Global Warming Again Agtain Again
Post
09/01/07, Editorial, His environmental stand, (Source).
10/01/07, Philip Thornton, How richest fuel global warming - but poorest suffer most from it, (Source).
10/01/07, Michael McCarthy & Stephen Castle, EU: Climate change will transform the face of the continent, (Source).
09/01/07, Editorial, His environmental stand, (Back).
Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs to stop criticizing the former Liberal government's record on global warming and develop a strong, credible plan of his own. Because of the Liberals, he said on the weekend, Canada won't come anywhere close to its international commitments to cut greenhouse gases by 2012. The Liberal record was shoddy, but it's old news. Mr. Harper's job is to lead, not criticize.
The problem is that he lacks all conviction on the need to do something about global warming. (An early clue: In an underwhelming plan last fall, his government set a serious target to reduce greenhouse gases -- by 2050.) It might be considered refreshing to have a prime minister who does not pretend to convictions he does not have, except that the blind spot this Prime Minister has on global warming is gaping, and worrisome.
"I think the preponderance of the evidence on [climate change] is clear, that it's a real long-term challenge, but what I've said is it can't be fixed overnight. This country is headed to be 50 per cent above its Kyoto target in 2012," he said on CTV's Question Period. "We can't tell the Canadian population to heat its homes one-third less of the time. So we've got a major challenge and we're going to get on with it."
The grudging tone of those remarks, with its flippant reference to home heating (didn't Mr. Harper's government slash a retrofit subsidy for consumers?), is not terribly different from that of Rona Ambrose, who as environment minister spent her time at a climate-change conference in Kenya taking political potshots at the Liberals. Ms. Ambrose no longer holds that job, but the attitude she brought with her starts at the top. Mr. Harper's remarks are also faintly reminiscent of former Progressive Conservative leader Kim Campbell, who met with political disaster in the 1993 election campaign after her seemingly offhand prediction that Canada would have double-digit unemployment rates for another three or four years. What was missing in Mr. Harper's remarks, as in Ms. Campbell's, was a sense of urgency.
The best that can be said is that Mr. Harper has woken up to the politics of the issue. Global warming ranks high among voter concerns, and not only in Quebec, where Mr. Harper is vulnerable. Mr. Harper has replaced Ms. Ambrose with John Baird, a blank slate on the environment.
But he hasn't woken up to the problem. It's not that Kyoto is a terribly flawed agreement (though it is) or that Canada can't meet its 1997 Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels (it can't). Nor is it that under the Liberals, who made that far-fetched and irresponsible promise, emissions rose to 34.6 per cent over 1990 levels by 2004. Those are yesterday's problems. Today's problem is that, on the evidence so far, when Mr. Harper speaks about global warming, he does not have his heart in it.
10/01/07, Philip Thornton, How richest fuel global warming - but poorest suffer most from it, (Back).
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have caused as much global warning as the typical Kenyan will over the whole of this year, according to a report.
The findings highlight the glaring imbalance between the rich countries that produce most of the pollution and the poor countries that suffer the consequences in the forms of drought, floods, starvation and disease.
The World Development Movement (WDM), a poverty campaign group, has drawn up a "climate calendar" showing the dates when the UK will have emitted as much CO2 gas as other countries will in a year.
Unsurprisingly, the poorest counties such as Chad, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo produce virtually no carbon emissions. Even populous countries such as India will be overtaken in its emissions by the UK in a month's time. In fact, 164 countries in the world have a smaller carbon footprint than the UK, while just 20, mainly including the major oil producers as well as the US, have a larger one.
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have produced 0.26 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
"The poorest countries in the world, with 738 million people, make no contribution to climate change, but it is those same people who face the worst consequences," Benedict Southworth, WDM's director, said. " One hundred and sixty thousand people are already dying every year due to climate change- related diseases and billions will face drought, floods, starvation and disease."
WDM has calculated the figures by taking the annual CO2 emission for each country, dividing by the number of people and then working out a daily contribution.
Thus while an Afghan on average will produce an annual equivalent of 0.02 tonnes of CO2, a Briton will produce 9.62 tonnes and the most prolific polluter - someone from the United Arab Emirates - will emit about 56 tonnes.
