Climate Emergency News

The day the Earth stood still

2009-12-20T14:55:00.001-08:00

MARIAN WILKINSON

The Age, December 22, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-day-the-earth-stood-still-20091220-l7jf.html

IN a faltering step that nearly all concede is too little to avert a climate crisis, the majority of world leaders will adopt the first international agreement that recognises global warming must stay below two degrees to avoid dangerous climate change.

Despite the deep disappointment of many who helped create it, the Copenhagen accord will stand as a first attempt to bring the biggest greenhouse gas polluting nations, the United States and China, into a political deal to curb soaring global emissions.

By the end of next month, rich nations, including Australia, must lodge their 2020 targets to cut emissions under the accord while the big emerging polluters, including China, India, Brazil and Indonesia, have agreed to list the voluntary measures to curb theirs.

''We have sealed the deal,'' the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said. ''This accord cannot be everything that everyone hoped for, but it is an essential beginning.''

The accord was formally recognised by the UN conference in Copenhagen in its closing session even as some of its smaller members condemned its lack of ambition - if unchanged, it will leave the world on a path to warming at least three degrees.

The deal was struck after a marathon round of negotiations between 26 world leaders, including the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, which almost collapsed several times as it was progressively watered down by China and the US.

The exhaustion on the faces of the European leaders was matched by the disappointment when they finally faced the media at 2am on Saturday. The Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, acting as President of the European Union, and Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, had just given their grudging agreement to the flimsy document, just several pages long, that was supposed to guide the world in its fight against climate change.

''Let's be honest and say that this is not a perfect agreement. It will not solve the climate threat,'' Mr Reinfeldt said as the last draft of the accord was running off the photocopiers.

He admitted that throughout the long day and night all hope of an ambitious politically binding agreement had been crushed by China and the US. ''We have been fighting not to go backwards,'' he said.

Yet in those early hours of Saturday, the Europeans, along with Mr Rudd and his British counterpart, Gordon Brown, faced the media one after the other to defend the accord that environmental groups and many small, vulnerable nations were calling a catastrophe.

''This represents a significant global agreement,'' Mr Rudd insisted. His Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, stood beside him looking shattered, whether from exhaustion, disappointment or a combination of both was unclear. By then, Senator Wong had been in negotiations for 24 hours, working through the gritty details of the deal.

Mr Rudd had to acknowledge the accord's obvious flaw: the emissions cuts promised in the document, even at their most ambitious, failed to match the promise of avoiding dangerous climate change.

''A huge amount of work still remains to be done,'' he conceded. ''But the alternative, which we confronted, staring into the abyss at midnight last night, [was] these negotiations collapsing altogether and throwing back all progress that has been reached in recent times in global climate change action.''

Almost two hours earlier, before Mr Rudd, Mr Brown and the Europeans had emerged from their final leaders' meeting, the US President, Barack Obama, had announced the accord to the travelling White House press corps as he prepared to fly out of Copenhagen.

A reporter queried the President's departure before the draft was finalised. ''Does it require signing, is it that kind of agreement?'' The President replied vaguely: ''You know, it raises an interesting question as to whether technically there's actually a signature - since, as I said, it's not a legally binding agreement, I don't know what the protocols are.''

But Mr Obama quickly added: ''I do think that this is a commitment that we, as the United States, are making and that we think is very important.'' Then he raised his hands. ''All right. Thanks, guys.'' And briskly he left for Air Force One.

Mr Obama had been in Copenhagen for less than 14 hours.

In that time, he had done a deal with the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, that steamrolled over the UN climate negotiations. The US and China had wrested control of the strategic decision-making from the Europeans. Any future climate change agreements will be dictated by their joint level of ambition.

After almost two weeks of debate, where minister after minister, and leader after leader, had spoken passionately about the threat facing the planet, after all the mass protests, the pleas, the prayers and the promises, what had emerged was not ''the grand bargain'' called for by Mr Rudd, but the weak compromise so many had predicted.

The Copenhagen accord lacks legal force. In the last hours of the conference on Saturday, nations agreed only to ''take note'' of the agreement.

The accord has one big promise: to keep the global temperature from rising by more than two degrees. But the fine print shows clearly that as it stands, the accord keeps the world on a path that will lead to a warming of at least three degrees.

This, according to the UN's scientific body, will lead to catastrophic consequences this century for many nations, from Bangladesh to Australia.

As Mr Reinfeldt explained to the bleary-eyed reporters, rich

countries were supposed to come to Copenhagen with pledges on the table to cut their emissions from 1990 levels between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020. They did not. What is on offer is a group cut of only 18 per cent. Dragging down the numbers, Mr Reinfeldt said, is the US. Bound by bills before the US Senate, Mr Obama would not move beyond pledging a cut of about 3 per cent on 1990 levels.

The Europeans agreed to the weak outcome largely because of one breakthrough: for the first time, the US, with China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and Singapore have put on paper measures to curb emissions.

But those 2020 commitments are now likely to be at the lower level of ambition. Mr Rudd's promise of a 25 per cent cut to Australia's emissions is conditional on an ambitious deal. He will now feel justified in putting up a target of 10 to 15 per cent.

China, who repeatedly blocked negotiations, promised to curb its emissions, but will be limited by economic growth - and so they could continue to soar.

The Europeans' concerns were compounded after Mr Wen argued to remove a clause calling for global emissions to be halved by 2050 - the formula based on the advice of the UN's peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ''How can we reach the two degrees if we can't agree on a long-term target?'' Mr Barroso asked.

Mr Obama faced criticism from the Europeans over the lack of a long-term target in the accord or pledges to achieve it. But he insisted the accord was a first step. ''There are going to be those who are going to look at the national commitments, tally them up and say, you know, the science dictates that even more needs to be done,'' he said.

''The challenge here was that for a lot of countries, particularly those emerging countries that are still in different stages of development, this is going to be the first time in which even voluntarily they offered up mitigation targets. And I think that it was important to essentially get that shift in orientation moving. That's what I think will end up being most significant about this accord.''

Mr Obama's determination to have China, India and Brazil in an agreement, however weak, overrode the resistance of the Europeans. The deal was struck after critical meetings. Mr Obama and Mr Wen met twice behind closed doors after each publicly staked their positions.

The US-China meeting was then expanded to include the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. ''That's where we agreed to list our national actions and commitments,'' Mr Obama said. ''We agreed to set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius, and importantly, to take action to meet this objective consistent with science.''

But what Mr Obama ditched was any promise for a legally binding treaty as the next crucial step. The Europeans had argued such a treaty needed to be signed within six months, a year at the latest, when the UN climate conference meets in Mexico. Asked if that was possible, Mr Obama said: ''I think it is going to be very hard and it's going to take some time.''

This was a big defeat for Australia, Europe and Japan who, unlike the US, have ratified the only current legally binding climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. Under Kyoto, rich industrialised nations must cut their emissions. A strategy behind Copenhagen was to get a deal that would lead to replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a single treaty for all nations, especially the US and China.

But China, India and Brazil along with virtually all the key developing nations brought the summit to a standstill over this issue, refusing to accept any proposal they said would ''kill Kyoto''.

The accord has been criticised by environmental groups, small island states and the least developed nations, who said two degrees of warming would condemn much of Africa and the low-lying islands to disaster.

They mounted a strong case for a limit of 1.5 degrees - ''1.5 to stay alive''. The clause to examine this target was taken out of the final text. But, critically, what remains is a promised review in line with the science by 2015, after the next report of the UN's scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But despite all the criticism, the last two weeks cannot be seen simply as a failure. For all its many flaws, the summit brought together 119 world leaders who acknowledged for the first time that climate change is one of the greatest economic and security challenges facing the planet.

From the President of the US to the President of the Maldives, virtually almost every leader recognised their economies would be forced to undergo a clean energy revolution within the next few decades.

One of the most telling revelations came not on the floor of the conference but in a briefing from the US senator John Kerry, who is trying to shepherd climate change laws through the Senate.

Asked why anyone would believe the US would pass these bills next year given the level of scepticism in America, he hit back. The state of North Carolina, he said, has just announced it is shutting down 11 coal-fired power plants. South Carolina is refusing to build another one.

America is already moving, he said. He was not worried about its initial 2020 target being seen as too weak: ''We will eclipse it dramatically.''

Obama's climate accord fails the test

2009-12-18T17:37:00.001-08:00

Watered-down agreement follows day of bitter wrangling in Copenhagen

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor, in Copenhagen

The Independent, Saturday, 19 December 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/obamas-climate-accord-fails-the-test-1845090.html

World leaders late last night agreed a hugely watered-down version of a new global pact on climate change, after an astonishing day of deadlock, disagreement, misunderstandings, walkouts and insults at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

The agreement, patched together after massive and rancorous divisions between the rich nations and the developing countries, especially America and China, was described as a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" by the US President Barack Obama. However, a senior American official openly admitted it was not enough to combat the threat of a warming planet, saying merely: "It is a first step."

Known as the Copenhagen Accord, the new agreement falls massively short of the ambitions many people had centred on the two-week meeting in the Danish capital, in the hope of a major new effort to combat the global warming threat. Although in principle it commits – for the first time – all the countries of the world, including the developing countries, to cut their emissions of the greenhouse gases which are causing climate change, the accord is not legally binding, merely a political statement.

They key timetable for turning it into a legal instrument by this time next year, which is what the world desperately needs so that cuts in CO2 emissions really are carried out, was dropped from the text during the immensely difficult and seemingly-intractable talks which lasted all day and late into the evening. In effect, that makes it toothless. Mr Obama himself admitted that a binding deal would be "hard to achieve".

And although, again for the first time, the new accord set a target for the whole world to try to keep the expected rise in temperatures to below the danger threshold of C above the pre-industrial level, last night's final text dropped all reference to the individual targets for emission cuts which countries will have to take on, both in the medium and in the long-term. It is possible these may be inserted early next year – but without being legally binding, they are merely generalised aspirations.

Although at least there was a deal of sorts, which may be built on later, it was a sorry end to a day which saw seemingly insuperable divisions between rich nations and the developing countries over how the biggest problem facing the world should be tackled, even though nearly 120 of their heads of state and government were in Copenhagen to deal with it directly.

The day's most remarkable feature was a direct and unprecedented personal clash between the US President, Barack Obama, and the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, in which Mr Wen took deep offence at Mr Obama's insistence – in public – that the Chinese should allow their promised cuts in greenhouse gases to be internationally verified. When the President, in an unyielding speech, said that without international verification "any agreement would be empty words on a page", that was too much for Mr Wen. He left the conference in Copenhagen's Bella Centre, returned to his hotel in the city, and responded with a direct snub of his own – he sent low-level delegates to take his place in the talks.

A high-level source told The Independent that the US President was amazed when he found who he was negotiating with, and clearly regarded Mr Wen's absence as a major diplomatic insult. He snapped: "It would be nice to negotiate with somebody who can make political decisions" although last night urgent diplomatic efforts were underway to try to bring the two leaders face to face for a second round of talks, to patch up the disagreement.

Even until late there was stubborn disagreement over two issues – what long-term emissions cuts of greenhouse gases the world should aim at, to keep future warming below the C danger threshold, and the America-Chinese "transparency" problem – how promised emissions cuts by individual countries could be internationally monitored and verified. In both cases, it was the Chinese, now the world's biggest CO2 emitters with the world's fastest growing economy, who held out – against fixed targets, and international verification. In the end, the ambition of the deal had to be sacrificed to get it signed.

