Today, I stumbled – this is the term for using the internet without using Google – upon Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews – WIREs Climate Change – a new publishing effort to create a cross-disciplinary platform for climate change.

The first issue of WIREs CC is just available online, as is a series of Editorial Commentaries from the 14 sub-sections of the online journal (see list below my signature).

These are mostly available open access and provide a nice set of short, but densely referenced, overviews from authors who have been working for many years at each respective “coalface” (perhaps not the best metaphor to use these days?!).

The ToC of the first issue is available here:

http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresIssue/wisId-WCC_1_1.html

and the Early Online Editorials are at:

http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresIssue/wisId-WCC.html?pageType=early

A nice (rare?) combination of the rigour of peer-review, coupled with escape from academic “silos”,and the twin advantages of brevity – each editorial is just a few pages – yet well-referenced for further research.

Related posts:

1. Special Issue of NRF on Climate Change
2. New journal issue on CC/Marine Systems
3. New Journal: Weather, Climate, and Society

Three Stanford graduate students from programs in law and biology founded the journal in 2008 as an outlet for interdisciplinary, science-based papers on public policy.  Their latest issue follows a symposium hosted by SJLSP in April 2009 called “Climate Change and Marine Systems: Managing for Resiliency.”   The symposium attracted participants from regional NGO’s, state and federal agencies, and academia to discuss themes of ocean energy, marine reserves and fisheries.

SJLSP articles often represent the collaboration of scientists and legal scholars.  In the current issue, Mark Carr of UC Santa Cruz, Meg Caldwell of Stanford and Emily Saarman of PISCO present “The role of ‘rules of thumb’ in science-based environmental policy: California’s Marine Life Protection Act as a case study.”  The authors suggest an improved format for distilling scientific information into useable guidelines that policymakers can incorporate into their decisions.

Edwin Feo and Josh Ludmir of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP contributed an article called “Balancing the right regulation with the right economic incentives: government’s role in the development and financing of marine renewable energy in the United States.”  They discuss how current U.S. laws impede the development of technology to harness the ocean’s enormous potential for clean, renewable energy.   Other articles include a review of marine organisms’ physiological responses to climate change as a means to predict fishery and ecosystem “winners” and “losers,” and proposed guidelines for melding natural and social science to develop scientific-yet-appealing marine indicators of climate change.

The unique approach of SJSLP allows scientists to communicate the salient findings and implications of their research directly to policy makers, who can in turn draw on relevant, cutting-edge science when crafting policy solutions.  More information about SJSLP and access to journal articles can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjlsp.

New York Times Article coverage of marine energy talks from the 2009 symposium: http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/04/15/15greenwire-marine-power-not-ready-for-prime-time-experts-10525.html
Meg Caldwell, JD
Center for Ocean Solutions
Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program
Stanford University
w 650/723-4057
http://centerforoceansolutions.org/climate

Related posts:

1. Special Issue of NRF on Climate Change
2. Call for Articles: UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy
3. Innovations Issue on Energy and Climate

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html
<http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html>

2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new
NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis,
conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York
City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest
year since modern records began in 1880.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade — due to strong
cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean — 2009 saw a return to
near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a
degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a
cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 — as the
second warmest year since recordkeeping began.

“There’s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers
and on a given year’s ranking, but usually that misses the
point,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS. “There’s
substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the
tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature
over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global
warming is continuing unabated.”

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.
Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record
shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since
1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available
to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present,
though there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.

The near-record temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably
cool December in much of North America. High air pressures in the Arctic
decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while also increasing
its tendency to blow from north to south and draw cold air southward
from the Arctic. This resulted in an unusual effect that caused frigid
air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude
air to shift toward the north.

“Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world
area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature
much,’ said Hansen.

In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C
(1.4°F) since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin
Schmidt, another GISS climatologist. “In contrast, the difference
between, say, the second and sixth warmest years is trivial since the
known uncertainty — or noise — in the temperature measurement is
larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

Decoding the Temperature Record

Climate scientists agree that rising levels of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases trap incoming heat near the surface of the Earth and
are the key factors causing the rise in temperatures since 1880, but
these gases are not the only factors that can impact global
temperatures.

