26 October 2016, Independent, Climate change wars are coming and building walls won’t help, top general warns. The effects of global warming ‘are becoming so severe they hold tremendous conflict potential’ in some areas and the world should prepare for millions of refugees. Climate change is threatening to force millions of people to become refugees and spark major wars that could “completely destabilise” the world, a leading general has warned. And countries which attempted to deal with the coming crisis by resorting to “narrow nationalistic instincts” – for example, by building walls to keep out refugees – will only make the problem worse, according to Major General Munir Muniruzzaman, chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council On Climate Change (GMACCC). He added that, while countries had talked a lot about the problems posed by global warming and how to address them, there did not seem to be “much action” on the ground. The GMACCC was set up in 2009 to investigate the security implications of climate change and its members include serving and retired military officers from around the world, such as the UK’s Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti and Brigadier General Stephen Cheney, a former US Marine. Speaking ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Marrakesh next month, General Muniruzzaman said it was time to make good on the promises made at last year’s historic meeting in Paris with global warming already contributing to flooding and droughts, threatening financial security and affecting people’s health. Read More here
Monthly Archives: October 2016
26 October 2016, Bloomberg, Magical Thinking Won’t Stop Climate Change. World leaders have started to generate some real optimism with their efforts to address global climate change. What’s troubling, though, is how far we remain from getting carbon emissions under control — and how much wishful thinking is still required to believe we can do so. The Paris agreement on climate change has garnered the national signatories needed to go into force on Nov. 4. Some economists see it as a promising framework for cooperation among many different countries, especially if those not pulling their weight suffer penalties such as trade sanctions. There’s even talk of aiming for the more ambitious goal of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius or less of their pre-industrial level, as opposed to the currently agreed 2 degrees. Meanwhile, another major international deal has been reached to phase out greenhouse gases used in refrigeration systems, and solar energy technology continues its rapid advance. For all the progress, though, the gap between what needs to happen and what is happening remains large. Worse, it’s growing. Consider, for example, how far the planet remains from any of the carbon emission trajectories in which — according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — global warming would remain below 2 degrees. Even in the most lenient scenarios, we would have to be cutting net emissions already. Yet under the pledges countries have made in the Paris framework, emissions will keep increasing sharply through at least 2030, as this chart from a recent commentary in the journal Science illustrates….. The gap is probably even bigger than the chart suggests. As climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters argue, an element of magical thinking has crept into the IPCC projections. Specifically, they rely heavily on the assumption that new technologies will allow humans to start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere on a grand scale, resulting in large net negative emissions sometime in the second half of this century. This might happen, but we don’t know how to do it yet. The assumptions about negative emissions amount to a bizarre step in what ought to be a cautious and conservative analysis. The IPCC scenarios essentially ignore the vast uncertainty surrounding a technology that does not yet exist, and about our ability to ramp it up to the required scale. To eliminate that much atmospheric carbon, as geophysicist Andrew Skuce estimates, we would need an industry roughly three times as big as the entire current fossil fuel industry — and we would need to create it fast, building something like one new large plant to capture and store carbon every day for the next 70 years. Does that sound likely? Read More here
24 October 2016, NASA, Studies offer new glimpse of melting under Antarctic glaciers. Two new studies by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), detect the fastest ongoing rates of glacier retreat ever observed in West Antarctica and offer an unprecedented direct view of intense ice melting from the floating undersides of glaciers. The results highlight how the interaction between ocean conditions and the bedrock beneath a glacier can influence the glacier’s evolution, with implications for understanding future ice loss from Antarctica and global sea level rise. The two studies examined three neighboring glaciers in West Antarctica that are melting and retreating at different rates. Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers flow into the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica, the part of the continent with the largest loss of ice mass. A study led by Bernd Scheuchl of UCI, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 28, used radar measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite and data from the earlier ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites to look at changes in the glaciers’ grounding lines — the boundary where a glacier loses contact with bedrock and begins to float on the ocean. The grounding line is important because nearly all glacier melting takes place on the underside of the glacier’s floating portion, called the ice shelf. If a glacier loses mass from enhanced melting, it may start floating farther inland from its former grounding line, just as a boat stuck on a sandbar may be able to float again if a heavy cargo is removed. This is called grounding line retreat. Read More here
17 October 2016, Renew Economy, Historic climate deal reached on potent refrigerant gases. After almost a decade of efforts to achieve a climate benefit of up to 0.5°C reduction in global temperature by the end of the century, 197 nations have finally reached agreement on the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. At the conclusion of unprecedented overnight negotiations extending past 7am last Saturday in the Rwandan capital, a face-saving compromise was finally achieved. Negotiations at the Montreal Protocol on an amendment to include the hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, potent synthetic greenhouse gases used primarily as refrigerants, began in earnest in 2009. But the first concerted efforts to draw international attention to the problem of projected rapid growth in HFC emissions began at the UNFCCC COP13 in Bali in 2007, where the London and Washington based Environmental Investigation Agency worked for two weeks with several large boxes of briefing notes to teach observers and negotiators alike to speak about the “F for Forgotten” F-gases.Highly regarded scientific papers by the Dutch climate scientist Guus Velders (et. al.) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2007 and 2009 were crucial in gaining the attention of the highest levels of the Obama administration, and so the long road to the historic agreement in Kigali last week began. As Obama’s Presidential statement on the agreement concludes, “diplomacy is never easy”. In spite of its flaws and shortcomings, the compromise brokered to deliver the climate legacy sought by the US is a significant achievement. Jubilation that might have been expected by the achievement of the “largest temperature reduction ever achieved by a single agreement” (according to one seasoned observer) has been tempered by delays in implementation of restrictions on use of HFCs granted to a block of recalcitrant developing countries including India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Arab Gulf states. Read more here