28 November 2015, Climate News Network, Records reveal warming’s first warning. COP 21: Scientists identify a worldwide pattern of climate change in the late 1980s as the early signpost that has now led to the crucial UN summit in Paris. Climate change may have begun more than 25 years ago. At around the time that global warming and the spectre of climate change first emerged as a geopolitical challenge for future generations, it had already commenced, according to new research. As world leaders gather in Paris for COP21, the UN summit seeking to get a global agreement on responses to climate change, British oceanographers and colleagues from around the world have identified a “major change in the Earth’s biophysical systems” in the late 1980s. They looked back into recent climate history, and now say that the change can be attributed to “rapid global warming from anthropogenic plus natural forcing”. Climate scientists have been warning for decades that the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as a result of the human combustion of fossil fuels, will at some point tip stable climate zones into new regimes – a shift defined by the researchers as an “abrupt, substantial and persistent” change. Most climate scientists expect such change to happen in the next few decades, but this new study seems to declare that it has already started to happen. Cause and effect The scientists report in Global Change Biology journal that they have identified a worldwide pattern of change, centred around 1987, that was seemingly associated with the eruption of Mexico’s El Chichón volcano in 1982. Analyses such as these are complex. No single weather event can be taken as significant, while cause and effect also are not easily linked. Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2015
28 November 2015, The Guardian, Paris climate activists put under house arrest using emergency laws. At least 24 climate activists have been put under house arrest by French police, accused of flouting a ban on organising protests during next week’s Paris climate summit, the Guardian has learned. One legal adviser to the activists said many officers raided his Paris apartment and occupied three floors and a staircase in his block. French authorities did not respond to requests for comment but lawyers said that the warrants were issued under state of emergency laws, imposed after the terror attacks that killed 130 people earlier this month. The author and climate change campaigner, Naomi Klein, accused French authorities of “a gross abuse of power that risks turning the summit into a farce”. “Climate summits are not photo opportunities to boost the popularity of politicians,” she told the Guardian. “Given the stakes of the climate crisis, they are by their nature highly contested. That is democracy, messy as it may be. The French government, under cover of anti-terrorism laws, seems to be trying to avoid this, shamefully banning peaceful demonstrations and using emergency powers to pre-emptively detain key activists.” Read More here
27 November 2015, Climate News Network, UN counts climate’s human cost. COP 21: New study informs Paris summit delegates that extreme weather in the last two decades has claimed well over half a million lives and cost trillions of dollars. In the 20 years since the first UN conference on climate change, weather-related disasters have claimed 606,000 human lives, damaged or destroyed 87 million homes, and injured, displaced or left helpless a total of 4.1 billion people. A new study from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) demonstrates that 90% of all disasters are now weather-related. And the average of 335 weather-related disasters per year in the last 10 years is twice that recorded between 1985 and 1995. The report, The Human Cost of Weather-Related Disasters 1995-2015, is intended to focus attention during the UN climate change conference – which opens in Paris on Monday − on the damage already inflicted by global warming as a consequence of rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in turn as a consequence of the human combustion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the planet’s forests. Read More here
27 November 2015, The Conversation, Out of step: marching for climate justice versus taking action. This weekend, tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of people in cities around the world will take to the streets to protest against governments’ inaction on climate change. Past experience suggests media coverage will be largely sympathetic, if cursory, and (many) politicians will say that they hope the Paris climate summit that begins immediately afterwards represents a turning point. We have been here before. Quite often. There have been demonstrations at international climate meetings since at least 1990. However, “sympathy” marches in places far removed from the climate talks – such as those planned this weekend – are less frequent. So, can they make a difference? Read More here