Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

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IPCC Meeting opens in Busan. Pachauri to go?

October 11, 2010

It is time for Pachauri to call it a day. Even though the Indian Government is forced to support the discredited Chairman, the recommendation that the Chairman not serve more than one term will probably be followed.

(400 delegates! And the UN meeting has just been held in Beijing. Cancun in November. A gravy train, hot air and not just a few ounces of carbon dioxide!!)

KBS World reports that

The 32nd general assembly of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opened in Busan today.
Attending the four-day meeting are IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, the heads of the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Environment Program, and some 400 other delegates from 194 countries. The participants will discuss 14 issues, including the publication of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report that will be announced in 2014.

The Times of India believes the Busan meet will decide Pachauri’s fate as IPCC head.

Though the Council had recommended that the “the term of the IPCC Chair should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment”, and Pachauri has already headed one such assessment report, which was released in 2007, the Indian government plans to back the director of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) at the meeting.
But, the Indian representatives at the meeting will ask for immediate implementation of all the other reforms of the committee set up after the Himalayan glacier scandal that had dented the IPCC’s reputation earlier this year.

 

THIRTY-SECOND SESSION OF THE IPCC

Busan, 11-14 October 2010

IPCC-XXXII/Doc. 1

(4.VIII.2010)

Agenda Item: 1

ENGLISH ONLY

 

PROVISIONAL AGENDA

1. OPENING OF THE SESSION

2. APPROVAL OF THE DRAFT REPORT OF THE 31st SESSION

3. IPCC PROGRAMME AND BUDGET FOR 2010-2014

4. THE IPCC 5TH ASSESSMENT REPORT (AR5)

4.1. Scope, content and process for the preparation of the AR5 Synthesis Report

4.2 Progress reports and schedule of AR5 related activities

5. REVIEW OF THE IPCC PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES:

REPORT BY THE INTER ACADEMY COUNCIL

6. ADMISSION OF OBSERVER ORGANIZATIONS

7. RULES OF PROCEDURES FOR THE ELECTION OF THE IPCC BUREAU AND ANY

TASK FORCE BUREAU

8. REPLACEMENT OF MEMBERS OF THE IPCC BUREAU

9. COMMUNCATIONS STRATEGY

10. MATTERS RELATED TO UNFCCC

11. OTHER PROGRESS REPORTS

11.1 Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation

11.2 Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance

Climate Change Adaptation

11.3 Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories

11.4 Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis

(TGICA)

11.5 Development of new scenarios

11.6 IPCC Scholarship Programme

11.7 Implementation of decisions taken at the 30th Session

11.8 Any other progress reports

12. OTHER BUSINESS

13. TIME AND PLACE OF THE NEXT SESSION

14. CLOSING OF THE SESSION


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Unsettled science?

October 9, 2010

 

History of sunspot number observations showing...

Image via Wikipedia

 

Within the space of two days there have been two scientific papers with entirely different conclusions about the effect of the active sun on climate. That there is a difference from two different studies is perfectly normal (and desirable if we are to learn), but what is obvious is the inanity of considering that the effects of solar variations on climate is a “settled science”. Solar Science and Climate are still in the realm of “where we don’t know what we don’t know”.

The first on October 5th, led to the conclusion that:

an increase in solar activity from the Sun actually cools the Earth

The second reported here comes to the conclusion that:

“The contribution of the active sun, indirectly via cosmic rays, to global warming appears to be much stronger than the presently accepted [IPCC] upper limit of 1/3.”

 

????

(more…)

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Socio-economic measures can help adapt crops for climate change

October 8, 2010

The headline in the Telegraph is both remarkable and irresponsible.

Climate change threatens UK harvest

The article is about a new paper in Environmental Research Letters:

Increased crop failure due to climate change: assessing adaptation options using models and socio-economic data for wheat in China

Andrew J Challinor, Elisabeth S Simelton, Evan D G Fraser, Debbie Hemming and Mathew Collins Environ. Res. Lett.5 034012  doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/3/034012

This paper deals with simulations of  crop failures due to heat and water stress in North east China, where the simulations are themselves based on climate model output taken from the coupled atmosphere–ocean simulations of the Hadley centre for the period 1990 – 2099. The base-line for climate was for the period 1950-1989.

 

Grain crops China: Xinhua News Agency

 

The authors conclude that based on their simulations

The results from this study suggest that climate change will result in increasing spring wheat crop failure in northeast Chinadue to increasing extremes of both heat and water stress.