It was thought that the presence together in the same room of the world's most powerful politicians, from Mr Obama down, would prove the means of unlocking the stalemate which has dogged the two-week conference, itself the culmination of a two-year negotiating process aimed at building a new and comprehensive climate treaty. But instead, the differing attitudes and distrust which have plagued the conference remained entrenched, and were even more visible when the leaders met in Copenhagen's Bella Centre – most notably in the direct clash between the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters America and China.

Yet it got worse. The long-awaited meeting, on which so much hope has been placed for so long around the world – the Danes, from their Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussne down, have been referring to Copenhagen as "Hopenhagen" – threatened to descend into farce when Venezuela's firebrand Marxist President, Hugo Chavez, fired off a string of insults at Mr Obama from the podium, saying he had been awarded "the Nobel Prize for war" and referring to his "Yankee Empire".

Subsequently Mr Chavez said he was leaving the meeting, along with his fellow Marxist Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, and leaving the talks to junior negotiators.

It was a tragic sight for all those trying to head off the immense catastrophe-in-waiting which global warming represents, especially for the poorest in the world who will be hit hardest by rising temperatures – such as many of Mr Chavez's own people, and millions of others in South America, Africa and Asia.

Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure

2009-12-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

Deal thrashed out at talks condemned as climate change scepticism in action

John Vidal, Allegra Stratton and Suzanne Goldenberg in Copenhagen

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 December 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal

The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

American officials spun the deal as a "meaningful agreement", but even Obama said: "This progress is not enough."

"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he added.

The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was still unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session.

The agreement aims to provide $30bn in funding for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year after 2020.

But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries who had been holding out for far deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in previous drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO₂ emissions by 80% was also dropped.

The agreement also set up a forestry deal which is hoped would significantly reduce deforestation in return for cash. It lacked the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries that the US and others demanded.

Obama hinted that China was to blame for the lack of a substantial deal. In a press conference he condemned the insistence of some countries to look backwards to previous environmental agreements. He said developing countries should be "getting out of that mindset, and moving towards the position where everybody recognises that we all need to move together".

This was a not-so-veiled reference to the epic row over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol and its legal distinction between developed and developing nations. Developing nations saw this as an attempt by the rich world to wriggle out of its responsibility for climate change. Many observers blamed the US for coming to the talks with an offer of just 4% emissions cuts on 1990 levels. The final text made no obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

Negotiators will now work on individual agreements such as forests, technology, and finance – but, without strong leadership, the chances are that it will take years to complete.

Obama cast his trip as a sign of renewed US global leadership. "The time has come for us to get off the sidelines and shape the future that we seek; that is why I came to Copenhagen," he said. But he said he would not be staying for the final vote "because of weather constraints in Washington".

Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, was scathing: "This deal will definitely result in massive devastation in Africa and small island states. It has the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It's nothing short of climate change scepticism in action.

"It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush."

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: "The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. Ed Miliband [UK climate change secretary] is among the very few that come out of this summit with any credit. It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen."

Lydia Baker, Save the Children's policy adviser said: "By signing a sub-standard deal, world leaders have effectively signed a death warrant for many of the world's poorest children. Up to 250,000 children from poor communities could die before the next major meeting in Mexico at the end of next year."

Leaked document says world will warm three degrees

2009-12-17T16:21:00.001-08:00

BEN CUBBY

The Age, December 18, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/leaked-document-says-world-will-warm-three-degrees-20091218-l110.html

A document leaked from the UN secretariat says the world will warm by about three degrees this century if the greenhouse gas cuts being proposed at Copenhagen are followed through, exposing the huge gap between the rhetoric of world leaders at the conference and climate science.

Scientists say the three degree rise would likely have severe consequences on human development for centuries, and may well trigger "tipping points" that cause uncontrollable climate change.

The document, marked "confidential very initial draft - do not distribute", shows the pledges made to date would fall well short of the stated aim of world leaders, including that of the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, to hold world temperature rises to the safer level of two degrees.

"Unless the remaining gap of around 1.9 to 4.2 Gt (billion tonnes of greenhouse gases) and Parties commit themselves to strong action ... global emissions will peak later than 2020 and remain on an unsustainable pathway that could lead to concentrations equal 550 ppm (parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) with the related temperature raise 3 (degrees celcius) or above 550 ppm," the document reads.

Couched in the bureaucratic language of the UN, this is a stark warning that carbon emissions cuts are on the wrong track.

The analysis is, however, in keeping with the trajectories developed by the UN's peak global warming body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The estimated impacts of a three degree temperature rise include half of the world's animal species facing extinction and half a billion people threatened with starvation.

The average global temperature has not consistently been three degrees above pre-industrial levels since about three million years ago, well before modern humans existed.

The document, dated December 15, has the name "Bill McKibben" written in handwriting on it - a reference to the founder of the 350.org campaign which aims to limit the global temperature rise to a safer 1.5 degrees.

Mr McKibben told the Herald he had no part in the leak, and guessed a UN staffer may have released the material.

"What this shows, to me, is that the world leaders think political reality is more important than scientific reality," Mr McKibben said from Copenhagen. "Somehow they think they are going to be able to outmanoeuvre physics."

Australia currently proposes minimum emissions cuts of five per cent on its 2020 level, rising to 25 per cent if there is a binding global deal.

To keep the world within the two degree temperature rise, cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent on a baseline year of 1990 would be required, according to UN estimates.

Ben Cubby is the Herald's Environment Reporter

Two degrees to disaster

2009-12-17T00:16:00.001-08:00

DEBORAH SMITH

The Age, December 17, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/two-degrees-to-disaster-20091217-kzhv.html

For the abstract of the study go to - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7275/full/nature08686.html

The polar ice sheets are more vulnerable to moderate global warming than had been thought, says a new study published inNature.

An additional 2 degrees of warming could lead to large-scale melting in Greenland and Antarctica and a global sea level rise of more than six metres, according to an analysis of sea levels during the last warm interglacial period, which took place about 125,000 years ago.

American researchers said that unless greenhouse gas emissions were cut, the planet could be committed by 2100 to this long-term outcome, which would leave much of Bangladesh and the Netherlands submerged and hundreds of millions of people displaced.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, said:

"These findings should send a strong message to the governments negotiating in Copenhagen that the time to avoid disastrous outcomes may run out sooner than expected."

The period about 125,000 years ago provides an indication of what the planet could be like with moderate warming because the poles then were at temperatures expected to be reached with a further global warming of 1 to 2 degrees.

A billion could lose clean water to ice melt, says Al Gore

2009-12-14T19:12:00.001-08:00

From correspondents in Copenhage
AFP
December 15, 2009

http://www.news.com.au/features/a-billion-could-lose-clean-water-to-ice-melt-says-al-gore/story-e6frflp0-1225810459794

To download the report go to - http://rfflibrary.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/melting-snow-and-ice-a-call-for-action/

Ice cap showing record shrinkage
Acts as mirror to deflect sun's rays
Gore warns of climate refugees

CLIMATE guru Al Gore warned UN climate talks today that record melting of Polar and Himalayan ice could deprive more than a billion people of access to clean water.

Adding to an avalanche of bad scientific news over the past two years, the former US vice-president cited new research showing the Arctic ice cap may have shrunk to record-low levels last year.

"2008 had a smaller minimum, probably, than 2007," Mr Gore said at the release of a report he co-sponsored with the Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Store, called Melting Snow and Ice: A call for Action.

"These figures are fresh, I just got them yesterday," Mr Gore said, alluding to work led by Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

"Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of summer months could be completely ice-free within five to seven years," Mr Gore said.

"There are more than a billion people on the planet who get more than half of their drinking water - many of them all of their drinking water - from the seasonal melting of snow melt and glacier ice."

Scientists reported last September that Arctic ice cover - which helps beat back the sun's heat-delivering rays back into space - had reversed course after 2007, when it had shrunk to its smallest size ever.

But when measured by volume, the 4.5 million sq km area in 2008 was actually smaller than the year before.

The Arctic ice cover does not affect sea levels, but is a critically important barrier to global warming.

Intact, its white surface acts as a mirror, but when the ice disappears it becomes a sponge.

"Instead of 85 per cent of the solar energy being reflected, 85 is absorbed in the Arctic Ocean," Mr Gore, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on warning of the threat posed by climate change, said.

Co-author Robert Corell pointed to another threat: the massive, accelerating loss of mass - measured in hundreds of billions of tonnes per year - from icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Combined with the expansion of ocean water due to global warming, the continent-sized icesheets are now set to contribute to a global sea level rise of about a metre by the end of the century, double the mid-point prediction of the UN's benchmark science report in 2007.

"A one metre rise equals 100 million people who will have to move, one hundred million environmental refugees,'' Mr Corell said.

"We have woken giants,'' Arctic ice specialist Dorothe Dahl-Jensen said in presenting a second report on Greenland from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme.

"This is really scary. This really shakes us scientists.

"These icesheets are enormous."

Greenland's ice block holds enough frozen water to lift seas seven metres, while West Antarctica could add another five metres to the global water mark.

Ms Dahl-Jensen said the pace at which some glaciers on the west coast of Greenland were "calving'', or falling into the sea, has sped up dramatically over the last decade.

"This is by far the fastest flowing ice we have ever dreamed of," she said.

"This is a rate of loss that we have never seen before."

Both scientists pointed out that all of these impacts had been unleashed by a less than 1C increase of global temperatures since pre-industrial times.

"Current proposals from individual countries for their own actions would lead to a temperature increase of approximately 3.8C'', by the end of the century, Mr Corell said.

When the moral argument went mainstream

2009-12-14T16:17:00.001-08:00

MARIAN WILKINSON

The Age, December 15, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/when-the-moral-argument-went-mainstream-20091214-ksdm.html

SLOWLY, carefully, the Reverend Tofiga Falani, from the tiny nation of Tuvalu, walked down the long aisle of the Copenhagen Cathedral, holding in his arms a piece of bleached dead coral from the Pacific Ocean. With him came the Reverend Suzanne Matale from Zambia clutching dried-up maize from Africa and Bishop Sofie Petersen, from Greenland carrying stones uncovered in the melting glaciers of her ice-capped home.

As a thousand worshippers sang All Creatures of Our God and King, the three religious leaders from far-flung corners of the world joined scores of bishops and priests who gathered in Copenhagen's most famous church on Sunday to pray for the planet and for the politicians who are disputing its fate.

The dignitaries of the Danish Lutheran Church in their black robes and stiff white collars sat shoulder to shoulder with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in flowing pale yellow, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu readily recognisable in his red, white and black robes. Opposite the bishops, Denmark's Queen Margrethe II and her husband Prince Henrik, took their place in the royal cathedral where their son Frederik had married his Australian bride, Princess Mary.

Far more than the weekend's mass demonstration, this powerful display of church and palace seemed to capture the moment when the moral argument for tackling climate change suddenly became mainstream thinking.

As the historic UN climate change conference nears its climax, the politicians and officials are still in deep disagreement over the basic question: will the big polluters cut their greenhouse gas enough to avoid dangerous climate change?

As the negotiators remain divided, the churches are uniting behind what is rapidly becoming one of the largest civil campaigns since World War II.