WDM acknowledged that its figures were based on averages that masked differences between life in rural and urban areas, but said that the figures still exposed the "injustice" of global warming.
"It is the richest people in the world who have produced and who are still producing most of the greenhouse gases causing climate change," Mr Southworth said.
The report said 7,800 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Rwandans died every year from diseases that were related to climate change. It warned that a 2C rise in temperature could lead to as many as 60 million more people being exposed to malaria in Africa.
The potential for massive ecological and human suffering as a result of climate change was a key finding in the report by Sir Nicholas Stern, although it was overshadowed by the political debate over the need for higher taxes or the imposition of rationing.
The Stern report found that many "vulnerable" regions embracing millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa were at risk from harvest failures, droughts and malaria.
It warned that these phenomena would affect the poorest people most of all and fuel conflicts and raise the number of child deaths as populations moved to avoid the worst-hit areas.
WDM said that although the Government had used the Stern report to show Britain's commitment to fighting climate change, emissions had risen 5 per cent under Labour.
It called on the Government to include legally binding annual targets to cut emissions in its Climate Change Bill.
Carbon comparison:
The average British citizen produces 26kg of CO2 in a day. This breaks down as follows:
* 7.4 electricity
* 1.6 fuel production
* 3.8 manufacturing and construction
* 7.4 transport, of which: (5.2 road transport, 1.7 air travel, 0.1 railways and 0.4 shipping)
* 1.0 office buildings
* 3.8 residential heating
* 1.0 Other industrial processes, agriculture, military travel, other
The average Kenyan citizen produces 0.7kg of CO2 in a day. This breaks down as follows:
* 0.08 electricity
* 0.08 fuel production
* 0.16 manufacturing and construction
* 0.31 transport
* 0.07 other
10/01/07, Michael McCarthy & Stephen Castle, EU: Climate change will transform the face of the continent, (Back).
Europe, the richest and most fertile continent and the model for the modern world, will be devastated by climate change, the European Union predicts today.
The ecosystems that have underpinned all European societies from Ancient Greece and Rome to present-day Britain and France, and which helped European civilisation gain global pre-eminence, will be disabled by remorselessly rising temperatures, EU scientists forecast in a remarkable report which is as ominous as it is detailed.
Much of the continent's age-old fertility, which gave the world the vine and the olive and now produces mountains of grain and dairy products, will not survive the climate change forecast for the coming century, the scientists say, and its wildlife will be devastated.
Europe's modern lifestyles, from summer package tours to winter skiing trips, will go the same way, they say, as the Mediterranean becomes too hot for holidays and snow and ice disappear from mountain ranges such as the Alps - with enormous economic consequences. The social consequences will also be felt as heat-related deaths rise and extreme weather events, such as storms and floods, become more violent.
The report, stark and uncompromising, marks a step change in Europe's own role in pushing for international action to combat climate change, as it will be used in a bid to commit the EU to ambitious new targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
The European Commission wants to hold back the rise in global temperatures to 2C above the pre-industrial level (at present, the level is 0.6C). To do that, it wants member states to commit to cutting back emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, to 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as long as other developed countries agree to do the same.
Failing that, the EU would observe a unilateral target of a 20 per cent cut.
The Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, gave US President George Bush a preview of the new policy during a visit to the White House this week.
The force of today's report lies in its setting out of the scale of the continent-wide threat to Europe's "ecosystem services".
That is a relatively new but powerful concept, which recognises essential elements of civilised life - such as food, water, wood and fuel - which may generally be taken for granted, are all ultimately dependent on the proper functioning of ecosystems in the natural world. Historians have recognised that Europe was particularly lucky in this respect from the start, compared to Africa or pre-Columbian America - and this was a major reason for Europe's rise to global pre-eminence.
"Climate change will alter the supply of European ecosystem services over the next century," the report says. "While it will result in enhancement of some ecosystem services, a large portion will be adversely impacted because of drought, reduced soil fertility, fire, and other climate change-driven factors.
