I want to flag four important major reports on the impacts from climate change.  Three of these came out in June, the third a few months back.  What all four do is underscore the urgency of our situation.

As you know, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out in 2007.  The Working Group 2 report, on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” was launched in Brussels on April 6.  Many of its conclusions were startling and unequivocal.  AR4, of course, was based on hundreds of scientific studies which derived from thousands of datasets from around the world and in many different disciplines.  An international scientific congress on climate change, “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions,” was convened this past March in Copenhagen.  I wrote then on the State of the Science and how it had come to see the AR4 as not sufficiently indicative of the problems we’re facing.

The Copenhagen Climate Congress issued a synthesis report on June 18^th.  Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a key member of the team that issued the synthesis report, said “…there is evidence pointing towards the very real possibility of triggering tipping points…” These include “…the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the abrupt change to the Asian Monsoon to a substantially drier state, or the loss of water storage capacity in the Himalayan glaciers” as well as “…signs of tipping points in connection with ocean acidification.”  What does this imply?  “This may cause creation of areas in the ocean with less oxygen which could put places in danger such as the Great Barrier Reef. To recover ecosystems like that would likely take hundreds of thousands, if not many millions of years, although true recovery is impossible because extinctions are irreversible.”

Another major report on climate change impacts came out in mid-June, this one on how the US is being and will be effected.  White House Sounds Alarm On Climate Change was the headline from CBS News.  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco was quoted.  “This report provides the concrete scientific information that says unequivocally that climate change is happening now and it’s happening in our own backyards and it affects the kind of things people care about.”  The “Washington Post” said here that the report “…found that a warmer world, with average U.S. temperatures increasing four to 11 degrees, would significantly alter natural ecosystems and urban life.”  It lists some of the findings such as heavier rainfall in the Northeast, higher temperatures bringing more insect pests, and that sea level rise of as much as three feet could inundate parts of South Florida.

Global Climate Change in the United States was issued by the US Climate Change Science Program, an interagency entity.  It looks at the key areas of Society, Human Health, Energy Production and Use, Transportation, Water Resources, Agriculture and Land Resources, and Ecosystems and for nine discrete areas of the country.

At the same time as these two alarm bells were sounding, the UK was issuing its newest wake-up call on climate change:  UK Climate Projections 2009 (UKCP09).  Prognosis?  Much hotter summers, and with less rainfall - as much as 60% less!

Finally, the National Academy of Sciences came out with its Ecological Impacts of Climate Change earlier this year.  Like the US government report, the NAS study looks at “Climate Change in Your Backyard.”  What we see are the impacts today on our forests, farms, waters, mountains and cities, and what the future holds.

These are all carefully considered studies, weighed and presented with the conservative voice of science.  If you want to look straight into the mouth of hell, go to National Geographic Magazine’s article from April, Australia’s Dry Run, and the accompanying piece by Betsy Kolbert, Changing Rains.  Australia’s seven-year drought is a heartbreaking story.

Major Economies Forum (MEF) on Energy and Climate - After the second of four meetings scheduled to take place among the world’s major economies - all major contributors to global warming - the participants announced progress on finance.  The 2^nd MEF meeting took place this week in Paris.  (See my notes from April on the first meeting.)  This article from AFP quotes French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo:  “We made progress on a major subject, which is finance and financial architecture. It’s not final, but one feels that there is a real consensus.”  Todd Stern, America’s top climate diplomat, was also enthusiastic.  He said that there was interest in a “Green Fund” proposed by Mexico last year.  In this Reuters article, Stern says that on policy “The United States is proposing to make a seismic change.”  Next stop for the MEF?  Mexico from June 22 to 23.  The nations’ leaders will then gather together in Italy in July to further flesh out their views and seek some further consensus.  (In the meantime, the UNFCCC will hold more preparatory meetings for Copenhagen starting next week in Bonn.  See also the UNFCCC newsletter for May.)

