News

New Zealand has abandoned plans to introduce a carbon tax after deciding it would not cut emissions enough to justify the cost of its introduction, a move that comes as Victoria negotiates with other states for an Australian emissions trading scheme. New Zealand's carbon tax was to be set at a relatively low level of $A14 per tonne of carbon emissions and was expected to add 6 per cent to electricity prices. That price compares with about �21 ($A34) per tonne at which carbon is trading in the European emissions market created by the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol a year ago. However, a carbon tax is more punitive than credits as it is paid by all emitters and cannot be traded away.

Ice ages come every 11,000 years. A mega ice age comes every 105,000 years. Both are due between now and 2012. The 11,000 year cycle happens because of increase and decrease of cyclical underwater volcanic eruption. The 105,000 mega ice age happens because of the changing shape of the orbit of the earth around the sun - circular to elliptical and then back to circular every 105,000 years. Both the cycles are overdue. They have actually started.

In Gulliver's Travels, the diminutive Lilliputians tie down the "giant" Gulliver with hundreds of tiny cords. The other nations of the world are hoping to try the same trick on the "giant" United States, binding it with strings of small international agreements that will ultimately restrict its emissions of greenhouse gases. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal ended this past weekend with two such accords. In the first deal, the parties to the Kyoto Protocol reached an agreement to launch negotiations about imposing further restrictions on their emissions of greenhouse gases after that treaty expires in 2012. Since the United States is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol it had no say in this agreement.

During the 10-day United Nations Climate Change Conference that wrapped up on Friday in Montreal, a Greenpeace staffer said something so idiotic and implausible that not one of the 10,000 delegates called him on. "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with," said Steven Guilbeault, the director of the Greenpeace movement for Quebec. So now that colder means warmer basically, anything goes.

Monthly averages of solar radiation reaching the Top of the Atmosphere (TOA) as simulated by 20 General Circulation Models (GCMs) during the period 1985–1988 are compared. They were part of submissions to AMIP-2 (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project). Monthly averages of ISCCP-FD (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project – Flux Data) are considered as reference. Considerable discrepancies are found: Most models reproduce the prescribed Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) value within ±0.7 Wm−2. Monthly zonal averages disagree between ±2 to ±7 Wm−2, depending on latitude and season. The largest model diversity occurs near polar regions. Some models display a zonally symmetric insolation, while others and ISCCP show longitudinal deviations of the order of ±1 Wm−2. With such differences in meridional gradients impacts in multi-annual simulations cannot be excluded. Sensitivity studies are recommended.

The Montreal conference on global warming looks like ending tonight with no big agreement: nothing approaching the status of the Kyoto Protocol, and possibly nothing at all. That is not a tragedy. It is more like a success. One of the fortnight's achievements is to have drawn attention to the difficulty of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol itself, never mind drafting a successor, given that so many countries are on course to breach it by an extravagant margin.

These findings have implications for both science and public policy. For example, with respect to temperature data there is overwhelming evidence that the planet has warmed during the past century. But could this warming be due to natural dynamics? Given what we know about the complexity, long-term persistence, and non-linearity of the climate system, it seems the answer might be yes. Finally, that reported trends are real yet insignificant indicates a worrisome possibility: natural climatic excursions may be much larger than we imagine. So large, perhaps, that they render insignificant the changes, human-induced or otherwise, observed during the past century.

As one of the very few scientists at the UN's eleventh Conference of the Parties climate meeting (COP-11), I feel like an outsider. That's because I am. The army of thousands in attendance (international delegates, NGOs, and all manner of stakeholders in the climate change issue), have little interest in knowing how certain or uncertain the science of global warming is. All these people know - or need to know - is that the "glaciers are melting," it's getting "hotter every year", and "climate change is killing people now" (all of these are direct quotes from presenters).

