Ethical & Environmental News
Pakistan Floods, Russia Heat Fit Climate Trend
Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia's heatwave match predictions of extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists say.
This year is on track to be the warmest since reliable temperature records began in the mid-19th century, beating 1998, mainly due to a build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
"We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes," said Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at WMO headquarters in Geneva.
"It is too early to point to a human fingerprint" behind individual weather events, he said.
Recent extremes include mudslides in China and heat records from Finland to Kuwait -- adding to evidence of a changing climate even as U.N. negotiations on a new global treaty for costly cuts in greenhouse gas emissions have stalled.
Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist."
The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.
"Global warming is one reason" for the rare spate of weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
DOWNPOURS
He pointed to the heatwave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. "We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom," he said.
The weather extremes, and the chance of a record-warm 2010, undercut a view of skeptics that the world is merely witnessing natural swings perhaps caused by variations in the sun's output.
Russia's worst drought in decades has led to fires that have almost doubled death rates in Moscow to around 700 per day, an official said. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a grain export ban from August 15 to December 31.
Nearly 1,500 people have died in landslides and flooding caused by months of torrential rains across China, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.
Baddour said one cause of a shift in monsoon rains in Asia seemed to be a knock-on effect of La Nina, a natural cooling of the Pacific region.
Scientists say it is impossible to pin the blame for individual events from hurricanes to sandstorms solely on human activities led by burning of fossil fuels that release heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Still, one study concluded that global warming had doubled the chances of heatwaves similar to a scorching 2003 summer in Europe, in which 35,000 people died. Those temperatures could not convincingly be explained by natural variations.
"It may be possible to use climate models to determine whether human influences have changed the likelihood of certain types of extreme events," the U.N. panel of climate scientists said in its latest 2007 report.
That report said it was at least 90 percent likely that most warming in the past 50 years was caused by mankind, a finding questioned by skeptics who have pointed to errors in the report such as an exaggeration of the melt of Himalayan glaciers.
"Warming of the climate is likely to bring more events of this sort," said Henning Rodhe, professor emeritus of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, of the Russian heatwave.
"But you can't draw the conclusion that this is caused by global warming."
Most countries agreed at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen last year to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, a tough goal since temperatures already rose 0.7C in the 20th century.
The latest round of U.N. climate talks in Bonn, from August 2-6, ended with growing doubts that a global climate treaty could still be agreed as hoped by some nations in 2010 despite deep splits about sharing the burden of curbs on emissions.
U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has all but abandoned climate change legislation this year. The United States, the number two greenhouse gas emitter behind China, is the only major industrialized nation with no law to cut emissions.
Ten Key Indicators Show Global Warming "Undeniable"
Melting glaciers, more humid air and eight other key indicators show that global warming is undeniable, scientists said on Wednesday, citing a new comprehensive review of the last decade of climate data.
Without addressing why this is happening, the researchers said there was no doubt that every decade on Earth since the 1980s has been hotter than the previous one, and that the planet has been warming for the last half-century.
This confirms the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reported in 2007 with 90 percent certainty that climate change is occurring. The IPCC also said that human activities contribute to this phenomenon.
The new report was released after U.S. Senate Democrats delayed any possible legislation to curb climate change until September at the earliest. Prospects for U.S. climate change legislation this year are considered slim.
Released by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as "The 2009 State of the Climate Report," the new report draws on the work of 303 scientists from 48 countries, including data from last year.
The 10 key planet-wide indicators of a warming climate identified by the report are:
-- Higher temperatures over land
-- Higher temperatures over oceans
-- Higher ocean heat content
-- Higher near-surface air temperatures (temperatures in the troposphere, where Earth's weather occurs)
-- Higher humidity
-- Higher sea surface temperatures
-- Higher sea levels
-- Less sea ice
-- Less snow cover
-- Shrinking glaciers
The seven indicators expected to rise in a warming world rose over the last decade, the report said; the three indicators expected to decline did so over that same period.
With an almost daily flood of data on climate change, Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in Asheville, North Carolina, saw the need for a comprehensive look at the information to pick the most obvious signs of planetary warming.
"These are indicators from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean that we would expect to be changing in a warming world," Thorne said at a telephone briefing for reporters.