But the authors also studied socio-economic adaptation factors. Access to capital and land, increasing fertilizer, per capita investments in agriculture, and falling numbers of rural households all of which reduce vulnerability. They find that “measures to adapt may include institutional policies to support adaptation; schemes to ensure that the requisitecrop varieties are available to farmers; crop insuranceschemes or weather derivatives to aid management ofclimate variability; plant breeding; and building capacity foragricultural extension services to effectively prepare farmers for extreme events”. They go on to conclude that

The simulations show significant potential for adaptation throughboth socio-economic and biophysical measures. The methods used could form part of a methodology to link climate andcrop models, socio-economic analyses and crop variety trialdata. By examining at the regional scale the range of abioticstresses likely to be experienced by crop production systemsin the future, the relative importance of these stresses couldbe determined using a risk-based or probabilistic framework.This work could in turn be used with analyses of current andpotential future germplasm, and socio-economic conditions,in order to prioritize efforts to adapt regional-scale cropproduction to climate change, using a range of measures suchas policy, plant breeding and biotechnology.

But The Telegraph somehow can only see the alarmist side. They also manage to bring the UK Met Office into the story and create a remarkable headline from these simulations of North East China! Louise Gray writes:

Climate change threatens UK harvest

Climate change could push up food prices by causing large-scale crop failures in Britain, the Met Office has warned. Rising temperatures could mean events such as the drought in Russia this summer, which pushed up grain prices, hit countries like the UK.

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Life flows back into the Murray-Darling Basin

October 1, 2010

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

An aerial view of the Choke (north and south lagoon) of the Coorong. Photo: David Mariuz

The long wait is almost over at the mouth of Australia’s greatest river. A decade after it last spilt into the sea, the Murray River will reconnect with the Southern Ocean in a matter of days.

The Murray-Darling Basin is having its fourth wettest year (to date) on record, the Bureau of Meteorology said yesterday. The Murray’s famous Lower Lakes – surviving on environmental ”death row” last year – have swollen close to 150 centimetres higher than the nadir of 2009, thanks mostly to summer downpours in northern Australia and the September floods in Victoria.

Chief executive of South Australia’s environment and water department Allan Holmes is bullish about the future, saying the region was already ”an entirely different environment” to the one he was managing six months ago. ”These systems, provided you don’t tip them over the edge, are enormously resilient and they come back with a vengeance,” he said.

Just a month ago The plight of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin was being attributed to climate change:

“Australian climate scientists see the country as ‘extremely vulnerable’ to climate change and the Murray-Darling Basin as a ground zero for global warming. Climate change advisors to Australia’s government have warned that agricultural production in the basin could fall by up to 92% by 2100”.

“Global warming will trigger more frequent and severe droughts, as well as more devastating bushfires, cyclones and floods”–Kathy Marks.

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Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Science, Weather | 1 Comment »

BBC balance: 1 PR = 2 x FRS

October 1, 2010

The BBC carries a short article about the Royal Society’s rewritten “Short guide to the science of climate change”.

Professor Anthony Kelly, one of the 43 Fellows who called for the change, says he is reasonably satisfied with the new guidance. “It’s gone a long way to meeting our concerns,” he said. “The previous guidance was discouraging debate rather than encouraging it among knowledgeable people. The new guidance is clearer and a very much better document.”

Professor Kelly is one of two Fellows who are advisers to Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, which says it wants to bring balance to a “seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist” debate about the impact of human activities on the Earth’s climate system.

Having named the GWPF the BBC feels it incumbent for the sake of balance to also mention the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, But to do this they are forced to quote a certain Bob Ward who is the PR hack of the Grantham Institute.

But the BBC which is far from neutral in the climate disruption / change debate, reveals its governing mathematics when it implies that one public relations hack is sufficient to balance two Fellows of the Royal Society:

1 x PR = 2 x FRS

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Riding piggy-back can save the polar bears from melting ice!!

September 16, 2010

Well now….

Swedish Radio reports that a previously unknown behaviour of polar bears has been observed. A cub can travel on its mother’s back while she swims in search of food. “It could be a way for polar bears to cope better than we thought” said Tom Arnbom of WWF. “I think it’s positive” he says. “It proves that the polar bears can adapt if climate changes in the Arctic”

image: Isbjörnar. Foto: Angela Plumb/WWF.

Polar bear with cub

Update: Story also on the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8284000/8284906.stm

Dr Jon Aars from the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso describes what happened in the journal Polar Biology. On the 21 July 2006, Mrs Angela Plumb, a tourist from the UK, was aboard a ship in the mouth of a fjord in the Svalbard archipelago.

“The cub was on the back of the polar bear when it was in the water, then it got out of the water and stayed on its mother’s back a little, then she shook it off,” Mrs Plumb explains.

For large parts of the year, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) live among the sea ice, feeding mainly on seals. The challenge for the bears is to navigate the many areas of open water between the islands of floating ice. Seeing the bear had a radio collar, Mrs Plumb got in touch with Dr Aars to report her sighting and asked if this was a common behaviour.

“I hadn’t seen this behaviour before or heard about it so I asked other researchers and found out it is something that has been observed but not frequently at all,” Dr Aars says.