Nobel Laureate Symposium - In London, a meeting took place this week of Nobelists and top climate change experts.  The underlying theme was “the fierce urgency of now…”  Participants included Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC; Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy; Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt movement; and Lord Nicholas Stern, leader of the UK’s seminal “Stern Review on the economics of climate change.”  The release from the conference, hosted by Prince Charles and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said “…60 leading scientists from various disciplines, among them more than 20 Nobel Laureates, will discuss the dimensions of the climate crisis and innovative strategies for solutions.”  The Potsdam Institute said “Major items of the agenda will be measures to counter deforestation, the development and implementation of new technologies, the options to establish a low-carbon energy infrastructure, as well as the role of global and national economic and political frameworks.”  Secretary Chu had an op-ed in the “Times of London” detailing many of the Obama administration’s new initiatives.  He wrote that “…Obama has a real and deep commitment to putting America on a sustainable energy path. Energy is a signature issue of his Administration, and, with his leadership, we have a great moment of possibility for meeting our global economic, energy and climate challenges.”

Chu also had some noteworthy remarks, reported by the “Independent,” prior to the conference that true with what I was discussing last week on the engineer’s axiom, KISS.  Chu specifically says that we could get a huge bang for the buck in simply painting roofs and other surfaces white.  “If that building is air-conditioned, it’s going to be a lot cooler, it can use 10 or 15 per cent less electricity.  You also do something in that you change the albedo of the Earth - you make it more reflective. So the sunlight comes down and it actually goes back up - there is no greenhouse effect.”  KISS, baby, KISS.

World Business Summit on Climate Change - Meanwhile, the Copenhagen Climate Council hosted this congregation of business leaders and climate change nabobs earlier this week.  The UNSG, Ban Ki-moon, revved up the participants, urging them to action.  In his speech, he told them “With your support, and through your example, we must harness the necessary political will to seal the deal on an ambitious new climate agreement in December here in Copenhagen.”  Other high-profile speakers included Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, and José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, as well as Tim Flannery, Chairman, Copenhagen Climate Council.

What’s the pitch?  “The Copenhagen Call” which sets out the elements the global business community believes are necessary for an effective treaty to be finalized in December:

1. Agreement on a science-based greenhouse gas stabilization path with 2020 and 2050 emissions reduction targets that will achieve it;
2. Effective measurement, reporting and verification of emissions performance by business;
3. Incentives for a dramatic increase in financing low emissions technologies;
4. Deployment of existing low-emissions technologies and the development of new ones;
5. Funds to make communities more resilient and able to adapt to the effects of climate change, and
6. Means to finance forest protection.

Great stuff!  With all this activity - between the business leaders, the scientists and the government leaders, not to mention the driving force of the NGOs - we may yet get something with teeth coming out of Washington this fall, Copenhagen in December, and the rest of the world as we progress.

KISS - the engineer’s way of designing things that work.  Solving the climate change crisis with nuclear fission plants to power the separation of oil from the billions of tons of tar in which it’s embedded - and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of forest to get at the tar - is not a simple technique.  (See last post below.)  Blowing up grasslands and forested mountains to uncover the coal, transporting it hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to burn it for electricity then capturing the CO₂ in an enormously expensive process and then driving it below the surface of the earth where it may - or may not - stay sequestered is just a tad on the needlessly complex, wasteful, expensive and stupid side.  Putting gigantic mirrors in space to deflect solar radiation or placing tens of thousands of bus-sized boxes around the world to suck CO₂ out of the air are not particularly viable, cost-effective or smart strategies.

We’ve got hundreds of ways to do things better and simpler.   “Teach us delight in simple things …” said Rudyard Kipling.  (I’m reading the Jungle Book stories to my kid right now.  Let me tell you something:  This cat was tuned in.)

This is all just a roundabout way of directing you to a good little article by the indispensable Fiona Harvey at the “FT.”  Black-and-white answers to motley puzzle talks about using the existing vehicle of the Montreal Protocol to reduce existing GHG emissions 10%!  How?  By eliminating hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).  The Montreal Protocol, designed to eliminate ozone-depleting chemicals (ODCs) from the atmosphere, has been spectacularly successful in its 20 plus years of life, not only in reducing ODCs but also in reducing GHG.  (I wrote about that unexpected and entirely welcome success story here a while back.)

Harvey’s article also discusses the manifest benefits of simple approaches with a whole lot of bang for the buck such as reducing the black carbon output of biomass cook stoves.  Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, says “The time has come to explore these other options.”  IGSD is doing groundbreaking work in promoting simpler approaches to sustainability, both at the planetary and the community level.  See this from a couple of weeks ago at the blog for more on black carbon and a great video.