"Each indicator is changing as we would expect if the world truly were warming," he said. "Not a single analysis disagrees that the global climate is changing. The bottom line conclusion that the world's been warming is simply undeniable."
The entire report can be seen online here
The report is being published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Costly Nuclear Fusion Demo Worries Cash-Strapped EU
A funding battle is brewing in Europe over a 16-billion-euro ($21.5 billion) experiment to crack the puzzle of commercializing nuclear fusion -- the process that powers the sun.
The European Union's executive arm is trying to coordinate an extra contribution of 1.4 billion euros in 2012-2013 from EU member countries, whose finances have been crippled by the economic crisis.
Many environmentalists say the cost of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is out of control and money would be better spent on low-carbon projects such as home insulation which also create millions of jobs.
ITER's backers argue it has the potential to change the course of history and needs unwavering commitment.
At the center of the issue are dreams of harnessing nuclear fusion, which releases vast amounts of energy in the core of a star, under huge gravitational forces and temperatures of around 10 million degrees Celsius.
Scientists have shown the process can be recreated on Earth, combining simple hydrogen isotopes to release vast amounts of energy, but so far it has not been demonstrated on an industrial scale. Nor have previous experiments released more energy than they consume.
In 2006, more than 30 countries signed a deal to build the ITER nuclear fusion reactor, under construction in Cadarache, southern France.
At its core will be a 500-cubic-meter doughnut-shaped steel vessel in which a superheated stream of plasma circulates in a vacuum, held in place by superconducting magnets.
EXPLODING COSTS
If all goes well, from 2020 the project will be capable of generating around 500 megawatts of fusion energy -- clean power with no climate-damaging emissions and little radioactive waste.
But increasing complexity and rising prices for steel, concrete and copper have led to a tripling of construction costs since they were estimated in 2001. The 27-country European Union is committed to picking up 45 percent of that.
"It is irresponsible to invest huge amounts in a dead-end technology without creating jobs in this period of financial crisis," said Green group politician Claude Turmes.
A 1.4 billion euro funding gap has emerged in the EU contribution over the two years 2012-2013, and the European Commission also hopes to coordinate a stable source of longer-term funding within the next EU budget from 2014.
The overall EU share of construction costs has more than doubled from 2.7 billion euros in 2001 to 7.2 billion now.
The timing could not have been worse.
Spain, Italy and Greece are grappling with huge public debts and unions have been demonstrating against austerity measures.
"Instead of a huge investment with exploding costs and without any added value, we Greens think we should use techniques that are available and reliable now like renewables and energy efficiency," Turmes said.
But European Commission officials argue the two issues are not connected and that EU governments have always remained well-informed on the cost overruns as they have the bulk of members on ITER's European executive board.
"We must not lose sight of the potentially epoch-changing benefits of ITER," EU Research Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn told ministers recently.
"The potential prize in terms of energy supply and security, tackling climate change and also in terms of major contributions to our economies and to geopolitical stability is huge," she said.
Constructing ITER will also lead to spin-off benefits in research, such as new heat-transfer technology and superconducting magnets that could be used in levitation trains and the transport of electricity, officials say.
ITER's international council, which also includes Japan, India, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States, will meet on June 16 to discuss the scope, schedule and costs of the project. But the meeting is unlikely to reach concrete decisions until the EU has solved its financing issues.
Source: Planet Ark 17/06/2010
BP OIl Leak Flow Estimates Increase By 50%
A team of U.S. scientists on Tuesday upped their high-end estimate of the amount of crude oil flowing from BP Plc's stricken Gulf of Mexico well by 50 percent, the second major upward revision in less than a week.The scientists said the "most likely flow rate of oil today" ranges from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1.47 million and 2.52 million gallons/5.57 million and 9.54 million liters) per day.That is a significant jump from the last estimate issued by the Flow Rate Technical Group on June 10 and pegging the well's flow at 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day.And those figures were considerably higher than the previous "best estimate" of 12,000-19,000 bpd issued by the flow rate group on May 27."This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP's well," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
The team of scientists said they may revise the estimates again as they gather new data on the well, one mile beneath the ocean surface.Even at the minimum estimated rate of 35,000 bpd, the ruptured well has dumped nearly 2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 -- nearly eight times the amount that the Exxon Valdez spilled into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989.At the U.S. government's direction, BP is boosting its oil capturing capacity to up to 53,000 bpd by the end of June and to 80,000 bpd by mid-July from about 18,000 bpd.The new estimates come from detailed pressure data taken by instruments inside BP's oil-containment device on the sea floor over the last 24 hours, the government said."This estimate, which we will continue to refine as the scientific teams get new data and conduct new analyses, is the most comprehensive estimate so far of how much oil is flowing one mile below the ocean's surface," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.
