Developed countries duck warming responsibility

Beijing Normal University’s John Moore, Xuefeng Cui and their collegues assessed the relative impact on future warming if developed and developing countries follow the pledges to cut CO2 emissions they made at the UN climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, shown here. Credit: UNclimatechange/Flickr

Disputes between leaders of rich and poor countries currently mean little comes from meetings where they’re meant to draw up plans to slow and stop climate change. But developed countries’ existing promises would achieve just 1/3 of any warming slowdown, even though we’re responsible for more than 2/3 of CO2 emissions before 2005. That’s according to a team of mainly Chinese researchers who have tried to settle these fights using “earth system” models, considering both natural and human factors. “Developed countries need to take more responsibility in climate mitigation by cutting more carbon emissions and helping developing countries to control carbon emission while maintaining economic development,” said Xuefeng Cui from Beijing Normal University (BNU).

At the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, leaders agreed to try and limit the global temperature rise to 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels. They also agreed that doing this needs deep, but fair, cuts in the amount of warming-causing greenhouse gases humans emit. But they still argue about how to share those cuts. That prompted Cui and his team to make an unusual effort to use science to show what is fair.  “The arguments in the IPCC process demand some fact-based reasoning rather than just the ‘blame game’,” team member John Moore told Simple Climate. “Our study is the first interdisciplinary study by climate, social, economic, and ecological scientists and policy makers to look at the historical responsibilities and effect of future mitigation by applying state-of-art earth system models,” Xuefeng added.

Getting such a broad view meant that the team had to develop entirely new methods for their research, published online in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on Monday. “Most scientists are interested in the real impacts rather than assigning responsibilities,” Moore said. “These are more abstract philosophical and moral points than they tend to consider.” It took a 37-strong team of scientists to develop the approach, and one of the two earth systems models, they used. Whole earth system models are needed to understand the effects plants, animals, land and oceans have on climate.

Society must be 50 times more responsive to meet leaders’ climate promises

Even with the deployment of giant wind farms like this, society’s adoption of renewable energy in response to rising temperatures is too slow to prevent a 6°C temperature rise, according to Andrew Jarvis and colleagues. Credit: Land Rover Our Planet/Flickr

Based on society’s response to a warming world, we are not building clean power plants fast enough to prevent a 6°C temperature rise compared to pre-industrial levels. According to Andrew Jarvis and colleagues from Lancaster University, UK, current efforts to cut climate-changing CO2 emissions in response to warming aren’t enough to hit the temperature control targets our governments have agreed. Even slightly stronger responses from society to our warming world could be powerful in lowering their prediction – but delaying action means much greater effort will be needed.

We have all probably experienced some strange and perhaps even extreme weather in recent years – some of which has been shown to be down to climate change. But how strong an effect – or feedback – does knowing this have on the CO2 our society emits? That’s the question that Andrew’s team looked at in their paper, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change last Sunday.

To do this, they considered worldwide energy use, CO2 emissions and average temperature. Energy usage and emissions have grown at a steadily increasing rate as temperatures have risen over the past 150 years. However, since 1990 the amount of extra electricity each year coming from renewable generation plants, rather than by burning gas or coal that emits CO2, has also grown. That can be thought of as our society responding to warming, even if it isn’t yet enough to slow it down.

“Presumably this is owing to a combination of increased public responsiveness to the risks of climate change during that period and of political action concerning climate change,” Andrew’s team wrote in their paper. “This climate-society feedback has been too weak and short-lived to have caused significant changes… suggesting that, so far, the risks and damages attributed to climate change cannot have been deemed significant enough by society.”

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.

Beefing down farming could cut carbon

University of Exeter’s Tom Powell. Credit: University of Exeter

If people like me in the developed world eat less steak, it could free up room for plants to reduce CO2 levels in the air driving climate change. That’s one forecast that has come from Tom Powell and Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, who have studied how much space we’ll need for food in the future. “The impact on the environment of trying to produce the food demanded by the world’s population in the future could be disastrous, unless we make the production system much more efficient,” Tom told Simple Climate. “By far the easiest way to do this would be to cut meat eating, especially beef. Meat is likely to get more expensive as the resources needed to produce it become limited, and its environmental impact grows. Small changes to our diets and the ways we produce food have the potential to make what is currently a very environmentally damaging system a much more positive one.”

When we’re buying food, its climate impact may not be immediately obvious. But plants use the sun’s energy to take CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow, storing that energy and CO2 in their bodies for a comparatively short time. “We can’t escape the links between our energy use, whether it’s for diet, industry or transport, and the carbon cycle,” Tom underlined. “Unfortunately, the carbon cycle also controls a sort of global thermostat, with the amount in the atmosphere as CO2 or methane influencing the climate.”

Tim and Tom noted that as the number of us on the planet grows, and we get wealthier, we are demanding more energy, both as food and fuel. “This is having damaging effects on ecosystems, and even on the world’s climate as the population grows toward 9.5 billion people all aspiring to a western lifestyle,” Tom underlined. As people get richer they also eat more meat – but meat production is hugely inefficient. Only about three or four parts in 100 of the feed energy livestock eat becomes food, with the rest lost as manure, heat, methane and slaughter by-products. Today, meat consumption provides one-sixth of the energy people across the world get from their food on average. However, people in rich countries eat much more meat, getting almost one third of their energy from it.