a spectacular ring of fire. Credit: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.

So instead, the lucky folks who live in a swath of the country from Northern California into Nevada will see what’s known as an annular eclipse on Sunday, late in the afternoon, the first visible in the U.S. in 18 years — weather permitting, of course. What it means is that when the moon is dead-center in front of the sun, a fiery ring of sunlight will surround the moon’s silhouette (“annulus” is Latin for “ring”).

“I like to compare different types of eclipses on a scale of 1 to 10 as visual spectacles," said NASA's Fred Espenak of the Goddard Space Flight Center on the agency’s eclipse website. “If a partial eclipse [where the moon crosses the sun off-center] is a 5 then an annular eclipse is a 9." (His ranking for a total solar eclipse on that same 1-10 scale: “A million! It’s completely off the charts.”

One note of caution: even though the moon will cover 94 percent of the sun on Sunday, there’s still enough light to blind you. Use an approved solar filter if you want to take a look, or, suggests Espenak, “A #14 welder's glass is a good choice.” If you’ve got one lying around, that is.

Princeton Senior Exploring Solution of Bamboo as Biofuel

2012-05-18T10:45:25+00:00

If you pay any attention to headlines about alternative energy, you know by now that our two big problems with transportation fuels — our dependence on foreign oil produced by people who hate us and the greenhouse-gas emissions — could be solved, at least in part, by biofuels. They can be home-grown, and the heat-trapping carbon dioxide they pump into the atmosphere is balanced by the CO₂ they sucked out of the air while they were growing. Unfortunately, nobody’s figured out how to turn biofuels into a true replacement for diesel and gasoline, for a variety of reasons.

But a Princeton University senior named Amanda Rees may have come up with the most promising solution so far. Rees, 22, is convinced that an important part to the world’s energy future may lie in a fast-growing, nearly indestructible weed that makes homeowners tremble and pandas salivate: bamboo. “It comes in over 1,200 species,” she said with unabashed enthusiasm during a conversation in her lab, deep within Princeton’s Engineering Quadrangle. “It has a high growth rate, and it thrives in thrives in a wide range of climates.”

Best of all, she explained, bamboo is so hardy — it’s downright, aggressive, in fact — that you can grow it in places that wouldn’t be suitable for food crops. It was that concern that first got her into the bamboo game. “I’ve been really passionate about the environment ever since high school,” she said. The school was Marlborough, in Los Angeles, a private girls’ school that has a program focused on getting students internships in science labs. Rees interned at UCLA for two years, focusing on materials science projects, including finding ways to store hydrogen as a future energy source.

ON THE FRONT LINES
A series of profiles of people
on the front lines of
climate change.

Amanda Rees:
Princeton senior exploring biofuels.

Antonio Busalacchi: Climate Scientist and Certified Specialist of Spirits

Keith London: City commissioner, Hallandale Beach, Fla.

Katharine Hayhoe: Climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University

Abigail Borah: 21-year-old Middlebury junior

Edward Lu: Astrophysicist and electrical engineer

Michael Mann: Climatologist and physicist

When she arrived at Princeton, Rees knew she wanted be an engineer, but yet another summer internship, this one at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, left her with a real concern about food security. In the U.S., she said, “we’re now using more corn to make ethanol than we are for food” — a trend that drives up the price of both. “Does that really make sense?” It even makes less sense when you realize that corn ethanol may be little better for the climate than gasoline, and maybe even somewhat worse.

In trying to figure out what she’d do for her senior thesis project, Rees and her advisor, engineering professor Winston Soboyejo, went back and forth on a few ideas and finally realized that her interest in energy and food security dovetailed with one of his. “He really loves bamboo,” she said. Sobojeyo has designed pack frames for camels made of the light, strong, inexpensive stuff, and guided students in building a bamboo bicycle.

People had tried converting bamboo into ethanol before, but Soboyejo urged Rees to explore the idea of making it into butanol instead. Like ethanol, butanol is a form of alcohol, but, where ethanol is corrosive to pipes and engines in too high a concentration, butanol isn’t: you can therefore mix more of it with gasoline. “It also has a higher energy density,” Rees said, “and when you burn it, it creates less nitrous oxide and sulfur in the exhaust.”

The tricky part is that where ethanol can be fermented in open vats, the microbes that naturally produce butanol can survive only in oxygen-free environments. “A few companies are producing it,” she said, “including Butamax and gevo,” but as far as Rees knows, nobody’s making it from bamboo. “Our argument is that we’re using a better feedstock to create a better fuel; we’re capitalizing on the advantages of both.”

Since the engineering school isn’t equipped with the fermenters that you need to cook butanol, Rees also had to collaborate with faculty in Princeton’s molecular biology department. “We know about chemistry,” said Rees, a chemical and biological engineering major, “but they’re the experts on bacteria.” Rees liberated the bamboo's internal sugars by treating bamboo sawdust acid and enzymes, but bacteria she used to try and convert the sugers into butanol only produced a small amount of fuel. The process clearly needs to be improved on to be commercially useful — possibly by trying a different bacterial species.

Will Rees be the one to do the improving? She’s not sure. “I’ve thought about staying on after graduation to do another year of research. I’ll probably go to grad school eventually.”

But for a young woman with such wide-ranging interests, it may be too early to focus narrowly on the most obvious career path. Last year, Rees was named a Dalai Lama Fellow, a distinction that allowed her to pursue a project designed to further compassion and understanding.

“My project,” she said, “was going to an all girls’ school in Tanzania, “where I taught a class on energy, the environment and entrepreneurship. The girls were brilliant, just amazing. It was life-changing.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that those Tanzanian girls felt exactly the same way about her.

Major New Project Targets Mystery of Thunderstorms

2012-05-17T10:45:37+00:00

A multifaceted air and ground-based scientific field campaign is underway in the Central and Southern U.S., with about 275 scientists, pilots, and technicians out to solve meteorological mysteries about how thunderstorms affect the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.

