Environment Forum

U.N. climate process in emergency ward

Old rifts between negotiators of rich and poor countries re-surfaced at UN climate talks last weekend, posing a question mark over the continued usefulness of meetings held at least twice a year, and which can be traced back to the signing of the UN Climate Convention on Climate Change in 1992.

Is it now time to end those talks, which are focused on delivering a global climate deal to succeed the present Kyoto Protocol after 2012?

It could be argued that their last big breakthrough was the signing of Kyoto in 1997. Possible alternative processes include more streamlined meetings of ministers and leaders, to agree emissions cuts and funds to help the poor face a warmer world.

The UN process was thrown into focus by a Copenhagen climate summit last December which failed to deliver an “agreed outcome” on a new global deal, as promised by environment ministers two years earlier.

About 120 world leaders flew into Copenhagen to sign a deal, but found 87 pages of rather indecisive documents riddled with square brackets, indicating unresolved choices for example on emissions targets.

It had taken negotiators two years to produce those texts, at six additional, meetings of one- or two-weeks in Bonn, Germany and in Bangkok, Barcelona and Accra, which cost $30 million, according to the UN climate secretariat. Costs included the flights, hotel accommodation and daily allowances paid to negotiators from least developed countries, as well as the rent of the venue and security.

The $30 million excludes the costs of scheduled meetings through 2008-2009: the Danish government allocated $62 million for the two-week Copenhagen summit. In addition there were two previously scheduled two-week meetings in Bonn, Germany and one two-week ministerial session in Poznan, Poland.

“taking cars off the road”, or climate tokenism?

There’s no shortage of references these days in corporate and government reports to earnest, new steps to fight climate change. Often they promise to make carbon emissions cuts equivalent to taking millions of cars off the road…

For example, take Europe’s fourth biggest single source of carbon emissions, Britain’s Drax coal plant. It said in March that as a result of efficiency improvements it had cut carbon emissions equivalent to taking 195,000 cars off the road.  But of course that was a cut against a theoretical projection of rising emissions — not an absolute cut.

Take a similar announcement from Canada this week. The oil industry in Alberta is busy trying to extract oil from tar sands. That is a far more polluting, energy-intensive way than just sucking the stuff out of oil wells, because steam must first be injected into the sand to make the oil flow. Now Alberta is experimenting with a technology, called carbon capture and storage, with three test projects which by 2015 would “achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions equivalent to taking about a million vehicles off the road”, the province says.

Funnily enough, 2015 is also the year when a U.N. panel of climate scientists says global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide must stop rising to limit global warming to 2-2.4 degrees celsius, a widely perceived threshold for dangerous effects (page 20 here). It seems a little disingenuous — in that wider context — for  Alberta to talk of taking cars off the road from test projects to trim carbon emissions under a wider programme to expand one of the most polluting forms of oil drilling known to man.

The wider context does seem relevant if we’re not to pat ourselves on the back as catastrophic climate effects creep up. And it may be especially relevant this year, as climate talks and rhetoric ratchet up ahead of a meeting in December in Copenhagen, meant to seal agreement on a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Biochar backlash tries to bury carbon plan

Last year scientists at Cornell and elsewhere announced that they may have found a new weapon against climate change — in the soils of the Amazon Basin.

Amazon peoples thousands of years ago ploughed charred plants into the ground, perhaps to improve soil fertility or just as an ancient means of waste disposal. 

Plants suck carbon out of the air as they grow and charring them keeps most of that stored carbon in a solid form which can be buried. What scientists found interesting was that the ancient Amazon ”biochar” soils still contained up to 70 times more carbon than the surrounding ground. And so the idea was born of how to trap carbon dioxide and stop it from reaching the atmosphere and cooking the planet. The notion of ploughing into the soil charred organic waste including food, woodchips, straw etc drew favourable reviews in the media .

Perhaps predictably, the biochar backlash swiftly followed. The anti-lobby feared that the private sector would bend biochar support to char whole forests, all in the name of stopping global warming, but really just to cash in on carbon credits or whatever other payments emerged. Among critics, British environmentalist George Montbiot wrote that “the last mass fuel cure, biochar, does not stand up.”

