It’s not often that greenhouse gases spewed out by human activities get praise as potential saviours of the planet in a leading scientific journal — they’re normally viewed as villains for causing global warming.

But a study in Nature today shows that heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide can help avert an even worse problem in thousands of years’ time — a shift to a freeze worse than an Ice Age that could blanket much of the northern hemisphere with ice (see picture on the left and story here).

The scientists say that the Earth is close to a natural tipping point, partly based on shifts in the orbit around the sun, that could abruptly end swings between warm periods, like the present, and Ice Ages like the one that ended 10,000 years ago.

Sometime between 10,000 and 100,000 years in the future, a shift would bring an icy blanket to much of North America, Russia and Europe – permanently. (…well, the projection only goes about half a million years into the future, but it shows no let up).

But greenhouse gases can come to the rescue by keeping the planet artificially warm, the scientists say. Still, they say the findings are no excuse to ignore the fight against global warming now — at least 10,000 years is a long time to work out how to avoid the freezer.

“I’m sure some headline writers will want to say ‘CO2 good for the atmosphere’, or ‘CO2 is good for us’. That’s not the case,” said Thomas Crowley, an American scientist at Edinburgh University who was one of the two authors. (…he stressed that point several times in an interview).

Greenhouse gases are of course a reason why the planet is warm enough to support life in the first place. But the problem is that extra emissions of the gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, are upsetting the climate. (A small minority disagrees – the U.S. Competitive Enterprise Institute famously produced pro-fossil fuel advertisements about CO2, saying: “They call it pollution, we call it life”)

…Maybe the Nature study adds a new twist for greenhouse gases — from saints, for creating the conditions for life, to criminals to future saviours?

New research shows that both Antarctica and the Arctic are getting less icy – and the best explanation is mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

But will that convert anyone who doubts that global warming is caused by human activities, led by burning fossil fuels?

The scientists, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, say that a study of temperature records from Antarctica (there aren’t many of them) shows a slight rising trend over recent decades that can be best explained by a build-up of greenhouse gases led by carbon dioxide.

Antarctica had until now been the only continent where a human fingerprint of warming had not been detected by scientists — that meant some sceptics said it might not be global at all.

Ice around the frozen continent has tended to expand in recent years — some climate experts have theories to explain that that could be a side-effect of warming linked to shifting ocean currents or changes in snow and rainfall.

But more ice obviously doesn’t sound a convincing argument for global warming when a runaway melt of the summer sea ice in the Arctic — to a record low in September 2007 – is often held up as Exhibit A in the evidence for climate change.

The U.N. Climate Panel said last year that it was at least 90 percent certain that most of the global warming in the past half century was caused by human activities. Ten percent is room for doubt, but it seems to be shrinking.

Coca-Cola is the latest American brand working to improve its environmental credentials with a sweeping new program that pledges to improve water efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions throughout its massive global system.

The soft drink maker today said that through a partnership with environmental group WWF, it has commited to eliminating 50 billion liters of water from its bottling plants by 2012 by improving water efficiency by 20 percent over 2004 levels. Coke’s announcement comes a few months after General Electric said it would cut water usage by 20 percent by 2012.

The beverage industry has increasingly become a target for environmentalists, who say plastic soda and water bottles add to landfills while the companies themselves use too much energy producing and shipping bottles across the world. 

Coke also pledged to promote more sustainable agricultural practices, initially focusing on sugar cane production. It will work with two additional crops beginning next year.

The water initatives build on an agreement Coke struck last year with WWF in which it vowed to “return to communities and to nature an amount of water water equivalent to what we use in all of our beverages and their production.” Coke at the time said it would commit to specific targets for reducing water usage this year.

Coke’s biggest challenge is reducing its carbon or water footprint while its business keeps growing. The company said it plans to “grow the business, not the carbon system-wide.” That goal will prevent the release of more than 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015 — about the equivalent of planting 600,000 acres of trees. In developed countries, Coke will reduce emissions by 5 percent from 2004 levels by 2015.

No pun intended but for the world’s carbon community, times are looking a little black.

The global financial crisis, or GFC as it is being called this week during Australia’s largest ever carbon market gathering, is deeply troubling many participants. But a larger, more worrying issue remains “post 2012″.

