DAVID CAMERON is to abandon plans for “green” taxes amid fears of a backlash from voters unhappy about having to pay for climate change.
A leaked policy paper commissioned by the Tory leader warns that action on the environment is too often seen in terms of “consumer sacrifice”.
For more than 100 years, climate scientists have fully understood that if all else were held constant, an increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) would lead to an increase in the near-surface air temperatures. The problem becomes a lot more complicated in the real world when we consider that “all else” cannot be held constant and there are a lot more changes occurring at any one time than just the concentration of CO2. Once the temperature of the Earth starts inching upward, changes immediately occur to atmospheric moisture levels, cloud patterns, surface properties, and on and on. Some of these changes, like the additional moisture, amplify the warming and represent positive feedback mechanisms. Other consequences, like the development of more low clouds, would act to retard or even reverse the warming and represent negative feedbacks. Getting all the feedbacks correct is critical to predicting future conditions, and these feedbacks are simulated numerically in global climate general circulation models (GCMs). Herein lies a central component of the great debate — some GCMs predict relatively little warming for a doubling of CO2, and others predict substantial warming for the same change in atmospheric composition.
If that is not enough, changes in CO2 in the real world would almost certainly be associated with other changes in the atmosphere – sulfur dioxide, mineral aerosols (dust), ozone, black carbon, and who knows what else would vary through time and complicate the “all else held constant” picture. By the way, the Sun varies its output as well. And when discussing climate change over the next century, even more uncertainties come from estimations of economic growth, adoption of various energy alternatives, human population growth, land use changes, and … you get the message.
However, the fundamental question in the greenhouse debate still comes down largely to a question of climate sensitivity defined as the change in global temperature for change in radiative forcing associated with varying levels of atmospheric CO2. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that the sensitivity is between 0.48 and 1.40 degrees Kelvin (K) per one Watt per square meter (Wm-2) which translates into a global warming of 2.0 K to 4.5 K for a doubling of CO2 concentration (1 degree K equals one degree Celsius which equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Rather than turn this into a review of a physics course, what we have is the IPCC predicting global warming of 3.2°F to 7.2°F for a doubling of CO2 concentration. Others have shown in very credible professional journals that there is a 66% chance of the IPCC being right in their estimate – this provides the fodder for alarmists to suggest that IPCC acknowledges the possibility of a global warm up of 10°F for a doubling of CO2.
To say the least, these numbers are hotly debated in the climate community. A recent article in Geophysical Research Letters presents an interesting approach to pinning down the critical sensitivity value (K/Wm-2) for elevated levels of CO2. The article is by Petr Chylek and Ulrike Lohmann of New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science; funding was provided by the Los Alamos Laboratory. The team decided to re-examine the temperature, CO2, methane, and dust record from the Vostok ice core extracted from a site in Antarctica. Although the core record goes back nearly a half million years, Chylek and Lohmann elected to restrict their primary analysis to the past 42,000 years.
As seen in Figure 1, the core reveals that we clearly escaped from an ice age around 15,000 years ago as we moved into the modern, relatively warm Holocene period, but the core also shows that the Earth experienced a cooling from 42,000 years ago to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). They recognize that the Vostok data represent Antarctic conditions, not true global conditions, and they used a variety of scenarios to estimate global conditions from what was observed in Antarctica. To make a long story short, the authors used the cooling from 42,000 years ago to the LGM and the warming from 15,000 years ago to the near present to estimate the climate sensitivity parameter.
Figure 1. Vostok ice core data for changes in temperature (in units of 0.1 K), carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration (in ppmv), and dust aerosols (in arbitrary units normalized to value of one for an average Holocene concentration), and relative changes in summer solar insulation (in W/m2) at the latitude of 65°N (dashed line). A solid thick black line shows a five point running average of dust aerosol concentration (from Chylek and Lohmann, 2008)
By combining temperatures, carbon dioxide concentrations, methane concentrations and importantly, dust amounts determined from the ice core during the past 42,000 years, the authors were able to derive the climate sensitivity from the combined variations for these factors. One of their largest uncertainties surrounded the dust amounts, and so Chylek and Lohmann turned to a climate model to see if changes in atmospheric dustiness could have the magnitude of the effect on global temperatures (and thus climate sensitivity) that they had determined empirically. The modeled results were consistent with their other calculations, giving them added confidence in their calculations.