Source: Planet Ark - 16th June 2010
Rich-Poor Rifts Stall Progress At U.N. Climate Talks
U.N. climate talks opened on Monday, exposing familiar rifts between rich and poor countries which delegates said were likely to delay a re-start of formal negotiations.
The 185-nation Bonn conference, which will run until June 11, is the biggest international meeting on climate change since a summit last December in Copenhagen failed to agree a new pact.
Several countries said they could not give a green light to formal negotiations on a new text published in mid-May and which outlines a huge range of options for fighting climate change.
The Copenhagen summit last year struggled to overcome suspicion on how to share global effort to curb greenhouse gases under a new deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012.
On Monday differences re-emerged when a clutch of Latin American countries said they could not start negotiations on the new text.
The United States said it did not think the new text was intended as a basis for negotiations and South Africa said the document put too much burden on developing countries.
The Latin American group including Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba said on Monday that the new text placed too much emphasis on the Copenhagen accord, which they opposed in December.
"The chair has prioritized the Copenhagen Accord," said Rene Gonzalo Orellana Halkyer, a member of the Bolivian delegation, speaking on the sidelines of the talks in Bonn.
Bolivia also wanted tougher targets, for example to return atmospheric greenhouse gases to a level far below where they are already, he added.
The Copenhagen Accord seeks to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times but does not spell out how.
Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe of Zimbabwe chairs the U.N. talks on forging agreement on global action and is expected to release a revised version next weekend, delegates said.
FIRST STEP
The United States said it believed Mukahanana-Sangarwe's text was not intended to be the basis of negotiations.
"Our view is that the text is Margaret's effort to elicit views so she can develop a formal negotiating text," said Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation. "It's a constructive next step."
It remained to be seen whether countries can start negotiations on a revised text in the next two weeks, he told Reuters.
The head of the South African delegation, Alf Wills, said the new text focused too far on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developing countries.
"It's completely unbalanced in that respect," he said.
However Karsten Sach, head of Germany's delegation, said: "We think it is a basis for negotiation."
An additional, specific gap to be addressed at the Bonn talks was whether or not developed countries should be allowed to exclude from their national greenhouse gases carbon emissions from chopping trees to produce renewable energy.
That rule, allowed under the existing Kyoto Protocol, would represent "fraudulent accounting," said the head of Papua New Guinea's delegation, Kevin Conrad.
Global CO2 Emissions To Rise 43 Percent By 2035
The world's emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and natural gas should rise 43 percent by 2035 barring global agreements to reduce output of the gases blamed for warming the planet, the top U.S. energy forecaster said on Tuesday.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide from the fossil fuel sources should rise from 29.7 billion tonnes in 2007 to 42.4 billion tonnes in 2035, the Energy Information Administration said in its annual long-term energy outlook.
Much of the rise will occur in rapidly growing developing countries like China and India where electricity demand is expected to soar.
"With strong economic growth and continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels expected for most of the non-(Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) economies under current policies, much of the projected increase in carbon dioxide emissions occurs among" those developing countries, the EIA report said.
In the absence of national policies on emissions and binding international agreements to fight climate change, global coal consumption is expected to rise from 132 quadrillion British thermal units in 2007 to 206 quadrillion Btu in 2035, the EIA said.
Rich countries and developing countries have had trouble agreeing on a pact that would cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent the droughts, heat waves, and floods expected from global warming.
The stalled U.S. climate bill, which if passed could help bring countries together, faces an uncertain future as lawmakers in coal- and oil-producing states oppose it. The United States is the world's second leading emitter of greenhouse gases after China.
BMW Could Launch 5 Series Full Hybrid
German carmaker BMW (BMWG.DE) plans to take its 5 Series ActiveHybrid concept into full-scale production as early as next year and expects to introduce the dual-powertrain technology into its smaller 3 Series.
