A Swiftly Melting Planet  

Tim Flannery is saying that greenhouse gas levels are now 'dangerously high'.

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions have already exceeded worst-case scenario projections, a leading scientist says. Acclaimed author and scientist Tim Flannery said results of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis report, due for release next month, show that since 2005 Australia has already been producing the amount of greenhouse gases expected a decade away.

"What (the report) says is we already stand a risk of unacceptable climate change and that the need for action is ever more urgent," Professor Flannery told ABC television. "We thought we would be at that threshold within about a decade ... but the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold. As of mid-2005 there was about 455 parts per million of what's called carbon dioxide equivalent, and that's a figure that's gathered by taking the potential of all 30 greenhouse gases and converting them into carbon dioxide potential."

Prof Flannery said carbon dioxide levels were the most worrying, accounting for about 75 per cent of the greenhouse gases, but others - such as nitrous oxide, methane and HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons) - were also concerning. "What we've all been hoping is that we can avoid dangerous climate change and that's the sort of climate change that's very large scale and rapid and irreversible," Prof Flannery said. "We haven't done the homework right in terms of converting the potential of those greenhouse gases in the past into the CO2 equivalent ... but also we have really seen an unexpected acceleration in the rate of accumulation of CO2 itself and that's been beyond the limits of projection ... beyond the worst-case scenario."

Prof Flannery said the report should drive political debate on climate change and further highlight environmental scientific research. "We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change - that's what the new figures say," Prof Flannery said. "It's not next year, or next decade; it's now."

Thomas Homer Dixon has an op ed in The New York Times on A Swiftly Melting Planet.

THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.

A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.

But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.

The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.

There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.

Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.

Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).

Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.

This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.

When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.

In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.

The IHT has a look at the new frontier opened up in the Arctic courtesy of the rapidly melting planet - noting the quest for new energy supplies is becoming tougher.

For a quarter-century, energy executives were tantalized by vast quantities of natural gas in one of the world's most inhospitable places - off Norway's northern coast, beneath the Arctic Ocean. Bitter winds and fierce snowstorms lash the region, located 90 miles, or 145 kilometers, from the country's shoreline. The sun disappears for two months a year. No oil company knew how to operate in such a harsh environment.

But Norway has finally solved the problem. The other day, on an island just offshore, a giant yellow flame illuminated the sky here. It was just a temporary flare for excess gas, but it signaled a new era in energy production.

Across the bay from this small fishing village, where reindeer wander the streets, one of the world's most advanced natural gas plants is coming to life. Within weeks, natural gas will start crossing the ocean in specially designed ships, feeding into the pipeline network for the eastern coast of the United States. Before Christmas, furnaces in New York and stoves in Washington will be burning the fuel. It will be the first commercial energy production from waters north of the Arctic Circle.

As global demand soars and prices climb, energy companies are going to the ends of the earth to find new supplies.

In Kazakhstan, petroleum engineers are braving wild temperature swings in the shallow waters of the Caspian Sea to tap the biggest oil discovery of the past 30 years. They are drilling wells six miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. And on the island of Sakhalin, in eastern Russia, they have drilled horizontal wells through miles of rock to produce oil from a stretch of ocean beset by giant icebergs.

But as the industry extends its reach, the quest is becoming more arduous. The cost of producing new oil and gas is rising fast, and companies are plagued by worsening delays. Drilling rigs are scarce. Engineers, geologists, and petroleum specialists are in critically short supply. And the politics of oil and gas are getting trickier, with hydrocarbon-rich countries demanding a bigger share of the revenues and growing angry about project delays that postpone their payments.

Industry executives say their ability to keep up with global demand is badly strained. "We're facing bigger risks and bigger difficulties when we go into new frontier regions," said Odd Mosbergvik, a senior manager at the Norwegian state energy company, Statoil Hydro. "But this is why the oil industry is for big boys. It's a big gamble."

The industry's new reach is shifting the economics of energy extraction. According to a recent study, discovery and development costs - a leading indicator for the industry - tripled between 1999 and 2006, to nearly $15 a barrel. Last year alone, companies spent $200 billion developing new energy projects worldwide, according to the study by two consulting firms, John Herold and Harrison Lovegrove. That sum is bigger than the economies of 147 countries.

