Environment Forum

Stern, in center of climate pessimism, hopeful about U.S.

Nicholas Stern, the British economist who warned five years ago that global warming could cost the world’s GDP as much as 20 percent a year by 2050, hasn’t given up on the United States  taking action on climate even though he’s down on Washington for not passing a bill that would do just that.

“If you look around the world, of all places to sit and wonder where (climate policy is) going, this is probably the most pessimistic place — this city,” he told a small gathering of reporters at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. late this week.

But all one has to do is travel out of the U.S. capital to see enormous potential for taking action, he said. Stern is optimistic about U.S. companies in Silicon Valley and Boston and other places developing low-carbon technologies such as batteries for electric cars, or new biofuels that aren’t made out of food crops.

“There are so many technological ideas on the table that you don’t need all of them to work, just some,” he said.

 He also takes heart in state level mandates for renewable energy and the reelection of Jerry Brown, the pro-solar governor of California, who wants to set the bar even higher for renewable energy.

Be that as it may, Stern is even more deeply concerned about the risks of climate change.

He thinks he underestimated the risk in the Stern Review issued five years ago. But now he doesn’t describe the risks in terms of percentage points of lost GDP. He believes hundreds of millions of people could be forced to migrate in coming decades because of global warming, resulting in conflicts, or even wars.

Even everyday weather could pack a $485 billion punch

No question about it: this has been a wild weather year so far in the United States, with record rains, droughts, wildfires and tornadoes. But a new study indicates that even routine weather events like rainstorms and cooler-than-normal days could pack a huge annual economic wallop.

Weather’s effect on all sectors of the U.S. economy may total $485 billion a year, as much as 3.4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, according to research published in the current Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It is the first study to apply qualitative economic analysis to estimate the U.S. economy’s weather sensitivity.

Mining and agriculture are particularly sensitive to weather influences, with routine variations taking a toll of 14 percent on mining each year — possibly because of changing demands for oil, gas and coal — and farming feeling a 12 percent impact, conceivably because temperature and precipitation affect many crops, the study said.

Other weather-sensitive U.S. sectors include manufacturing (8 percent); finance, insurance and retail (8 percent), and utilities (7 percent). By contrast, wholesale and retail trade had a weather sensitivity of 2 percent, and the service sector felt a 3 percent impact from routine weather variations. The impacts stretch across every U.S. state, researchers found.

“It’s clear that our economy isn’t weatherproof,” said the study’s lead author, Jeffrey Lazo, an economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

This research could help policymakers figure out whether it makes sense to invest in enhanced forecasts and other strategies to help shield U.S. economic activity from weather impacts, NCAR said in a statement. The study did not calculate any additional costs from extreme weather events because data from these events was not available for the time period of their economic model. They also did not factor in possible impacts of climate change, which is expected to spur floods, heat waves and other severe weather events.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (Spectators don rain gear during first round play at the 2011 U.S. Open golf tournament in Bethesda, Maryland, June 16, 2011.)

Is this the greenest office on Earth?

Every workstation has a view. Much of the lighting comes from reflected sunshine. It’s so naturally quiet that unobtrusive speakers pipe in “white noise” to preserve a level of privacy. The windows open, and they’re shaded in such a way that there’s no glare. Even with the windows closed, fresh air circulates through vents in the floor. Extreme recycling prevails, not just of bottles, cans and kitchen refuse but beetle-blighted wood.

Welcome to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which contains some of the greenest office space on the planet.

NREL’s headquarters in Golden, Colorado, is also the home to cutting-edge research on biofuels, photo-voltaics for solar power and other renewable energy technology, but the physical plant is a living lab for green building. At $63 million, or $259 per square foot for its construction cost, including interiors and furniture, the Research Support Facility as it is called, was hardly cheap to build. But with 220,000 square feet of space, it is the biggest energy efficient building in the United States.