The Reverend Henrik Stubkjaer told the overflowing crowd in the cathedral the bleached coral was brought to Copenhagen as a symbol for the rising sea temperatures, the dead maize for extended droughts and failed crops, and the stones for the melting polar worlds. ''Lord'' he called, ''we lay in your hands these symbols of your suffering creation. Forgive us our part in the destruction of your carefully balanced world, our home and community. Help us heal and reconcile your earth.''

The Church of the Rock Choir sang in Zulu, the Aavaat choir in Greenlandic and the Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir in Danish and English. But in every language, the religious leaders had the same message. They wanted the politicians to tackle climate change as a moral imperative because, they argue, poor nations will suffer the most and will have the least ability to adapt to it.

At the end of the service, the diminutive Archbishop Tutu stood in front of the huge white marble statue of Christ and gave the final blessing. Each worshipper lit a candle and took it out into the fading afternoon light as a symbol of hope for the talks.

The cathedral bells chimed 350 times to remind leaders of the ambitious climate agreement now being demanded by the poorest nations on earth and now the churches. This is an agreement that keeps carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from rising above 350 parts per million, to stop the temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees, not the 2 degrees acceptable to the big players.

Daniel Varmeer, a Christian youth activist from the Netherlands, said he had come to march in the political demonstrations but he was glad he had also come to the cathedral. ''It's a moral problem we have right now, not just politics,'' he said. ''And I think the church has something to say about this.''

Australia accused of cooking carbon books

2009-12-13T15:00:00.001-08:00

By Gregg Borschmann for Radio National - exclusive

ABC News Online, 14 December 2009

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/14/2770326.htm

see also Carbon Emissions Soar, The Age http://www.theage.com.au/environment/carbon-emissions-soar-20091213-kqi2.html

The Australian Government has been accused of accounting fraud in the reporting of its carbon emissions.

By ignoring a massive rise in polluting gases from the agricultural and forestry industries, Australia has managed to make its overall emissions seem much lower than they actually are.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Australia is allowed to increase carbon emissions by 8 per cent compared to 1990 levels.

But figures supplied to the United Nations earlier this year show that between 1990 and 2007, Australia's real carbon emissions actually rose by 82 per cent.

The dramatic increase has mainly been caused by rising emissions from Australia's rural lands, caused by bushfires and drought.

But it is those very same agricultural, grazing and grasslands that both major political parties in Australia hope will help offset the country's rising industrial emissions.

Australia has led the charge on proposed land use rule changes to the new global climate deal. The changes will open the door to the bonanza of green carbon that can be stored away in the world's rural lands.

'Get out of jail free'

But the move is deeply dividing the Copenhagen conference. Australia - and other big players - have been accused of a trying to pull off a rort.

Christine Milne, who is in Copenhagen as the climate change spokesperson for the Australian Greens, says Australia has been trying to "cook the books".

"The United States has always wanted to use Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry as a mechanism for not having to do as much in its fossil fuel sector, and Australia has always been the fall guy for the US," she said.

"So I think what you are seeing is the umbrella group, chaired by Australia, including the US, including Canada, trying to really cook the books in some dodgy deals on land use."

That is not an error. It is actually called Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry. Everything in these negotiations has an acronym - this one is LULU_CF.

But developing nations fear that with some changes to the existing rules, LULU_CF may be the way that countries like Australia will wriggle out of the reductions currently being negotiated for 2020 greenhouse targets.

A climate scientist for International Rivers network, Dr Payal Parekh, says such loopholes will water down the carbon targets.

"It essentially means that developed countries, including Australia, could actually increase their emissions in the next few years," he said.

"What it means is that it is a total scam. It appears as if something is done, but it is not.

"The best way to sum it up is that it is a 'get out of jail free card'."

Emissions blow-out

Earlier this year, Australia quietly supplied the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change with its latest official greenhouse data.

With a blow-out in emissions in the land use sector of 657 per cent, it is no surprise the Government was not keen to publicise the figures.

Australia has chosen not to account for these land use emissions as part of its reporting under the Kyoto Protocol.

This is because with events such as bushfires and drought, there are huge and unpredictable spikes - for example, the 2002-03 Victorian bushfires caused a massive blow-out in Australia's emissions.

But because the Government is desperate to unlock Australia's rural lands for so-called carbon farming, it is proposing LULU_CF rule changes that would mean nations did not have to account for emissions caused by so-called extraordinary events or circumstances.

Then the door could be opened to carbon farming in paddocks and grasslands from Wubin to Wangaratta, from Burke to Barcaldine.

But an expert on LULU_CF for Greenpeace International, Paul Winn, is not impressed.

"These are basically accounting frauds; they're just shuffling the cards," he said.

"The atmosphere sees the same amounts of emissions, but the accounts are shuffled."

'Green carbon' controversy

Australia is not the only country playing this game. The Americans - who already trade carbon for about $US5 a tonne on the Chicago Climate Exchange - have made it clear they will be making extensive use of land use off-sets.

No-one is arguing that carbon farming is a bad thing. At its simplest, it will involve farmers adopting landcare principles they have been encouraged to follow for decades.

In fact, carbon farming has become almost the holy grail of sustainable land management, giving farmers another income stream to "do the right thing" - with outcomes that will boost biodiversity and agricultural productivity.

But the argument is whether this 'green carbon' will become a substitute for dealing with the brown carbon - the emissions that come out of our smokestacks and tailpipes.

And that is why it has become such a controversial issue during negotiations at Copenhagen for a new global climate deal.

Developing nations are increasingly recognising the potential for countries such as Canada, the US and Australia to offset rising industrial pollution against carbon sequestration in rural landscapes.

"What's going on here is that there is a suggestion that you can use Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry and the creative accounting around that without the robust figures in place," Christine Milne said.

"And you can use that to offset your emissions reduction targets, especially in your fossil fuel sector.

"It is very clear that you need to reduce your emissions from fossil fuels and you need to sequester carbon in the landscape and you need to protect your forests as carbon stores, but that isn't happening," she continued.

"What we are seeing is attempts to be offset and quite dishonest systems so that we are going to end up with something that doesn't actually save the climate."

Greenpeace's Paul Winn is worried that carbon farming will undermine the integrity of the 2020 targets, assuming they are agreed to this week.

"This has the potential to be the green-washing of Copenhagen; there are a number of factors that will affect Australia and at a stroke of the pen will change emissions into removals," he said.

Doubts about effectiveness

The Government, for its part, does not see what the fuss is all about. It is not proposing any caps on land use offsets.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong is keen to find and save a tonne of carbon wherever she can - at the smokestack or out in the back-blocks.

The Government says emission reductions from Australia's forest and agriculture sector are just as real as reductions in other sectors of the economy.

But a source who knows the arcane world of greenhouse gas accounting well is not so sure.

This source told Radio National Breakfast that there were huge problems trying to account for carbon in rural landscapes.

And given the uncertainty, the only "real" emissions - the ones that really needed to be cut - came from the energy, transport and industrial sectors.

"This is all about paper shuffling. It's not about reducing emissions," the source told Breakfast.

"I would be suspicious any [accounting] method in that land use sector is tactical to reduce pressure on other emissions.

"This Government is not any more committed to doing anything about cutting greenhouse gas emissions than the previous government - and we're not the only country doing it."

Next year forecast to be hottest on record

2009-12-10T17:06:00.001-08:00

Prediction contradicts sceptics' claim that warming stopped in 1998

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

The Independent, Friday, 11 December 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/next-year-forecast-to-be-hottest-on-record-1838184.html

Global warming will resume its upward climb again next year, the UK Met Office predicted yesterday at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen – forecasting that 2010 will be the hottest year ever recorded for the world.

The coming 12 months will be hotter than 1998, currently the hottest year in the 160-year-old instrumental record, Met Office officials said at the meeting in the Danish capital.

The "central estimate" of their forecast is that the global average surface temperature for 2010 will be 0.58 degrees C above the long-term average for 1961-1990 (which is 14 degrees C), compared to the average for 1998, which was 0.52 degrees above.

If a new hottest year is indeed recorded, it will undermine the argument of climate change sceptics that the actual warming of the atmosphere ceased in 1998. Earlier this week the head of the World Meteorological Organisation, Michel Jarraud, insisted the world was "still in a warming trend". The new record is likely to be broken, the Met Office said, because of a combination of global warming and El Nino, the periodic, natural warming of the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific, which is currently pushing up world temperatures.

In 1998, the record was established because the El Nino of that year was the strongest ever seen. But 2010 is likely to top it, climate scientists believe, even though the present El Nino, which began this summer and is likely to extend to next spring, is much less strong than its 1998 equivalent, and is regarded merely as "moderate".

This implies that global warming will play an even stronger role in the average temperature out-turn for next year, although the natural variability of the climate will also play a part.

A record warm year in 2010 is not a certainty, the Met Office statement said, especially if the current El Nino was to decline rapidly near the start of 2010, or there were a large volcanic eruption, such as that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, whose vast dust cloud, ejected into the stratosphere, cooled the global climate for several years.

But there is considered to be more than a 90 per cent chance that it will be hotter than 2009, which is likely to turn out to be the fifth hottest year in the global record, with an excess above the 1961-1990 average of 0.44 degrees – something the Met Office predicted precisely in its 2009 global forecast, issued a year ago.

Since the Met Office began forecasting global temperatures 10 years ago, the average error in the predictions has been 0.06 of a degree – so even if the forecast of 0.58 above the baseline were out by that much, 2010 would still turn out to be joint hottest with 1998. The UK Met Office is still suffering some public unpopularity for having forecast, last April, that Britons would enjoy "a barbecue summer", when – although average temperatures were considerably up on 2008 – July turned out to be one of the wettest on record.

Asked why the public should trust next year's global forecast when the summer forecast was wrong – as the Met Office admitted – Dr Vicky Pope, the head of climate advice, said it was much easier to predict the global temperature that a national temperature average. "Forecasting for the whole globe over the whole year means that the forecast is less influenced by the vagaries of small-scale regional variability," she said. "Global forecasting has a very high level of success compared to similar forecasts for the UK."

She added that the Met Office was by no means predicting a "barbecue year". "A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so in fact there would be likely to be more rain," she said.

Ocean acidification rates pose disaster for marine life, major study shows

2009-12-10T16:26:00.001-08:00

Report launched from leading marine scientists at Copenhagen summit shows seas absorbing dangerous levels of CO2

Severin Carrell

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 December 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/10/ocean-acidification-epoca

Down load the report here - http://www.epoca-project.eu/index.php/Ocean-Acidification-the-facts.html

The world's oceans are becoming acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the last 55m years, threatening disaster for marine life and food supplies across the globe, delegates at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen have been warned.

A report by more than 100 of Europe's leading marine scientists, released at the climate talks this morning, states that the seas are absorbing dangerous levels of carbon dioxide as a direct result of human activity. This is already affecting marine species, for example by interfering with whale navigation and depleting planktonic species at the base of the food chain.

Ocean acidification – the facts says that acidity in the seas has increased 30% since the start of the industrial revolution. Many of the effects of this acidification are already irreversible and are expected to accelerate, according to the scientists.

The study, which is a massive review of existing scientific studies, warns that if CO2 emissions continue unchecked many key parts of the marine environment – particularly coral reefs and the algae and plankton which are essential for fish such as herring and salmon – will be "severely affected" by 2050, leading to the extinction of some species.