"Europe can expect a decline in arable land, a decline in Mediterranean forest areas, a decline in the terrestrial carbon sink and soil fertility, and an increase in the number of basins with water scarcity. It will increase the loss of biodiversity."
The report predicts there will be some European "winners" from climate change, at least initially. In the north of the continent, agricultural yields will increase with a lengthened growing season and a longer frost-free period. Tourism may become more popular on the beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic as the Mediterranean becomes too hot, and deaths and diseases related to winter cold will fall.
But the negative effects will far outweigh the advantages. Take tourism. The report says "the zone with excellent weather conditions, currently located around the Mediterranean (in particular for beach tourism) will shift towards the north". And it spells out the consequences.
"The annual migration of northern Europeans to the countries of the Mediterranean in search of the traditional summer 'sun, sand and sea' holiday is the single largest flow of tourists across the globe, accounting for one-sixth of all tourist trips in 2000. This large group of tourists, totalling about 100 million per annum, spends an estimated €100bn (£67bn) per year. Any climate-induced change in these flows of tourists and money would have very large implications for the destinations involved."
While they are losing their tourists, the countries of the Med may also be losing their agriculture. Crop yields may drop sharply as drought conditions, exacerbated by more frequent forest fires, make farming ever more difficult. And that is not the only threat to Europe's food supplies. Some stocks of coldwater fish in areas such as the North Sea will move northwards as the water warms.
There are many more direct threats, the report says. The cost of taking action to cope with sea-level rise will run into billions of euros. Furthermore, "for the coming decades, it is predicted the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events will increase, and floods will likely be more frequent and severe in many areas across Europe."
The number of people affected by severe flooding in the Upper Danube area is projected to increase by 242,000 in a more extreme 3C temperature rise scenario, and by 135,000 in the case of a 2.2C rise. The total cost of damage would rise from €47.5bn to €66bn in the event of a 3C increase.
Although fewer people would die of cold in the north, that would be more than offset by increased mortality in the south. Under the more extreme scenario of a 3C increase in 2071-2100 relative to 1961-1990, there would be 86,000 additional deaths.
(Back)
10/01/07, Philip Thornton, How richest fuel global warming - but poorest suffer most from it, (Source).
10/01/07, Michael McCarthy & Stephen Castle, EU: Climate change will transform the face of the continent, (Source).
09/01/07, Editorial, His environmental stand, (Back).
Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs to stop criticizing the former Liberal government's record on global warming and develop a strong, credible plan of his own. Because of the Liberals, he said on the weekend, Canada won't come anywhere close to its international commitments to cut greenhouse gases by 2012. The Liberal record was shoddy, but it's old news. Mr. Harper's job is to lead, not criticize.
The problem is that he lacks all conviction on the need to do something about global warming. (An early clue: In an underwhelming plan last fall, his government set a serious target to reduce greenhouse gases -- by 2050.) It might be considered refreshing to have a prime minister who does not pretend to convictions he does not have, except that the blind spot this Prime Minister has on global warming is gaping, and worrisome.
"I think the preponderance of the evidence on [climate change] is clear, that it's a real long-term challenge, but what I've said is it can't be fixed overnight. This country is headed to be 50 per cent above its Kyoto target in 2012," he said on CTV's Question Period. "We can't tell the Canadian population to heat its homes one-third less of the time. So we've got a major challenge and we're going to get on with it."
The grudging tone of those remarks, with its flippant reference to home heating (didn't Mr. Harper's government slash a retrofit subsidy for consumers?), is not terribly different from that of Rona Ambrose, who as environment minister spent her time at a climate-change conference in Kenya taking political potshots at the Liberals. Ms. Ambrose no longer holds that job, but the attitude she brought with her starts at the top. Mr. Harper's remarks are also faintly reminiscent of former Progressive Conservative leader Kim Campbell, who met with political disaster in the 1993 election campaign after her seemingly offhand prediction that Canada would have double-digit unemployment rates for another three or four years. What was missing in Mr. Harper's remarks, as in Ms. Campbell's, was a sense of urgency.