The 45-day field campaign, known as the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry Project, or DC3, could help climate scientists fine tune their computer models and improve simulations of global warming.

The project, which involves experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA, along with researchers from Germany and numerous universities, employs a wide array of assets, including ground-based research radars, sophisticated lightning mapping arrays, as well as three heavily-modified research aircraft that will help measure changes in atmospheric chemistry before, during, and after thunderstorms move through a particular region.

Diagram of the field campaign's research platforms gathering data on a thunderstorm. Click on image for a larger version.

Credit: NCAR.

All this scientific firepower is aimed at gaining a better understanding of how thunderstorms affect the formation and transport of two key atmospheric compounds that affect the climate — nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ozone.

According to NOAA researcher Tom Ryerson, large thunderstorms act like “hoover vacuums,” sucking in surrounding air — pollutants and all — and lofting it to great heights.

Thunderstorms eventually vent these chemicals into the upper atmosphere, where they can have a significant influence on atmospheric chemistry.

“When thunderstorms form, air near the ground has nowhere to go but up,” said Mary Barth, a principal investigator on the project from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a press release. “Suddenly you have an air mass at high altitude that’s full of chemicals that can produce ozone.”

Getting a better handle on the sources and movement of NOx is a priority for climate scientists, since NOx itself is a greenhouse gas that helps warm the planet, and it’s also a precursor to ozone formation.

Ozone is created through a series of chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides, water vapor, and other gases in the presence of sunlight. Ozone in the troposphere — which is the lowest layer of the atmosphere where most weather occurs — acts as a potent greenhouse gas.

Lightning is thought to be the largest natural source of nitrogen oxides emissions. Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels for energy, also emit nitrogen oxides.

What scientists do not fully understand, and are hoping to ascertain through this field project, is exactly how much nitrogen each bolt of lightning produces.

“We don’t think that lightning is as big [a source of nitrogen oxides] as manmade sources, but we still need to know what the baseline is,” said Don Macgorman of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., and another one of DC3’s project coordinators.

Braving Turbulent Flights

NOAA’s Ryerson is one of many DC3 researchers that have descended upon the small town of Salina, Kan., where the research aircraft are based. Ryerson is a crew member aboard NASA's DC-8 research jet.

NASA's DC-8 research laboratory, which is being used in the thunderstorm research project that is currently underway.

Credit: NASA.

This assignment involves spending hours flying at low altitudes through turbulent air, as instruments attached to the jet capture data about air flowing into and out of the storm.

The DC-8 crew, along with a German-operated Dassault Falcon jet and an NSF/NCAR Gulfstream V, are based in Salina in order to be prepared if storms erupt in any of the study’s three target areas. These areas, in northeastern Colorado and central Oklahoma, as well as northern Alabama, were chosen because of an extensive ground-based network of weather instruments, such as cutting edge mobile radar systems and lightning mapping arrays that can complement the data gathered from the air.

These regions also have different types of manmade and natural sources of pollutants and gases that affect atmospheric chemistry.

“It’s going to be really fun to contrast what’s being processed by the storms from these three different regions,” said NCAR’s Barth in an interview.

The field campaign is a formidable logistical challenge, given the many teams and fast-moving research platforms involved.

It’s no easy task to arrange flight patterns while complying with changing air traffic control needs, Ryerson said. “It’s a dance we have to perform each time. It’s kind of like jazz, we have to improvise.”

The research flights themselves aren’t all that pleasant for those aboard the aircraft, either. Thunderstorms, after all, are usually something that pilots avoid, not fly close to or into.

Ryerson noted that many have already suffered from some degree of airsickness, even during the training flights.

But that’s a price they’re willing to pay in order to gather valuable data.

Arctic Death Spiral: More Bad News about Sea Ice

2012-05-16T18:50:24+00:00

The sea ice that blankets the Arctic Ocean each winter peaked in early March this year, as usual, and is now in retreat, en route to its annual minimum extent in September. How low it will go is something scientists worry: ice reflects lots of sunlight back into space, and when the darker ocean underneath is exposed, more sunlight is absorbed to add to global warming.

That’s the simple version of the story, but things look even worse when you dig into the details. For one thing, all that open water does re-freeze each winter, but it freezes into a relatively thin layer known as seasonal, or first-year ice. Because it’s so thin, first-year ice tends to melt back quickly the following season, giving the ocean a chance to warm things up even more in what National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze has called a “death spiral” that could lead to ice-free Arctic summers by 2030.

The sun reflects over thin sea ice and a few floating icebergs. Credit: Jefferson Beck/NASA

But it’s worse than that, says a new analysis by scientists at the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. “First-year ice is not just thinner, “ said Donald Perovich, lead author of a report in Geophysical Research Letters, in an interview. “We’re also beginning to realize it has other properties.” The most important: new ice is less reflective than old ice, for most of the year, anyway. It absorbs more heat from the Sun, which means it doesn’t just melt faster: it actually speeds up its own melting.

Here’s how it happens, according to Perovich. “Most of the precipitation in the Arctic,” he said, “happens at the end of summer and in the early fall.” When the snow first begins to fall, it builds on the multi-year ice, but disappears onto the patches of open ocean. Those patches eventually freeze, and the snow sticks there as well; it just forms a thinner layer. So for most of the winter, all of the ice, thick and thin, is covered with a brightly reflective blanket. That would be good as far as warming is concerned, except that for most of the winter, the Sun doesn’t rise.

When the Sun finally does rise in spring, it melts the thinner snow first, forming heat-absorbing pools on the surface of the first-year ice. The older ice eventually catches up, forming pools of its own, but since the surface is crumpled, the ponds don’t spread as widely, and they absorb less heat.

In short, the death spiral — where more melting leads to more melting — appears to be even steeper than anyone thought.