At this year's UN climate conference in Montreal, there's a seriousness of purpose and an acknowledgement of difficult realities that's unprecedented. At this conference, demands for unrealistic and economically harmful cuts in greenhouse gases, such as those outlined in the Kyoto Protocol, have been blunted. Instead, consideration is being given among delegates, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), bureaucrats, and politicians to bolstering adaptive capacity.

The goal of the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate Change (AP6) is to address climate change by focusing on creating and deploying technologies that emit less greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide. The AP6 appear to be aligned with the new proposals for combining economic development and climate policies being offered by various participants in the Montreal conference. For example, the environmental think tank the World Resources Institute issued a new study that focuses on how to boost the economic growth of poor countries while simultaneously helping them improve their energy efficiency.

The single most important underlying theme that unites critics of affluence is a misunderstanding of basic economics. I'm not talking about the intricacies of economic theories and their associated technical buzzwords. I'm talking about concepts that are so basic to the health and happiness of a society that they should be taught in every high school -- perhaps before.

Bitterly cold air poured southward across the nation's midsection Wednesday, dropping temperatures to record lows from Montana to Illinois. The mercury dived to a record 45 below at West Yellowstone, Mont., the frequently cold spot at the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park, the National Weather Service said. The old record for Dec. 7 was 39 below, set in 1927.

Thousands of UK demonstrators have taken to the streets as others protested around the world for action to combat the threat of global warming.Almost 10,000 people chanting slogans, waving banners and blowing whistles marched through the capital calling on the Government to tackle climate change, organisers said. The demonstration in London coincides with other events in 32 countries and with critical United Nation talks in Montreal which will be attended by the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, and Elliott Morley, the Environment Minister. Some carried banners saying 'Bush, Blair, Beckett: climate criminals', while others waved banners which read 'Save Our World'.

At the halfway point of the UN climate change talks in Montreal, environmental groups are struggling a bit to work out who the latest villain is in this long-running drama. Usually it is very straightforward. The US is generally a dead cert for the award of "Fossil of the Day", reviled by green groups for its rejection of the Kyoto protocol, closely followed by Saudi Arabia for what are regarded as obstructive tactics.

In the December 1st issue of Nature magazine, Harry Bryden and colleagues at Britain's National Oceanography Centre report that the Atlantic meridional circulation (also known as the thermohaline circulation (THC) -- the density driven current that carries warm surface water northward and returns colder deep water southward -- has slowed by 30 percent between 1957 and 2004. The significance of this finding is difficult to assess in light of other recent observations.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has turned away an appeal from state authorities and environmental groups which sought to compel the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The Court previously ruled that the EPA was not required to regulate CO2.

A federal court rejected the appeal of a ruling that lets carmakers such as General Motors Corp. and utilities such as American Electric Power Co. avoid federal standards for emission curbs under the 1977 Clean Air Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 4-3 to deny a petition for a review by the full court, after a three-judge panel ruled in July the Environmental Protection Agency acted properly in rejecting a plea by 12 U.S. states to require reductions in gases linked to global warming.

The world's media has been criticised for being too negative in its reporting of environmental issues. Continual coverage of destruction was making people switch off, delegates at the International Media and Environment Summit (Imes) in Kuching, Malaysia, were told. "We keep crying wolf and we keep overstating the doomsday scenario," said Ong Keng Yong, the Secretary General of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean).

We can no longer absolutely conclude whether globally the troposphere is cooling or warming relative to the surface. Clearly, however, the climate system has evolved in one unique way. Hence the challenge to the climate science community is to understand the reasons for the coherent differences between available datasets, and to discern the true climate evolution. The key first step is to understand the likely sources and causes of errors and biases. Only with this knowledge can we hope to truly reconcile the differences and gain a more complete and accurate picture of the true climate system evolution.

Harlan Watson, the US Administration's chief climate change negotiator has said that the US will not agree to any reduction in emissions at the G8 meeting in July. This is a blow to British Prime Minister Tony Blair who hoped that he would be able to persuade America to put artificial constraints on energy use.