“I’m Not Crazy After All Department” - I suggested a couple of years ago that we could cultivate white grass for lawns, golf courses and for planting on roofs.  Well, the FT story says that “White paint reflects heat back into space, so changing the colour of roofs and pavements could make a big difference.”  (It’s the albedo effect.)  I also reported on sun-reflecting plants here.

KISS.

What could be a more quintessentially human activity?  Our food tastes better and is usually much safer to eat when it’s cooked.  (There is something to be said, don’t get me wrong, for the raw foods approach too.  I’ve been a vegetarian for … what year is this? … a long time and I do take various “non-traditional” approaches to food and nutrition seriously.)

The question remains for most of the 6.5 billion of us:  How do you cook?  In much of the developing world, in hundreds of thousands of villages, people gather biomass - scrub wood and dung mostly - and cook over open fires.  This leads to massive exposure to smoke by the mostly women and children who are around the fires.  It requires a lot of time and effort to gather the biomass.  When you are clearing scrub or forest for firewood, you are destroying valuable local cover that holds the soil and provides windbreaks, among other things.  And, it turns out, you are making a massive contribution to climate change.  The black carbon - soot, or particulate matter - that is the major component of the smoke, not only ruins the health of those immediately exposed to it, it also is a powerful source of “radiative forcing,” second only, it now appears, to carbon dioxide.

I wrote about the question of black carbon and low-tech approaches at “Teach us delight in simple things …” I met Elisabeth Rosenthal, the “NY Times” environmental reporter based in Europe, at an event in February.  We spoke a bit about getting at low-tech solutions and she’s been very much on that for awhile.  She wrote an important article last week, Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight.  She said what more and more scientists and climate activitists have been noting about black carbon with “….recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming - especially in the short term, climate experts say.”  Here is an excellent slide show from the “NY Times” on The Threat of Black Carbon.

How do you reduce black carbon?  I wrote about the Kyoto Box winning an international contest recently.  This is a simple, cheap “solar box cooker.”  Rosenthal looks at some of these cookers here at a follow-up at DotEarth, the excellent “NY Times” blog.  As always, some of the most stimulating content here is in the comments.  For further reference, see the fascinating “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition from a couple of years ago, and the good folks at Solar Cookers International, the truly superb NGO that has been spreading the word and the technology both among international aid agencies and on the ground in the developing world for a number of years now. See this powerpoint show for an introduction and use their website to learn more.

I was surprised to learn that the White House science advisor, John Holdren, who I have lauded here, along with most of the other Obama appointees working on energy, the environment and climate change, has said that geoengineering should not be “off the table.”  See Obama climate adviser open to geo-engineering to tackle global warming from “The Guardian.”  John Holdren and his colleagues are a Murderer’s Row.  They should keep their eye on the ball and smash out some solid singles and extra-base hits, run hard, and generally stay focused.

I am, you’ll excuse the expression, a skeptic when it comes to massive high-tech, high-cost ideas that may - or may not - counteract the dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system that we’ve been wreaking.  First things first:  mitigate the inputs by doing all the many things - at hand today! - that we can do to reverse our slide toward climate chaos.  Next, adapt whenever feasible to the impacts that we’re experiencing now and are going to further experience.  Get our house in order in the US and in Copenhagen in December.  Spending hundreds of billions to launch sun-reflecting mirrors into space doesn’t seem like the proper focus at all.  (Don’t get me started on hundreds of thousands of highly engineered, expensive little carbon sequestration devices.  By the way, they have this thing called a tree……)  As I tell my eight-year-old daughter:  “No messing around, until you’re squared away.”  Geoengineering really strikes me as sci-fi fun and frolic.

For more on this red herring, see the Terraforming Earth series and Geoengineering Megaprojects are Bad Planetary Management from “WorldChanging.”

Here is a big boost for low-tech, low-cost, potentially very high-impact solutions to “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI) with the climate system:  a solar-powered cooker that costs less than $5 to build.  I wrote about the FT’s Climate Change Challenge last month here.  The FT and its partners, Forum for the Future and HP, are providing exactly the kind of support for these sorts of critically important, innovative, and scalable projects that they need.

See this from the BBC on the winner, the Kyoto Box, including an interview with the inventor, Jon Bøhmer, who lays out all the many positives.  See also the FT article from today.  “Mr. Bøhmer hopes the box will be eligible for carbon credits, hence the name Kyoto box, making a yearly profit of €20-€30 (£18-£27) per stove, which would enable further expansion and easily cover the cost of replacing the cooker after five years.”