Dr Helen Phillips, chief executive of Natural England, which co-sponsored the report, said: "The threat to the delicate balance of the marine environment cannot be overstated - this is a conservation challenge of unprecedented scale and highlights the urgent need for effective marine management and protection."

Although oceans have acidified naturally in the past, the current rate of acidification is so fast that it is becoming extremely difficult for species and habitats to adapt. "We're counting it in decades, and that's the real take-home message," said Dr John Baxter a senior scientist with Scottish Natural Heritage, and the report's co-author. "This is happening fast."

The report, published by the EU-funded European Project on Ocean Acidification, a consortium of 27 research institutes and environment agencies, states that the survival of a number of marine species is affected or threatened, in ways not recognised and understood until now. These species include:

• whales and dolphins, who will find it harder to navigate and communicate as the seas become "noisier". Sound travels further as acidity increases. Noise from drilling, naval sonar and boat engines is already travelling up to 10% further under water and could travel up to 70% further by 2050.

• brittle stars (Ophiothrix fragilis) produce fewer larvae because they need to expend more energy maintaining their skeletons in more acid seas. These larvae are a key food source for herring.

• tiny algae such as Calcidiscus leptoporus which form the basis of the marine food chain for fish such as salmon may be unable to survive.

• young clownfish will lose their ability to "smell" the anemone species that they shelter in. Experiments show that acidification interferes with the species' ability to detect the chemicals that give "olfactory cues".

The report predicts that the north Atlantic, north Pacific and Arctic seas – a crucial summer feeding ground for whales - will see the greatest degree of acidification. It says that levels of aragonite, the type of calcium carbonate which is essential for marine organisms to make their skeletons and shells, will fall worldwide. But because cold water absorbs CO2 more quickly, the study predicts that levels of aragonite will fall by 60% to 80% by 2095 across the northern hemisphere.

"The bottom line is the only way to slow this down or reverse it is aggressive and immediate cuts in CO2," said Baxter. "This is a very dangerous global experiment we're undertaking here."

Written for policy makers and political leaders, the document is being distributed worldwide, with 32,000 copies printed in five major languages including English, Chinese and Arabic. Every member of the US congress, now struggling to agree a binding policy on CO2 emissions, will be sent a copy.

Congressman Brian Baird, a Democrat representative from Washington state, who championed a bill in Congress promoting US research on ocean acidification, said these findings would help counter climate change sceptics, since acidification was easily and immediately measurable.

"The consequences of ocean acidification may be every bit as grave as the consequences of temperature increases," he said. "It's one thing to question a computer extrapolation, or say it snowed in Las Vegas last year, but to say basic chemistry doesn't apply is a real problem [for the sceptics]. I think the evidence is really quite striking."

Past decade the warmest since records began in 1850

2009-12-08T16:43:00.001-08:00

DEBORAH SMITH SCIENCE EDITOR

The Age, December 9, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/past-decade-the-warmest-since-records-began-in-1850-20091208-khqv.html

THIS year has been the third-hottest on record in Australia, and is ranked as the fifth-warmest globally.

A report by the World Meteorological Organisation, published last night, concluded that the decade from 2000 to 2009 was the warmest since instrumental climate records began in 1850.

In 2009, only the United States and Canada experienced conditions that were cooler than average. ''Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have their warmest year on record,'' the report said.

Published as world leaders gathered in Copenhagen to consider climate change, it highlights extreme weather conditions around the globe this year, including three ''exceptional heatwaves'' in Australia, China's worst drought in 50 years and the wettest October in the US in 115 years.

Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, said this year should have been a cool year because of low solar activity and a recent La Nina weather event. ''The fact it ranked in the top 5 since 1850 is actually frightening,'' he said.

This year's heatwaves in NSW, Victoria and South Australia also did not bode well for next year, Professor Pitman said.

The report is based on data from a network of weather stations on land, ships, buoys and satellites.

This information was fed to three analysis centres, including one maintained jointly with the British Met Office by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which has been at the centre of the climate email affair, after its computers were hacked.

The other two analysis centres are the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA.

Not only did Australia have three heatwaves - in January and February, August and November - winter was also exceptionally mild, the report said.

''Maximum temperatures were well above normal across the entire continent, reaching 6 to 7 degrees above normal in some parts.'' Climate extremes, including devastating floods, severe droughts, snowstorms, heatwaves and cold waves, were recorded in many parts of the world.

''This year the extreme warm events were were more frequent and intense in southern South America, Australia and southern Asia, in particular.''

India had an extreme heatwave in May, which caused 150 deaths, and a heatwave that hit northern China in June broke summer records in some areas.

In East Africa, a drought led to ''massive food shortages'', and drought in central Argentina also caused severe damage to agriculture, livestock and water resources, the report said.

In the Arctic, sea ice during the summer melt was the third lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, ranking behind 2008 and the record year, 2007.

Globally, the combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for January to October this year is estimated at 0.44 degrees above the 1961 to 1990 annual average of 14 degrees, making it likely 2009 will rank in the top 10 years on record.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Ruling smooths path for Obama's US carbon cuts

2009-12-08T16:29:00.001-08:00

ANNE DAVIES, WASHINGTON

The Age, December 9, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/national/ruling-smooths-path-for-obamas-us-carbon-cuts-20091208-khn9.html

IN A move likely to be a boost to the climate change talks in Copenhagen, America's Environmental Protection Agency has formally declared that greenhouse gases endanger human health.

The decision provides a potential alternative route for the US to curb greenhouse gases. It will give US President Barack Obama an avenue to regulate carbon dioxide emissions - with or without Congress.

The EPA could regulate sectors such as cars, trucks, power stations and other heavy industry by passing rules that do not require a congressional vote.

It also gives President Obama new moral authority to offer up cuts to US emissions despite Congress resistance, because the EPA could impose limits by regulation.

Two weeks ago the President said he wanted a 17 per cent cut on 2005 levels by 2020 as a mid-term goal for a cap-and-trade scheme that aims for an 83 per cent cut by 2050. The mid-term figure is highly controversial. It has passed the House of Representatives but faces difficulties in the Senate.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on Monday that Mr Obama ''continues to strongly believe that the best way forward is through the passage of comprehensive energy legislation, the type of which previously passed the House and is being considered now on the Senate side''.

But he added that the Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that greenhouse gas emissions could be considered a pollutant and should be regulated by the EPA if it deemed they were hazardous to health, meant that ''some action'' had to be taken.

The thinly veiled threat of using the alternate path will focus the minds of the handful of Democrat Senators and most Republicans who have indicated that they will oppose the cap-and-trade legislation.

It also means that world leaders can be more confident that Mr Obama will implement any pledges to cut emissions made at Copenhagen. Mr Obama has now said he will attend at the end of the conference about December 18, when negotiations are expected to reach a conclusion.

Announcing that the EPA had made the finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health and public welfare, administrator Lisa Jackson said: ''The threat is real. The EPA is now authorised and obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Energy Act.''

The ruling has horrified US business groups. The conservative US Chamber of Commerce, which has been locked in a public war of words with the Obama Administration, said the EPA finding ''could result in a top-down command and control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project''.

The National Association of Manufacturers said the EPA action would do little to combat climate change and ''is certain to come at a huge cost to the economy''.

Mr Obama is due to meet industry groups supportive of cap and trade this week to urge them to support his plan.

The US developments will also be studied closely by environmental groups in Australia. The NSW Land and Environment Court has ruled that CO2 is a pollutant that needs to be considered when major projects, such as power stations, are approved.

If the cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme fails to pass Australia's Senate next year, the state development approvals processes could provide a new avenue to regulate CO2.

2000–2009, THE WARMEST DECADE

2009-12-08T03:58:00.001-08:00

WMO Press Release No.869

For use of the information media
Not an official record

http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_869_en.html

Geneva, 8 December 2009 (WMO) –

The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2009 (January–October) is currently estimated at 0.44°C ± 0.11°C (0.79°F ± 0.20°F) above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F. The current nominal ranking of 2009, which does not account for uncertainties in the annual averages, places it as the fifth-warmest year. The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989). More complete data for the remainder of the year 2009 will be analysed at the beginning of 2010 to update the current assessment.

This year above-normal temperatures were recorded in most parts of the continents. Only North America (United States and Canada) experienced conditions that were cooler than average. Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have the warmest year on record.

Climate extremes, including devastating floods, severe droughts, snowstorms, heatwaves and cold waves, were recorded in many parts of the world. This year the extreme warm events were more frequent and intense in southern South America, Australia and southern Asia, in particular. La Niña conditions shifted into a warm-phase El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in June. The Arctic sea ice extent during the melt season ranked the third lowest, after the lowest and second-lowest records set in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

This preliminary information for 2009 is based on climate data from networks of land-based weather and climate stations, ships and buoys, as well as satellites. The data are continuously collected and disseminated by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) of the 189 Members of WMO and several collaborating research institutions. The data continuously feed three main depository global climate data and analysis centres, which develop and maintain homogeneous global climate datasets based on peer-reviewed methodologies. The WMO global temperature analysis is thus based on three complementary datasets. One is the combined dataset maintained by both the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Another dataset is maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the United States Department of Commerce, and the third one is from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The content of the WMO statement is verified and peer-reviewed by leading experts from other international, regional and national climate institutions and centres before its publication.

Final updates and figures for 2009 will be published in March 2010 in the annual WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate.

Regional temperature anomalies

The year 2009 (January–October) was again warmer than the 1961–1990 average all over Europe and the Middle East. China had the third-warmest year since 1951; for some regions 2009 was the warmest year. The year started with a mild January in northern Europe and large parts of Asia, while western and central Europe were colder than normal. Russia and the Great Lakes region in Canada experienced colder-than- average temperatures in February and January, respectively. Spring was very warm in Europe and Asia; April in particular was extremely warm in central Europe. Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria reported temperature anomalies of more than +5°C, breaking the previous records for the month in several locations. The European summer was also warmer than the long-term average, particularly over the southern regions. Spain had the third-warmest summer, with hotter summers reported only in 2003 and 2005. Italy recorded a strong heatwave in July, with maximum temperatures above 40°C, and some local temperatures reaching 45°C. A heatwave at the beginning of July affected the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Germany, and some stations in Norway experienced new maximum temperature records.

India had an extreme heatwave event during May, which caused 150 deaths. A heatwave hit northern China during June, with daily maximum temperatures above 40°C; historical maximum temperature records were broken for the summer in some locations.

In late July many cities across Canada recorded their warmest daily temperatures. Vancouver and Victoria set new records, reaching 34.4°C and 35.0°C, respectively. Alaska also had the second-warmest July on record. Conversely, October was a very cold month across large parts of the United States. For the nation as a whole, it was the third-coolest October on record, with an average temperature anomaly of -2.2°C (-4.0°F). Similarly, a very cold October was reported in Scandinavia, with mean temperature anomalies ranging from -2°C to -4°C.

The austral autumn (March to May) was extremely warm in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil. With daily temperatures ranging from 30°C to 40°C, several records were broken during this season. By the end of October, an extreme weather situation affected north and central Argentina, producing unusually high temperatures (above 40°C). Conversely, November was abnormally cold in the southern part of the region, with some rare and late snowfalls.