This is when the Clean Development Mechanism under the current phase of the U.N. Kyoto Protocol runs out, along with the hundreds of CDM projects already approved and the 3,000 still awaiting approval by a U.N. board.

U.N. talks at the end of next year aim to agree on a broader replacement for Kyoto from 2013 and market players are hoping those talks don’t fail. Already there are fears that some rich nations will use the financial crisis as an excuse to say now is not the time to be negotiating tougher emissions curbs that might hurt industry and cost jobs.

“The volume of primary CDM activity is declining. Every month virtually this year, the number of new CDM transactions has been in decline. And that’s because the 2012 deadline is approaching and we’re running out of runway,” said Paul Bodnar, Manager of  Carbon Markets at London-based Climate Change Capital.

In China, the largest source of Kyoto offsets called CERs, the number of projects there are in decline, just as they are elsewhere, said Alex Wyatt, director of Emissions Zero, which helps Chinese entities to become carbon neutral.

“If you wanted to put it on a scale, the financial crisis and the post-2012 uncertainty, many times more significant is the post-2012 uncertainty. If you know what’s going on past 2012 you can invest with a much longer-term horizon,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland state.

A lot of people are still taking the risk to invest in CDM projects, said Wyatt, whose company has about 130 projects in China, many of them focused on renewable energy.

“But the willingness to do so is decreased. You see it now.  People are investing a lot more in short-term projects that will only take a year or so to build.”

He said the financial market had yet to affect CDM project development in China.

“It’s too early to see any real effects. Projects take a long time. But if there are any effects, they will be seen in a few months.”

“The impact on the VER market is a lot more direct in the sense that a VER is like any retail good. It’s discretionary spending,” he said, referring to verified emission reductions, which must meet firm standards but are outside the Kyoto Protocol.

With worries about recession in many countries, does it make sense to try out some more radical ideas for fighting global warming, like placing mirrors in the sky to block the sun or fertilising the oceans to soak up greenhouse gases?

They sound like great proposals at first sight: simple,  probably cheaper and in some cases reversible. See a story about the technologies here. But there’s a lot of scepticism among scientists in the U.N. Climate Panel – there could be nasty side effects.

If you spew clouds of tiny particles, such as sulphur, into the upper atmosphere to block out some sunlight, for instance, they will eventually fall to earth and add to smog (think Beijing on bad days before the Olympics). Backers say that volcanoes do the same thing naturally — big eruptions can cool the planet. But who wants to breathe it in every day?

You can also dump iron filings into the seas to spur a bloom of algae which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then sink to the bottom when they die and cut the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Sounds great, but it might also make the oceans more acidic — shellfish, crabs, lobsters, etc could then find it harder to build shells and so be more vulnerable to predators.

And if you put a giant barrier in space to reflect sunlight it might cause all sorts of havoc with the climate.

Time Magazine once called such “geo-engineering” options the “Hail Mary pass” - a desperate throw that just might win you the match. 

Is it worth the risk?

By Peter Jebautzke

Getting caught speeding changed my life — for the better.

It inadvertently turned me into a devoted bike commuter, has saved me lots of money, aggravation — and even saved the world a little bit of carbon dioxide to boot. Since giving up the car for my daily commutes by bike to work in August, I’ve also lost about 2 kilos and now look forward to my daily 16 km journeys each way to and from the office.

Other colleagues who cycle to work had long tried to encourage me to try out commuting by bike. We’ve even got a little shower here where I work in the centre of Berlin. But it was always so much easier to jump into the car.

In April, I jumped into the car and stepped on the gas a bit too hard. I got a late-night call from the office and had to get there in a hurry. The motorway was clear so I got up to 117 kph. That was 37 kph over the 80 kph limit. The police caught me — and I lost my driver’s licence for a month.

I tried commuting via the underground for a few days but I didn’t like feeling like a sardine. So I bought a mountain bike and cycled the 16 km home one day. It was exhausting but somehow delightful as well. It took me 77 minutes. Within a few days I was down to 56 minutes and within two weeks I had cut my time to about 48 minutes. I got to work and home feeling
invigorated by the fresh air and cardio workout.

I’ve since cut my best commuting time to 35 minutes — when I push the pace. That’s even two minutes faster than my previous commuting time in the car. Even when I don’t push the pedals too hard I can make it under 40 minutes.