That doesn’t mean that there’s less ice literally every year. The lowest levels ever recorded happened in September of 2007; since then, coverage has been bouncing around near, but not quite at, those historic lows, and first-year ice in the winter has been near its historic highs.

“What it means,” Perovich said, “is that with more seasonal ice, the Arctic is more susceptible to an outlier kind of year.” If there’s significantly more heat in a particular year due to natural variations, in other words, there could be a huge loss of ice. It’s kind of like a staircase, Petrovic said. “It bounces around for a while, then there’s a drop to a new normal, then it bounces around.” The point, he said, is that “we now have a type of ice cover that’s even easier to knock over than it was before.”

What that means is that at some point in the not too distant future, an unusually warm summer (even for a globally warming world) could knock the ice in the Arctic ocean down another major step, and take the world closer to the time when all of it vanishes — creating a new heat-trapping region where none existed before, and pushing climate change into an even higher gear.

Tiny Frigid Bubbles Get to the Core of Climate Change

2012-05-16T10:59:59+00:00

As Michael Bender prepared to lead the way into the storage area of his lab at Princeton University, he gave a visitor a quizzical look. “You really might want to put these on,” he said, holding up a bulky red parka and a pair of thick gloves. “Oh, I’ll be fine,” said his guest. “No, really,” Bender insisted gently. “It would be a good idea.”

A minute later, it all made a lot more sense. The storage area is a refrigerator the size of a walk-in closet, chilled to minus 30°F, and with a powerful fan blowing just to ensure the frigid air circulates evenly to every corner of the cramped space. Plastic foam coolers and cardboard boxes lined with insulation cover most of the floor, with more piled on top. Bender reached into one of the coolers, pulled out a plastic bag with a lump of ice inside and held it to the light. On close inspection, you could see that the ice was permeated with tiny bubbles, as though it was a chunk of frozen Sprite — and if you chipped off a piece and dropped it into a glass of water, the ice would sizzle and hiss, as the bubbles escaped.

A researcher insepcts a freshly drilled ice core. Credit: Kendrick Taylor/WAIS Divide Ice Core Project Research Professor.

These bubbles didn’t come out of a soft-drink factory, however. They’re bits of ancient atmosphere, trapped in the spaces between fallen snowflakes that eventually became welded into a mass of solid ice in the world’s truly cold places. “This one is from Antarctica,” Bender said over the whirr of the fan. “And this,” he said, retrieving another sample, “comes from Greenland.”

The bubbles, preserved like flies in amber, are tiny time capsules that hold a record of what the air was like — its temperature, the gases it was made of, the tiny particles of dust and pollen and volcanic ash it carried — when the snow first fell. And because each year’s snowfall buries the snow from the previous year, which buries the snow from the year before, and so on into the past, the bubbles that come from deeper layers contain air that’s tens or even hundreds of thousands of years old.

By gently melting slices of ice from different depths to release and study this preserved air, scientists like Bender have teased out the story of a climate that has changed drastically, plunging into the frigid depths of ice ages and emerging into warm interglacial periods over at least the past 800,000 years.

In large part, their goal is to understand how the climate responds to changing concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which for the first time in the planet’s history are generated from human activity more than natural sources. They’re reading the past in order to understand what the future might hold.

What the past has told them already is that there’s been an intimate relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature as far back as they can see. When CO₂ is high, so is the thermometer, and when it drops, the temperature goes with it. But the ice can tell them much more than that. It also carries information about what kinds of vegetation thrived in different eras, and whether the planet was moist or dry, and even how bright the Sun was.

A researcher examines layers in a snow pit deposited by different storms. Credit: Kendrick Taylo/WAIS Divide Ice Core Project.

All of that information and more is locked up deep ice; it’s Bender’s job, and that of his colleagues across the world, to unlock it.

The concept is simple enough, but the execution and analysis can be extremely complicated. The first step, Bender explained back outside the refrigerator, is to retrieve samples from sheets of ice that can be thousands of feet thick. U.S. scientists rely mostly on crews from Ice Core Drilling Services, based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who use custom-designed equipment to extract cylinders, or cores of ice, a little less than 5 inches across. Back in the lab, where the cylinders are shipped packed in dry ice, you can easily see the layers representing individual years, much as you can see each year of a tree’s growth in its annual rings.

You don’t just show up in Antarctica and drill anywhere, though. “The preferred place to work,” Bender said, “is at a dome.” These are the ice plateaus that mark the very highest points on the world’s highest continent. They’re ideal for two reasons. First, the ice sheet is thickest here, so you can drill most deeply into the past. Second, Bender said, “Once you get off the highest point, the ice is flowing laterally, trying to discharge into the ocean as bergs. The flow leads to the deepest layers being folded and mixed up.”

Even when the layers are nice and orderly, however, the information scientists can extract from the air bubbles, and also from the ice that surrounds them, isn’t much good if they don’t know how old a given layer is. They do it by comparing ice cores with other ancient records — sediments from the bottom of the sea, for example, where dust and organic matter, including shells of tiny plankton known as foraminifera, form their own layers.

Ice core storage facility at the National Ice Core Laboratory.

The organic material’s age can be teased out with radioactive dating, and if you go far enough back, you can see a change in the orientation of tiny iron particles from a time when Earth’s north and south magnetic poles changed places about 780,000 years ago. (Contrary to what some poorly informed folks believe, these reversals, which happen every so often, have nothing to do with climate change). Scientists can also synchronize the sea floor and ice core records by looking for thin layers of ash that mark massive volcanic eruptions.

Once they’ve figured the age of a layer in an ice core, paleoclimatologists melt the ice and capture the trapped air. The meltwater tells them what the air temperature was at the time the original snow actually fell, based on the form of oxygen the water contains. The liberated air, meanwhile, tells the scientists how much CO₂ was in the atmosphere at the time.