So far, Australia has had the third-warmest year on record. The year 2009 was marked by three exceptional heatwaves, which affected south-eastern Australia in January/February and November, and subtropical eastern Australia in August. The January/February heatwave was associated with disastrous bushfires that caused more than 173 fatalities. Victoria recorded its highest temperature with 48.8°C. The northern region experienced a cold summer, however, with anomalies reaching -3°C to -4°C in some places. Winter was exceptionally mild over much of Australia. Maximum temperatures were well above normal across the entire continent, reaching 6°C to 7°C above normal in some parts. The national maximum temperature anomaly of +3.2°C was the largest ever recorded for any month.

Severe droughts

China suffered its worst drought in five decades. Water levels in parts of the Gan River and Xiangjiang River were the lowest in the past 50 years. In India the poor monsoon season caused severe drought impacts in 40 per cent of the districts. The north-western and north-eastern parts of the country were badly affected. It was reported to be one of the weakest monsoon seasons since 1972.

In East Africa the drought led to massive food shortages. In Kenya the drought was responsible for severe damage to livestock and a 40 percent decline in the maize harvest.

In North America, Mexico experienced severe-to-exceptional drought conditions by the month of September. In the United States, the western region was the most affected by a moderate-to-exceptional drought by the end of October. Nevertheless, the total area affected by drought in the United States during October was the second-smallest value recorded in this decade.

Drought in Central Argentina caused severe damage to agriculture, livestock and water resources. The situation was most severe at the end of October, with very high temperatures reported as well.

Over the key agricultural areas of the Murray-Darling Basin and the south-western part of Western Australia, rainfall was generally below normal. The passage of another year without any sustained above-normal rainfall has seen long-term rainfall deficits continuing in south-eastern Australia. Sustained dry conditions in the Murray-Darling Basin have now continued for nine years.

Intense storm events and precipitation

At the end of January, Spain and France were severely affected by winter storm Klaus, the worst extra-tropical storm in a decade, with winds similar to a category 3 hurricane. Another winter storm combined with heavy snowfall caused severe damage in western Europe and resulted in serious disruptions of air and rail traffic in several countries. In late spring and summer a large number of thunderstorms with heavy rain, hail and tornadoes caused local flooding and significant damage across Germany. In September, several parts of the Mediterranean region were affected by extreme rainfall events. Total rainfall of more than 300mm was recorded in less than 48 hours in one location of south-eastern Spain, where the long-term average for total annual precipitation does not exceed 450 mm. During the same month, intense rainfall caused devastating damage to infrastructure in several parts of northern Africa, including Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. In a similar pattern, the highest September rainfall recorded in 80 years produced severe flash floods in north-western Turkey. November brought severe flooding to northern areas of the United Kingdom, and a new 24-hour precipitation record was set for the country.

During the beginning of the year heavy rainfall was observed in Colombia, producing landslides and widespread floods. North-east Brazil was severely affected by heavy rainfall and flooding in April and May. Later, in July, a severe snowstorm hit the southern part of Argentina; it was the worst snowstorm in 15 years. During the austral spring, particularly in November, continuous heavy and intense rainfall was seen in north-eastern Argentina, southern Brazil and Uruguay, causing flooding in many places and affecting more than 15,000 people. Total monthly precipitation records were broken, with rainfall exceeding more than 500mm in many locations.

In Canada, Ontario experienced a record number of witnessed tornadoes and a record number of related fatalities. Canadian avalanches were almost double the yearly average for the past decade and the worst since 2002–2003. A total of 25 deaths made it one of the deadliest seasons. The northern plains region of the United States was affected by record flooding during the month of March. As a whole, the United States recorded the wettest October in 115 years.

In Central America, an intense storm in El Salvador in November, associated in part with Hurricane Ida, produced deadly floods and landslides that claimed 192 lives.

In Asia, after the weak 2009 monsoon season, southern India recorded severe flooding due to incessant rain in late September and the first week of October, and more than 250 lives were lost. On the other hand, northern China was severely affected by a snowstorm that occurred during the first half of November as part of a strong cold wave. These snowfalls were one month earlier than normal, breaking local weather records.

In western Africa, heavy and intense rainfall in September caused flooding that affected more than 100,000 people. The worst flooding was observed in Burkina Faso, where 263 mm of rain was recorded in less than 12 hours, breaking a record set 90 years ago. Further south on the continent, nearly 1 million people in Zambia and Namibia were affected by torrential rain that caused rivers to overflow their banks, flooding homes and cropland.

Australia was also affected by local flooding. Coastal Queensland and New South Wales were the hardest hit by several heavy rain events, with daily rainfall totals in excess of 300 mm. On the other hand, numerous duststorms affected eastern Australia in the second half of September and early October, as regular strong winds transported dust from northern South Australia over the eastern states. The most severe duststorm occurred on 22–23 September and covered large parts of New South Wales and Queensland, where the visibility was reduced to 100–200m in both Sydney and Brisbane.

End of La Niña and Development of El Niño

La Niña-like conditions were present in early 2009, followed by the development of El Niño patterns starting in June 2009. During June–September 2009, sea surface temperatures were generally about 1°C warmer than the long-term average across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. An El Niño event is currently underway, with the early phase of the event holding steady at weak-to-moderate levels through July–September. During October, almost all indicators of El Niño became noticeably stronger.

Tropical cyclone season

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season closed with the fewest named storms and hurricanes since 1997, most likely due to the unfavourable cyclonic conditions caused in part by El Niño. A total of nine named tropical storms were formed, including three hurricanes, two of which were major hurricanes at Category 3 strength or higher. (The averages are 11, 6 and 2, respectively).

In the East Pacific, 20 named tropical storms were recorded, eight of which evolved into hurricanes and five of which became major hurricanes (The averages are 16, 9 and 4, respectively.)

In the western North Pacific, 22 named tropical storms have been recorded so far, and 13 of them reached the intensity of typhoon, compared to the long-term averages of 27 and 14, respectively. Heavy precipitation associated with typhoons Ketsana and Parma was observed across the south of Luzon Island in the Philippines. The resulting flood disaster caused more than 900 fatalities in total. In August, Typhoon Morakot swept across Taiwan Province of China and caused more than 400 deaths and severe damage to agriculture and infrastructure. Hundreds of roads and bridges on the island were destroyed by floods.

The Australian and South Indian Ocean cyclone seasons recorded near-average activity. In the Australian region, there were 10 systems during this season, with Hamish the most significant one, although it did not make landfall. It reached category 5 intensity and was the most intense cyclone observed off the eastern Queensland coast since 1918.

Third-lowest Arctic sea ice

According to scientific measurements, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically over the past 30 years at least, with the most extreme decline seen in the summer melt season. Arctic sea ice extent during the 2009 melt season was 5.10 million km2, which is the third-lowest on record after the 2007 record (4.3 million km2) and 2008 (4.67 million km2), since satellite measurements began in 1979.

Information sources

This press release was issued in collaboration with the Hadley Centre of the United Kingdom Meteorological Office; the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; the National Climatic Data Center, National Environmental Satellite and Data Information Service, and the National Weather Service under NOAA; and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the United States. Other contributors are the NMHSs of Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Japan, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey and Uruguay. The African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD, Niamey), the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the Centro Internacional para la Investigación del Fenómeno de El Niño (CIIFEN, Guayaquil, Ecuador), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC, Nairobi, Kenya), the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Drought Monitoring Centre (SADC DMC, Gabarone, Botswana) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) also contributed.

Global Surface Temperature Trend : Result from three Global datasets: NOAA (NCDC Dataset) , NASA (GISS dataset) and combined Hadley Center and Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (UK) (HadCRUT3 dataset)

WMO is the United Nations System's authoritative voice on weather, climate and water.

Decision time... face the facts or give up

2009-12-06T23:53:00.001-08:00

It's the poorest of our fellow citizens who are most vulnerable to a changing climate

Kevin Anderson

The Independent, Monday, 7 December 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/kevin-anderson-decision-time-face-the-facts-or-give-up-1835525.html

It is not possible to overestimate the global significance of the next two weeks of intense negotiation. Copenhagen is unprecedented; it is not an updated Kyoto and even Bretton Woods is little more than a footnote when compared to the magnitude and urgency of the challenge we now collectively face.

Given the uncomfortable repercussions associated with the scale of emissions reductions necessary to avoid "dangerous climate change", it is not surprising that the build-up to Copenhagen has triggered a co-ordinated backlash attempting to undermine the science of climate change.

However, whilst important questions have been raised about "process" and "communication", the validity of the science itself has emerged unscathed and, I believe, strengthened. Despite the best attempts of often well-funded "sceptics" picking over the minutiae of the science, the principal objections have been about the alleged behaviour of individual scientists rather than the science itself – a distinction overlooked in much of the reporting on the issue.

Away from this distraction, the real issues of how the global community can respond to the magnitude and urgency of the challenge remain both unchanged and central to the Copenhagen process.

Whilst the next fortnight of discussions in the Danish capital is pivotal to thrashing out the scope and structure of any meaningful agreement, stringent targets and detailed national commitments are unlikely to be forthcoming at this stage. Consequently, Copenhagen must be seen not as the last battle, but as a kick-start to an intense international process culminating, within a year, in detailed national commitments informed by the science of climate change.

Anything short of this will mean knowingly bequeathing to future generations a life of hardship and uncertainty at best and social and environmental collapse at worst. Moreover, our failure to act now condemns many millions of the world's poorest citizens to the additional ravages and instability of a rapidly changing climate.

So what is the scale of the challenge, why is it fundamentally different from what has gone before, and what do targets from the Copenhagen process need to look like? In 1992, the Earth Summit in Rio thrust what had hitherto been a scientific issue – climate change – into the political arena. However, whilst precedents existed for similar transitions in the guise of acid rain and ozone depletion, in reality these are wholly inadequate analogues for this new challenge.

Unlike sulphur or chlorofluorocarbons (responsible for acid rain and the ozone depletion respectively) carbon is ubiquitous, so whether it's the energy we consume, the production of fertiliser, the food we eat or the cement we manufacture, greenhouse gas emissions are implicated. Certainly substitutes exist for all of these. But with a growing population and all current models of development and industrialisation premised on cheap and abundant hydrocarbons, the challenge of a wholesale transition of contemporary society to low or zero carbon in little more than a couple of decades is unprecedented.

In recent weeks we've seen provisional commitments from several major emitting nations to achieve either absolute reductions in emissions (US) or lower the emissions per unit of economic growth (China and India) by 2020. These transitions should be welcomed. But they are little more than token gestures when compared with the scale of what the science concludes is necessary to give even a 50:50 chance of avoiding "dangerous climate change".

Unfortunately, and in complete contrast to what the sceptics would have us all believe, scientists have repeatedly underplayed or at least remained quiet as to the scale of the disjuncture between the science and politics of climate change. For example, the Stern and [UK] Committee on Climate Change reports are premised on global emissions reaching their highest levels by 2015 and 2016 respectively, before beginning a process of year-on-year reductions.

But amongst those working on climate change there is near-universal acknowledgment that such early peaking years are politically unacceptable – yet the Stern and the CCC analyses remain pivotal in the formation of emission-reduction policy. Statements by the US, China and India, allied with commitments from other nations, suggest peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is about as hard as the economic and political orthodoxy is prepared to push.

