Report warns of climate change impact on infrastructure
Climate change could cripple UK infrastructure in the future if action is not taken to mitigate its effects, a new report has warned.
Engineering the Future was presented to the government’s chief scientific advisor this week and states, unless measures are taken to protect infrastructure, climate change “could have seriously detrimental effects on UK society and the economy”.
Lord Browne of Madingley, president of the Royal College of Engineering, which compiled the report, said: “Climate change is a genuine risk. While efforts must continue towards mitigating its effects, we need to think very carefully about how we adapt to the changing climatic conditions that are anticipated over the coming century.”
He added that engineering “is one of the best chances we have” of dealing with issues such as rising sea levels.
Last year, the Met Office dramatically revised its worst case scenario for rising sea levels, more than halving its prediction to 6ft from 13ft.
>>> Please read the full article here
February 14, 2011
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Early flowering plants signal climate change threat
Plants in Britain are flowering earlier in the year than at any time in the last two-and-a-half centuries, a new study
shows.
Published in the journal Proceedings B, it revealed that for every one degrees Celsius increase in temperature, plants flower five days earlier.
The data was compiled using information gathered by domestic gardeners over the last 250 years.
More than 400 species of plant were examined, allowing researchers to estimate when plants will flower in the future as global warming causes temperatures to rise.
This means they can carry out conservation work to protect animals and other plant species that may be affected by the changes to their environment.
Richard Smithers, senior conservation advisor at the Woodland Trust, who helped to compile the research, told the Telegraph: “It is hard to make climate change real for people. This makes it very real for people.”
Earlier this year, the BBC reported that spring in the UK is beginning 11 days earlier on average than it was 30 years ago, according to a study published in the journal Global Change Biology.
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April 14, 2010
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UK must help homes adapt to climate change, MPs say
Programme to “retrofit” homes with measures to make them more energy and water efficient and resilient to flooding is needed to help households cope with climate change, MPs said today.
The environmental audit committee also warned that new housing developments should only get planning approval if they are designed to suit future changes in the climate, as part of efforts to make sure the UK adapts to rising temperatures.
And there needs to be greater focus on “green infrastructure” including water storage, more trees and more open spaces which can tackle flash flooding and hot city summers, the committee said.
A report by the committee of MPs warned efforts to adapt to a changing climate needed to be as much of a priority as cutting the greenhouse gas emissions which cause global warming.
The UK is already locked in to a rise in temperature, and is expected to experience wetter winters, drier summers and a higher likelihood of heatwaves, storms and flooding.
To maintain current levels of flood protection will require real terms spending on defences to increase from around £600m a year now to £1bn in 2035.
And by the end of the century some £7bn may be needed to improve the Thames barrier and tidal defences.
The committee called on the government to ensure there was a coherent approach to adaptation that involves all Whitehall departments and helps local communities tackle the risks posed by climate change.
The government should also be clear how it is going to help those worst affected by climate change – for example those whose homes face the risk of coastal erosion.
Tim Yeo, chairman of the committee, said: “For a long time the climate change debate has focused on reducing carbon emissions, but adapting to the inevitable impacts of rising global temperatures is equally critical.
“Even if all the world’s power stations were switched off tomorrow, past emissions mean that some climate change will still take place and we will face more floods, droughts and heat waves.”
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April 2, 2010
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Forest loss slows, as China plants and Brazil preserves
The world’s net rate of forest loss has slowed markedly in the last decade, with less logging in the Amazon and China planting trees on a grand scale.
Yet forests continue to be lost at “an alarming rate” in some countries, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 finds the loss of tree cover is most acute in Africa and South America. But Australia also suffered huge losses because of the recent drought.
“It is good news,” said the report’s co-ordinator Mette Loyche Wilkie, a senior forestry office with FAO.
The area of forests undisturbed by human activity continues to decrease, so countries must further strengthen their efforts to conserve and manage them
Eduardo Rojas, FAO
“This is the first time we’ve been able to say that the deforestation rate is going down across the world, and certainly when you look at the net rate that is certainly down.
“But the situation in some countries is still alarming,” she told BBC News.
The last decade saw forests being lost or converted at a rate of 13 million hectares per year, compared to 16 million hectares in the 1990s.
However, new forests were being planted to the tune of more than seven million hectares per year; so the net rate of loss since the year 2000 has been 5.2 million hectares per year, compared to 8.3 million in the 1990s.
Globally, forests now cover about 31% of the Earth’s land surface.
>>> Please read the full article here
April 1, 2010
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Climate ‘fix’ could poison sea life
By Richard Black – Environment correspondent, BBC News
Fertilising the oceans with iron to absorb carbon dioxide could increase concentrations of a chemical that can kill marine mammals, a study has found.
Iron stimulates growth of marine algae that absorb CO2 from the air, and has been touted as a “climate fix”.
Now researchers have shown that the algae increase production of a nerve poison that can kill mammals and birds.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say this raises “serious concern” over the idea.
The toxin – domoic acid – first came to notice in the late 1980s as the cause of amnesiac shellfish poisoning.
If the end goal is to use it to fight climate warming, then we have to understand the consequences for marine life
It is produced by algae of the genus Pseudonitzschia, with concentrations rising rapidly when the algae “bloom”.
Now, its presence in seawater often requires the suspension of shellfishing operations, and is regularly implicated in deaths of animals such as sealions.
Domoic acid poisoning may also lie behind a 1961 incident in which flocks of seabirds appeared to attack the Californian town of Capitola – an event believed to have shaped Alfred Hitchcock’s interpretation of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds in his 1963 thriller.
Carbon focus
Over the last decade, about 10 research projects have investigated iron fertilisation, with mixed results. But only two of them measured domoic acid production, and only then as an afterthought, explained William Cochlan from San Francisco State University, a scientist on the new project.