As climate skeptics love to point out, these measurements lead to an apparent paradox: if you look closely enough, you see that over and over, as ice ages gave way to warm interglacial periods, the temperature began to rise before the CO₂. In fact, this makes perfect sense. Enormous amounts of CO₂are stored in the deep ocean, so when changes in Earth’s orbit bring more sunlight to the poles, the jolt of warmth liberates the stored gas, leading to more warming, and ultimately to the end of the ice age. A recent paper showed exactly how it might have played out.

Bubbles containing ancient gases are visible in a piece of an Antarctic ice core sample. Credit: Oregon State University.

Scientists like Bender aren’t content just to leave it at that, however. They’re constantly trying to determine new ways to slice and dice ancient air see what other stories they might tell of the ancient past. They look for traces of methane, for example, which naturally rise and fall as methane-burping wetlands spread during wetter times and shrink when it’s dry — a clue to average rainfall at different times in Earth’s history. They look for nitrous oxide, produced by bacteria in drier soils. They even look for changes in the mixture of gases that tell them how quickly the original snow grains welded themselves together, which tells them how bright the sun was at any given era.

All of that comes from the continuous ice-core record, which goes no more than 800,000 years into the past. But Bender is determined to break that barrier. His lab is now working with ice he believes to be more than a million years old. You can’t use conventional dating techniques to confirm its antiquity, but he and his colleagues think they’ve figured out a way (it has to do with radioactive argon).

It’s not just curiosity that drives him. For the past million years or so, ice ages have lasted about 100,000 years each (the information comes not just from ice cores, but also from geological records). But before that, Bender said, “the cycles lasted 40,000 years, and the ice volume was only half of what we’ve gotten more recently.” Nobody really knows why — but there was clearly something different going on, quite possibly having to do with a mix of greenhouse gases different from what came later.

Understanding what changed at a million years B.C. could help climate scientists better understand the climate system overall. That in turn will help climatologists to gauge the coming impacts of human-generated greenhouse gases more accurately. The better the information they have to feed into their models, the more we can trust the projections that come out — and plan for what’s on the way.

Globe Records Fifth-Warmest April on Record

2012-05-15T16:22:48+00:00

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report released Tuesday, last month was the fifth warmest April on record (record-keeping began in 1880, so we’re talking 132 years).

NOAA’s analysis of global temperatures showed that the planet’s thermometer stood at 57.87°F for the month, averaged over night and day, land and sea, from the poles to the equator. That’s 1.17°F higher than the 20^th-century average — the biggest such departure from average of any month since November, 2010. The last time April was below that average was in 1976, when Gerald Ford was president.

Global surface temperature departures from average during April 2012. Credit: NOAA.

Some places that drove April numbers up, said NOAA, included Alaska, the lower 48 states of the U.S., Mexico and most of Russia. The places that kept the global average from being even higher — which is to say, places that were cooler than average — included Scandinavia (particularly Norway and Sweden), the United Kingdom, and northern Australia.

NOAA also reported that La Nina, the Pacific ocean current that’s been around since for about a year and a half, has dissipated. Normally, La Nina is associated with cooler than average global temperatures; it tends to hold back the longer-term warming associated with human greenhouse gases. With the brakes now off, it’s not at all implausible that warming will increase over the next year or so.

New Push to Limit ‘Super Greenhouse’ Gases

2012-05-15T11:00:46+00:00

United Nations climate change talks may be on a slow train to nowhere, but that doesn't mean countries can't try tackling global warming at the international level. Friday, the Federated States of Micronesia, a Pacific island nation, submitted a plan to amend the 1989 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer to phase down the production and use of so-called "super-greenhouse gases."

The Micronesian proposal, which has garnered the support of more than 100 parties to the ozone treaty, including the U.S. and the European Union, seeks to cut emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are compounds that contain carbon, hydrogen, and fluorine. These substances are used as solvents, refrigerants, firefighting agents, and propellants. They were introduced as a substitute for the chloroflourocarbons, or CFCs, that scientists discovered were destroying the Earth's protective ozone layer — thereby allowing greater amounts of the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays to reach the Earth's surface.

The Antarctic ozone hole as depicted by NASA satellite sensors in 2004. Credit: NASA.

Unlike CFCs, HFCs don't destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere, but they do have a downside: they are extremely powerful global warming gases. In fact, HFC-134a, which is the most popular HFC substitute and is used in air conditioning systems in vehicles, has a global warming potential that is more than 1,400 times that of carbon dioxide, the main manmade global warming gas.

HFCs don't remain in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does, though, which means that the benefits of reducing their use could be seen rather quickly. This makes reducing HFCs an attractive option for low-lying island nations like Micronesia, which are worried about sea level rise during the next several decades.

"In Durban the world agreed to develop a new climate plan by 2015 to go into effect in 2020, but we need action now, and an agreement to phase down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol is the best strategy this year," said Micronesian ambassador Asterio Takesy in a press release.

In the U.S., HFC emissions have skyrocketed in recent years, growing by 216 percent between 1990 and 2009, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. The Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), an environmental think tank in Washington, claims that phasing down HFC production and use under the Micronesian plan would be the equivalent of preventing 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

"Phasing down HFCs is the biggest, fastest, cheapest piece of climate mitigation available to the world in the next few years," IGSD president Durwood Zaelke said.

With U.N. climate talks deadlocked, environmental advocates have increasingly turned to the Montreal Protocol to address greenhouse gases that fall under that treaty's purview. The Protocol is widely considered to be one of international environmental law's greatest success stories, responsible for slashing emissions of ozone-depleting substances and helping address climate change at the same time.

Zaelke said the proposal may draw opposition from India and Brazil, among others, due to concerns that an HFC phaseout would harm industry, and because of their opposition to mandatory emissions reductions.

This isn't the first time that Micronesia has spearheaded an effort to address global warming within the framework of the Montreal Protocol, either. In 2007, parties to the treaty agreed to a Micronesian plant to accelerate the phase-out of HCFCs, another CFC substitute that is also a potent global warming agent. The U.S., along with Canada and Mexico, have submitted a similar proposal for an HFC phase-down.