Consequently, if Copenhagen is to have any chance of kick-starting a global movement to stay below the 2°C characterisation of dangerous climate change, it must inspire and instigate a rapid shift away from the current political and economic consensus. If peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 are left unquestioned, the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gases emitted will be sufficient to put temperatures on a 4°C or higher trajectory. Accordingly, the first challenge for Copenhagen is to get political buy-in to what the science is saying in relation to, at least, a 50:50 chance of not exceeding 2°C.

In brief, wealthy (OECD) nations need to peak emissions by around 2012, achieve at least a 60 per cent reduction in emissions from energy by 2020, and fully decarbonise their energy systems by 2030 at the latest. Alongside this, the "industrialising" nations (non-OECD) need to peak their collective emissions by around 2025 and fully decarbonise their energy systems by 2050. This scale of reductions is presently far removed from that which the negotiators in Copenhagen are intending to consider.

The second challenge for Copenhagen, therefore, is to make a clear and explicit decision to do all that is necessary to put global emissions on a 2°C pathway, even if this requires a temporary cessation in economic growth amongst the wealthy OECD nations.

An alternative, but equally honest, response would be to acknowledge that we lack the necessary moral fibre to make the requisite short-term reductions and openly accept our inaction will lead to high levels of "dangerous climate change" with all that entails for the poorer communities around the globe and also for future generations. Either way, as a minimum, any output from the Copenhagen process needs to be upfront, honest and direct.

Professor Kevin Anderson is director of the Tyndall Energy Programme at the University of Manchester

Greenhouse gas cuts just 'token gestures'

2009-12-06T23:19:00.000-08:00

Copenhagen won't prevent disaster, warns top scientist

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Monday, 7 December 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/greenhouse-gas-cuts-just-token-gestures-1835499.html

The cuts in greenhouse gas emissions being proposed at the Copenhagen climate conference, which opens today, are completely inadequate to stop dangerous climate change, one of Britain's leading climate scientists warns.

Current proposals, including recent ones from major emitting nations such as the US, China and India, are "little more than token gestures", compared to what the science deems necessary to give even a 50-50 chance of staying below the danger threshold, says Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester.

Writing in The Independent today, Professor Anderson cautions that with the commitments currently on the table in Copenhagen, global emissions of carbon dioxide will peak far too late for temperature rises to stay below two degrees Centigrade above the pre-industrial level, which is regarded as the limit that the earth and human society can safely stand.

Instead, they are likely to put the world on a disastrous trajectory for four degrees or even higher.

Nations must now make much more radical commitments, he says, even if it means sacrificing economic growth.

Professor Anderson is one of the world's leading experts on CO2 emissions rates, and his comments represent a sobering reality check about just how great is the task which the world now faces in bringing global warming under control.

The meeting in the Danish capital, which lasts for the next two weeks and will be attended in its final stages by most of the world's leaders including President Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, will attempt to construct a new climate treaty under which all countries will eventually cut back their CO2.

In the run-up to the conference, most of the world's biggest carbon emitters, led by China and the USA, and including the European Union and Britain, have "put numbers on the table" indicating the reductions they are prepared to make, if negotiations are successful in the round.

The targets announced for the first time in the last fortnight by America, China and India, in particular, have been regarded as a considerable step forward.

But the sum of all the commitments is simply inadequate for the point where emissions peak as a whole and then start to decline to come early enough, Professor Anderson says.

The date of the emissions peak is increasingly seen as a vital point in checking the progress of the warming.

Last year, the Met Office's Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research said that if global emissions peaked in 2015 or 2016 and then declined annually at a rate of four per cent, there would be a 50-50 chance – but no more than that – of keeping the rise in temperatures to two degrees, the goal upon which much of the world's climate policy is premised.

For every ten years that the peak was delayed, the Hadley Centre said, the world would be committed to another 0.5 of a degree of warming.

Professor Anderson points out that there is a widespread assumption that an emissions peak might come relatively early, but asserts that the political and economic will to bring this about is actually absent.

He writes: "For example, the [Lord] Stern and the [UK] Committee on Climate Change reports are premised on global emissions reaching their highest levels by 2015 and 2016 respectively, before beginning a process of year-on-year reductions."

He goes on: "However, amongst those working on climate change there is near universal acknowledgment that such early peaking years are politically unacceptable – yet the Stern and the CCC analyses remain pivotal in the formation of emission-reduction policy.

"The statements by the US, China and India, allied with commitments from other nations, suggest peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is about as hard as the economic and political orthodoxy is prepared to push in terms of emission reductions.

"If peaking global emissions between 2020 and 2030 is left unquestioned, the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gases emitted will be sufficient to put temperatures on a 4 degrees C or higher trajectory."

In recent years, emissions have shot up in a way no-one expected even a decade ago, largely owing to the breakneck industrialisation of China, which doubled its CO2 output over the decade from 3bn to 6 bn tonnes, and in doing so overtook the US as the world's biggest polluter. Currently global carbon emissions are rising by nearly three per cent annually, making a four per cent annual decline a tall order indeed, and one that the present Copenhagen commitments would not remotely be able to facilitate.

There has to be a move to a radical new level of emissions cuts, Professor Anderson says, if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.

He writes: "If Copenhagen is to have any chance of kick-starting a global movement to stay below the 2 degrees C characterisation of dangerous climate change, it must inspire and instigate a rapid shift away from the current political and economic consensus."

The first challenge, he says, is to get political buy-in to what the science is saying in relation to, at least, a 50:50 chance of not exceeding 2 degrees C.

"In brief, wealthy (OECD) nations need to peak emissions by around 2012, achieve at least a 60 per cent reduction in emissions from energy by 2020, and fully decarbonise their energy systems by 2030 at the latest.

"Alongside this, the 'industrialising' nations (non-OECD) need to peak their collective emissions by around 2025 and fully decarbonise their energy systems by 2050."

He notes: "This scale of reductions is presently far removed from that which the negotiators in Copenhagen are intending to consider."

He concludes: "The second challenge for Copenhagen, therefore, is to make a clear and explicit decision to do all that is necessary to put global emissions on a 2 degrees C pathway, even if this requires a temporary cessation in economic growth amongst the wealthy OECD nations."

Climate's day of reckoning looms

2009-12-06T18:08:00.001-08:00

Editorial

The Age, December 7, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climates-day-of-reckoning-looms-20091206-kcwv.html

"Humanity is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately."

THAT warning, in a report commissioned by a US president, was delivered 30 years ago and is today vindicated by the evidence all around us. The world prevaricated, even after Britain's Margaret Thatcher called for binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in 1988. In 1990, she told the Second World Climate Conference: "There is already a clear case for precautionary action at an international level." None of her political peers attended.

Since then, even as temperatures and oceans rose faster than predicted, most leaders have been found wanting. Emissions are 60 per cent higher than in 1979. The world is close to the point at which we won't be able to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees this century, which is considered the threshold for avoiding dangerous climate change.

Today, when 192 nations begin the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, they must aim for a binding accord that ensures global emissions peak by 2020 and halve by 2050 to achieve the 2-degree target. Every one of the world's 6.8 billion people will be affected by the deliberations of the next 12 days. It is in all nations' long-term interest to reach an effective agreement.

Years of obstructionism, led by the US under the Bush administration, created habitual pessimism about climate talks. Yet, over the past year, the dynamics have changed more rapidly than could be foreseen a year ago with the election of Barack Obama. The world's 16 biggest emitters produce 71 per cent of emissions. Only one, Iran, has not put on the table targets for emission cuts.

The US and emerging giants China, India and Brazil have stepped forward in recent weeks. All targets combined still amount to only half the cuts required, but big advances are possible if all nations find the resolve to move as one.

Cutting emissions involves huge costs, albeit much less than either the global bail-out of banks or the consequences of doing nothing. Indeed, many nations now see this challenge as a great economic opportunity in the race to develop the dominant sustainable technologies of the 21st century. Last year, for the first time, investment in renewable energy sources and technology was greater than in fossil fuels. The news that about 65 leaders will attend the end of the 12-day conference offers hope that failure will not be countenanced. Rich nations, which produced three-quarters of emissions since 1850, have a duty to lead the way. That includes Australia, which should aim higher than it has to date.

Copenhagen must at least produce an ambitious in-principle framework by December 18, with exact formulations to be agreed within a year. If the political will exists — and momentum is building — this can be done. After a generation of denial and delay, history will judge today's leaders by whether they put future generations at risk or acted to avert climate change.

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

2009-12-06T17:39:00.001-08:00

Editorial

The Guardian, Monday 7 December 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/06/copenhagen-editorial

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Likethe Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

Both the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age dropped out of the project after climate change convulsed Australian politics, demanding, they felt, a more localised editorial position.

COPENHAGEN CLIMATE DEAL HEADED FOR 3.5°C GLOBAL WARMING AND CLOSE TO 800 PPM CO2 EQUIVALENT GHG CONCENTRATIONS

2009-12-05T17:54:00.001-08:00

ECOFYS, 4 December 2009

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/copenhagen-climate-deal-headed-for,1075159.shtml

For Climate Action Tracker go to - http://www.climateactiontracker.org/

For Australia's rating go to - http://www.climateactiontracker.org/country.php?id=815

A sobering new assessment by the ''Climate Action Tracker'' of the emission commitments and pledges put forward by industrialized and developing countries for the Copenhagen climate negotiations shows that the world is headed for a global warming of well over 3 degrees C by 2100. Carbon dioxide concentrations are projected to be over 650 ppm, with total GHG concentrations close to 800 ppm CO2 equivalent.

"The pledges on the table will not halt emissions growth before 2040, let alone by 2015 as indicated by the IPCC and are far from halving emissions by 2050, as has been called for by the G8. Instead global emissions are likely to be nearly double 1990 levels by 2040 based on present pledges", said Dr Niklas Höhne of Ecofys.

"In 2020 we project total GHG emissions to be around 55 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent per year from all sources, a reduction of about 3 billion tonnes compared to business as usual. In ten years from now global emissions will already have to be well below current levels of about 46 billion tonnes (in 2008) to have much chance of meeting temperature goals such as 2°C, as called for by the major emitters globally, or below 1.5°C as put forward by the Small Island States and Least Developed Countries as essential for their survival", said Dr (h.c.) Bill Hare of Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

"After accounting for the new position of Russia, the announcement of President Obama of a US emission reduction pledge for Copenhagen, the developed country emission reductions as a whole are currently projected to be 13-19% below 1990 levels by 2020. However the proposed forest credits these countries want would degrade this by about 5% with the effective reductions in industrial GHG emissions being 8-14% below 1990 levels by 2020. The low reduction target (8%) is unconditional for most countries and the highest reduction target (14%) is linked by most countries to a strong agreement in Copenhagen", said Dr. Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics.

Around 25-40% reductions by industrialized countries by 2020 from 1990 GHG emissions levels are described as necessary by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Recent announcements such as the Chinese carbon intensity reduction target for 2020, and the Korean emission goals for 2020 and 2050, are very important and useful. However the overall effect on greenhouse gas emissions (excluding deforestation) is disappointing; with overall developing country emissions projected to be close to, or significantly above, the IPCC range for 2020" said Dr Niklas Höhne of Ecofys.