For me this has highlighted growing suspicion of private sector solutions to fighting climate change. The argument runs that industry created the problem of climate change, aided by consumer demand, through large scale combustion of fossil fuels, so don’t trust the private sector to solve the problem with market solutions like carbon trading or green certificates or other subsidies. Instead, carbon should be regulated through tough emissions caps, for example. The case of carbon markets has borne suspicion out to some extent.

For example steel lobbies and power companies have earned multi-billion dollar windfalls under the European Union’s emissions trading scheme, a scheme meant to curb emissions from those two high-carbon sectors especially, Reuters analysis has showed.

Ambitious estimates by the International Biochar Initiative of the merits of the technology may have helped sow the seeds of the backlash. The IBI says biochar could remove 1 billion tonnes of carbon annually by mid-century. That’s more than one tenth of annual carbon emissions now. The trouble is uncertainty in how those numbers are calculated. Certainly, the IBI acknowledges its figures depend on a few “optimistic plus” assumptions.

Climate a new threat for Poland’s wolves-expert

By Piotr Pilat

Climate change worries Professor Andrzej Bereszynski of the Poznan Agriculture Academy, who runs a 30-year-old wolf sanctuary.

He fears that global warming could take a new toll on the elusive predator — almost hunted to death across much of Europe.

What hope for U.N. climate talks in Poland?

This week the U.N. leads a new round of global climate talks, in its 14th meeting since the world signed up to the convention on climate change in 1992.

It’s all about replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a more ambitious climate deal from 2013. Kyoto is widely regarded as toothless, but so could be its successor. (For a story, click here)

After all, fighting climate change isn’t easy – it involves limiting emissions of greenhouse gases which are a by-product of everyday essentials from energy to food, from burning fossil fuels and making fertiliser, for example.

But where does that leave Kyoto – a multilateral process which requires unanimity for every decision?

Oxford University’s energy expert Dieter Helm last week compared the entire emissions-cutting effort of Kyoto from its base year 1990 to 2012 to the increase in emissions from aviation alone over the same period.

At the moment Kyoto excludes the United States, which didn’t ratify the pact, and all developing countries, including China and India. And it gave too much emissions headroom in its target for Russia.

Planet sick; do the doctors care?

    The UN’s climate surgery opening hours this week in Bonn, Germany, are 10am-1pm and 3pm-6pm.

    Several times they’ve finished early — lack of demand?

    “That’s good. Often they just go on and on. Next week it may be a bit later,” a UN spokesperson told me.

    Welcome to a new round of talks to find a successor to the UN-administered Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Bonn is the second of eight meetings of 190 countries and 2,000 people or so to agree a new climate pact by December 2009.

    All right, on the two-week agenda there’s also a lot of side events, lobby group huddles and so on, while delegates wake up very early to attend busy, ad hoc sessions, one told me.

    But from the outside at least there’s no sense of rush – the plenary sessions are often dry presentations from government bureaucrats, re-hashing well known positions with erudite allusions to climate convention text written 16 years ago.

    UN chairmen tried on Friday to steer talks towards “concrete proposals” for a new pact, to discuss in more meetings.

So what happened to global warming?

So what happened to global warming?

It’s not just that it’s disappeared from media headlines this year – shoved off by the credit crunch and natural disasters, for example. It can’t be ignored that 2007 came and went as another very warm year – the 7th hottest on record since 1850 according to the World Meteorological Organization.

But it wasn’t a record. In fact that was 1998, a full 10 years ago — the year of an exceptional El Nino, a Pacific weather pattern which heats the whole globe. So is global warming not living up to the hype?

Two weeks ago Leibniz Institute’s Noel Keenlyside stirred an academic hornet’s nest by saying that we may have to wait longer – a decade or more – for another peak year, because a natural weakening in ocean currents may be cooling sea temperatures.

Many scientists flatly rejected the idea, saying Keenlyside had over-estimated the effect. But some pointed out that a recent switch in a weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation could indeed cool temperatures globally.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year recent warming was “unequivocal” and most of it ”very likely” manmade. And almost all scientists in the latest debate, including Keenlyside, agree that any temporary cooling doesn’t alter that – blips due to natural effects are to be expected.