A final decision on the latest amendment won't be reached until November, when treaty talks take place in Geneva, Switzerland.

A Tour of Drought as it Unfolds Across the U.S.

2012-05-15T09:55:43+00:00

Last year at this time, all eyes were on Texas, where drought conditions were intensifying into what became that state’s worst single year drought on record, causing nearly $8 billion in economic losses. Recently, though, Texas has gone from famine to feast in the precipitation department, and drought concerns for the upcoming summer are focused farther to the west, as drought tightens its grip across a broad swath of the interior West and Southwest

In addition to the West, drought conditions are also prevalent in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and parts of the Northeast as well, along with a small pocket in the Upper Midwest. In all, 56 percent of the Lower 48 states were experiencing drought conditions as of May 8, almost twice the area compared to last year at this time, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.

U.S. Drought Monitor issued May 8, 2012. Click on image for a larger version.

Fortunately, much of the West had such bountiful winter precipitation last year that the risk of water supply disruptions are rather low in most areas, but that could change if the current weather pattern lasts much longer. Water officials in Colorado, for example, have begun urging residents to start conserving water in case the dry spell continues.

Take a look at the streamflow forecast for the West this summer compared to last year at this time. The orange and red hues this year indicate well below average streamflow conditions are likely, as unusually thin and dry snow cover yields less water than usual. Last year at this time, the same map showed above average streamflow conditions for most of the West.

Western streamflow outlook for spring/summer 2012. Credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service. Click on image for a larger version.

In addition to heightened water supply concerns, the dry conditions may provide favorable conditions for a busier wildfire season, including in California, as Climate Central reported on May 11.

Heavy rains and severe weather have dominated weather headlines in Texas recently — a stark contrast from last spring — and the rainfall has eroded what was a widespread area of severe-to-exceptional drought conditions. As can be seen in this Drought Monitor map, the severe drought conditions are now confined to northern and western Texas, with dramatic improvement in southern and southeastern areas.

Drought monitor image and statistics showing improved conditions in Texas. Credit: NOAA/USDA. Click on image for a larger version.

Parts of Texas picked up nearly a foot of rainfall during in a seven-day period ending on May 14, eating away at the large precipitation deficit the state had been facing.

In the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, though, meaningful drought relief has been wanting. In Georgia and South Carolina, for example, pop-up thunderstorms have provided some rainfall recently, but nowhere near the widespread rains needed to put a solid dent in the drought conditions that intensified during the winter.

The Southeast drought is very likely related to the La Niña conditions that existed in the Pacific Ocean last winter. La Niña events, which feature cooler-than-average waters in the equatorial Tropical Pacific, tend to influence weather patterns in such a way that it leads to drier-than-average winter conditions in the southern tier of the U.S. Fortunately, La Niña has diminished, with neither La Niña or El Niño conditions likely for the next few months, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and forecasters affiliated with Columbia University (some researchers refer to the absence of La Niña and El Niño as “La Nada”).

Texas rainfall during the seven-day period ending May 14, 2012. Credit: NOAA. Click on image for a larger version.

The latest drought outlook issued by the Climate Prediction Center shows the likelihood of some improvement in drought conditions for Florida and North Carolina, but Georgia and South Carolina aren’t looking quite as good for some reason.

In the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, forecasts favor improving drought conditions. Maryland and Delaware had their driest January to April period on record.

Drought conditions are also expected to improve in parts of the Upper Midwest.

U.S. Drought Monitor issued May 8, 2012. Click on image for a larger version.

Of course, these forecasts aren't set in stone. If a tropical storm or hurricane were to make landfall in northern Florida or coastal Georgia, for example, it could end the southeastern drought. But as Texas learned last year, when Tropical Storm Don essentially evaporated as it made landfall, it's probably best not to hold your breath for such relief.

Dreaming of Wind Energy in the Shadow of the Himalayas

2012-05-14T11:15:04+00:00

By Robert van Waarden

Part 3 in a series

Amrit points it out as we zoom past on his motorbike. If you look closely, past the Nokia sign, past the other motorbikes, over the jumble of electric wires, and let your eyes drift upward, you might see it. It is a solution to the energy problems of Nepal, turning in the wind. Amrit turns a corner, jokes with a security guard and drives into the grounds of the Kathmandu Engineering College. A few minutes later we are on the roof, listening to the whirling of his homemade wind turbine and looking out over this crowded and noisy city called Kathmandu.

Amrit Singh Thapa, owner of Eenergys.com, lives and breathes wind energy. When he was still a student at the Engineering College, he began researching sustainable technology and felt deeply that his path was entwined with wind energy. He hasn’t looked back since.

“My life has been changed drastically since I got involved in wind energy. I don’t have time to sleep. My experience is very small, but there is no one with my experience in Nepal. That is the main factor; from the management, technical, ground, and field level, I have to manage and tackle everything. I am working as the complete package.”

Kathmandu is in the midst of an energy crisis. The Himalayas provide ample opportunity to tap hydro resources, but current supply is insufficient for the entire electrical needs of the city and in winter, when the reservoirs are low or landslides fill the reservoirs, hydro capacity is compromised.

“In the summer we have 3 to 4 hours a day of load shedding”, says Amrit, using the all-too-common term for a government scheduled black-out of city regions. “In the winter it will be even higher, in 24 hours we will only get 18 hours of electricity. This is the past record of maybe 4 years.”

Amrit dreams of seeing turbines on the hills surrounding the Kathmandu valley one day. He believes that wind energy is the solution to the energy crisis in Nepal. His calculations show that it is feasible, and he cites the build time difference between wind and hydro as an additional plus.

“Kathmandu has a daily demand for 200 Megawatt. Around the Kathmandu Valley we can take 70 to 100 Megawatt from wind energy. In only one year we can make a big energy project, and you can’t do that with hydro power”, says Amrit.

