Rich versus poor obstructs climate progress

One of the more bizarre scenes at Rio+20 was reigning 2011 Miss Universe Leila Lopes and Executive Board Member of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Dr. Dennis Garrity meeting to call for a goal to halt land degradation and to scale up successful community projects to combat desertification. Credit: UNCCD

Every morning the news is full of fighting – between individuals and groups, within and between countries. When people seem to disagree over nearly everything, it’s strange to expect our leaders to come together for the good of us all, and the whole planet. But that’s exactly what they tried to do last month in Brazil at the Rio+20 UN conference on sustainable development that I recently covered hopefully here on Simple Climate. Will this meeting be remembered as fondly in 20 years’ time as the original “Earth Summit” meeting in Rio de Janeiro 20 years ago that its name refers to? If most reactions to the new agreement reached by political leaders are anything to go by, then no. While rich and poor countries’ competing priorities are largely responsible for the apparently weak wording, some hope of removing key stumbling blocks did emerge from the 45,000-person meeting.

On 22 June, world leaders signed a 49-page document called The Future We Want. As well as renewing the original Earth Summit deal, it charts a road to bringing through sustainable development goals when the UN Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. It encourages a greener world economy, reducing consumption and improving energy systems. It calls for an international system to conserve high seas biodiversity, action to stop land being degraded and becoming desert, and support for small island developing countries. But the deal’s language lacks power, typically using “should” rather than “must”. And overall there was little about protecting the environment, and much about supporting fair economic growth – a fact that has been strongly attacked by some.

If these goals weren’t already seen as weak in the developed world, that outlook was clinched by how they were formed. The document had been agreed by civil servants even before world leaders began arriving in Rio, meaning that they instead spent their time announcing national initiatives. But the funding for these seems tiny, when the amount needed to meet the goals is estimated to be thousands of billions of dollars. The Sustainable Energy For All initiative – one of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s highlights of the meeting – saw Brazil commit $4.3 billion to promote universal energy access for its citizens. The US promised $2 billion in grants and loans to support public-private energy partnerships, while businesses and investors committed more than $50 billion to the same scheme. Japan pledged $3 billion in international aid for the green economy – even though the final treaty is vague on what the green economy actually is.

Economy-CO2 link reveals GDP weakness

The key US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) site where CO2 concentrations in the air are monitored, at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Unlike CO2 emissions, these CO2 concentrations can be readily measured directly, so Edward Ionides, José Tapia Granados, and Óscar Carpintero used them to study their link with global GDP. Credit NOAA

Researchers have confirmed a relationship that is making climate change tough to fight: economic growth and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been tightly linked for the past 50 years. That’s what the University of Michigan‘s Edward Ionides and co-workers found by looking at levels of the greenhouse gas and gross domestic product (GDP), an important measure of countries’ financial performance, at a worldwide level. “GDP growth is like a proxy for CO2 concentration growth,” Edward told Simple Climate. “Under business-as-usual conditions, these two quantities are measuring essentially the same thing. This highlights a problem with using GDP as a measure of progress.”

Until now, much research on the link between CO2 and economic growth has looked at figures for each country. Some think using each country’s CO2 emissions separately “should be more informative”, Edward said. But there are problems with recording emissions accurately, plus goods or services used in one country often result in CO2 emissions in another. So, with Michigan colleague José Tapia Granados, and Óscar Carpintero from the University of Valladolid, Spain, Ionides went to the worldwide level for “a new and simpler perspective”.

As well as the total of all countries’ GDP, they used precisely measured atmospheric CO2 levels, rather than the more uncertain emission figures. “In addition, concentration of CO2, rather than the level of emissions, is the variable directly determining the global climate,” Óscar said. “Change in the atmospheric concentration is the result of emissions – mainly from burning fossil fuels, since natural emissions from volcanoes are estimated as a tiny fraction of man-made emissions – minus removals by natural sinks.”