So the net result is: no CO2, better fitness, far lower commuting costs and less wear and tear on my car. The only thing that I wonder about is: Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

(Peter Jebautzke is a project engineer working for Reuters in Berlin)

Emissions of the main greenhouse gas are rocketing — despite international efforts to slow them down, according to a study today.

Read my colleague David Fogarty’s worrying article about carbon dioxide emissions — China has definitely overtaken the United States as top emitter, India is catching up with third placed Russia.

What’s alarming is that the rate of growth of gases blamed for stoking global warming is quickening. And the fastest growth is in the developing world.  

The Global Carbon Project said in its report carbon dioxide emissions by mankind are growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the 1990s, despite efforts by 37 rich nations to rein in emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

Ouch! The report confirms that the developing countries are now producing more greenhouse gases than rich nations which have been burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

Any ideas about how the world can slow the rise, without shutting down the economy?

Can carbon capture and storage (CCS) save the world?

Is this the silver bullet everyone’s been waiting for? Or just pie in the sky? Is capturing and storing carbon dioxide the technology breakthrough to cut greenhouse gas emissions without getting in the way of economic growth and industry’s “addiction” to fossil fuels? Or is it just a “greenwash” — a token gesture by some of the utilities responsible for so much of the world’s CO2 to try to persuade an increasingly green public that the great emitters are doing something to fight climate change?

Those are the questions that were hurled at Vattenfall executives on Tuesday when the Swedish-based utility opened the world’s first CCS plant in a small town south of Berlin called Schwarze Pumpe. The company believes it will be economically feasible before long to capture carbon, liquify it, and store it permanently on a large scale underground. This is only a small pilot plant producing enough power for a town of 20,000. But if it works, Vattenfall plans to build two conventional power plants 10 times larger in Germany and Denmark by 2015 and from 2020 they hope CCS will be a viable option for large-scale industrial use.

Proud as Vattenfall CEO Lars Josefsson and other executives from one of Europe’s largest utilities were at the inauguration of the 30-megawatt lignite-burning plant on Tuesday that cost 70 million euros and removes 95 percent of the CO2 emissions, they were nevertheless pummeled by journalists from across Europe wanting to know about the economics of it (and were told they’re not bad but could be better), whether they have the permits to store the CO2 underground (not yet but expected soon) and whether it was just more “greenwash” (a definite no).

“We take our responsibility seriously,” Josefsson said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with ‘greenwashing’.”

Economists like Nicholas Stern have placed a lot of hope in carbon capture. He told a group of journalists in Berlin last year that with coal so abundant and cheap around the world, it is hard to imagine any solution to climate change without CCS.

But what do the economics of CCS look like? Vattenfall said that CCS will at first cut the efficiency rate from 46 and 43 percent (for hard coal and lignite) by about 10 percentage points — making it roughly 25 percent more expensive to produce the same amount of energy. But they are confident that those efficiency levels would soon be back to their original level before long.

“We aim to show that it’s feasible, that it’s economical,” said Josefsson. “It’s a long-term project. We’ll have to invest many, many billions for the next step. Vattenfall is prepared to invest many billions. We will make electricity clean.”

Vattenfall said the costs of the investment will pay for itself as prices for EU-wide trading in emission rights rise. Tuomo Hatakka, head of the Germany-based Vattenfall Europe unit, said the break-even point is between 30 and 35 euros per tonne — the current price is just under 30 euros but expected to rise.

“It shouldn’t lead to any additional costs,” said Josefsson. “We’re taking the fight against climate change seriously in Europe and we’ve got a market. This is only the start of a long process. There are incentives to solve the problem.”

So is carbon capture a silver bullet — or just ‘greenwash’? I’m not sure it’s the silver bullet, not yet anyhow. But the 70 million euros they spent on Schwarze Pump isn’t chicken feed either. Seeing some tangible steps taken like in Schwarze Pumpe is certainly a better way to spend a day than listening to politicians talking about what needs to be done.

 Are gasoline and energy prices too high? What’s high enough? 

It may be a distinct miniority opinion, but if you were to ask me, I’d say I think they’re not high enough — and I sincerely hope they keep rising. It may be the only way the world wakes up to the perils of climate change — hitting people in their pocketbooks where it hurts most.
 