The only thing holding wind energy back is proof to the Nepal business, government and people that the technology can work and be sustained. If Amrit can do that, and he thinks he can, then the money will flow and the technology will be replicated across the country.

“I think that it only takes one or two years to make a big windmill project in Nepal. I am quite optimistic. I hope that I can make it, and I can show that Nepal can also generate wind energy.”

As Amrit and I climb down from the roof, his story reminds me that one person can make a difference. If he has his way, this energetic young man’s vision and passion for wind could be the difference for Nepal’s energy problem.

For more information about Amrit’s work, visit http://eenergys.com/

This blog post is Part 3 of a series of wind energy stories from photographer Robert van Waarden. Next up is the De Clerck family, a farming family in the Netherlands that enthusiastically co-operatively harvest wind energy.

Part 1: Roman Jurgi in the Czech Republic.

Part 2: Piet Willem Chevalier in Mali.

Part 3: Amrit Singh Thapa in Kathmandu.

Bangladesh Has Seen the Enemy That is Climate Change

2012-05-13T11:29:59+00:00

By John Vidal, The Guardian

Rebecca Sultan's life has been shattered twice in a few years. First, the 140mph winds of Cyclone Sidr ripped through her village, Gazipara, flattening houses, killing 6,000 people and devastating the lives of millions as it slammed into southern Bangladesh in 2007.

Then, 18 months later, as Sultan was recovering, Cyclone Aila tore in from the Bay of Bengal with torrential rains, breaching the coastal embankments and flooding her fields with salt water.

Storms of this intensity historically happen in Bangladesh once every 20 to 30 years. But two "super-cyclones" in two years, followed by a narrow escape when super-cyclone Nargis killed 100,000 people in nearby Burma a year later, convinced Sultan and her village, as well as many skeptics in government, that climate change was happening and Bangladesh's very survival was at stake.

Grappling with solutions, villagers repair a vital flood-protecting embankment after Cyclone Aila struck in 2009. Credit: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty.

Gazipara, like thousands of other villages in coastal Bangladesh, is now racing to adapt to the increased flooding, erosion and salt-water intrusion.

Sultan and 30 other women have raised their small houses and toilets several feet up on to earth plinths. Others are growing more salt-tolerant crops and fruit trees, and most families are trying different ways to grow vegetables. "We know we must live with climate change and are trying to adapt," said Sultan.

Elsewhere in Bangladesh, hundreds of communities are strengthening embankments, planting protective shelter belts, digging new ponds and wells and collecting fresh water. Some want to build bunkers to store their valuables, others want cyclone shelters.

"I am quite amazed at how people are grappling with climate change and are adapting," said Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi scientist who is head of the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London and an adviser to the Bangladesh government on how to adapt to climate change.

"It's by far the most aware society on climate change in the world," Huq said. "It has seen the enemy and is arming itself to deal with it. The country is now on a war footing against climate change. They are grappling with solutions. They don't have them all yet but they will. I see Bangladesh as a pioneer.

It has adapted more than any other country to the extremes of weather that climate change is expected to bring."

With the latest research showing more droughts in the country's north and rising sea levels, more than 30 million Bangladeshis are liable to lose everything from climate change in the next 30 to 50 years, said Atiq Rahman, director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies and a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report.

"It's extreme events, like super-cyclones and the droughts, that will dominate in future, not the mean [average]," Rahman said. "It's the extra days of heat or cold or the intensity of the cyclones that will affect life most. Poor people cannot wait for global leadership on climate change — they are acting now. They are paying with their own lives, their own resources, their own efforts. They cannot wait. It is not a question of choice."

The trouble, Rahman told a conference on community adaptation last week in Dhaka, is that traditional knowledge about when to plant which crops, or to harvest, may not be sufficient. "Government recognizes it is a very real threat. But what happens in the future will not be indicated by what has happened in the past. There is a new knowledge challenge," he says.

A woman wades through a flood in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Credit: Sumaiya Ahmed/flickr.

"Many know to plant more tolerant crops in hard years, but lack the drought-tolerant or salt-resistant seeds now needed to deal with worsening conditions. We need new technologies, funds and knowledge."

But, said the foreign minister, Dipu Moni, rich countries had not given the money they had pledged to help Bangladesh and other vulnerable countries adapt. "Climate change is real and happening," Moni said. "A 1°C rise in temperatures for Bangladesh equates to a 10% loss of GDP. One event like Sidr can take 10 to 20 years to recover from and cost us billions of dollars. But we don't see the money coming.

"The people being affected are not the big banks but the poor. Our plight goes quite unnoticed. It does not make the rich countries produce trillions of dollars overnight. It's a shame, but we keep trying."

According to her ministry, Bangladesh has received $125 million so far, including $75 million from the Department for International Development (DfID). "But [countries] have refused to [say] if the climate change money is taken out of [the existing] aid basket," said a senior civil servant. "We want clear guarantees that this money will be on top of official development assistance money (ODA). DfID has not clarified this is additional to ODA."

On the coast, Sultan pondered the changes. "The difference we've all seen in the weather in just a few years is great. Now we are getting sudden rains, we don't know when to expect them; the water levels rise faster, the erosion is greater and we are getting more salinity. We used to know when the seasons would change; now they are temperamental. We are resilient and determined to adapt to whatever happens, but it is hard."

Reprinted from The Guardian with permission.

Small Island States in Clean Energy Race

2012-05-12T11:30:22+00:00

By John Vidal, The Guardian

They seldom meet on the cricket or football fields, but the world's small island developing states are informally competing with each other to be the first to ditch fossil fuels and embrace clean energy.

