Plan B may be necessary - experts
Publish date: 06 January 2009
Issue Number: 93
Diary: Legalbrief Environmental
Category: Climate Change
Experts continue to warn on the world's worsening climate change crisis, writes E-Brief News. A poll of international scientists, carried out by The Independent, reveals a consensus view that carbon dioxide cuts have failed. It also reveals their growing support for technological intervention (emergency 'Plan B') that would bring that latest technology to the battle to halt climate change.
The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary. The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This 'geo-engineering' approach - including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms - would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by the majority of scientists surveyed as a viable emergency back-up plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.
Full report in The Independent
The 'profound disconnect' between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem is highlighted by White House science adviser, Professor James Hansen, in a personal new year appeal to President-elect Barack Obama and his wife just three weeks before Obama's inauguration. In it, according to a Mail & Guardian Online report, he praises Obama's campaign rhetoric about 'a planet in peril', but says that how the new President acts in office will be crucial. Hansen lambastes the current international approach of setting targets through 'cap and trade' schemes as not up to the task. The letter will make uncomfortable reading for officials in 10 US states whose cap and trade mechanism - the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative - got under way on Thursday. The scheme is the first mandatory, market-based greenhouse gas reduction programme in the US. Hansen advocates a three-pronged attack on the climate problem. First, he wants a phasing out of coal-fired power stations - which he calls 'factories of death' - that do not incorporate carbon capture. Second, he proposes a 'carbon tax and 100% dividend'. This is a mechanism for putting a price on carbon without raising money for government coffers. Finally, he urges a renewed research effort into so-called fourth generation nuclear plants, which can use nuclear waste as fuel.
Full Mail & Guardian Online report
This year is set to be one of the top-five warmest on record, according to British climate scientists in a Moneyweb. The average global temperature for 2009 is expected to be more than 0.4 ºC above the long-term average, despite the continued cooling of huge areas of the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina. That would make it the warmest year since 2005, according to researchers at the Met Office, who say there is also a growing probability of record temperatures after next year. Theories abound as to what triggers the mechanisms that cause an El Nino or La Nina event but scientists agree that they are playing an increasingly important role in global weather patterns. The strength of the prevailing trade winds that blow from east to west across the equatorial Pacific is thought to be an important factor.
Full Moneyweb report
Governments could slow global warming dramatically, and buy time to avert disastrous climate change, by slashing emissions of one of humanity's most familiar pollutants - soot - according to Nasa scientists. The Independent reports that a study by the space agency shows that cutting down on the pollutant, which has so far been largely ignored by climate scientists, can have an immediate cooling effect - and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution at the same time. The study - from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics - concludes that tackling the pollution provides 'substantial benefits for air quality while simultaneously contributing to climate change mitigation' and 'may present a unique opportunity to engage parties and nations not yet fully committed to climate change mitigation for its own sake'.
Full report in The Independent
Spain will become the first major buyer of surplus carbon dioxide emission rights from eastern Europe in an attempt to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, says an Earthtimes report. Spain has sealed with Hungary the purchase of a quota of six million tons of CO2, and is in talks about similar deals with Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Kyoto Protocol allows eastern European countries to sell surplus emission rights after closing contaminating factories in the early 1990s. Spanish greenhouse gas emissions increased by 50% between 1990 and 2007, though the Kyoto Protocol would only have allowed them to go up by 15%. The right of eastern European countries to sell emission quotas has been criticised by environmentalists, who say it allows countries not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Full Earthtimes report