But how long is a blip? No-one knows.

What’s a Kyoto sceptic doing at the Bali talks?

His work at the Bali climate change conference isn’t sponsored by world oil giant Exxon Mobil, although he has held past conferences which were, says Alan Oxley.

Oxley, former Australian ambassador at world trade talks and now chairman of his NGO World Growth,  believes the sense of urgency that pervades the Bali talks – meant to launch negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — is misplaced.

“There’s a surfeit of enthusiasm,” he says.

“I think there’s been a bit of a campaign to engender this sense of urgency,” he says, pointing to Britain and Germany as chief culprits.

Oxley isn’t convinced that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak in the next few years, one scenario proposed by a U.N. panel of scientists. Twenty to 30 years is fine, he says. He isn’t too worried, either, about a 2 degrees centigrade hotter world. “We need a very long-term perspective, so what’s the rush?”

Oxley is in Bali to try and calm everyone down and promote his publication — on the threat emissions cuts pose to the world’s poor. But his main agenda appears to be to argue for free trade.

He’s worried that climate change policies such as Europe’s emissions trading scheme could unleash a new wave of protectionism, whereby countries slap tariffs on imports of goods like steel and cement, to try and compensate for carbon taxes on their industry at home.

Should 10,000 people fly to Bali to fight climate change?

Take more responsibility for your personal carbon footprint. Fly less. Use video link-ups, instead of flying to conferences in exotic places. Sound familiar? All advice you can expect from many governments on how we should all roll up our sleeves in the fight against climate change. But over the next two weeks some 10,000 delegates including representatives from 186 governments, up to 2,000 journalists (including me) and members of 130 non-governmental organisations descend on Bali, Indonesia. They’re attending a two-week conference to kick-start two years of talks to agree a new, tougher, sharper climate change regime to replace the Kyoto Protocol. But why Bali? Indonesia’s environment ministry estimates that the event will produce 47,000 tonnes of the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, carbon dioxide. If it had to be Indonesia, why not Jakarta, instead of forcing 10,000 people to take connecting flights? Have the sponsor, the United Nations, made a PR gaffe by hosting a climate change event on a beautiful tropical paradise island at the Westin Resort, pictured above and below, which also happens to be miles from anywhere? Tell us what you think. (BTW these are my photos, taken today)

A quibble with the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just presented its summary report on how bad climate change is. There’s one inconsistency in there which doesn’t undermine for me the key IPCC message — that climate change is a serious threat towards which mankind is hurtling. But it has left me with a feeling that in one case at least figures have been selected to stress the threat. The IPCC published on Saturday its handbook version of thousands of pages of climate change research.

On page 4 of this 23-page pocket guide it says that manmade greenhouse gas emissions rose 70% from 1970 to 2004. But earlier this year, after an enquiry to the IPCC’s lead authors, I found that emissions of all greenhouse gases actually rose 49%. It’s a still a big increase, but not as big. In its report published on Saturday the IPCC did mention in a footnote that the 70% figure only included greenhouse gases regulated by the Kyoto Protocol. What it didn’t mention anywhere was that there’s a whole bunch of other greenhouse gases not included in the number, and whose emissions are rapidly falling. These ozone-depleting gases (ODP gases) are very strong planet-warming gases, as measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).

Mankind emitted some 5.9 billion tonnes CO2e of such ODP gases into the atmosphere in 1970, but that fell to just 1.5 bln tonnes in 2004, after global efforts to stop a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer from getting any bigger. So — total global greenhouse gas emissions including ODPs were 51.3 bln tonnes in 2004, up 48.6% on 1970 levels. But excluding ODPs greenhouse gases increased by 74.0% to 49.8 bln tonnes — the IPCC’s headline number. The IPCC summary is based on a more detailed report published earlier this year, which mentions that ODP gases have “declined significantly”, but only in passing. A 70% increase is the headline figure there, too. Like I say, to me this doesn’t colour the IPCC message, but it does comes across as message management.