The reason they were looking for independent confirmation was that their findings for climate sensitivity were near the low end of the bounding range given by the IPCC—and that means they are going to be subject to an endless amount of scrutiny from those folks who want potential global warming to seem as bad as possible.
Here are the concluding paragraphs Chylek and Lohmann paper:
We have shown that the ice core data from the warm period (around 42 KYBP) to the LGM and from the LGM to Holocene transition can be used to constrain the dust aerosol radiative forcing during these transitions. We find the dust radiative forcing to be 3.3 ± 0.8 W/m2. Assuming that the climate sensitivity is the same for both transitions, we obtain [the climate sensitivity] = 0.49 ± 0.07 K/Wm_2. This suggests 95% likelihood of warming between 1.3 and 2.3 K due to doubling of atmospheric concentration of CO2 (assuming that the CO2 doubling produces the radiative forcing of 3.7 W/m2 according to the IPCC 2007 report). The ECHAM5 model simulation suggests that during the LGM the global average aerosol optical depth might have been almost twice the current value.
The results compatible with climate sensitivity around or below 2 K for doubling of CO2 were recently deduced using cloud resolving models incorporated within GCMs [Miura et al., 2005; Wyant et al., 2006], from observational data [Chylek et al., 2007; Schwartz, 2007], and from a set of GCM simulations constrained by the ERBE (Earth Radiation Budget Experiment) observations [Forster and Gregory, 2006]. All these results together with our work presented in this paper support the lower end of the climate sensitivity range of 2 to 4.5 K suggested by the IPCC 2007 report [Solomon et al., 2007].
To long-time readers of World Climate Report (and its predecessors), these results should hardly come as much of surprise. For at least a good 7 or 8 years we have repeatedly been telling you that you should be expecting about a 1.5 to 2.0ºC of warming from greenhouse gas increases this century. Chylek and Lohmann’s findings are simply further confirmation of this.
The biggest thing to take home in all of this is that the less the temperature rise, the less the chance for major disruption, such as a large sea level rise, at least anytime soon. That means we have more time to figure out a solution.
Assuredly, had Chylek and Lohmann discovered that IPCC was underestimating the climate sensitivity, they would have been a front page news story the world over. Instead, they found that IPCC is likely overestimating the climate sensitivity to CO2, so they were reduced to coverage only at World Climate Report.
Reference:
Chylek, P., and U. Lohmann, 2008. Aerosol radiative forcing and climate sensitivity deduced from the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition. Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L04804, doi:10.1029/2007GL032759.
In her article 'What's happening to our climate?' (Belfast Telegraph, February 18), Linda McKee falls into the same traps occupied by so many of her colleagues in the media.
In the first instance, she confuses local climate variations with global warming.
U.S. plans to replace 15 percent of gasoline consumption with crop-based fuels including ethanol are already leading to some unintended consequences as food prices and fertilizer costs increase. About 33 percent of U.S. corn will be used for fuel over the next decade, up from 11 percent in 2002, the Agriculture Department estimates.
The shift to renewables has been ditched for a carbon intensive future
The Armani-style beige suits worn by security staff at BP headquarters in London and introduced under the reign of former boss, Lord (John) Browne, are to be quietly dropped in favour of more traditional grey ones. It is a small change but one dripping with symbolism that the flamboyant days of the "sun king" are definitely over and the company is going back to basics and a bit of no-nonsense austerity.
Porsche, whose cars are seen as an emblem of wealth and success in London's financial district, is planning a legal challenge to prevent its customers from paying an increased congestion charge in the UK capital.
The German company intends to seek a judicial review aimed at quashing the plan by Ken Livingstone, London's mayor, to impose a £25-a-day ($49, €33) charge for the most polluting cars from October. Porsche said its solicitors were formally writing to the mayor to challenge his decision.