The higher energy costs are truly a blessing in disguise for anyone concerned about climate change and worried about the inability of world leaders to take any tough measures to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With the growing scientific evidence that global warming has been happening, there’s no excuse for this generation’s inaction.

And with the WTO talks ending in abject failure, who could possibly be optimistic about the world ever agreeing on taking the costly, pain-inducing steps necessary to at least slow global warming in our time?
 
So it is the soaring energy prices are filling the void the cowardly political leaders have left. Rising prices for petrol, natural gas and electricity are causing pain and leading to conservation — and reduced emissions of carbon dioxide It’s a good thing.

 Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, pointed out in his excellent book “The Age of Turbulence” that as honourable as the fight against climate change was, he didn’t think there would be any significant reductions until economics figured into the equation. “I fear that a more likely response to global warming will be to quibble until the dangers it poses to national economies become more apparent,” Greenspan wrote. He was criticised by some for that but those “dangers” to economies are now now happening faster than anyone could have imagined. And it’s a good thing.
 
Those who don’t see the light need to feel the heat. The finance minister in Berlin, Thilo Sarazzin, has been criticised this week for his suggestion that people turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters in the winter if they feel cold in their apartments. He said room temperatures of 15 or 16 degrees — with a sweater on — would be the best answer to rising energy prices rather than introducing a new government energy subsidy for low-income households as some other political leaders were clamouring for. Sarazzin has been getting bashed in the German media for his suggestion — but he’s right.   
 
In Britain, the announcement this week that natural gas and electricity prices would be raised sharply in the months ahead got a lot of people upset. But what better way to promote conservation and spur the development of renewable energy — which becomes increasingly attractive with every increase in the price of fossil fuels. In the United States, by far the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, fuel tax revenues are down sharply this year — because people are using less fuel. That’s a good thing.
 
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the prices are high enough yet to really make a difference. A recent German news broadcast found several motorists who said the higher fuel prices would not change their driving habits and they said they hoped the higher prices would nevertheless force other drivers off the road so the streets would be less congested. So I do hope they keep rising — to the point those smug motorists will think twice about their driving patterns.
 
My personal answer to rising prices? I’m driving a lot less (one 60 litre tank now lasts six weeks instead of three weeks about two years ago), I use wood rather than natural gas for heat as much as possible, have taken a number of energy-saving measures on my house, commute by bicycle and have converted my monthly electric bill into a monthly windfall profit with the help of solar panels. I’m unfortunately still far from zero emissions. But that’s the goal — and an increasingly rewarding one.
 
So no, if you ask me, energy prices are not high enough. And I hope they keep rising.

…What do you think? 
 

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Often when seeing anti-environmental commentary about global warming in the media, I feel like the first question I would like to ask these commentators is: “Why do you deny that carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is increasing in an unprecedented way in the atmosphere, is a greenhouse gas?”

If they were to start their answer: “I don’t deny it …” I would think “Good, we’ve made some progress.” However, as I think would often be the case, if they start their answer: “Because …” we should be ready to pounce on the ensuing nonsense.

Here’s a key example of such nonsense from a former weatherman:

“Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000, only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t”.

This might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that editorial pages like the Wall Street Journal and conservative news sources such as Fox News treat such individuals as scientific authorities on climate change.

Leaving aside the fact that it is the molecular structure of CO₂ that is the basis for its greenhouse effect with respect to absorbing heat radiation from the Earth’s surface and warming the climate, or that with no CO₂ in the atmosphere our planet would freeze over, the numbers argument above is just unforgivable. The current and future higher concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere are precisely accounted for in climate models that simulate present and future warming.A seemingly small concentration of a gas in the atmosphere is not a measure of its potential environmental or health impact. Indeed, if anything, the more trace level a gas is in the natural atmosphere, the more powerful its environmental impact is likely to be.

For example, I would ask any reader that accepts the above argument, with all its hubris (“…that’s all there is to it …” !!) to consider this: Would you mind if there were just 38 molecules of carbon monoxide (CO) out of 100,000 molecules of atmosphere in ‘front of your face’? If you don’t mind, you should know that, after a few hours of exposure, you would probably be dead.

Similarly weather reporters surely should know that dangerous air pollution levels of gases like ozone (O₃) are measured in very low concentrations of 100 molecules per billion molecules of atmosphere! After all, ozone levels are a routine part of weather forecasts today.