“We had a number of major aims in this work; but one of them was to ask ‘do you normally find the species of algae that produce domoic acid, are they producing domoic acid, and will production be enhanced by iron?’,” he said.
In studies conducted around Ocean Station Papa, a research platform moored in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean, the answers to all three questions turned out to be “yes”.
>>> Please read the full article here
March 24, 2010
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Battle over climate science spreads to US schoolrooms
11 March 2010 by Debora MacKenzie
SCHOOLS in three US states – Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota – have been told to teach alternatives to the scientific consensus on global warming. The moves appear to be allied to efforts to teach creationism in public schools. Such efforts have in the past been thwarted when courts ruled them unconstitutional, but those advocating the teaching of sound science may find it harder to fight misrepresentations concerning climate change.
Last week, South Dakota’s state legislature adopted a bill which “urges” schools to take a “balanced approach” to teaching about climate change, because the science is “unresolved” and has been “complicated and prejudiced” by “political and philosophical viewpoints”.
When New Scientist asked what these were, the bill’s sponsor, Don Kopp, mentioned claims commonly cited in opposition to the idea of human-induced global warming: for example, that any global warming is due to changes in solar activity. “I am against bankrupting the country to fight warming,” he said, “without being sure it’s true.”
The measure makes no mention of evolution, but its wording resembles bills in other states primarily aimed at teaching alternatives to evolution. Since a court in Pennsylvania ruled in 2005 that “intelligent design” had religious origins, so could not be taught in state schools, states have used vaguer language in bills when calling for schools to teach alternatives to established science.
In Michigan in 2005, one such bill also called for students to “critically evaluate… theories of global warming”. It failed, as have all similar bills – except in Louisiana, which in 2008 passed a law requiring “open and objective discussion” of warming, evolution and human cloning. Kentucky is now debating a similar bill.
In March 2009, Texas adopted school standards that both allow creationist claims and say students must “evaluate different views on the existence of global warming”. Texas buys more textbooks than any other state, so publishers often conform to Texan demands, including adding scepticism about warming.
Bundling warming with evolution in calls for “academic freedom” may make it harder to challenge these laws. Steve Newton of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, observes that the US constitution restricts the teaching of religious ideas in state schools, but not the teaching of bad science. A study last year found that evangelical Christians, who account for most creationists, are up to three times as likely as other Americans to deny that warming has human origins.
Moves against climate science and in favour of creationism are linked in other ways too: some see warming, like evolution, as the product of a hostile scientific establishment. When the US Chamber of Commerce, which opposes stringent cuts in greenhouse emissions, called for a public hearing on climate science last August, it called it “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century”, after the 1925 Tennessee trial about teaching evolution.
>>> Read the full article here
March 17, 2010
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Whaling worsens carbon release, scientists warn
By Victoria Gill
A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes – or a large forest’s worth – of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say. Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released. US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, US. Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the “forests of the ocean”.
Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew. “Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon,” he said. “And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that’s removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere.” He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.
“And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean. “If they die where it’s deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years.”
In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years. Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.
When whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.
Dr Andrew Pershing, University of Maine. But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem. Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could “sequester” the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits.
He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks. Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem.
Dr Pershing said: “These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they’re fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die].”
Read the full article at BBC News
March 7, 2010
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Cynicism over Copenhagen Treaty
The UK government says it is highly unlikely that a new legally binding climate treaty can be agreed this year – and a full treaty may be a year away. Two years ago, the world’s governments vowed to finalise a new treaty at next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen. Climate Secretary Ed Miliband has until now said it could be done – but now he says only a political deal is likely, echoing some other senior figures.
Developing countries reacted with frustration and disappointment.
“When we left (UN talks in) Bali two years ago, we all expected that would be agreeing on a legally binding outcome to respond to the urgency… that we were on the verge of catastrophic climate change, so we’re very disappointed,” said Selwin Hart from Barbados, speaking for the group of small island developing states.
“If we don’t take urgent and ambitious action, the reality is that some small island developing states will not be around within a couple of decades – certainly not by the end of the century.”
This is thought to be the first time that UK ministers have acknowledged the slim chances of achieving anything legally binding. In the middle of October, Mr Miliband said a new treaty looked “more do-able” following a meeting of the Major Economies Forum in London. His comments now echo warnings from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen and US chief climate negotiator Todd Stern that only a “politically binding” agreement can now be achieved.
Officials then warned it could take up to a full year to finalise the treaty.
View full article at bbc.co.uk
Image sourced from bbc.co.uk - Activists strung a banner from Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia church
November 19, 2009
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We still have a chance to save polar bears
With all the attention given to the loss of sea ice in the Arctic, it’s easy to forget that some ice will persist for many years yet. True, climate models project that much of the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in summer by 2040, but they also predict that half a million square kilometres of sea ice could remain until at least 2100.
This ice will lie next to the northern coasts of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic archipelago, the region where the oldest and thickest ice now occurs. This region will therefore offer at least a limited sanctuary for species that prefer, or rely on, year-round sea ice.
The continued existence of this habitat lays the foundation for the long-term survival of ice-dependent species. But to ensure they do survive, we urgently need to draw up a management plan. As ice-covered areas open up, the Arctic will experience more human activity than ever before.
New developments in shipping, tourism and resource extraction, for example, will put pressure on ecosystems already struggling to adapt to environmental changes. We need to start an international assessment now, before Arctic countries establish their development schemes.
Because sea ice is dynamic, we will need an international system of monitoring and managing the remaining habitat and the areas that supply its ice. If we are able to do this successfully, we could maintain a viable habitat for polar bears and other species for decades into the future.
Read full article here: NewScientist.com
November 18, 2009
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