Atmospheric CO2 (monthly average) as measured in air samples collected at Mauna Loa, Hawaii from Feburary 1958 to Februrary 2012. Units are parts per million by volume. Estimated preindustrial concentrations, at levels between 200 and 300 ppm, would be far out of the graph. The graph is often known as the Keeling curve. Credit: University of Michigan

Warming world could send corn price popping

The USA's number one crop - corn - could see its prime growing region shift to the Canadian border or its price volatility increase sharply within 30 years, with Noah Diffenbaugh, Tom Hertel and their colleagues pointing to climate change as the cause. Credit: Doug Wilson, Agricultural Research Service, USDA

Climate change is set to cause big swings in the price of corn grown in the US from year to year, researchers have said this week. That’s largely because temperatures above 29°C during certain points in the corn growing season reduce the amount produced, said economist Tom Hertel from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. But it will also be affected by how corn growers react and what the government does, he and his co-workers have found. “Corn prices have been fairly volatile in the last couple of decades,” Tom told Simple Climate. “That is nothing compared to what we would see under future climate, assuming that nothing else changed.”

In 2009, scientists showed that crops like corn were very sensitive to extreme heat, and that in a warmer world today’s plants would suffer. However, those studies didn’t show how smoothly or otherwise heat would change prices and output, or yield, of crops. Governments and farmers might like to know this to help their planning, but predicting warming’s impact on corn requires a very detailed picture of what future temperature might be like. “It’s not whether the temperature on average in a month or year was high, it’s whether you have a few hot days and whether those come at a time when they do significant damage,” Tom said. “If you talk to farmers they’ll certainly tell you, those really hot days coming at critical times can be very damaging.”

Did climate change make it harder to get your Christmas presents?

A US SH-60F Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron (HS) 14, flies around the Bangkok area with members of the humanitarian assessment survey team and the Royal Thai Armed Forces to assess the damage caused by flooding. Credit: Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer Villalovos/DVIDS

The devastation brought by floods sweeping through Thailand this year is hard for me to visualise, as a man sat in a room in Britain. It’s mind-bogglingly massive, according to the Associated Press:

More than a fifth of the country’s 64 million people have been affected by the flooding, which began in late July, and more than 600 have died. Fifteen provinces remain flooded. The World Bank estimates the damage at $45 billion and recovery and reconstruction needs at $25 billion.

But thanks to the interconnected world we live in, some comparatively trivial but more directly obvious effects of the Thai flood are showing themselves to the rest of us. Thailand produces around 40 per cent of all hard drives made. Those companies have had to stop production, meaning that less PCs will be sold in the last three months of 2012, with that shortage lasting into early 2012, and possibly 2013. Devices that record television straight onto hard drives are also affected, with price rises likely in 2012.

Other popular electronic devices, like smartphones and tablet computers like the iPad, don’t use hard drives, using solid-state flash memory instead. You might think that they wouldn’t be affected, therefore, but Thailand doesn’t only make hard drives. It also produces many other types of electronic component, and high-tech facilities that assemble and test these components have been halted by the flooding. Though the problems are not as severe as they are for PCs, there have been reports of short supplies of technological Christmas gifts like Sony’s e-book reader and Canon cameras. The internet is another area to watch, as a key producer of lasers and other pieces of the equipment that fibre-optic telecoms rely on was also flooded.

Controls needed to avoid waste in $100B climate fund

South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane opening a consultation meeting preparing for next week's climate summit in Durban. Credit: Jacoline Prinsloo/COP17

It’s a massive, ambitious, program with a pledged $100 billion budget per year – seven times that of the Apollo program that sent man to the moon – but you’ve probably never heard of it. The program was one result of last November’s worldwide climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, established so developed nations can help developing countries respond to climate change. With so much money potentially at stake Simon Donner, a geographer at the University of British Columbia (UBC) wants to make sure it’s used effectively.

“Naturally, governments want the money to be spent wisely,” Donner told Simple Climate. “The problem is that the standard mechanisms by which the spending decisions are made and evaluated sometimes do a poor job of addressing waste and misappropriation.” And even though the fund won’t start running until 2020, action to put the right mechanisms in place should begin with next week’s international climate talks in Durban, South Africa. “The next few years are critical,” he asserted.