I love solar cookers and have written about them in several contexts including at Black Carbon and Solar Cookers.

Computers - This is, as you might suspect, an area where lots of energy gets consumed.  According to Emerson, at their “Energy Logic” webpage:  “Data centers in the United States alone soaked up about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or $4.5 billion worth of electricity in 2006. If current energy usage trends continue, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts U.S. data centers will use more than 100 billion kWh by 2011, representing $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs and 2.5 percent of the nation’s total electricity.”  It’s clearly in the best interests of industry to get these numbers down.

I used to live across the street from a million-square-foot “telco hotel” that Cisco routers and other high-energy equipment packed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.  Think that stuff doesn’t generate heat?  They had AC going all the time in all weather.  Lot’s of noise as a result, which was our community’s main concern.  In any event, to get the energy consumption down, one thing you want to do is cut down on the heat, and thus the need for the AC.  That’s one of Emerson’s strategies.  For more from them, see this information.

Green IT is a big, critically important and rapidly growing field.  Nobody covers it better than GreenerComputing, part of the complex of “GreenBiz.”  (I referenced one of the sister sites, “Greener Building News” and its editor, Rob Watson, at this post recently.)  There’s a huge quantum of useful and well-crafted information at GreenerComputing.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is an initiative embraced by industry and supported by such environmental pioneers as NRDC and WWF.  Its members include Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft and a very good number of other big and medium-sized IT players.

Concrete - Here’s an area of the “old economy” that is still very much with us and essential to growth and economic well-being throughout the world.  However, there’s a real GHG burden:  making Portland cement is responsible for about five percent of carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources.  Concrete Is Remixed With Environment in Mind from the “NY Times” highlights some breakthroughs in this essential industry, including sequestering carbon by bubbling carbon dioxide through wet cement.

The article also notes an exciting possibility that I talked about in Desalination and Energy, Plus A Concrete Idea for Carbon Sequestration from last summer, namely using seawater in an industrial process that takes waste heat and carbon dioxide from power plants to make cement.  Calera says it can take more than 90% of the carbon dioxide from power plant emissions to, for all intents and purposes, sequester it in concrete.  Sweet.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has a robust Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI).  See this recent report, Climate Actions, from the CSI for a look at the various fronts on which progress is being made to reduce GHG.  For more on the industry itself, see the Portland Cement Association’s website.

Black Carbon in Waxman-Markey - As we’ve seen here, particulates from uncombusted materials - coal, diesel, and biomass - have a much bigger impact on the climate than previously recognized, not to mention the devastating direct health impacts.  (See under Soot here and at Black Carbon and Solar Cookers.)  It is entirely worth noting that the draft under discussion in the House (see last post below), addresses this.  The summary of Waxman-Markey says that black carbon “…is a major contributor to warming in the Arctic. EPA is directed in the draft to use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions of black carbon domestically and study opportunities for reductions internationally.”

EPA was obviously on the same page.  They announced a program on Monday that will lead to significantly reduced emissions of particulates, and other pollutants, from marine shipping.  The EPA release on this says “These standards will cut sulfur in fuel by 98 percent, particulate matter emissions by 85 percent, and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80 percent from the current global requirements.”

I referenced the health burden here in July (see Shipping), and also talked about some ways of radically reducing the problem.  Here is a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on some new work that further indicates the health and environmental impacts.  (You can also listen to the story in Real Audio and Windows Media and MP3 formats.)

Players - There is a series in this week’s “US News & World Report” that profiles some of the “…most influential energy and environmental policymakers in the Obama era.”  I’ve written about most of them here, but this is a concise further look at folks from Lisa Jackson and Steven Chu to Henry Waxman and Al Gore.  I haven’t written about Lisa Murkowski or Joe Romm, so let USN&WR bring you up to speed on these two.  (Romm and his blog, Climate Progress, are very influential indeed.)

Feel-Good Stories that Pack a Punch - First, DOE to Award $3.2 Billion in Energy Efficiency Block Grants is from the excellent “EERE Network News.”  This stimulus spending will get you more money back in the end than you put in, according to nearly every economic analysis you can find.  This is what we call investment.

