A climate sceptic has said that it is now time to end the debate over whether global warming is real after the most definitive study into temperature data gathered by weather stations over the past half-century.
Professor Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been an outspoken critic of the science underpinning global warming, said that there is little doubt in his mind the phenomenon of rising land temperatures is real. Over the past two years, he has chaired a group of scientists who have carried out an exhaustive analysis of more than 1.6 billion temperature recordings collected from more than 39,000 weather stations at land sites around the world.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (Best) study was set up to test the findings of other studies and was part-funded by US billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
“When we began our study, we felt that sceptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some sceptics of that,” Professor Muller said.
The Best study has yet to be peer-reviewed but has been submitted to the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists homed in on weaknesses they saw in studies by the Climatic Research Unit and Hadley Centre in the UK, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US.
Professor Muller and his colleagues, including this year’s physics Nobel winner, Saul Perlmutter, had suspected the previous work had been tainted by the “urban heat island effect”, where increasing urbanisation around weather stations was causing the temperature increases recorded over the past half-century.
But a fine statistical analysis showed the urban heat effect could not explain a global temperature increase of about 1C since 1950. Professor Muller said the warming was not the result of data bias caused by selective elimination of some weather stations from the analysis, or the practice of “homogenisation” to take into account changes in weather station positions or instrumentation.
On the heels of French deportations of Roma that have hit international headlines in recent weeks, Green Party autumn conference has passed an emergency motion on the issue.
The motion expresses “profound concerns over the recent treatment of Roma people in France and Italy. In particular, the mass deportations of Roma people which appear to have been made purely on the grounds of ethnicity.” It also points out that similar actions by the governments of Sweden, Denmark and Germany.
There are an estimated 10-12 million Roma people in the EU, making them the EU’s largest ethnic minority.
A £240bn plan for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) projects in North Africa has moved a step closer to reality with the formation of a German led consortium of 12 companies, the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII), which aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 or earlier, via HVDC power lines across the desert and under the Mediterranean. Led by re-insurer Munich Re, it includes Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank. Munich Re says that extreme weather events related to climate change have the potential to be uninsurable against within a few decades: ‘To keep our business model alive in 30 or 40 years we have to ensure things are still insurable’. It now believes the DII can start to deliver solar power to Europe as early as 2015.
According to the Guardian (1/11/09) ‘Desertec has gained broad support across Europe, with the newly elected German coalition government of Angela Merkel hoping the project could offset its dependence on Russian gas supplies. North African governments are said to be keen, too, to further exploit their natural resources.
Algeria and Libya are already big oil and gas suppliers to Europe.’ It noted that only some of the output would be exported, the rest would be used locally, but ‘North Africa has a small population relative to the size of its deserts. For similar reasons Australia is putting together its own Desertec initiative.’ And it quoted Dan Lewis, head of a new thinktank, the Economic Policy Centre: ‘This is just the sort of long-term, big-difference, energy security gain project that our UK short-term targets and policy framework can’t deliver.
However, as we discussed in Renew 182, not everyone is keen on mega projects like this, particular since they look like being dominated by large consortium whose aim may be to keep electricity generation large scale and centralised, so they can retain market control. Fair trading will be vital to avoid exploitation and neo-colonial land grabs.
The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December’s UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits.
Two analyses of the Copenhagen Accord and its pledges, by Dr Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and by the Climate Action Tracker website, suggest that, with the cuts that are currently promised under Copenhagen, the world will still warm by 3.5C by 2100. Such a rise would be likely to have disastrous effects on agricultural production, water availability, natural ecosystems and sea-level rise across the world, producing tens of millions of refugees.
A month ago, in its annual State of the Climate report, published in conjunction with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed 10 separate indicators of a warming planet, seven of them rising – ranging from air temperature over land and humidity to sea level – and three of them declining: Arctic sea-ice, glaciers, and spring snow cover. “The scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable,” NOAA said.