Donner has worked on climate change adaptation in the Pacific Islands, and sought to bring that together with other lessons about international aid that can be applied to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) at the centre of the $100 billion program. He’s also a fellow at UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues where two of his colleagues, Hisham Zerriffi and Milind Kandlikar, had similarly helped developing world responses to a changing climate. Together they called upon this experience, as well as previous reviews of the successes and failures of these kinds of programs, to gather advice relevant to theGCF. After two rounds of reviewing by fellow scientists, three main pieces of specific advice were published in top research journal Science last week.

Fossil fuel exporting countries should adopt green taxes

The danger that someone else might impose taxes that reduce fossil fuel consumption before fuel-exporting countries should motivate them to get there first. That’s according to Steven Davis from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, and his colleagues, who have looked at the links between international trade and CO2 emissions. Their “Supply Chain of CO2 Emissions” shows where goods, services and the fossil fuels the world burned, generating power and emitting CO2, came from and went to in 2004. They found that 10.2 billion tons of CO2, over one-third of global emissions, came from fossil fuels traded internationally. 6.4 billion tons of CO2 were used to make traded goods. “The sheer magnitude of emissions that are traded internationally show an inherent flaw of trying to design an effective national program to manage carbon,” Davis told Simple Climate.

Last year, Davis and his Carnegie institution colleague Ken Caldeira showed that in 2004 on average each US citizen consumed goods imported from other countries whose production emitted 2.5 tons of CO2. For Europeans, the figure sometimes exceeded four tons per person. This CO2 benefits people in the country the goods are consumed in, but is not counted as being emitted there. Instead only CO2 directly produced in a country is considered in international negotiations seeking to fight climate change by limiting emissions.

But as CO2 emissions are also closely tied to economic growth, developing countries – and China in particular – are fighting hard to retain the right to emit and develop themselves further. Developing/developed world conflict is a regularly feature of climate negotiations, including in the Copenhagen summit in 2009 that failed to produce a binding treaty to control CO2 emissions. Yet, many countries did make their own pledges to cut CO2 emissions. One potential tool they can use to reduce CO2 emissions is through tax, for example China’s resource tax, and Australia’s upcoming tax on its biggest emitters.

Food links climate change and social unrest

The Hanging, by Jacques Callot, depicts a scene from the 30 Years War that occurred in Europe between 1618 and 1648, during which time the continent was going through a cold period. Usually thought of as being triggered by disputes between Protestant and Catholic Christians, David Zhang and his colleagues now point to the climate as an ultimate cause for upheaval during this period.

People’s struggle to feed themselves has led to economic chaos and war through history, and the most vicious struggles can be traced directly back to climate change. That’s the conclusion of an ambitious attempt to work out exactly how climate and human social crises are linked by David Zhang from the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues. “Climate change has been scientifically proven to be the ultimate cause of significant human crises in pre-industrial Europe and the Northern Hemisphere,” Zhang stated boldly on Tuesday.

Many studies have shown that civilizations have collapsed in times of climate change, typically in periods when the world cooled. Zhang has been especially active in this area. “Over the last 7 years I have published over 20 papers on climate change and social responses,” he told Simple Climate. But, he noted, other researchers’ work had been criticised for a lack of evidence that definitively showed that climate causes upheaval in human societies. Zhang’s response, in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on Monday, calls on great volumes of data to show that there are, in fact, strong statistical links.

The researchers from Hong Kong and China brought together measurements on 16 different climate, agricultural, and social factors between 1500 and 1800 AD. “The great challenge is collecting and analysing this huge amount of data,” Zhang said. “The datasets come from different disciplines, and we have read over a thousand pieces of literature. For the same reason, we invited other economists, geographers and anthropologists to join us in the research to make sure there were no mistakes.”

Rich countries speed up emissions exports

An increasing share of global emissions comes from the production of internationally traded goods and services. Credit: Crestock/CICERO

Any success that developed countries may seem to be having in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions is being undermined by goods that they import from developing countries. That’s according to a team of scientists who’ve conducted the first study into the link between international trade and emissions over an extended time period. Glen Peters from the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, in Oslo, Norway, explained that some countries appear to have stabilised their emissions. However, that’s only if you look exclusively at greenhouse gases produced within their borders. “We find that the emissions have generally increased over time if we consider the emissions from the products consumed in a country,” he said. “It is important for countries to acknowledge the issue and regularly estimate these emissions so that we can track progress.”