These higher costs mean the industry needs higher energy prices to finance new projects. They are also constraining its ability to expand quickly.

"As the CEO of a major oil company told me, 'This is an industry in crisis masked by high prices,' " said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an oil industry consulting firm in Washington. "There are no easy barrels left. The only barrels are going to be the tough barrels."

The IHT also has an article on the Carbon Disclosure Project.

On the sidelines of the UN climate conference in New York this week, hundreds of corporate investors and executives gathered to hear researchers pitch the Carbon Disclosure Project and to report its new results. The project is a brilliant plan to prod large companies to cut emissions, but it may take more than a good sell to get businesses to seriously buy in.

The mood at the event, held at Merrill Lynch headquarters was upbeat, inspiring, luxurious even, with fresh croissants and comfy sofas. Former President Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker, exhorting the corporate audience to see the profit potential in going green. "I think this will be an economic boom," he said. "I hope I've persuaded you that it's good economics as well as good for the future of our children." Sustainability, Clinton said, could be "economic salvation."

From an environmental perspective, Clinton's inspirational speaking was needed, since the results of the latest Carbon Disclosure Project were, in fact, exceedingly mixed.

But first, a quick introduction to this clever five-year-old project: Each year a group of environmentally minded institutional investors has sent a voluntary "Carbon Disclosure" survey to hundreds of the world's largest companies, asking for information about how much CO2 they put into the atmosphere, and if they have a plan to reduce it.

The group has grown dramatically since its inception in 2002, so that now it is harder to ignore. This year, the query was sponsored by 315 financial corporations that manage $41 billion, including heavyweights like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and American International Group.

The idea is that if investors ask for information about companies' carbon footprints, it would be a powerful incentive for corporations to reduce pollution and their contributions to global warming.

The Economist has an article on climate policy and how game theory, in the form of the prisoner's dilemma, can be applied to the problem to punish the recalcitrant - Playing games with the planet.

AT ANY given summit on climate change, it is never long before some politician declares how “urgent” or “vital” or “imperative” it is to stop the planet from overheating. And yet few governments are willing to tackle the problem by themselves. In practice, what these impassioned speakers usually mean is that it is urgent—no, vital!—no, imperative!—for all countries but their own to get to grips with climate change.

That is natural enough. After all, all countries will enjoy the benefits of a stable climate whether they have helped to bring it about or not. So a government that can persuade others to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions without doing so itself gets the best of both worlds: it avoids all the expense and self-denial involved, and yet still escapes catastrophe. The most obvious free-riders of this sort are America and Australia, the only rich countries that refuse to put a limit on their emissions. But they are far from being the only offenders: most poor countries, too, are keen to palm the responsibility for curbing global warming off on rich ones, and to continue to grow and pollute as much as they like.

The problem, of course, is that if everyone is counting on others to act, no one will, and the consequences could be much worse than if everyone had simply done their bit to begin with. Game theorists call a simplified version of this scenario the “prisoner's dilemma”. In it, two prisoners accused of the same crime find themselves in separate cells, unable to communicate. Their jailers try to persuade them to implicate one another. If neither goes along with the guards, they will both receive a sentence of just one year. If one accepts the deal and the other keeps quiet, then the turncoat goes free while the patsy gets ten years. And if they both denounce one another, they both get five years.

If the first prisoner is planning to keep quiet, then the second has an incentive to denounce him, and so get off scot-free rather than spend a year in prison. If the first prisoner were planning to betray the second, then the second would still be better off pointing the finger, and so receive a five-year sentence instead of a ten-year one. In other words, a rational, self-interested person would always betray his fellow prisoner. Yet that leaves them both mouldering in jail for five years, when they could have cut their sentences to a year if they had both kept quiet.

Pessimistic souls assume that the international response to climate change will go the way of the prisoner's dilemma. Rational leaders will always neglect the problem, on the grounds that others will either solve it, allowing their country to become a free-rider, or let it fester, making it a doomed cause anyway. So the world is condemned to a slow roasting, even though global warming could be averted if everyone co-operated.