Cancun, or “COP 16” as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world’s defences against dangerously rising temperatures – the “gigatonne gap”.
A gigatonne is a billion tonnes of carbon, and the emissions cuts currently promised by the nations of the world in the Copenhagen Accord – the last-minute agreement patched together by leaders after the conference in the Danish capital all but collapsed – will mean that, by 2020, when global emissions should be on a firmly downward trend, they will be several gigatonnes too high to limit the warming to C above the pre-industrial level. This is widely considered the most that human society can stand without serious consequences.
Yet the international community does not seem any closer to consensus on the need to make further reductions in carbon and at Cancun, which takes place from 29 November to 10 December, it is at best side issues on which any progress will be made.
Today, the Coalition’s Climate Change Secretary, the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, will travel to Berlin to discuss strengthening the EU climate target in advance of the Cancun meeting from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, with his German and French counterparts, Norbert Röttgen and Jean-Louis Borloo.
Mr Huhne told The Independent: “There’s hard work ahead to maintain and build on the level of commitment embodied in the Copenhagen Accord and to rebuild the credibility of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process.
He added: “It’s the UK’s view – and one shared by my French and German counterparts – that the EU should raise its ambition and that the economic case for doing so stacks up.
It is hard to exaggerate the dire effect which the failure at Copenhagen has had both on the climate change negotiating process itself, and on the belief of those involved that an effective climate deal might be possible.
A year ago, many environmentalists, scientists and politicians genuinely thought that the meeting in Denmark might produce a binding agreement to cut global CO2 by the 25-40 per cent, by 2020, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated is necessary to keep the warming to below C.
Today that optimism has vanished. The Danish meeting foundered on the disagreement between the developed countries and the developing nations over who should do how much, and when, in cutting emissions; the major point of disagreement was the Kyoto Protocol, the current treaty, which makes developed countries do a lot, and developing nations not very much.
The Kyoto treaty runs out at the end of 2012 and the developing nations, led by China and India, wanted it renewed, while developed countries, including Britain and the rest of the EU, want a completely new treaty to share out the carbon-cutting burden.
At Copenhagen last December, world leaders cobbled together an agreement which ended up devoid of any binding carbon emissions targets (but did recognise the need to stay under C for the first time). Instead of the legally-binding treaty which had been hoped for, nations were invited to “register” voluntary targets, saying by how much they thought they could cut their CO2 by 2020.
Britain is part of the EU target of a 20 per cent cut, on a 1990 baseline, which may be raised before Cancun to 30 per cent. (Britain’s own domestic target is one of the highest, to cut CO2 by 34 per cent by 2020.) Other targets include 25 per cent for Japan, Australia by 5 to 25 per cent and the US by 17 per cent on a 2005 baseline – although the legislation to achieve it is firmly stalled in the Senate. Among the developing nations, China has promised to reduce the energy intensity of its economy by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020.
Various analyses of all these pledges suggest they amount to cuts of the global CO2 total of between 11 and 19 per cent by 2020, instead of the 25 to 40 per cent which the IPCC says is needed. This can also be expressed in real amounts of CO2, of which the world is currently emitting annually about 45 gigatonnes – 45 billion tonnes of carbon.
If the world continues with these levels of emissions it is thought this will increase to between 51 and 55 gigatonnes by 2020. Lord Stern of Brentford, author of a landmark report on the economics of climate change, has calculated that if, instead, global CO2 could be cut back to 44 gigatonnes by 2020, the world would be on a credible path to stay below a rise of C. Yet analysis suggests the Copenhagen Accord pledges will leave the figure at 48-49 billion tonnes – the gigatonne gap which Cancun is not going to close.
What the conference may do is agree the architecture for the new major climate funds to help developing countries which were agreed in Denmark – a “fast-start” fund of $30bn (£19.4bn) per year in new money for the years 2010-12, and a fund of $100bn annually to be set up by 2020.