A new United Nations analysis of the most recent energy plans of 52 low lying poor countries - traditionally heavily dependent on imports of petrol and oil - shows the Caribbean island of Dominica leading the world with plans to become carbon "negative" by 2020. The Maldives is not far behind, hoping to be carbon neutral by 2020. Tuvalu and the Cook islands intend to generate all their electricity from renewables by 2020 and Timor-Leste, the poorest country in Asia, expects to provide solar electricity to all its 100,000 families by 2030.

Sunlight warms the town of Roseau. The Caribbean island of Dominica plans to become carbon 'negative' by 2020. Credit: Brian Jannsen/Alamy

With Tonga, Samoa, Nauru, Mauritius and many other countries also volunteering to switch to solar, geothermal and wind energy, the collective target of the group of 52 small island developing states is a 45 percent cut in emissions in the next 18 years - considerably more than the world's rich countries who between them have pledged 12-18 percent cuts by 2020.

"We are showing the world leadership," said Dominican ambassador to the UN, Vince Henderson, at a UN development program meeting ahead of next week's reconvened climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

"This is about survival as well as economics. We are spending $220 million a year importing fuel so it is in our interests. It is vested interests by the oil, coal and fossil fuel industries that is preventing rich countries meeting their obligations. We are demanding that all countries take their responsibilities."

"Small island developing states can leap toward the goal of a poverty-free and prosperous future by changing their energy sectors," said Barbados Prime Minister, Freundel Stuart. "We can rally the international community with a unified voice, sharing our aspiration to become fully sustainable."

View to Roseau, the capital of the Commonwealth of Dominica. Credit: flickr/palestrina55

In a separate development, the world's 47 least developed countries (LDCs) will propose on Monday what they call a "bold new plan" to help break the deadlock and speed up the UN climate talks. It is expected that the group, which sided with the EU in the final hours of the Durban climate summit last December, will press for a new body to negotiate a second protocol under the UN climate convention as well as accept 75 percent approval on decisions rather than the complete consensus of all countries.

"Countries agreed to complete negotiations by 2015, but such deadlines have been broken before," said Pa Ousman Jarju, the chair of the LDC group. "Our countries cannot wait. We are already feeling the effects of climate change, but the time has come for us to be leaders in the international effort to address this global challenge."

"The creation of a new body to negotiate a second protocol … represents an overdue acknowledgement by all parties that the climate convention and the Kyoto protocol alone are insufficient to drive action consistent with the ultimate objective of the convention," said Jarju.

Reprinted from The Guardian with permission.

House Cuts Funding for Climate Education, Outreach

2012-05-11T14:35:34+00:00

The House passed a bill on Thursday that would make significant cuts to federal climate change education and outreach efforts. Within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the House approved an amendment to cut off funding for the agency’s online portal for climate information, Climate.gov. The website, which has been in a prototype phase supported by a shoestring budget for more than a year, is aimed at communicating climate science information to policy makers, businesses, and the public. It contains climate data, imagery, videos, and lengthy stories about climate change adaptation measures, as well as lots of detailed information on recent climate news.

The House also voted in favor of an amendment that would cut off all funding for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) climate change education program. That amendment passed by a vote of 238-188.

Credit: Climate.gov

Both cuts came during consideration of the Fiscal Year 2013 appropriations bill covering the Commerce, Justice, Science and related agencies. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department.

The NOAA amendment, sponsored by Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md), would prevent the website from receiving a 56 percent increase in funds compared to last year, for a total of $542,000. “I don’t know of many Maryland families who have received a 56 percent increase in their incomes this year during the longest sustained period of high unemployment in our country’s history — and it’s not fair for a government agency to do so either,” Harris said in a press release.

As Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang blog reported, the website is intended to give state and local decisionmakers the tools necessary to help make their communities more resilient to climate variability, climate change, and extreme events. Among the plans for the next year, NOAA hopes to construct online decision support tools on Climate.gov to help decision-makers prepare for, and respond to, climate and extreme weather events.

The website aims to solve one of the key problems the public faces when trying to access NOAA's climate data — that information is scattered across a half dozen or more offices within the agency, from the Climate Prediction Center to the National Climatic Data Center. One currently needs a Ph.D. in bureaucratic acronyms to navigate all of the different websites, but with Climate.gov, there would be a one-stop shop for this information.

The House move to cut off the modest amount of funding for the climate website is noteworthy because it runs contrary to NOAA’s mission, which is to “understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts” and “to share that knowledge and information with others.”

In other words, if agreed to by the Senate and signed into law by the President, the amendment would hinder NOAA from doing the job it is supposed to be doing.

Last year, Congress blocked NOAA's attempt to reorganize itself and form a new National Climate Service. This reorganization plan, which would not have required any new funds, was met with hostility largely because many congressmen interpreted it as an attempt to set up an Obama Administration global warming "propaganda" agency.

The House-passed appropriations bill now heads to the Senate, where these cuts and other provisions are likely to face opposition.

After Dry ‘Rainy Season,’ Calif. Faces High Wildfire Risks

2012-05-11T10:30:24+00:00

In California, May typically marks the beginning of a warm and dry summer season. This year, however, things are different. Not only has it been warm and dry for the past couple weeks; it’s been warm and dry for months. So dry, in fact, that officials are warning the risk of wildfires across much of the state is going to be much worse than usual, for several months to come.

According to their most recent outlook, the National Interagency Fire Center predicts that large parts of southern and central California, along with forests throughout the Sierra Nevada, are likely to see more wildfires than normal, particularly later this summer.

Three firefighters watch as a wildfire approaches Carbon Canyon road near Brea, Calif., in 2008. Credit: Mike Blake/Reuters

“A big chunk of the state is looking at above-average wildfire risk,” said Rob Krohn, a meteorologist with the U.S. Forestry Service’s Predictive Services Branch in Riverside. According to Krohn, the exceptionally dry conditions in California during most of this winter have left many areas parched and vulnerable to ignition from both human and natural causes.