Three others key factors — including changes in the sun’s
irradiance, oscillations of sea surface temperature in the tropics, and
changes in aerosol levels — can also cause slight increases or
decreases in the planet’s temperature. Overall, the evidence suggests
that these effects are not enough to account for the global warming
observed since 1880.

El Niño and La Niña are prime examples of how the oceans can
affect global temperatures. They describe abnormally warm or cool sea
surface temperatures in the South Pacific that are caused by changing
ocean currents.

Global temperatures tend to decrease in the wake of La Niña, which
occurs when upwelling cold water off the coast of Peru spreads westward
in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. La Niña, which moderates the impact
of greenhouse-gas driven warming, lingered during the early months of
2009 and gave way to the beginning of an El Niño phase in October
that’s expected to continue in 2010.

An especially powerful El Niño cycle in 1998 is thought to have
contributed to the unusually high temperatures that year, and
Hansen’s group estimates that there’s a good chance 2010 will be
the warmest year on record if the current El Niño persists. At most,
scientists estimate that El Niño and La Niña can cause global
temperatures to deviate by about 0.2°C (0.36°F).

Warmer surface temperatures also tend to occur during particularly
active parts of the solar cycle, known as solar maximums, while slightly
cooler temperatures occur during lulls in activity, called minimums.

A deep solar minimum has made sunspots a rarity in the last few years.
Such lulls in solar activity, which can cause the total amount of energy
given off by the sun to decrease by about a tenth of a percent,
typically spur surface temperature to dip slightly. Overall, solar
minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C
(0.18°F) of cooling or warming.

“In 2009, it was clear that even the deepest solar minimum in the
period of satellite data hasn’t stopped global warming from
continuing,” said Hansen.

Small particles in the atmosphere called aerosols can also affect the
climate. Volcanoes are powerful sources of sulfate aerosols that
counteract global warming by reflecting incoming solar radiation back
into space. In the past, large eruptions at Mount Pinatubo in the
Philippines and El Chichón in Mexico have caused global dips in
surface temperature of as much as 0.3°C (0.54°F). But volcanic
eruptions in 2009 have not had a significant impact.

Meanwhile, other types of aerosols, often produced by burning fossil
fuels, can change surface temperatures by either reflecting or absorbing
incoming sunlight. Hansen’s group estimates that aerosols probably
counteract about half of the warming produced by man-made greenhouse
gases, but he cautions that better measurements of these elusive
particles are needed.

Data Details

To conduct its analysis, GISS uses publicly available data from three
sources: weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations
around the world; satellite observations of sea surface temperature; and
Antarctic research station measurements. These three data sets are
loaded into a computer program, which is available for public download
from the GISS website. The program calculates trends in temperature
anomalies — not absolute temperatures — but changes relative to the
average temperature for the same month during the period of 1951-1980.

Other research groups also track global temperature trends but use
different analysis techniques. The Met Office Hadley Centre, based in
the United Kingdom, uses similar input measurements as GISS, for
example, but it omits large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic, where
monitoring stations are sparse.

In contrast, the GISS analysis extrapolates data in those regions using
information from the nearest available monitoring stations, and thus has
more complete coverage of the polar areas. If GISS didn’t extrapolate in
this manner, the software that performs the analysis would assume that
areas without monitoring stations warm at the same rate as the global
mean, an assumption that doesn’t line up with changes that satellites
have observed in Arctic sea ice, Schmidt explained. Although the two
methods produce slightly different results in the annual rankings, the
decade-long trends in the two records are essentially identical.

“There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular
perceptions about climate trends,” Hansen said. “In the last decade,
global warming has not stopped.”

Related Links

GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
› data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/>

Annual Temperature Summation for 2008
› data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/>

The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature
› data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html>

James Hansen Biography
› www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html
<http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html>

Q&A Session: NASA Climatologist Gavin Schmidt
› www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/gavin-schmidt.html
<http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/gavin-schmidt.html>

For a reporter package of background data and video on this topic, visit
NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio site
<http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010500/a010557/>

More formats and visualizations from the Scientific Visualization Studio
› svs.gsfc.nasa.gov…
<http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003600/a003674/>

Read the related NASA press release here
<http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jan/HQ_10-017_Warmest_temps.html>
.

