Monday, December 21, 2009
"Climate Express" to Copenhagen lowers footprint
|
Alpine Air Living Purifiers |
|
ABOARD THE CLIMATE EXPRESS - A train splashed with a green stripe carried 450 U.N. officials, delegates, climate activists and journalists from Brussels to the climate summit in Copenhagen on Saturday to symbolize efforts to reduce the convention's carbon footprint.
More trains were leaving from other European capitals, and one was concluding a trip from Kyoto, Japan, through China and the Trans-Siberian route across Russia.
But symbols were all the trains could be. Most of the 15,000 people expected at the two-week conference opening Monday will arrive by plane from opposite ends of the globe.
The journey through Belgium, Germany and Denmark was intended to underscore what campaigners say is the need to switch to low-carbon economies and rely more on public transportation to reduce tailpipe emissions.
"Anyone who thinks it's impossible is wrong," said Achim Steiner, director of the U.N. Environment Program, noting Germany's move away from fossil fuels over the past 10 years toward greater use of wind, solar and hydroelectricity.
Railway officials claimed the trip is carbon neutral. They said the German railroad, Deutsche Bahn, bought the equivalent of the electricity needed to run the train from renewable sources and added it to the Germany electrical grid.
Traveling by train along the nearly 500-mile (800-kilometer) route emits 33 kilograms of carbon dioxide per person, compared with 115 kilograms by air, the officials said.
Led by France, high-speed rail is being extended through much of Europe, with trains moving faster than 155 miles per hour (250 kph). Airlines say they plan to link up with railways to provide alternatives to short European flights.
But train travel is still not glitch-free. A power problem in moving from the Belgian to the German grid delayed the Climate Express by a half-hour at the German border town of Aachen, although railway officials said the transfer problem was unusual and the lost time would be made up.
The 14-hour journey passed rolling hills of eastern Belgium and German farmland and industrial centers. That compared with three hours' flight and about nine hours by car - in the unlikely case there are no traffic jams on Europe's crowded highways.
Steiner called for more investment in public transport and green energy, saying that business investors were looking for signals emerging from the summit.
"Hundreds of billions of dollars are in waiting mode," he said. "In this financial crisis right now, Copenhagen should be one of the biggest stimulus packages."
The summit aims to draw up a political accord among 192 countries for controlling global greenhouse gas emissions causing the warming of the earth. Transportation is responsible for about 27 percent of worldwide emissions.
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer
Labels: Climate Express, Copenhagen, Deutsche Bahn, global warming news
Proceed now to Refinance House With Bad Credit | Famous Entrepreneurs | Philippine News Online | Home Shopping Online
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
 |
 |
 |
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Chaos at climate conference
|
Alpine Air Living Purifiers |
|
COPENHAGEN - The Copenhagen climate change conference appeared to be imploding from within and exploding from without on Wednesday.
Police fired tear gas, brandished batons and detained more than 200 protesters who tried to push through the security cordon around the Bella Center, as negotiations inside bogged down, for the second time this week, over differences between China and the West over emissions, funding issues and transparency.
"People around the world [are] actually expecting something to be done from us," red-faced Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen lectured delegates from nearly 200 nations.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the highest-ranking American yet to appear at the talks, urged attendees to put aside their differences and "make Friday our day of success."
Minutes earlier - in a surprise move that captured growing uncertainty over conference - Denmark's climate minister, Connie Hedegaard, stepped aside as president of the conference, handing the gavel to Rasmussen, as head of the host country.
Outside, Danish police - who have been accused of heavy-handedness by human rights groups - clashed with thousands of environmental activists who descended on the complex from a nearby train station and demanded entry to the Bella Center.
BBC video showed truncheon-bearing Danish police shoving the crowd backward as protesters gasped and covered their faces to avoid breathing tear gas.
Inside the building, U.N. officials revoked the credentials of about 100 accredited members of the green group Friends of the Earth for staging a series of small protests on Tuesday.
Despite the gloom, U.S. officials told POLITICO they made incremental progress in a variety of areas during marathon sessions Tuesday night and cautioned that all previous climate conferences have experienced similar turbulence. And late Tuesday, negotiators announced a major breakthrough on a deal to preserve wetlands and forests.
Hedegaard will continue to consult parties as Rasmussen’s special assistant, and it was unclear whether the switch was pro forma, as Hedegaard claimed, or she was forced out by representatives of poor nations who had demanded her removal earlier this week.