"As early as next year, the new BMW 5 Series will also be available as a full hybrid. And we are anticipating the hybridisation of further models series, such as the BMW 3 Series," chief executive Norbert Reithofer told shareholders at the carmaker's annual general meeting in Munich.
As emission standards become ever stricter, BMW needs to lower the carbon footprint of its fleet in coming years as Brussels targets an overall level of around 95 grams of carbon dioxide by 2020 for new cars sold in Europe.
"We want to reduce our global fleet's carbon emissions by at least another 25 percent between 2008 and 2020," Reithofer said.
At the end of last year, BMW's European fleet emissions equated to 150 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, down from 156g at the end of 2008.
First shown at the Geneva auto show in March, the 5 Series hybrid can be driven entirely in electric mode -- like the Toyota Prius (7203.T) -- after the saloon's brakes recuperate enough kinetic energy initially generated by its petrol engine.
This would be BMW's second full hybrid on offer after the BMW ActiveHybrid X6 launched at the end of last year.
By comparison, the larger BMW ActiveHybrid 7 luxury saloon that hit markets this spring is a mild hybrid, meaning it cannot run on zero-emission electric propulsion alone.
Reithofer pointed to government incentives for hybrids as a key driver of demand, particularly in Japan.
"Sales of hybrid vehicles (there) have skyrocketed. If you don't have a hybrid in your portfolio, soon you might not be selling any cars in Japan at all," he explained.
BMW plans to sell over 1.3 million vehicles this year, a fraction of the 6 million plus that Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) will sell -- a key advantage for VW's luxury brand Audi versus its German rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz (DAIGn.DE).
BMW reaffirmed its targets for 2010 at the AGM.
Posted on 06/05/2010
Workers toiled above and below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday to plug a gushing oil leak and protect the U.S. shoreline in one of the biggest spill containment efforts ever mounted. London-based energy giant BP loaded a massive metal device on a barge that is d...
read full article …
Posted on 04/05/2010
A massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is unfolding just as the Senate was on the verge of considering climate change legislation that included an expansion of offshore oil drilling. The bill, which aims to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases...
read full article …
Posted on 28/04/2010
Europe's greenest modes of transport are falling behind the biggest polluters, which is contributing to a steep rise in climate-warming emissions, the European Environment Agency said on Tuesday. Road and air freight, which both have a large carbon footprint, grew slightly fas...
read full article …
Posted on 27/04/2010
General Electric Co and Nissan Motor Co on Monday announced a three-year agreement to collectively research development of charging stations for electric vehicles. Nissan will debut the electric Leaf hatchback later this year in Japan, the United States and Europe. The Leaf's...
read full article …
Posted on 19/04/2010
Genetically engineered crops are profitable for farmers and may help protect people and the environment from an overload of pesticides, a panel of experts reported on Tuesday. But there is a risk that weeds are developing resistance to Roundup, a weedkiller that is used to tre...
read full article …
Posted on 15/04/2010
European Union carbon prices could be set to rally through the second quarter, after they broke through a key price milestone on Wednesday, as energy prices firm and the economy shows signs of improving. Carbon permits traded under the EU's $100 billion emissions trading schem...
read full article …
Posted on 15/04/2010
An inquiry cleared British climate researchers of wrongdoing on Wednesday after their emails were hacked, leaked and held up by skeptics as evidence they had exaggerated the case for man-made global warming. Former government adviser Ronald Oxburgh, who chaired the panel, said...
read full article …
Posted on 24/03/2010
The Labour government will unveil a 2 billion pound ($3 billion) "green" investment bank in Wednesday's budget to help Britain's transformation to a low carbon economy, a government source said on Sunday. Finance minister Alistair Darling has said there will be no pre-election...
read full article …
Posted on 08/03/2010
The European Union executive is tempering its hopes of securing a legally binding climate deal in talks this year culminating in Cancun, Mexico, focusing instead on a 2011 summit in South Africa, a source said. "The realistic approach is to aim for deliverables in the Bonn and...
read full article …
Posted on 25/02/2010
Sustainable investments in Asia (ex Japan) could make a huge jump from approximately $20bn today to $4 trillion by 2015 according to research by Vontobel, the Swiss fund manager. Vontobel says it believes sustainability themes are being ?seriously undervalued? in a region undergo...
read full article …