The other story:  Billion tree campaign grows past 3 billion mark, says UN agency from the UN News Service.  They set out to plant a billion trees worldwide, have hit three, and are now aiming for seven by the end of this year.  Trees, by the way, are a pretty effective device for sequestering carbon.  Remember how that works?  Will the foresters and environmentalists win with this low-tech argument over the engineers and industrialists who are gaga over CCS, not to mention industrialized atmospheric carbon scrubbing?  We’ll just have wait to see.

Columbia Climate Center - I had the pleasure of guest blogging today at Nature’s fine blog, Climate Feedback, on the launch of an ambitious initiative of the Earth Institute.  It was an interesting event, highlighted by a conversation between Jeffrey Sachs and Ted Turner.

There really is a Murderer’s Row of environmentalists, renewable energy advocates and all-purpose rainbow warriors coming into the Obama administration and springing into action.

The three newest additions to the team are very strong.  Gina McCarthy is Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).  The “Hartford Courant” reports here that McCarthy is being named to the critical post of assistant administrator for Air and Radiation at EPA.  The paper further reports here that McCarthy “… was a key player in the creation of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based program in 10 Northeastern states to cut emissions from power plants.”  This program, of course, is a critical precursor to the federal cap-and-trade regime that is forthcoming.

For DOE, Obama has named Kristina M. Johnson, provost of the Johns Hopkins University, to be an Undersecretary.  She is a powerhouse, as the “Baltimore Sun” reports here.  Before JHU, she was “dean of engineering at Duke University. An award-winning electrical engineer, she holds 129 U.S. and foreign patents or patents pending and is the co-founder of several startup companies.”  Her portfolio at DOE will include renewables and energy efficiency.

Van Jones, an intellectual and activist - one likes to think that the two can very much, and perhaps absolutely should, go hand in hand - has been appointed as a special White House advisor “…working with agencies and departments to advance the administration’s climate and energy initiatives,” as “US News & World Report” tells us here.  For more on Jones, see this profile from my favorite journalist, Betsy Kolbert, writing in the “New Yorker” a couple of months ago.

Meanwhile, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the scandalous, bizarre practice of Senators unilaterally placing nominations on “hold.” NJ Senator Bob Menendez had been holding up the nominations of key administration appointees John Holdren, as science advisor to the President, and Jane Lubchenco as NOAA administrator - because he had a problem with what might be Obama’s tack on Cuba!  Greenwire, via the “NY Times,” reports that the hold was lifted and the relevant committee has approved both of these superlative, critically important players with flying colors.  Menendez backed off in a big hurry, apparently, because of the considerable hue and cry.  So Holdren and Lubchenco should be on the job very soon.  That’s very important in a number of ways, as the whole team is gathering steam for the critical months ahead.

The International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), ten of the world’s leading research universities, and the University of Copenhagen, organized a conference that took place in Copenhagen this week.  The scientists, economists, journalists and others gathered heard some startling news in a series of updates on the science of climate change.  The IPCC issued its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 - and shared the Nobel Peace Prize for its heroic work.  The conference was titled “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions” and it served to update us on the science that was in the pipeline and completed after the IPCC report.  This video, with Conference Chair Katherine Richardson, explains the scope of the conference.

Olive Heffernan, editor of “Nature Reports: Climate Change” and its sister blog, Climate Feedback, reports here from Copenhagen.  “The latest results made for bleak listening at times,” she writes.  One key researcher, Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said:  “Some aspects of climate are changing more rapidly than we thought even a few years ago. It is thus critical to review the scientific data in Copenhagen before COP15.”  Rahmstorf himself had some arresting data on sea-level rise.  All the abstracts and full text for the many presentations and papers can be found here.

The BBC says here that “The worst-case scenarios on climate change envisaged by the UN two years ago are already being realised, say scientists at an international meeting.”  Lord Nicholas Stern is quoted by the BBC:  “So I think it’s very important that we understand the magnitude of the risk we are running.”  Lord Stern is quoted in “The Times” as well:  “Do the politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating four, five, six degrees centigrade would be? I think, not yet.”

Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, made an address to the conference.  EurActiv quotes Dr. Pachauri, referring to politicians, in this article on the meetings.  “They should certainly respond to a worst-case scenario - even if there is only a small risk that it becomes reality - because it will have terrible consequences. It is quite common risk management.”

(Foto: Lizette Kabré.)

The world’s scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades now.  The policymakers have to really step up to the plate this year, as never before.