Related posts:

1. Putting the Lie to the Temperature Trend Arguments of Skeptics
2. Climate Denial and Russian Climate Data
3. New Study on Earth Sensitivity to Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations

Key take-aways from a simulation conducted by the researchers include the following:

1. The cumulative projected oceanic carbon sequestration would be only 18 PgC by the year 2100, a mere 7% of the cumulative increase in export production; however, the reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide would be much mroe substantial,a bout 83 PgC; this would correspond to one of the “stabilization wedges” of Pacala & Socolow’s projections of what would be necessary to avoid a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide over the next 50 years. As a consequence, simulated global surface temperatures could drop by up to 1C within the first decreases up the pipes’ operation;
2. However, should the scheme’s operation cease, conditions would not simply revert to the control run, in contrast to some other climate engineering schemes. Rather, temperatures would rise by 0.07C in 20 years because ocean upwelling would additional heat uptake of the planet, with the extra heat stored predominantly in the ocean’s low-latitude subsurface waters, where it would make its way back to the sea surface once upwelling stopped.

Some potential discussion questions could include:

1. What potential adverse side-effects do you envision could result from ocean upwelling? How do you envision this risk would be addressed in a governance regime?
2. Does the potential increase in temperatures that could result from ceasing ocean upwelling operations counsel against even consideration of the method?
3. What legal regimes would potentially have jurisdiction over ocean upwelling operations?

Related posts:

1. Ocean Fertilization Geoengineering: Time to Stop?
2. Yet Another Reason to Worry About Ocean Acidification …
3. New Article on Aragonite Undersaturation in the Arctic Ocean

Sandbag is happy to share with you its latest research into the carbon rich list. Please find the full report attached.

CARBON FAT CAT COMPANIES COULD SHARE AT LEAST €3.2 BILLION BY 2012

New research out today from Sandbag Climate Change compiled in association with www.carbonmarketdata.com reveals the top ten companies set to profit from the EU carbon market.

The Carbon Fat Cats List, dominated by steel and cement companies, could share a surplus of pollution permits worth €3.2 billion by 2012 [1].  This is more than double the EU’s investment of €1.5 billion in renewable energy and clean technology as part of the economic recovery plan.

The findings strongly refute claims by steel association Eurofer last month that tougher climate change targets would lead to industry’s competitiveness being further damaged.  Rather it seems that the very companies opposing stronger action on climate change are doing very well out of the current system they claim has already damaged them [2].

Anna Pearson Head of Policy at Sandbag commented:

‘Emissions trading is meant to be the central policy for cutting CO2 levels. The fact that companies are able to make large sums of money for doing nothing highlights that the trading scheme must be reformed and EU climate change targets strengthened.

‘Politicians continue to give generous numbers of free permits to industrial sectors that face international competition in order to prevent job losses. But using an environmental scheme to do this has proved poor policy making since many of the same companies are cutting swathes of jobs [3] despite being able to make windfall profits from carbon.
Anna Pearson
Sandbag Climate Change Campaign
anna@sandbag.org.uk
+44 (0)7796176280
skype pearsonanna
4 Charterhouse Square, London. EC1M 6EE

Related posts:

1. Carbon Management Library Online

Among the take-aways:

1. Geoengineering schemes can be divided into two categories, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) (e.g. air capture or ocean fertilization) and solar radiation management (SRM) (such as stratospheric aerosol injection and cloud brightening).
   1. CDR deployment and long delays in climatic response to carbon forcing means that it would take decades to have substantive impacts
   2. SRM could influence climate within months, but is fraught with greater uncertainties in terms of effects; it could also result in uneven regional impacts and have serious unintended consequences, including delaying recovery of the ozone layer by decades and production of droughts in some regions
2. Banning SRM research, despite the threats it may pose, would be ill-advised because SRM “might be the only recourse should a climate crisis materialize;” moreover, the threat of unilateral deployment counsels in favor of developing further knowledge to help us develop effective international governance structures and avoid unilateral actions;
3. SRM research has moved from the “largely politically benign” stage of modeling to laboratory-based development of technologies, raising the prospects for national or corporate interests to seek to control or profit from these schemes.
   • Field tests of such technologies could exacerbate tensions; while sub-scale field experiments, such as those recently conducted in Russia, ostensibly are designed to have negligible environmental and transboundary impacts, the controversy surrounding a 2009 Indo-German ocean fertilization experiments evinces the political sensitivities of such efforts and uncertainties of such experiments’ impacts
4. Confirming the effectiveness of an SRM scheme would ultimately require large-scale tests with demonstrable climatic effects, but given the difficulty of attributing impacts, and thus potentially assessing liability, it’s likely that uncertainties associated with causation would create international tension. Thus, there is a need to develop international norms and best practices for research;
5. Issues of acceptable risk for sub-scale testing or management of SRM technologies, involves both scientific and political considerations. Vulnerable developing countries, absent at this point from discussions associated with SRM must be engaged. Moreover, we need to determine if existing frameworks, including international treaty regimes, are adequate to facilitate this process, or whether new architecture is required;
6. National research programs and individual scientists need to forswear climatic impacts testing and carefully restrict sub-scale field testing until a legitimate international process has been established. These programs need to maximize transparency and prioritize research that focuses on international vs. international benefits.