The recycling is evident at the entrance, which is decorated with angled wall panels made of golden-colored pine. Look more closely and you see a bluish tinge on the wood, from fungus that grew after the pine tree that formed the lumber was attacked by pine beetles. A warming climate in the Western U.S. has enabled pine beetles to survive winters and reproduce to assault pine forests.

This building is highly energy efficient, but it still is responsible for some climate-warming carbon emissions because of some of the construction materials and emissions from vehicles and equipment used to put the building together. It offsets most of the energy it uses by drawing on electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

The building uses 35,000 BTU per square foot per year, or about 65 watts per person, about one-third to one-fourth the amount of energy used by a conventional office building constructed in the last 30 years.

One key to making it energy efficient is old technology, according to Shanti Pless, a senior engineer at NREL. Really old. Like the thick outer walls you might see in a medieval cathedral. Exposed concrete helps keep the internal temperature of the building comfortable.

A flying HIPPO, with ICE-T on the side

A HIPPO took off from a windswept airfield in Colorado today, as  ICE-T waited in a nearby hangar, getting ready for a summer trip to the Caribbean.

OK, OK, enough fun with acronyms. HIPPO and ICE-T are flying climate laboratories, one in a Gulfstream V jet, the other in a refurbished C-130 military cargo plane.

Unlike its animal namesake, HIPPO is actually a rather sleek aircraft, fitted with equipment and a crew of 10, that makes flights of  eight hours or more at a go, sampling the atmosphere around the Pacific Basin, from near the North Pole to just off the coast of Antarctica. HIPPO is actually a combination of two acronyms: HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations. HIAPER itself stands for High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research. Quite a mouthful.

Unlike most Gulfstream V’s — usually used as corporate jets — this one has no in-flight bar. (Roger Wakimoto, the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which manages the program along with the National Science Foundation, said the bar was one of the first things to go after the plane was delivered.)

HIPPO takes off steeply and then flies in a sawtooth pattern, rising to 28,000 feet and then dipping to just 1,000 feet above the water or land. The point of this roller-coaster flight is to figure out how climate-warming carbon dioxide and other trace gases is distributed, not just at Earth’s surface but up to the edge of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where most weather occurs. Learn more about this project here.

By contrast, ICE-T is being equipped for summer in St. Croix, where it will be based for a series of flights out over the open Atlantic Ocean. Its mission is to examine the ice that forms in clouds, because more than half of all precipitation begins in the ice phase.

How ice forms and multiplies in clouds is poorly understood and ICE-T — Ice in Clouds Experiment – Tropics — is meant to help scientists learn more about it. That could in turn help with accurately modeling precipitation and predicting climate changes. Take a look here for more information.

Enviro-word of the moment: Anthropocene

A word has entered the language — at least, the language of environmental concern — that may be ready for prime-time. That word is Anthropocene. It’s the epoch we’re apparently living in, roughly translated as the Age of Man. The theory behind the name is that human beings have made such an impact on Earth’s geology that we should have an era named for us that differentiates this time from the tired old Holocene period.

Holocene means “entirely new,” but it’s been some 10,000 years since it started. Scientists and others meeting in London figure it may be time to move on.

In a note about their meeting at The Geological Society, they ask: “Has humanity’s impact on the Earth been so significant that it defines a new geological epoch? In the blink of a geological eye, through our need for energy, food, water, minerals, for space in which to live and play, we have wrought changes to Earth’s environment and life that are as significant as any known in the geological record.”

They may have a point. Homo sapiens has been particularly expert at exploiting natural resources, warming up the planet by 1.3°F (0.74ºC) over the past century. But the impact goes beyond the extraction and burning of fossil fuels; increasing human appetites for land, food and water put pressure on every other species on Earth. Some scientists believe Earth is on the brink of a sixth mass extinction (the last one was 65 million years ago) and see human activities as being at least partly to blame.

Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen gets most of the credit for coining the word. Back in 2000 he reckoned that human impacts on the world, its ecosystems and the geologic record constitute a new “Anthropogenic” geological epoch (he wrote it up for the journal Nature two years later). Andrew Revkin, who runs the New York Times’ Dot Earth environmental blog, gets some points for using the term “Anthrocene” in 1992 to describe the same phenomenon.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach (Google Earth demonstration at the Google I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco, California)

REUTERS/Mariana Bazo (Tomas, an endangered Humboldt penguin, on a boat en route to a penguin colony on San Lorenzo Island, Peru, January 26, 2011)

from The Great Debate UK:

The safest form of power: Everything in moderation

By Morven McCulloch

The ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in north-eastern Japan, seriously damaged by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami, has led to anti-nuclear protests in several countries and forced governments to rethink their energy policies.

The UK currently has 10 nuclear power stations, representing 18 percent of the country’s energy supply according to Energy UK. Should British Prime Minister David Cameron, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reverse his position on the safety of nuclear power?

Environment and climate scientist Lord Julian Hunt told Reuters in a video interview that although the situation at the Fukushima plant is an “extremely serious event,” there are risks to consider with every type of power.

Hunt says: "I think the difficulty about a public debate is to weigh up very short-term risks with longer-term risks that happen all the time.

“Take for example coal, which is still used very widely in India, China and Denmark (80 percent of Danish power comes from coal). The coal is mined... which leads to massive air, water and ground pollution. A million people die a year from air pollution, according to the World Health Organisation figures, and that’s a global figure. So there are risks associated with fossil fuels, let alone the question of climate change.

“Part of the strategy has got to be to consider how climate change itself is affecting conditions for different sorts of energy supply. Because we really can't predict everything, and all possible interactions, it seems to me to be a strong argument for continuing to have an energy mix and to invest in new kinds of technology.”

Amazon’s drought, seen from space

How green is the Amazon?

Not as green as it used to be, as shown in an analysis of satellite images made during last year’s record-breaking drought.

Because greenness is an indication of health in the Amazon, a decline in this measurement means this vast area is getting less healthy — bad news for biodiversity and some native peoples in the region.

What does a drop in the greenness index look like? It looks gold, orange and red in a graphic accompanying an article to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

Gray areas are the norm, based on a decade of satellite observations that cover every acre (actually every square kilometer) on the planet. Dots that are gold, orange or deep red show areas with a decrease in greenness. Scientists call this the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI on this chart) or the greenness index.

The chart shows what happened during July, August and September of 2010, the height of the dry season — a deep loss of greenness. The researchers found that the 2010 drought reduced the greenness of approximately 965,000 square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) of vegetation in the Amazon,  more than four times the area affected by the last severe drought in 2005.

Even when rains came in late October, greenness didn’t bounce back, according to Ranga Myneni, one of the scientists who worked on this research.

How to make communities see green over REDD?

Forests are the lifeblood for millions of people around the world. Murniah, a 40-year-old mother of one in Mentaya Seberang village in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan Province, knows this only too well.

Large areas to the west of her village on the Mentaya river have been converted to palm oil. Good for a short-term boost in incomes but not so good for the environment.

“The forest is very important,” she said. “There are many examples where the forest has been opened up, such as for palm oil, and this has caused flooding. We only care about rubber and rattan,” she said during a village meeting to discuss a project to save a vast peat swamp forest just to the east.

Forests have become central to efforts to curb the pace of climate change because they soak up large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide from power stations, industry and transport. They are a key part of two-week climate talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun that began on Monday aimed at stepping up efforts to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Saving what’s left of the world’s tropical rainforests won’t be easy amid growing demands for land to grow food and extract timber and minerals.

A visit to Central Kalimantan shows this in stark terms. The province has lost millions of hectares of forest to logging, palm oil plantations, coal and zircon mining as well as slash-and-burn farming. Large areas are now wasteland, vulnerable to choking fires in the dry season and flooding in the wet season.