The best that can be said is that Mr. Harper has woken up to the politics of the issue. Global warming ranks high among voter concerns, and not only in Quebec, where Mr. Harper is vulnerable. Mr. Harper has replaced Ms. Ambrose with John Baird, a blank slate on the environment.
But he hasn't woken up to the problem. It's not that Kyoto is a terribly flawed agreement (though it is) or that Canada can't meet its 1997 Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 6 per cent below 1990 levels (it can't). Nor is it that under the Liberals, who made that far-fetched and irresponsible promise, emissions rose to 34.6 per cent over 1990 levels by 2004. Those are yesterday's problems. Today's problem is that, on the evidence so far, when Mr. Harper speaks about global warming, he does not have his heart in it.
10/01/07, Philip Thornton, How richest fuel global warming - but poorest suffer most from it, (Back).
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have caused as much global warning as the typical Kenyan will over the whole of this year, according to a report.
The findings highlight the glaring imbalance between the rich countries that produce most of the pollution and the poor countries that suffer the consequences in the forms of drought, floods, starvation and disease.
The World Development Movement (WDM), a poverty campaign group, has drawn up a "climate calendar" showing the dates when the UK will have emitted as much CO2 gas as other countries will in a year.
Unsurprisingly, the poorest counties such as Chad, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo produce virtually no carbon emissions. Even populous countries such as India will be overtaken in its emissions by the UK in a month's time. In fact, 164 countries in the world have a smaller carbon footprint than the UK, while just 20, mainly including the major oil producers as well as the US, have a larger one.
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have produced 0.26 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
"The poorest countries in the world, with 738 million people, make no contribution to climate change, but it is those same people who face the worst consequences," Benedict Southworth, WDM's director, said. " One hundred and sixty thousand people are already dying every year due to climate change- related diseases and billions will face drought, floods, starvation and disease."
WDM has calculated the figures by taking the annual CO2 emission for each country, dividing by the number of people and then working out a daily contribution.
Thus while an Afghan on average will produce an annual equivalent of 0.02 tonnes of CO2, a Briton will produce 9.62 tonnes and the most prolific polluter - someone from the United Arab Emirates - will emit about 56 tonnes.
WDM acknowledged that its figures were based on averages that masked differences between life in rural and urban areas, but said that the figures still exposed the "injustice" of global warming.
"It is the richest people in the world who have produced and who are still producing most of the greenhouse gases causing climate change," Mr Southworth said.
The report said 7,800 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Rwandans died every year from diseases that were related to climate change. It warned that a 2C rise in temperature could lead to as many as 60 million more people being exposed to malaria in Africa.
The potential for massive ecological and human suffering as a result of climate change was a key finding in the report by Sir Nicholas Stern, although it was overshadowed by the political debate over the need for higher taxes or the imposition of rationing.
The Stern report found that many "vulnerable" regions embracing millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa were at risk from harvest failures, droughts and malaria.
It warned that these phenomena would affect the poorest people most of all and fuel conflicts and raise the number of child deaths as populations moved to avoid the worst-hit areas.
WDM said that although the Government had used the Stern report to show Britain's commitment to fighting climate change, emissions had risen 5 per cent under Labour.
It called on the Government to include legally binding annual targets to cut emissions in its Climate Change Bill.
Carbon comparison:
The average British citizen produces 26kg of CO2 in a day. This breaks down as follows:
* 7.4 electricity
* 1.6 fuel production
* 3.8 manufacturing and construction
* 7.4 transport, of which: (5.2 road transport, 1.7 air travel, 0.1 railways and 0.4 shipping)
* 1.0 office buildings
* 3.8 residential heating
* 1.0 Other industrial processes, agriculture, military travel, other
The average Kenyan citizen produces 0.7kg of CO2 in a day. This breaks down as follows:
* 0.08 electricity
* 0.08 fuel production
* 0.16 manufacturing and construction
* 0.31 transport
* 0.07 other
10/01/07, Michael McCarthy & Stephen Castle, EU: Climate change will transform the face of the continent, (Back).
Europe, the richest and most fertile continent and the model for the modern world, will be devastated by climate change, the European Union predicts today.