Dr Aars was especially interested if this behaviour might have some adaptive value for the bears. “This could be potentially important because it means that the cubs get exposed to less water. If they are in the water they would have to swim and very small cubs are very badly insulated in water,” he says.

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Posted in Behaviour, Environment, Science, Sweden | 1 Comment »

Yvo de Boer: “Emissions targets and timetables are irrelevant”

September 15, 2010

I am an optimist and maybe I am over-reacting but I see clear signals that the “establishment” is beginning to back away from the hype and hysteria surrounding Global Warming and carbon dioxide. The reduction of temperatures in the last decade while carbon dioxide concentration has increased but where the increase is less than half of that which should have been caused by man-made emissions is beginning to bring common sense back into play.

Yesterday it was Caroline Spelman the new UK Environment Secretary. Today Yvo de Boer the former head of the UN climate negotiations, has acknowledged that the long debate over targets and timetables for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is irrelevant. Asked by Bloomberg about emissions reductions targets in the context of the upcoming climate negotiations in Cancun, de Boer replied:

“Discussions about targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome. I don’t think that we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition.”

image: treehugger.com

The failure of both the UN climate negotiations and domestic cap-and-trade policies has opened up new opportunities for progress on our long-stalled climate and energy goals. That progress will be driven primarily by direct public investment in energy technology, not by carbon markets, and will focus explicitly on making clean energy cheap through innovation.

Even though I don’t believe that carbon dioxide has any significant impact on Climate change I can only agree that innovation and technology development – rather than carbon trading scams or futile subsidies for renewables (which can never be more than intermittent) is the way to go.

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A whiff of common sense

September 14, 2010

Perhaps a return to some common sense instead of the religious fervour of the global warming terrorists.

  • Climate change is inevitable and warming and cooling will continue till the earth dies a “heat death” in about 4 to 5 billion years

  • The little (relative to the distance from the centre of the earth to the sun) turbulent layer of crust and atmosphere within which we live is a “chaotic” system dominated by the sun’s radiation and with the oceans as the primary vehicle for heat transport in this layer. The next largest “heat transporter” is the volcanic activity around the world and its transient effects. The atmosphere comes next and effects of its composition are dominated first by clouds and only then by the trace gases, sub-micron particulates and aerosols such as carbon dioxide and soot.
  • Climate science (which is a hotchpotch of disciplines and still a long way from being a science) can only  speculate as to the causes of and directions of climate change – from coming ice ages in the 1970’s to global warming and the melting of the ice caps in the 1990’s and to the prospects of a new little ice-age now.
  • Resorting to alarmism and the nonsensical “precautionary principle” in an attempt to control climate while still not understanding the causes of change is more than futile – it is plain stupid.

The new UK  Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman seems to have changed tack – ever so slightly but still significantly – to focusing on adaptation rather than on trying to control or brake climate changes.

Perhaps a whiff of common sense returning. And high time for that.

The Telegraph reports that she will express this shift in her first speech on climate change. For the past few years Government policy has concentrated on trying to make people turn off lights and grow their own vegetables in an effort to bring down carbon emissions. But as global greenhouse gases continue to increase, with the growth of developing countries like China and India, and the public purse tightens, the focus will increasingly be on adapting to climate change. Temperatures are expected to rise further because of greenhouse gases that are already “locked in” but will take decades to warm the atmosphere.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01408/carolinespelmanabb_1408348c.jpg

Climate change is inevitable, says Caroline Spelman

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Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Science | 1 Comment »

Termites predict climate change!

September 13, 2010
Termietenheuvel

Image via Wikipedia

USA Today reports that Termites help predict impact of climate change.

They rely on instinct rather than mathematical models but they surely couldn’t do worse than Michael Mann & The Hockey Stick Gang

Termites are careful builders that locate their mounds in areas with the right balance of moisture and drainage. This intuitive understanding of geology and hydrology can help explain how a local ecosystem might evolve, according to the study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

“By understanding the patterns of the vegetation and termite mounds over different moisture zones, we can project how the landscape might change with climate change,” explains co-author Greg Asner.

http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/green-house/2010/09/10/termitex-wide-community.jpg

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v1/n6/full/ncomms1066.html

Regional insight into savanna hydrogeomorphology from termite mounds

by Shaun R. Levick, Gregory P. Asner, Oliver A. Chadwick, Lesego M. Khomo, Kevin H. Rogers, Anthony S. Hartshorn, Ty Kennedy-Bowdoin & David E. Knapp

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IPCC: Self adulation or just simple plagiarism

September 7, 2010

It would appear that large sections of the IPCC 1995 Working Group 2 report has just lifted sections from a book published by its lead author.

It could be just simple plagiarism or is perhaps the self-adulation to be expected from lead authors – or the IPCC report being used for marketing the book??

http://www.rescuepost.com/.a/6a00d8357f3f2969e2013485bc0fc9970c-250wi

The Book the IPCC Plagiarized

by Donna Laframboise.

(more…)

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