Together with scientists based in Germany and the US, Peters tracked the greenhouse gas emissions arising when one country makes a product that is consumed in another. “For example, an emission occurs in China to produce a car which is purchased and used in Europe,” Peters said. They wanted to know whether this might be affecting countries that had cut greenhouse gas production under the Kyoto Protocol. That treaty separated more developed nations from less developed with 37 developed countries committed to overall emissions cuts, and the remainder left unregulated. “If countries have reduced emissions while at the same time increasing emission transfers from countries without emissions commitments, there may be a sense that we are meeting our climate objectives, when in fact we are not,” Peters said.

Driving up temperatures

While flying has a greater warming impact in the short term, it's actually less warming than driving in the long term - although the warming impact at all timescales must be considered. Credit: iStock

Driving alone in a car increases global temperatures in the long run more than making the same long-distance journey by air, Austrian and Norwegian researchers said this week. “Car travel emits more CO2 than air travel per passenger mile,” explained Jens Borken-Kleefeld of Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. As CO2 is a very stable chemical, remaining in the atmosphere longer than other gases, cars have a greater long-term impact on climate change. However, aeroplanes’ impact is greater in the short term. “As planes fly at high altitudes, their impact on ozone and clouds is disproportionately high, though short lived,” Borken-Kleefeld said. Writing in the August issue of Environmental Science and Technology, his team point out that all forms of transport are being used all the time. It’s important, therefore, to tackle air pollutants leading to both short-term and long-term warming.

Lots of shoes make for big carbon feet

China is by far the largest “exporter” of carbon dioxide emissions, as seen in this map of the net flow of emissions embodied in trade among the major exporting and importing countries. Arrows indicate direction and magnitude of flow; numbers are megatons (millions of tons). Credit: Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science

Goods bought in the richest parts of the world effectively export CO₂ emissions to poorer countries, a factor overlooked by governments’ climate change strategies. That’s the message coming from research in the news this month performed by two separate groups of researchers, one in the US and one in Norway. The Norway-based team of Edgar Hertwich and colleague Glen Peters in particular note that the carbon footprint continues to grow steadily in parallel with how much consumers spend. “There is no flattening out, no indication that the carbon footprint stabilizes at some point,” they write. Consequently, as nations continue to strive to raise their wealth, we might expect their carbon footprint to grow along with it. “This is, I’m afraid, bad news,” Peters and Hertwich say. “We cannot expect that emissions are reduced as a part of normal development.”

Hertwich and Peters last week won an award for the “Best Policy Paper” for 2009 from the journal Environmental Science and Technology that published their work. They looked at all countries’ carbon footprint in 2001, going further than just looking at CO₂ produced within their borders to also assess the impact of international trade for the first time. Their results have been made into a website, called “Carbon Footprint of Nations”, which shows how emissions vary with consumption. Greenhouse gas emissions rise about 70% with each doubling of consumer spending, with more emissions coming from transport and consumer goods and less from food.

The “Carbon Footprint of Nations” website created by Edgar Hertwich and Glen Peters shows international emissions in 2001.

On March 8 Ken Caldeira and Steven Davis at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, also published a similar analysis of carbon footprints in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study finds that, in 2004, 23% of global CO₂ emissions, or 6.2 billion tons, were used to produce goods traded internationally. Per person, about 2.5 tons of CO₂ are consumed in the U.S. but produced somewhere else. For Europeans, the figure can exceed four tons per person. Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China, where 22.5% of  the CO₂ produced was for goods to be exported. “There is little evidence that carbon-intensive industries are being sited in developing countries in direct response to climate policy,” Caldeira and Davis write. “However, industrial expansion occurring in those countries may unintentionally undermine ongoing efforts to regulate emissions.”

“Where CO₂ emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system,” Davis says. “Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.”

Hertwich and Peters suggest that improving production efficiency and using more renewable energy when manufacturing goods would also be useful. Nevertheless, they still seem uncertain that this will achieve enough. “If we really want to reduce climate change, it seems like the consumption of goods needs to be limited,” they write. This would not mean a complete halt, however, as the scientists note that consumption by rich households in both developing and industrialised nations is needed.