Yesterday's picture in the Mail of a cascade of icicles in the Yorkshire Dales was a reminder of how cold Britain can be – something many of us have forgotten in this unusually mild winter.
But it really is remarkable how little attention has been paid to the extraordinary weather events which in recent weeks have been affecting other parts of the world
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States fell by 1.8 percent in 2006, compared to a 0.3 percent increase in emissions in the European Union (EU), according to newly released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The new data confirm the continuing success of market-oriented, voluntary greenhouse gas emissions programs in the U.S. versus European cap-and-trade mandates.
The stark difference occurred even though the two economies grew at a near-identical pace in 2006, roughly 3 percent for the year.
Dr. Peter Friedman is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UMass Dartmouth and a member of the American Geophysical Union.
Although there are many uncertainties in climate science, we do know with reasonable assuredness that the earth is currently experiencing a modest warming trend. We also know that CO2, which is a small contributor to the "greenhouse effect," is increasing in concentration in the atmosphere.
The short-term confluence of these trends has led many to disregard the more convincing longer-term data and jump to a conclusion that there is a cause-and-effect relationship. But while the media have decided that the science is settled, many in the scientific community are skeptical — and with good reason.
In his Interim Climate Change Review for the Australian government Professor Ross Garnaut is looking to the world stabilising emission levels at year 2000 levels “soon after 2020”. Following this he sees a need for halving them by 2050 and reducing them to a quarter of 2000 levels by 2100.
He also considers that emissions must be based on some level of equality on a per capita basis. Realistically he recognises that there would need to be a phase to this and that population trends would need to be taken into consideration.
But, notwithstanding the cheer squad who were able to comment on detail about the report as soon as it was released, Garnaut barely scratches the surface in recognising the enormity of the task. Throw away lines like stabilisation at a uniform per capita level mask economic turmoil.
Australia’s emissions per capita are presently 16 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Largely because much of the OECD has (unlike Australia) outsourced its heavy energy intensive industries, the OECD average is 11.5 tonnes. The world average is 4.5 tonnes. Given population growth, that would have to fall to under 4 tonnes by 2030 to get to stabilisation.
In other words, to meet the level that Garnaut sees as necessary, Australia would be emitting only one quarter of its present level of CO2.
That degree of self discipline is possible only by accepting returning the economy to living standards similar to those currently experienced in the developing world. Nobody purposefully emits CO2 (though until a few years ago it was not a concern). The simple fact is that its emission is a by-product of earning income. We know of no other way to enrich ourselves and raise living standards of the poorest countries than to do so using energy and that means carboniferous sources.
As Garnaut acknowledges, easy gains in emission reductions have been made, especially with the dismantling of the command economies of the Soviet bloc and China. Those countries’ CO2 intensities have now stopped falling, in fact are rising. Indeed, China ahs already surpassed the magic 4 tonnes per capita and has only pulled a fifth of its population out of poverty. It is a pipe dream to think that Indonesia and PNG could become vast sinks to offset other countries’ emission levels. Only by foregoing the use of oil, gas and coal is it possible to reduce CO2 emissions.
For Australia this is even more difficult. Our economy is built on low cost coal based energy. Coal is also one of our most important exports. Even if we were to restructure our electricity industry so that it became fundamentally nuclear based (forget the fairies at the bottom of the garden calling for solar) we would still be twice the 4 tonnes per capita level.
And in moving to that position the corollary must be a vast jump in prices. There is no other way of ensuring the constricted use of the energy. Already in Australia with what to the environmental lobby is seen as totally inadequate measures at mitigation, prices of electricity are rising. Anticipating the measures foreshadowed the wholesale price of electricity for delivery in the first half of 2011 in Victoria and NSW is 50 per cent above present levels. And we have seen nothing yet.
Garnaut is surely correct in those of his recommendations that council gradualism and further study. He is also correct that the Kyoto agreement that all signatories including Australia have found it impossible to meet without cheating is only the start. But achieving the goal, even with the loathed nuclear future, is Mission Impossible unless some totally unexpected technical breakthrough comes along.
Alan Moran
Melbourne
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