Government in 'turmoil' over implementing flood precaution rules. 10 January 2014Last updated at 15:45 ET By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst Aerial footage of flooding in the Thames Valley area on Friday The government is in "turmoil" over the implementation of rules to prevent housing developments making floods worse, building industry sources say. A deal has been reached on the long-standing question of how drainage features should be maintained, but the policy remains postponed indefinitely.
One industry source told BBC News civil service cuts had left ministers "incapable" of implementing the policy. Ministers said reducing the impact of flooding was a key priority. Continue reading the main story As an island nation on the wrong end of a weather conveyor belt delivering storm systems across the Atlantic, huge waves and relentless rain should not surprise us. What is unusual is how the country has been hit for so long, for so hard, and on so many fronts at the same time. The thousands of miles of sea and river defences have rarely been so tested. This chart makes it painfully obvious that climate deniers are ridiculous.
Fungi could help boost crops and slow global warming. If not for an underground love affair between the fungal and plant kingdoms, today’s planet would be a far less hospitable place. Mycorrhizal fungi are critical for more varieties of crops than are bees — nine out of 10 crops have roots that are encrusted with these fungal tentacles.
The fungi rummage through soil, fetching water and nutrients and delivering them to the roots of crops and other plants, receiving carbon-rich sugars produced through photosynthesis in return. The fungi protect the plants, which they are basically farming for sugar, from diseases and drought. The myco relationship was formed some 460 million years ago, allowing plants to migrate from the sea onto land, where they started helpfully drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, stowing carbon in the soil, and releasing oxygen into the air. As scientists search for new ways to boost crop yields, they are turning their attention to this ancient and oft-ignored union between plants and fungus.
U.N. climate chief calls for fossil-fuel divestment. Take your money out of dirty energy and put it into clean energy. No, that’s not 350.org talking (not this time, at least) — that’s from Christiana Figueres, chief of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. On Wednesday, Figueres called on big firms that manage trillions of dollars of investments to dump fossil fuel stocks in favor of greener alternatives, arguing that such a shift would help the firms’ clients as well as the climate. “The pensions, life insurances and nest eggs of billions of ordinary people depend on the long-term security and stability of institutional investment funds,” she said. “Climate change increasingly poses one of the biggest long-term threats to those investments and the wealth of the global economy.”
From The Guardian: The United Nations climate chief has urged global financial institutions to triple their investments in clean energy to reach the $1 trillion a year mark that would help avert a climate catastrophe. Get your cash out of fossil fuel backed funds says UN climate chief. 15 January 2014Last updated at 13:34 ET By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News There has to be a significant increase in investment in clean energy, says the UN climate chief The pensions and nest eggs of billions of people around the world are being put at risk by global warming, says the UN's climate chief. Christiana Figueres has called on investors to pull their money out of fossil fuel linked funds. She said institutional investors would be in blatant breach of their fiduciary duty if they ignored the "clear scientific evidence".
Ms Figueres said that they should put their money into green assets instead. The issue of investing in oil, gas and other fossil fuel-backed funds has provoked a heated debate over the past 12 months. Carbon bubble Environmental campaigners have argued that if the Earth is to avoid dangerous climate change, defined as temperature increases above 2C, then up to three quarters of the coal, oil and gas that remains must be left in the ground. Watch the earth get hotter and hotter in NASA’s new animation. This plastic is made out of carbon sucked from the air.
Mark Herrema and Kenton Kimmel make a product that seems almost magic: They pull carbon out to the air and they make it into plastic. They call it AirCarbon, but they might as well call it AbraCadabra. Actually, it’s not magic — it’s just economical. Scientists have known for a while that this process is possible; it’s just not cheap.
But Herrema and Kimmel developed a catalyst that’s 10 times more efficient than other possibilities, USA Today reports. Which means their process makes financial as well as scientific sense. Does it also make climate sense? [Physicist William] Dowd, who is not a Newlight investor, says AirCarbon closely resembles polypropylene and could be a cheaper alternative. So, this product goes into the “every little bit helps” column rather than a “here’s how we’re going to save the planet” column. Send this comic to anyone who tells you cold weather disproves global warming. Oil (drilling) and climate action don’t mix.
The environmental community and the White House have beef, and it just escalated. On Thursday, a coalition of 18 environmental advocacy organizations — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the League of Conservative Voters — sent President Obama a letter expressing their opposition to his “all of the above” energy policy, which embraces oil and gas in addition to cleaner energy sources. Although they were careful to note that they “applaud the actions you have taken to reduce economy-wide carbon pollution,” they conclude that “continued reliance on an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy would be fundamentally at odds with your goal of cutting carbon pollution.” It’s not clear why the green groups have chosen now to go public with their frustration over Obama’s enthusiasm for domestic dirty energy production.