Yet, Indonesia. which loses about 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres)  of forest a year, has emerged as a key player in global efforts to preserve carbon-rich forests. The hope is that a U.N.-backed scheme called REDD, or reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, will eventually develop into an international payment system based on trading carbon credits from forest preservation projects. There are nearly 40 REDD pilot projects in Indonesia, placing local communities in the spotlight.

Making REDD work for illegal loggers

It took just 30 seconds to fell the tree. Hendri, 27, a skinny Indonesian from Central Kalimantan on Borneo island, skilfully wielded the chainsaw more than half his height. The result is a thunderous crash and a tree that is quickly cut into planks on the forest floor near by.

And the reward for this effort? About 125,000 rupiah, or roughly $12 per tree measuring 30 cm or more in diameter. Hendri and the three other members of this local gang of illegal loggers make about $45 a day (not including expenses and bribes) cutting down between 4 and 5 trees and slicing them into planks with a chainsaw, using no protective gear. They work for about 10 days at a stretch.

Their work is tough and highlights the challenge of finding alternative livelihoods in communities surrounding projects that aim to save large areas of forest in the fight against climate change.

Another member of the gang, Maulana, 40, explained he didn’t like the work but he had six children to feed. If given a choice, he said he’d switch to growing rubber or managing a small area of palm oil if given the seedlings and land. Just a hectare of palm oil would be enough to meet his needs. That was preferable than the dangerous work cutting down trees in the steaming, flooded peat swamp forest, he said.

Indonesia has emerged as one of the leading countries in a U.N.-backed scheme that hopes to reward developing nations with carbon credit payments in return for saving forests, particularly carbon-rich peatlands found in southern Borneo.

Called REDD, or reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, the idea is to pay for reductions of greenhouse gases, such as the carbon dioxide that forests absorb to grow and release in large amounts when cut down or burned. The greater the amount of carbon prevented from being emitted, potentially the greater the rewards in a scheme that could eventually be worth $30 billion a year in annual trade in CO2 credits, the United Nations says.

In Central Kalimantan, there are a number of large REDD projects, including where Hendri and his workers were operating. But project developers know that their investments will only pay off if the loggers are found new jobs, such as rangers, guides for ecotourists or given assistance to set up their own cash crops, such as rubber, rattan or even quick growing timber.

from The Great Debate UK:

Preparing for the next tsunami

-- Lord Hunt is a visiting professor at Delft University and emeritus professor at University College London, and former director-general of the UK Meteorological Office. Dr Simon Day is a researcher at the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London. The opinions expressed are their own --

The devastating tsunami that struck the Indonesian islands of Mentawai may have caused about 450 deaths, with hundreds more still missing, and compounds the disaster caused in the country by the eruption of Mount Merapi in Java. Following a magnitude 7.7 earthquake, the Mentawai Islands were engulfed with estimated three-metre waves that affected thousands of households.

What has shocked many about this latest disaster is the fact that, more than five years after the cataclysmic Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, when at least 187,000 people died (with 43,000 still missing), there were no greater preparations against the devastation.

This is especially puzzling to some as, since 2004, our understanding of the risks of tsunamis and how to reduce their impact has advanced considerably through warnings, forecasting and better tsunami-resistant construction and design.  For instance, in the past five years there has been significant progress in most aspects of warnings around the world, and the Indian Ocean region now has a system in place.

Much of the explanation for this apparent paradox stems from the fact that, even with a warning system in place, some communities close to epicentres may still not receive the warnings in time. This was exactly the issue with the recent disaster.

With Mentawai no more than 100 kilometres from the earthquake's epicentre, the tsunami waves reached the shores of the islands within 15-30 minutes; even if a tsunami alert had been issued by a warning system, it would have arrived too late for many people to have time to escape. This underlines the fact that, in almost all major earthquake-generated tsunamis (the exceptions occur when the source area is more or less uninhabited), at least 80 percent of the casualties occur in the zone of felt seismic shaking from the source, and within the first hour.

So does this mean that there is nothing we can do to assist communities near earthquake epicentres from tsunamis? The short answer is “no” in at least two main respects.