The ecosystems that have underpinned all European societies from Ancient Greece and Rome to present-day Britain and France, and which helped European civilisation gain global pre-eminence, will be disabled by remorselessly rising temperatures, EU scientists forecast in a remarkable report which is as ominous as it is detailed.
Much of the continent's age-old fertility, which gave the world the vine and the olive and now produces mountains of grain and dairy products, will not survive the climate change forecast for the coming century, the scientists say, and its wildlife will be devastated.
Europe's modern lifestyles, from summer package tours to winter skiing trips, will go the same way, they say, as the Mediterranean becomes too hot for holidays and snow and ice disappear from mountain ranges such as the Alps - with enormous economic consequences. The social consequences will also be felt as heat-related deaths rise and extreme weather events, such as storms and floods, become more violent.
The report, stark and uncompromising, marks a step change in Europe's own role in pushing for international action to combat climate change, as it will be used in a bid to commit the EU to ambitious new targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
The European Commission wants to hold back the rise in global temperatures to 2C above the pre-industrial level (at present, the level is 0.6C). To do that, it wants member states to commit to cutting back emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, to 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as long as other developed countries agree to do the same.
Failing that, the EU would observe a unilateral target of a 20 per cent cut.
The Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, gave US President George Bush a preview of the new policy during a visit to the White House this week.
The force of today's report lies in its setting out of the scale of the continent-wide threat to Europe's "ecosystem services".
That is a relatively new but powerful concept, which recognises essential elements of civilised life - such as food, water, wood and fuel - which may generally be taken for granted, are all ultimately dependent on the proper functioning of ecosystems in the natural world. Historians have recognised that Europe was particularly lucky in this respect from the start, compared to Africa or pre-Columbian America - and this was a major reason for Europe's rise to global pre-eminence.
"Climate change will alter the supply of European ecosystem services over the next century," the report says. "While it will result in enhancement of some ecosystem services, a large portion will be adversely impacted because of drought, reduced soil fertility, fire, and other climate change-driven factors.
"Europe can expect a decline in arable land, a decline in Mediterranean forest areas, a decline in the terrestrial carbon sink and soil fertility, and an increase in the number of basins with water scarcity. It will increase the loss of biodiversity."
The report predicts there will be some European "winners" from climate change, at least initially. In the north of the continent, agricultural yields will increase with a lengthened growing season and a longer frost-free period. Tourism may become more popular on the beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic as the Mediterranean becomes too hot, and deaths and diseases related to winter cold will fall.
But the negative effects will far outweigh the advantages. Take tourism. The report says "the zone with excellent weather conditions, currently located around the Mediterranean (in particular for beach tourism) will shift towards the north". And it spells out the consequences.
"The annual migration of northern Europeans to the countries of the Mediterranean in search of the traditional summer 'sun, sand and sea' holiday is the single largest flow of tourists across the globe, accounting for one-sixth of all tourist trips in 2000. This large group of tourists, totalling about 100 million per annum, spends an estimated €100bn (£67bn) per year. Any climate-induced change in these flows of tourists and money would have very large implications for the destinations involved."
While they are losing their tourists, the countries of the Med may also be losing their agriculture. Crop yields may drop sharply as drought conditions, exacerbated by more frequent forest fires, make farming ever more difficult. And that is not the only threat to Europe's food supplies. Some stocks of coldwater fish in areas such as the North Sea will move northwards as the water warms.
There are many more direct threats, the report says. The cost of taking action to cope with sea-level rise will run into billions of euros. Furthermore, "for the coming decades, it is predicted the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events will increase, and floods will likely be more frequent and severe in many areas across Europe."
The number of people affected by severe flooding in the Upper Danube area is projected to increase by 242,000 in a more extreme 3C temperature rise scenario, and by 135,000 in the case of a 2.2C rise. The total cost of damage would rise from €47.5bn to €66bn in the event of a 3C increase.
Although fewer people would die of cold in the north, that would be more than offset by increased mortality in the south. Under the more extreme scenario of a 3C increase in 2071-2100 relative to 1961-1990, there would be 86,000 additional deaths.
(Back)
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