"With so many heads of state and government having arrived, it's appropriate that the prime minister of Denmark presides," Hedegaard told the 193-nation meeting.
"However, the prime minister has appointed me as his special representative, and I will thus continue to negotiate the ... outcome with my colleagues," she said.
On Tuesday, Hedegaard made an emotional appeal for countries to put aside their differences to finalize a deal - after the G-77 bloc of developing nations accused her of trying to ram through an agreement amenable to the U.S. and other big industrialized nations.
But no sooner had Rasmussen assumed the presidency than those tensions burst out in the open again, with China, India, Bolivia, South Africa and Sudan saying they would block attempts by the Danish delegation to produce a draft text favored by most Western countries.
Minutes after taking the gavel, Rasmussen angrily denounced developing countries for seeking to delay consideration of the text, accusing them of focusing on "procedure, procedure, procedure."
He was immediately rebuked by a representative of China, a member of the G-77 bloc, who said moving forward too quickly was tantamount to "obstructionism" and a bullying attempt by the West.
"I think the matter isn't 'procedure, procedure, procedure.'... You can't just put forth some text from the sky," the representative said.
Glenn Thrush, POLITICO
Labels: Copenhagen, global warming news, Hedegaard
Proceed now to Refinance House With Bad Credit | Famous Entrepreneurs | Philippine News Online | Home Shopping Online
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
|
|
|
|
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
Copenhagen: The Crux of the Matter
|
Alpine Air Living Purifiers |
|
Left unresolved are the questions of emissions targets for industrial countries, billions of dollars a year in funding for poor countries to contend with climate change, and verifying the actions of emerging powers like China and India to ensure that promises to reduce emissions are kept.
Labels: Copenhagen, global warming news
Proceed now to Refinance House With Bad Credit | Famous Entrepreneurs | Philippine News Online | Home Shopping Online
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
|
|
|
|
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto
|
Alpine Air Living Purifiers |
|
WASHINGTON - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated - beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:
-The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
-Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
-Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.
-Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.
"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent.
Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."
The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.
From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period.
When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters - the U.S., China and India - were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.
And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.
"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.
That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.
"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.
In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.
"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.
The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.
Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.
Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves - adding up to the size of Delaware - came off the Antarctic peninsula.
While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.
Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.
Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.
"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."
Also, permafrost - the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane - is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.
Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.
More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.
In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.
More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.
The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.
Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Labels: Copenhagen, global warming news, kyoto protocol
Proceed now to Refinance House With Bad Credit | Famous Entrepreneurs | Philippine News Online | Home Shopping Online
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
|
|
|
|
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Five keys to Copenhagen
|
Alpine Air Living Purifiers |
|
COPENHAGEN - President Barack Obama's decision to participate in the end - rather than beginning - of the international climate change conference here stems from some newfound hope that negotiators can reach a deal by the time the conference wraps up at the end of next week.
But there's a lot to do between now and then.
As delegates from more than 190 countries arrive in the Danish capital, they'll confront more than just a dizzying schedule of meetings, a sea of protesters and a bicycle-powered Christmas tree in City Hall Square.
They'll have to navigate Pacific Islanders who want protection from rising sea levels; Africans who want billions of dollars in aid to cope with severe droughts, freak storms and spreading tropical diseases; Chinese and Indian delegates who don't want global-warming-prevention measures to slow their development; and leaders from the United States and the European Union who want to cut emissions without hurting already shaky economies back home.
How will you know if they're making progress? Here are five things to watch.
1. Can they cut it?
The centerpiece of any deal will be the various countries' agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Developing countries argue that richer nations have created most of the global-warming pollution over the past century through their industrialization - and, therefore, they should be the ones that make the deepest reductions.
But U.S. negotiators do not want to make drastic cuts unless emerging countries like China and India agree to their own robust reductions.
So far, the European Union has vowed to slash emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels - more if other nations agree to do the same. Japan has set a goal of a 25 percent reduction from 1990 levels, an almost 30 percent cut from 2005 levels. And last month, White House officials promised to cut greenhouse gases to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
That amounts to a mere 3 percent or 4 percent cut below 1990 levels, according to experts, and it's unclear whether that's enough to satisfy China, India and other developing nations.
A draft text of the pact circulated by Danish officials would have nations agreeing to cut emissions in half by 2050, but China and India say they oppose that target.
"If the Denmark draft is any indication, then we are heading to a dead end," Jairam Ramesh, India's environmental minister, recently told reporters.
Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Sudan plan to submit their own draft - one that rejects legally binding emissions cuts. And poorer countries have already agreed that they'll walk out of the talks if developed nations try to impose their will on them.
2. Is there any money on the table?
One of the most contentious issues at the summit will be figuring out climate financing - or how much rich nations will pay to help poorer countries develop new, clean technologies and deal with the devastating impact of climate change.
Although they have contributed relatively little to global warming, poor countries in the Southern hemisphere are likely to feel the worst effects of climate change over the next few decades. Rural African farmers already face changing weather patterns that disrupt centuries of traditional farming methods. Small island nations are sinking under rising sea levels. And national security experts predict that a scarcity of water and other resources will exacerbate conflicts in already strapped regions.
Now, they say, it's time for the United States, Europe and other developed countries to pay up. The World Bank estimates developing countries will need $75 billion to $100 billion per year over the next 40 years to adapt to climate change.
But that's more than most rich nations are willing to pay. Developed countries are expected to propose jump-start financing closer to $10 billion per year through 2012.
"I think it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to reach agreement on that exact long-term cost sharing," Yvo de Boer, the top U.N. climate official, said last week.
How the funds are distributed presents another difficult issue. The United States has proposed a new global fund that would operate under the World Bank. But poor nations and environmental activists have long been skeptical of the bank, which they say favors richer nations and focuses too much on the development of fossil-fuel industries.
3. Who's seeing red?
China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has long resisted adopting binding emissions limits. Its position has made reaching a deal extremely difficult because the United States is reluctant to act unless China takes some serious steps.
But some progress was made last month when Chinese officials promised a "carbon intensity target" that would lower greenhouse gas intensity 40 percent to 45 percent per unit of gross economic output by 2020.
Still, Western officials remain deeply skeptical of China's ability to follow through on its promises. Although Chinese officials promised their targets would be binding, they would not be subject to verification by the world community.
"Although this is a domestic voluntary action, it is binding," Xie Zhenhua, the Chinese climate policy envoy, told reporters. "As we've made this commitment, well, Chinese people stick to their word."
But China's "word" isn’t enough for many developing nations, who want to put in place strict systems to measure, report and validate the Chinese emissions cuts.
In the United States, manufacturing-state lawmakers also want to impose border taxes on Chinese imports if the country fails to take sufficient emissions reductions actions by a certain date - a proposal that sets the two countries on a collision course. China and other emerging economies have threatened to walk out of the talks if they are used to set up trade barriers.
4. What does Congress say?
It's a classic Catch-22: Without congressional action - or at least the promise that a Senate bill will come soon - foreign nations will be unwilling to make their own reductions. But unless international negotiators make movement toward a global agreement, U.S. lawmakers will resist making cuts at home, fearing that new regulations will drive manufacturing jobs to cheaper markets such as China and India.
That interdependency means that everyone in the Danish capital will be keeping a close eye on the congressional reaction to the negotiations. And one thing is certain: They'll be hearing the full range of outrage.
The House has already passed a cap-and-trade bill, and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will be in Copenhagen to assure the world that the Senate will follow suit soon. Democratic moderates released a letter last week saying they'll support binding targets - as long as competitors like China and India also make commitments.
But Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), longtime global-warming skeptics, are also traveling to Denmark - as a "climate truth squad" focused on informing the world that the U.S. Congress opposes the climate bill.
5. Is there O-mentum?
The Obama administration announced late last week that the president will travel to Copenhagen at the conclusion of the talks rather than this week, as he had originally planned.
But for Obama's in-the-thick-of-things visit to have much of an effect, he will have to make a serious commitment to getting a climate bill passed and signed this spring. International climate experts say such a promise is the only way to give other nations the reassurance they need to make their own emissions cuts.
"They're looking for that assurance from the president himself that this is going to get done," said Keya Chatterjee, climate program director for the World Wildlife Fund.
That pledge is particularly important, says Chatterjee, because the world has been burned by Congress before.
In 1997, lawmakers voted to reject any international deal adapting any climate treaty that exempted developing nations. It was a vote that effectively killed U.S. participation in the Kyoto climate treaty.
At the same time, Obama must be careful not to overpromise. Administration officials know that a repeat of Kyoto would be a major defeat for the White House - and for efforts to slow global warming overall.
Lisa Lerer
Labels: Copenhagen, global warming news, greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gas intensity
Proceed now to Refinance House With Bad Credit | Famous Entrepreneurs | Philippine News Online | Home Shopping Online
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
|
|
|
|
Business Marketing by Aredconsult
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