Of course, many other questions associated with geoengineering remain that could generate some good discussion, including:

• If international collaboration and transparency doesn’t convince some States that might be potentially adversely affected by such schemes that such programs are judicious, should such States have a veto over deployment of such schemes? Is that a realistic scenario? Is there a tenable basis in international law?
• Given the problems in ascribing causation cited in the piece, would it be possible to establish a liability regime, and what would be the contours of such a regime?
• From the perspective of potential negative side effects of geoengineering schemes, would it make more sense to focus on CDR approaches?

Related posts:

1. New Article on Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering
2. Ocean Fertilization Geoengineering: Time to Stop?
3. Can We Test Geoengineering Without Potential Consequences?

Posted at greenthoughts.us is a proposal for simple ethical rules that builds on Donald Brown’s post-COP15 summary.  This synthesis applies rule-based ethics to the selection of policy instruments, technologies, total cost of carbon mitigation, and the representation of facts, intentions, and statistical probabilities in the climate action movement.

PDF Version here

Web Version: http://greenthoughts.us/policy/post-copenhagen/

Related posts:

1. Good summary of Air Capture Geoengineering Approach
2. New Post-Copenhagen Report from Climatico
3. New Study on How to Achieve Equity in Long-Term Policymaking on Climate

The CDM/JI Pipeline Analysis and Database of the CDM & JI projects has been updated. It is updated every month. It contains all CDM/JI projects that have been sent for validation/determination. It also contains the new and the approved baseline & monitoring methodologies, a list of DOE’s and several analyses.

The UNEP Risoe CDM/JI Pipeline Overview has its own web-site:

www.CDMpipeline.org

This web-site contains the main graphs and tables from the CDM and the JI spreadsheets. It makes it easier for the user to find the analysis and to print them

Related posts:

1. New UNFCCC Data

The Fact Sheet highlights, inter alia, that many major killers such as diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, malaria and dengue are highly climate-sensitive and are expected to worsen as the climate changes, and that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) through better transport, food and energy-use choices can result in improved health.

The fact sheet recalls that in 2009, the World Health Assembly endorsed a new WHO workplan on climate change and health, which includes: advocacy (raising awareness that climate change is a fundamental threat to human health); partnerships (coordinating with other UN agencies and ensuring that health is properly represented in the climate change agenda); science and evidence (coordinating reviews of scientific evidence on the links between climate change and health, and developing a global research agenda); and health system strengthening (assisting countries to assess their health vulnerabilities and build capacity to reduce health vulnerability to climate change). [The Fact Sheet] [WHO Workplan on Climate Change and Health]

Related posts:

1. Earthscan Webcast on CC and Health
2. Good compendium sources for CC Science Literature
3. Impacts of Climate Change in the Arctic: New Study

Monday, March 1, 2010
Fifth Circuit grants rehearing en banc of lawsuit alleging that the operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming, resulting in the harms caused by Hurricane Katrina: Nine judges participated in last week’s order granting rehearing en banc. The order noted that seven judges were recused.

My earlier coverage of the original three-judge panel’s ruling can be accessed here and here.

Related posts:

1. U.S. Courts and CC
2. Guest Blogger, Ken Alex, on U.S. Climate Change Litigation, Part 2
3. Guest Blog: Ken Alex on the Role of Climate Change Litigation in the U.S.