"Faster economic growth than expected, particularly combined with slower improvements in carbon intensity in China explain part of this. China has ambitious policies on energy efficiency and renewable energy, but the new international target falls short of that ambition. A reduction from "business as usual emissions" by the developing countries as a group is needed in 2020 of 15-30% is needed to limit global warming to 2°C or even lower.

"On deforestation, we have accounted for the announcement of Brazil and of Indonesia which taken together would reduce deforestation emissions globally by about 40% from recent levels by 2020 (or about the same from estimated 1990 deforestation emissions), which is a very important contribution" said Dr Michiel Schaeffer.

"With no concrete pledges on the table for international aviation and marine CO2 emissions these are projected to grow to over double 1990 levels in 2020, reaching about 1.8 billion tonnes per year, and to nearly 4 times 1990 levels in 2050, about 3 billion tonnes per year" said Dr Niklas Höhne of Ecofys.

"From these numbers, there is at least a one in four chance of exceeding a warming of 4 degrees C", said Dr. (h.c.) Hare.

The Climate Action Tracker reveals major differences between the ambition levels of countries when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the lead are the Maldives and Costa Rica, which have proposed to become climate-neutral by around 2020. At the high end of the scale are Norway, Japan and Brazil, which are proposing to reduce their emissions significantly. In the "medium" range are developing countries such as India, Indonesia, Mexico and South Korea, who propose to reduce the growth of their emissions by the 2020s. The EU is a special case, in that its unconditional commitment is rated "inadequate". However, if it's 30% reduction target were to be adopted, the EU would move into the "medium" range and very close to "sufficient". China has moved down a category, because it's recently announced target falls short of the ambition level that we had expected from the implementation of the current national policies. Between the middle and the bottom of the scale is the United States, whose recently proposed actions are "inadequate", i.e. they do not fall within the range that is needed to keep global warming within lower limits. At the very bottom end of the scale are countries that have yet to propose substantial action beyond "business as usual". These include Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

Note for the editor

The web-based based climate policy assessment system "Climate Action Tracker" was developed by Ecofys, Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). It provides a picture of each country's proposed commitments and actions and how these contribute to total greenhouse gas emission reductions globally.

The Climate Action Tracker enables the public to track the emission commitments and actions of countries. The website provides an up-to-date assessment of individual country pledges about greenhouse gas emission reductions. It also plots the consequences for the global climate of commitments and actions made ahead of and during the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

The Climate Action Tracker shows that much greater transparency is needed when it comes to targets and actions proposed by countries. For developed countries, accounting for forests and land-use change significantly degrades the overall stringency of the targets. For developing countries climate plans often lack calculations of the resulting impact on emissions.

You can find the Climate Action Tracker at www.climateactiontracker.org. Ecofys and Climate Analytics are both research organizations that specialize in energy and climate-related issues.

Fraction too much fiction in 'climategate'

2009-12-05T15:47:00.001-08:00

STEPHAN LEWANDOWSKY,

The Age, December 5, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/fraction-too-much-fiction-in-climategate-20091205-kb9g.html

Stolen emails do not support wild claims of scientific misconduct.

"CLIMATEGATE" has gone viral on the web, forcing the director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to step aside pending an investigation. Hacked emails point to leading climate scientists withholding data, subverting the peer-review process, and distorting information. These are stunning accusations of serious misconduct, but are they true?

They are not. Even if we presume that the stolen material is authentic, the notion that climate data is being nefariously withheld is fantastical. Most of the world's climate data, including programming code for climate models, is freely available on the web. Anyone can download it and apply their instantly acquired expertise for the betterment of humanity.

Unfortunately, a small subset of the data is forcibly withheld by governments. For example, the British Met Office pursues legal action if data released for research is passed on to third parties. This policy emerged from an ideology that commercialises any public good, even weather information, and turns it into a ''product''.

What about attempts to interfere with the peer-review process? Some stolen emails reveal anger directed at other researchers, accompanied by the wish that certain papers had not been published. To understand why this is not an attempt to suppress dissent, one must understand the scientific peer-review process.

Having published nearly 100 journal articles, my disk is full of sizzling emails about editors, reviewers, journals, and granting bodies that are about as relevant to science as my gripes during last Friday's pub meet.

In the case of "Climategate", no censorship could have been exercised because the two papers in question made it into the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, arguably the contemporary world's most important document. However, both papers have identifiable flaws (including elementary numerical and statistical errors in one instance), thus retrospectively identifying any endeavour to prevent their publication as quality control rather than censorship.

Finally, what about the infamous use of a "trick" to "hide a decline" in the data? What about the pernicious "fudge factor" in the programming code? Surely those are the smoking guns that close the case against the scientists?

No. If scientists fabricated their data, why is the Arctic melting even faster than they predicted? If scientists fudged their models, why do temperature increases during the past decade conform to predictions?

NASA has just reported the hottest June to October period ever. Download the data and see for yourself. If climate scientists played less than straight, why was Adelaide's 2008 heatwave - by itself a once-in-3000-years event - followed by spring temperatures this year that equalled all previous summer records?

Make no mistake, this is climate change.

If climate scientists invented a trend, why are 400 out of 442 glaciers monitored worldwide retreating at a rapid rate? Why are sea levels rising? If climate scientists cooked the books, why have wind speeds in the southern oceans increased by 20 per cent since 1980? If climate scientists cheated, why is the human toll from civil wars in Africa a function of temperature? Darfur is a climate war, and a recent study showed that every extra degree Celsius in a given year increases the likelihood of civil conflict in Africa by 50 per cent. Best scientific estimates predict an additional human toll of 390,000 in Africa by 2030 because of climate change.

No, the climate scientists did nothing wrong. They just produced amazingly good science on a shoestring budget for the betterment of humanity. Everything we experience today was predicted 10 years ago and could have been ameliorated by heeding scientific advice.

And just because it is an interesting detective story, what about that "decline" that was being "hidden"? Paleoclimatology is a fascinating discipline that provides us with a temperature record dating back millennia by using "proxy" measures, such as the width of tree rings, corals, or ice cores. Proxies are calibrated by correlating them with modern temperature records. More than 1200 such proxy measures exist and, oddly, one of them showed a decline after 1960 while actual temperatures increased. This finding is well-known and cannot be hidden. But it makes no sense to graph the decline because we know what the temperatures were after 1960. So, the "trick" is simply to plot temperature using the best available measure for any given time period; proxies where necessary and measured temperature otherwise. This hides nothing.

Oh, and by the way, within the past few months the missing piece of the puzzle has been found; we now have a reason why those recalcitrant tree rings stopped indicating the temperature from 1960 onward - an effect due to special conditions at that particular altitude. Now the more than 1200 proxy measures confirm that our rapidly changing climate has not been encountered in the past 1000 years.

Beautiful science like this is a human achievement that ranks equal to Beethoven's 9th symphony. Why would anyone forgo that for the hysterical caterwauling surrounding some cherry-picked stolen emails?

Stephan Lewandowsky is Australian professorial fellow in the school of psychology at the University of Western Australia.

Warming rescue plan doomed, report warns

2009-12-04T13:08:00.001-08:00

ADAM MORTON

The Age, December 5, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/warming-rescue-plan-doomed-report-warns-20091204-kb1e.html

THE world has little chance of avoiding at least two degrees of global warming this century - the projected threshold for unpredictable and accelerated climate changes - if the emissions targets proposed by rich nations are locked in at next week's Copenhagen summit, an analysis has found.

A report by German-based consultants Climate Analytics says wealthy countries will arrive in Denmark with proposals that would lead to a joint cut in greenhouse gas emissions of between 13 and 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. Australia's contribution is a 5 to 25 per cent cut, with the final figure dependent on the level of international agreement reached.

The industrialised world target is well below the 25 to 40 per cent range that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found would be necessary for a 50/50 chance of keeping the temperature rise near two degrees.

Factor in climate policies proposed by major developing nations, including China, and global emissions could increase 35 per cent between 1990 and 2020 - a rise that is said to lock in the inundation of island countries such as Tuvalu, the Maldives and Kiribati.

Scientists have warned that global emissions must peak between 2015 and 2020 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

The analysis will add weight to a push by the US and the G77 bloc of developing countries for the Copenhagen talks to set aside proposed 2020 emissions targets, and instead aim for a climate treaty to expire in 2017. This would allow 2020 targets to be reassessed and potentially toughened up mid-decade.

Climate Institute chief executive John Connor, who commissioned the analysis, said it showed that signing up to inadequate 2020 emissions targets would lead to a global warming of 3 degrees, which would destroy the world's coral reefs.

Attempting to reduce emissions after 2020 would require abrupt annual cuts of between 4 and 6 per cent a year until 2050, he said. The rate of change was likely to cause severe economic disruption.

''Inadequate climate action in the short-term also risks tripling current rates of global warming,'' already being seen in Australia in intense droughts, bushfires and heatwaves.

The release of the analysis is timed to coincide with politicians and officials from 192 countries arriving in Denmark for the two-week conference to discuss a climate agreement to replace the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

World leaders have said the gap between rich and poor nations is too great for a new treaty to be signed this year.

Many countries have already introduced domestic climate change policies. China has announced it will reduce its ''carbon intensity'' by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020, almost cutting in half the carbon dioxide emitted for every yuan of GDP. Under current economic projections, it would still lead to China's emissions growing 40 per cent by 1990.

India has proposed a 25 per cent carbon intensity target.

Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, told the BBC that leaked emails from a British climate research unit last month would have a ''huge impact'' on the Copenhagen talks.

He said the emails cast doubt upon man's influence on global warming and could deter countries from offering emissions cuts at the conference.

Saudi Arabia, one of the world's biggest oil producers, has long taken a sceptical view of climate change.

Senior British civil servant Sir Muir Russell has been appointed to investigate suggestions that the emails, stolen from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit, suggested senior scientists were involved in manipulation or suppression of data and failing to comply with freedom of information requests. The head of the unit, Phil Jones, said he would stand down during the inquiry.

With AGENCIES

Virtual vote gives you a voice at Copenhagen

2009-12-03T19:04:00.001-08:00

By Environment reporter Sarah Clarke

ABC News Online, 4 December 2009

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/04/2762091.htm

To Show your vote go to - http://www.showyourvote.org

With three days until the United Nations climate summit kicks off in Copenhagen, internet giant Google has helped launch a new tool to give people a vote on the outcome of the crucial meeting.

The online virtual ballot box is able to collate global statistics on who wants what, and it is an innovation by a man who has made it his personal mission to act on climate change.

Every day Google innovationist Justin Baird pedals to work at the internet giant, where he is thinking big in his global campaign to act on climate change.

"My personal mission is to drive positive change through technology," he said.

"I am in a position where I can understand the issues surrounding climate change. And understanding the technology solution that can empower us to communicate collectively."

His brainchild is called "Show Your Vote". It allows people to register in a virtual ballot box that can be embedded into any website.

The focus of the campaign is to show world leaders in Copenhagen what the people want.

"From your local postcode it aggregates it together to a state level, then country level, then across the world, so what we're doing is generating a global statistic. Over time it starts to generate and show the strength of public support of what's happening," Mr Baird said.

Google has backed it and so has the United Nations.

Earth Hour is also hoping it will deliver a more accurate idea of public support for climate change action.

"It just gives individuals a chance to say 'Yes, I have registered my point of view'," Earth Hour's Andy Ridley said.

Alongside the ballot box are virtual maps showing which country is doing what and which people want change.