Yet in a recent paper, Michael Liebreich, of New Energy Finance, a research firm, draws on game theory to reach the opposite conclusion. The dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma, he points out, change dramatically if participants know that they will be playing the game more than once. In that case, they have an incentive to co-operate, in order to avoid being punished for their misconduct by their opponent in subsequent rounds.

The paper cites a study on the subject by an American academic, Robert Axelrod, which argues that the most successful strategy when the game is repeated has three elements: first, players should start out by co-operating; second, they should deter betrayals by punishing the transgressor in the next round; and third, they should not bear grudges but instead should start co-operating with treacherous players again after meting out the appropriate punishment. The result of this strategy can be sustained co-operation rather than a cycle of recrimination.

Mr Liebreich believes that all this holds lessons for the world's climate negotiators. Treaties on climate change, after all, are not one-offs. Indeed, the United Nations is even now trying to get its members to negotiate a successor to its existing treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Many fear that the effort will collapse unless the laggards can be persuaded to join in. But the paper argues that rational countries will not be deterred by free-riders. They will continue to curb their emissions, while devising sanctions for those who do not.

The Kyoto Protocol already embodies some of these elements. Countries that do not meet their commitments, for example, are supposed to be punished with a requirement to cut their emissions more sharply the next time around. But Mr Liebreich argues that there should also be sanctions for rich countries that refuse to participate, and stronger incentives for poor countries (which are exempted from any mandatory cuts) to join in. Rather than trying to craft an agreement that is agreeable to all, the more enthusiastic countries should simply press on with a system to which recalcitrant ones could later accede.

The global regime on climate change, Mr Liebreich believes, should also be revised more frequently, to allow the game to play itself out more quickly. So instead of stipulating big reductions in emissions, to be implemented over five years, as in Kyoto, negotiators might consider adopting annual targets. That way, co-operative governments know that they cannot be taken advantage of for long, whereas free-riders can be punished and penitents brought back into the fold more quickly.

There are flaws in the analogy, of course. In the real world, governments can communicate and form alliances, which makes the dynamics of the game much more complicated. And governments may not act consistently or rationally. Most observers, for example, assume that America's policy on global warming will change in 2008, along with its president. And most countries' willingness to act is presumably linked to the severity of global warming's ill effects. If things get bad enough, then with any luck everyone will play the game.

Links:

* Energy Justice Network - The Myth Of Clean Coal
* Minneapolis Star Tribune - Websites to visualize social issues
* Virtual Hosting Blog - Green Hosting: 11 Carbon Neutral Hosting Alternatives
* Reuters - Egypt plan to green Sahara desert stirs controversy
* The Energy Blog - USDA Suggests High Oil Prices May Push Up Food Prices More Than Biofuels
* The Oil Drum - Photovoltaics: From Waste to Energy-maker. Inteersting post from the Engineer poet on producing polycrystalline silicon from the waste produced by phosphate mining.
* Business Week - Solar's Day In The Sun
* CNN Money - Big Utilities Interested In Big Solar
* Business Standard - Sun struck: Jharkhand villages get water, light through solar power
* SMH - Commuters happier chained to the wheel. Which is why we need green cars.
* SMH - BHP's troubled Atlantis field pumps first oil. Genghis Khan is also up and running and Neptune starts in December.
* Vancouver Sun - Documenting the ravages of big oil in Ecuador
* IHT - Kurdish regional government defends its oil deals
* Forbes - Is Big Oil Losing The Race For Iraq?
* Korea Times - Grand Theft Iraq
* San Jose Mercury News - Novelist Wallace Stegner wrote story of Aramco in 1955 - Full version now published for first time. More related links at Energy Bulletin.
* Daily Telegraph (UK) - Roberrt Gates - The man who stands between US and new war in Iran
* Bangkok Post - Trouser snake kills Cambodian man. From Dave Robert's monster weekend link roundup. "Don't worry - it's nothing a drink can't fix".
* Daily Mail - Eat my pork, feel my fork. More from Dave.