This summer’s increased threat of wildfires is something Californians can expect to see more often in coming decades. Climate researchers predict that over the next 75 years, a combination of warmer winters, reduced snowpack, earlier snowmelts, and hotter, drier summers will lead to more wildfires in forested parts of the state. Year-to-year variations in the weather will still heavily influence fire risk in the future, as it has this year, but just how devastating this year’s wildfires are in California will be a warning of the forests’ vulnerability to the developing warmer, drier climate.

The past few years have been relatively quiet for wildfires in California, following two devastatingly dry years in 2007 and 2008, when more than 800,000 acres burned.

During a May 9 press conference, California State Climatologist Mike Anderson described the unusual weather in California this past winter.

“December [2011] was the second driest December in over a hundred years,” Anderson said. Several areas of the state received only 5-to-10 percent of their usual rainfall in December and heading into mid-January, it appeared California might have its driest winter on record.

A few days of heavy rain in late January brought a spot of relief. Then, a wetter than usual March boosted total winter precipitation. Nevertheless, all but the most northern parts of California still registered well below average total rain and snowfall, Anderson said.

Wildfires light up the night sky in San Bernardino in 2008. Credit: Chris Doolittle

And in terms of wildfire risk, Krohn said the wet weather in March and early April came too late. By then the damage was done. While the rain may have helped prevent spring wildfires from starting — to date this year only about 1,000 acres have burned in California, well below normal — plants and trees rely heavily on the rain that falls early in the season to help them stay moist and healthy throughout the dry summer season. Without moisture from early rain, the plants simply haven’t been taking up water that fell later in the spring.

Despite the arid winter, California water supplies are in generally good condition leading into summer. Thanks to record wet conditions last year, most groundwater basins and reservoirs are still high, and the California Department of Water Resources says most people — and farmers — won’t suffer from this winter’s drier than normal conditions.

Unfortunately, these reservoirs have little influence on the wildfire risk, And more often that not in California, Krohn said, predictions for bad wildfire years tend to come true.

“Odds are that these conditions will translate into above normal fire activity this year,” Krohn said. The U.S. Forest Service, along with the National Weather Service, will continue to revise the wildfire outlook throughout the summer, and Krohn said there is a small chance that heavy rains later this summer could develop, which would dampen this fire season.

It’s more likely, however, that local officials will begin to implement burning restrictions across much of the state, particularly as the wildfire risk worsens later this summer.

Image of the Day: A Tasty Volcano-Powered Barbecue

2012-05-10T12:30:25+00:00

How about a little volcano-powered barbecue? As a great display of sustainability, and as an alternative to fire, electricity and natural gas, chefs in the Canary Islands heat their meat over a geothermal stove. According to the BCC, the volcano hasn't erupted since 1824, so there is no lava involved. Instead, a basalt pit funnels the earth’s natural heat to the surface, where temperatures range between 750°F and 1,110°F.

Credit: Sylviane Moss

“I Love Windpower” Brings Energy and Identity to Mali

2012-05-10T12:00:55+00:00

By Robert van Waarden

Part 2 of a series

“If I had to sum it up in one word, I would say identity,” says Piet Willem Chevalier, owner and operator of I Love Windpower. “On my first trip to Mali, I saw this group of people that were really shy, that didn’t want to ask questions, they had no confidence. After we made that first turbine, we threw a party and it was quite amazing to see how this sense of identity grew.”

One day Piet literally drove off the road, transfixed by a set of wind turbines. He couldn’t have known at that time that this incident would change his life. In a few years he would be bringing wind power to Mali where the poorest communities often pay the highest rates for energy.

One thing led to another and Piet started working as an engineer for Siemens wind. After about a year he discovered the work of Welsh engineer, Hugh Piggott. Mr. Piggott is the inventor of an open-source, affordable, small-scale wind turbine design. Piet invited Hugh to come and teach a workshop in the Netherlands. It took some convincing, but Mr. Piggott finally agreed.

That workshop taught Piet how to build these turbines, and in doing so it changed Piet’s life. Piet knew that he needed to take this new skill and technology to a place where it would be most beneficial and he could pass it on. One of his best friends was from Mali and he figured that Mali was as good as anywhere else to get started. He founded I Love Windpower. Designing a course that was easy to teach, transcended language barriers and used readily available materials, Piet flew to Mali. In two weeks, he and a team of 10 people, five who couldn’t read or write and five who couldn’t speak any French, built a better turbine than Piet himself had done.

The windmills deliver energy to local homes, but they also had some unexpected impacts. Two men participating in the workshop were from different tribes that for the last 20 years had not spoken to each other. During the workshop the two men became great friends, and now the tribes are talking again. The sense of identity and ownership derived from this windmill project has been remarkable.

“This is something that I never realized when starting this. Even if this project is going to fail completely and they never make a business out of it - which I still believe is possible and just takes some more time - every investment has accomplished so much from a social and identity perspective.”

Recent events in Mali have threatened I Love Windpower’s projects – not only because of the military coup and the rebel unrest, but also due to an impending food crisis. Piet recently wondered whether his little amount of money would be better used feeding people. After much debate with his team, they decided to keep the project running. They thought giving these people something to be proud of, and which one day may become a financially sustainable business, was deemed equally important.

Piet is now also working with Wind Empowerment, a group dedicated to small turbine development across Africa and the globe. He will be attending Rio+20 and setting up windmills around the conference. Some of his volunteers have taken the skills gained with Piet even further, and in one case started the Tanzania branch of I Love Windpower.

As for the Mali project, it is too early to see where it will go, but one thing remains certain, small-scale windmills are helping build community and identity while providing much needed electricity to Mali.

This blog post is Part 2 of a series of wind energy stories from photographer Robert van Waarden. Next Amrit Singh Thapa, an engineer from Nepal who has a big wind energy vision. Last week: Roman Juriga in the Czech Republic.

Part 1: Roman Jurgi in the Czech Republic.

Part 2: Piet Willem Chevalier in Mali.

Part 3: Amrit Singh Thapa in Kathmandu.