Languages are also translated, so international barriers are removed.

Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, Tim Flannery, says the Google tool is an interesting invention.

"I can imagine a day not so long from now where the UN secretary-general is elected through Show Your Vote. It's a very interesting world that we're entering into," he said.

And a world where Mr Baird wants more people to have their say.

Copenhagen failure is planet's best bet: top climate scientist

2009-12-03T18:36:00.001-08:00

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG

The Age, December 4, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/copenhagen-failure-is-planets-best-bet-top-climate-scientist-20091203-k8qy.html

THE scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it will be better for the planet and for future generations if next week's Copenhagen climate change summit ends in collapse.

James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.

''I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track,'' said Dr Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. ''The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means.''

Dr Hansen, in repeated appearances before Congress beginning in 1989, has done more than any other scientist to educate politicians about the causes of global warming and to prod them into action to avoid its most catastrophic consequences.

But he vehemently opposes the carbon market schemes - in which permits to pollute are bought and sold - which are seen by the European Union and other governments as the most efficient way to cut emissions and move to a new, clean-energy economy.

Dr Hansen is also fiercely critical of Barack Obama - and even Al Gore, who won a Nobel peace prize for his efforts to get the world to act on climate change - saying politicians have failed to meet what he regards as the moral challenge of our age.

In Dr Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. ''This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,'' he said. ''On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say: 'Let's reduce slavery; let's find a compromise and reduce it 50 per cent or reduce it 40 per cent.'''

He added: ''We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual.''

Dr Hansen's journey from climate scientist to activist accelerated in the last years of the Bush administration. A reluctant public speaker, he says he was forced into the public realm by the increasingly clear looming spectre of droughts, floods, famines and drowned cities indicated by the science.

Dr Hansen has emerged as a leading campaigner against the coal industry.

He has irked some environmentalists by espousing a direct carbon tax on fuel use. Some see that as a distraction from rallying support in the US Congress for emissions trading - legislation that is on the table.

He is scathing of that approach. ''This is analogous to the indulgences that the Catholic Church sold in the Middle Ages. The bishops collected lots of money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement despite its absurdity. That is exactly what's happening.

''We've got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money, and that is what they can get through offsets.''

Guardian News & Media

Still spinning wheels after three decades

2009-12-03T18:34:00.001-08:00

MATTHEW ENGLAND

December 4, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/still-spinning-wheels-after-three-decades-20091203-k8t4.html

IN 1979 the then US president, Jimmy Carter, commissioned a report on the enhanced greenhouse effect and its implications for energy policy.

The report concluded that humanity "is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately''.

But there was good news, although it came with a warning: "Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing."

Thirty years on and we have not achieved much in terms of reductions in emissions; in fact we have rapidly increased them: today global emissions are more than 60 per cent higher than in 1979. The predicted warming has come to fruition as well: global average air temperatures have risen almost 0.6 of a degree since 1979. This is a big acceleration in warming on the multi-decade time scales that concern us most: the preceding 70 years had just 0.2 of a degree warming.

Today satellite and ice measurements show Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating rate. Melting of mountain glaciers and ice caps has also sped up over the past 20 years. Summer Arctic sea ice is melting and thinning well beyond the expectations of climate models of only a few years ago. Global average sea level rise is also occurring well above projections, consistent with a doubling in contribution from the melting of glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.

To make matters worse, natural carbon buffers appear to be weakening. The oceans and land surface have combined to absorb more than half our post-industrial emissions, yet the ability of these stores to absorb and retain carbon is changing. Fifty years ago natural carbon sinks removed about 600 kilograms of every tonne emitted. Today, only about 550 kilograms are removed.

Scientists often talk about trying to stabilise net greenhouse gases at or below the equivalent of 450 parts per million carbon dioxide. Yet 450 parts per million comes with a 50-50 chance of exceeding 2-degrees warming; a level of warming that would reduce food productivity over key parts of Australia and increase the severity of bushfire seasons and heat waves. Many understandably argue that 350 would be a safer goal. The problem is that we have already exceeded 450 in terms of total greenhouse gases and there's no known way to extract these gases from the atmosphere in large quantities.

If warming stabilises at 3 degrees then the changes become more extreme and the possibility emerges that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are set on course to gradually disintegrate over the coming centuries, raising sea level by about 10 metres and displacing hundreds of millions of people.

The science is clear that to avoid warming of more than 2 degrees, emissions need to peak within the next 10 years and then fall rapidly. This is becoming increasingly unlikely with every year of delayed action.

Matthew England is professor of ocean physics at the University of NSW.

Gagged CSIRO scientist resigns; calls for inquiry

2009-12-03T00:30:00.001-08:00

The Age, December 3, 2009

http://www.theage.com.au/national/gagged-csiro-scientist-resigns-calls-for-inquiry-20091203-k7py.html

Eminent scientist Clive Spashhas resigned from the CSIRO and called for a Senate inquiry into the science body after the censorship of his controversial report into emissions trading.

Dr Spash has lashed out at the organisation, which he says promotes self-censorship among its scientists with its unfair publication guidelines.

He has been stunned at the treatment he's received at the hands of CSIRO management, including boss Megan Clark, and he believes he's not alone.

"I've been treated extremely poorly," he said.

"There needs to be a Senate inquiry.

"The way the publication policy and the charter are being interpreted will encourage self-censorship.

"It's obviously happened before at the CSIRO - and there's issues currently."

Last month, Dr Spash accused the organisation of gagging him and his report - The Brave New World of Carbon Trading - and restricting its publication.

The report is critical of cap and trade schemes, like the one the Rudd government is seeking to introduce, as well as big compensation to polluters.

Dr Spash advocates a direct tax on carbon.

The CSIRO said the report was in breach of its publication guidelines, which restrict scientists from speaking out on public policy.

But it provoked accusations the CSIRO is censoring research harmful to the Government.

Under intense pressure, Dr Clark publicly released the report on November 26 but warned Dr Spash would be punished for his behaviour and his refusal to amend it.

"I believe that internationally peer-reviewed science should be published or, if Dr Clark wishes to have her own opinion, then she should publish her own opinion," said Dr Spash, who has been on sick leave.

"I've been to the doctor under extreme stress.

"I was surprised at senior management and how I was treated."

He had been ordered not to speak to the media while working for the CSIRO, which originally headhunted him for the job.

Dr Spash, who is heading to Europe where he plans to stay indefinitely, was reluctant to openly criticise the Government but noted that Science Minister Kim Carr had been abreast of the situation.

Journal New Political Economy had written to Senator Carr, detailing the changes the CSIRO had demanded and refusing to publish the censored version of the paper.

"They cut the conclusion by half, 11 per cent of the text, changed the thrust of the meaning from being an index criticism of an ETS to being an argument that it stands to be redesigned," Dr Spash said.

"I was clearly censored."

AAP

Logging could boost fire risk: study

2009-12-02T21:50:00.001-08:00

BY ROSSLYN BEEBY, SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

Canberra Times, 03 Dec, 2009

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/logging-could-boost-fire-risk-study/1694837.aspx

You can download the article (and others) here - http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/search/allsearch?mode=quicksearch&products=journal&WISsearch2=1755-263X&WISindexid2=issn&contentTitle=Conservation+Letters&contextLink=blah&contentOID=118902559&WISsearch1=lindenmayer&WISindexid1=WISall&articleGo.x=18&articleGo.y=10

Large-scale logging could increase bushfire risk for Australia's moist mountain ash forests, creating bigger fuel loads and drier, more combustible conditions, new research says.

A world-first study led by Australian National University ecologist Professor David Lindenmayer has found gaps in the forest canopy allow the forest floor to dry out, increasing flammability by as much as 50 per cent in some cases.

The team looked at the impacts of industrial logging in moist forests across the world, including tropical rainforest, North America and Russia's wet conifer forests and mountain ash forests in southern Australia.

Professor Lindenmayer said the study had ''huge implications'' for future forest management and bushfire control in Australia.

''We can't ignore the risks, particulary in the face of climate change. These trends are occurring in moist forests right across the planet. There are no excuses, no reason to claim Australia's forests are somehow different. We've got to face up to reality and do some serious thinking,'' he said.

The study, published by the international journal Conservation Letters found logging altered forest fire regimes by changing the amount, type and moisture content of fuels. The paper's four authors include University of Maine conservation biologist Malcolm Hunter and Canadian Forest Service senior research scientist Philip Burton.

Professor Lindenmayer said the team wanted to investigate whether logging made forests more or less fire-prone. ''This is a question that gets debated after any big bushfire, and we usually hear all sorts of uninformed opinions from lobby groups. So we said, 'Right, let's do some serious science.' We looked at moist forests because fires usually occur at a relatively lower frequency than dry forests.''

The team found logging changed moist forest microclimates, drying out understorey vegetation and leaf litter. Roads built for logging access also increased the number of ignition points for fires, and the area of forest edge susceptible to drying.

The study said research published almost 15 years ago, found clear-felling of moist forests in southern Australia led to ''the development of dense stands of regrowth saplings that created more available fuel'' than if the forests were not clear-felled. Professor Lindenmayer, who has spent more than 30 years doing research in the mountain ash forests near Marysville, said decades of logging had ''created a legacy of ecosystem disturbance that will be felt for centuries''.

Climate Emergency News

The day the Earth stood still

MARIAN WILKINSON

Obama's climate accord fails the test

Watered-down agreement follows day of bitter wrangling in Copenhagen

Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure

Leaked document says world will warm three degrees

BEN CUBBY

Two degrees to disaster

A billion could lose clean water to ice melt, says Al Gore

From correspondents in CopenhageAFP December 15, 2009

When the moral argument went mainstream

MARIAN WILKINSON

Australia accused of cooking carbon books

By Gregg Borschmann for Radio National - exclusive

'Get out of jail free'

Emissions blow-out

'Green carbon' controversy

Doubts about effectiveness

Next year forecast to be hottest on record

Prediction contradicts sceptics' claim that warming stopped in 1998

Ocean acidification rates pose disaster for marine life, major study shows

Past decade the warmest since records began in 1850

DEBORAH SMITH SCIENCE EDITOR

Ruling smooths path for Obama's US carbon cuts

ANNE DAVIES, WASHINGTON

2000–2009, THE WARMEST DECADE

WMO Press Release No.869

Decision time... face the facts or give up

It's the poorest of our fellow citizens who are most vulnerable to a changing climate

Greenhouse gas cuts just 'token gestures'

Copenhagen won't prevent disaster, warns top scientist

Climate's day of reckoning looms

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

COPENHAGEN CLIMATE DEAL HEADED FOR 3.5°C GLOBAL WARMING AND CLOSE TO 800 PPM CO2 EQUIVALENT GHG CONCENTRATIONS

Fraction too much fiction in 'climategate'

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/fraction-too-much-fiction-in-climategate-20091205-kb9g.html

Stolen emails do not support wild claims of scientific misconduct.

Warming rescue plan doomed, report warns

ADAM MORTON

Virtual vote gives you a voice at Copenhagen

Copenhagen failure is planet's best bet: top climate scientist

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG

Still spinning wheels after three decades

MATTHEW ENGLAND

Gagged CSIRO scientist resigns; calls for inquiry

Logging could boost fire risk: study

From correspondents in Copenhage
AFP
December 15, 2009