Obama finally put forth a comprehensive climate action plan in June. World Bank Head Calls for Carbon Pricing to Rescue Climate. DAVOS, Switzerland, January 27, 2014 (ENS) – At the World Economic Forum in Davos, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim called for a price on carbon, requiring companies to disclose their climate risk exposure, and greater investment in green bonds in the fight against climate change. The forum, which wrapped up on Sunday, starts off a busy year for climate action as leaders in government, business, and finance aim for an international climate agreement in 2015. “Now is the time to act for future generations before it is too late,” the banker said. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim at the World Economic Forum, Jan. 25, 2014 (Photo courtesy WEF) “In corporate boardrooms and the offices of CEOs, climate change is a real and present danger.
It threatens to disrupt the water supplies and supply chains of companies as diverse as Coca-Cola and ExxonMobil. Rising sea levels and more intense storms put their infrastructure at risk, and the costs will only get worse,” said Kim. “CEOs know this. Climate change: Food security should be top priority for Pakistan. KARACHI: Experts from various disciplines gathered at the Climate Change Conference in Karachi stressed a dire need for research on the issue in Pakistan as it ranked amongst countries highly vulnerable to the phenomena. The conference, organised by Habib University, highlighted the urgent need to incorporate climate change adaptation into the national climate policy.
The keynote speaker, Dr Bruce McCarl, a disitinguised professor of Agricultural Economic at Texas A&M University, sounded the alarm and advised the government of Pakistan to put a special emphasis on saving it agricultural sector, first and foremost since it was most sensitive to extreme weather. McCarl, who was also part of the Noble Peace Prize winning team of Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, said, "From agricultural point of view, Pakistan should focus on its most staple crops like Wheat" because food security should be the top priority in the climate change scenario. Fossil fuel giants asked to run 'climate stress test' at UN summit.
New York ‘climate risk’ meeting will call on oil majors to evaluate size of carbon reserves that are incompatible with warming world (Pic: UN Photo/Evan Schneider) By Ed King The world’s 48 leading fossil fuel companies will be asked to run a ‘climate stress test’ at a summit hosted at UN Headquarters in New York on Wednesday. Fund managers and investors attending the meeting want oil and gas majors to assess how compatible their assets are with global efforts to avoid dangerous levels of warming. US low carbon business group CERES, which runs a network of investors worth $12 trillion, is organising this week’s event. Its chief Mindy Lubber told RTCC the financial risks associated with a carbon ‘bubble’ of fossil fuel reserves that cannot be burnt was starting to concern experts, prompting the move to call for more transparency from the fossil fuel industry.
“One of the most important words and drivers of action on Wall Street is risk. Critical year. Climate Change Means No Food For Deep Sea Creatures. Not even those who dwell at the bottom of the sea can escape global warming. An international research team from Australia, Canada, France and the U.K. have found that those who live far below the surface of the ocean will not go unscathed due to climate change. Specifically, two very important and currently abundant types of ocean plankton, a key component of many aquatic animals’ diets, will be adversely affected as marine ecosystems change.
As scientists from the U.K.’s National Oceanography Center report in Global Change Biology, over the next century, the number of organisms that live on the sea floor will fall by more than 5 percent globally and by 38 percent in the North Atlantic. These deep-sea communities (which live at depths of four kilometers or 2.5 miles) are bottom-feeders who rely on plants and animals that live at the ocean surface and sink bottomwards after they die for their food. Comments Daniel Jones, the study’s lead author, hydroid Corymorpha glacial, credit: SERPENT.
Check out this shocking map of California’s drought. Climate Change Clouds Philippines’ Dream of Rice Self-Sufficiency - Southeast Asia Real Time. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images A flooded market in the farming town of Novaleta, near Manila, on Aug. 19. Climate change will complicate the Philippines’ efforts to become self-sufficient in rice, the country’s economic planning secretary said Monday. Arsenio Balisacan said preliminary data showed that 74% of the estimated damage from natural disasters in the country last year came in the farm sector, primarily affecting rice. The natural disasters include extreme weather caused by global warming, he said. “We expect these extreme events and unpredictable phenomena to become the new normal,” Mr. “For instance, supertyphoon Yolanda, internationally known as Typhoon Haiyan, damaged about 600,000 hectares of agricultural lands, with an estimated 1.1 million metric tons of crops lost,” said Mr. Haiyan was the deadliest storm in the modern history of the Philippines, claiming close to 6,200 lives and displacing four million people.
U.S. CO2 emissions are on the rise, and coal-loving members of Congress want to keep it that way. If the steady decline in U.S. carbon emissions in recent years has lulled you into a sense of complacency, this fact should snap you to attention: Last year, U.S. CO2 emissions rose by 2 percent over 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Brad Plumer provides a good explanation in The Washington Post. Over the past few years, the natural gas boom has made gas cheap and helped it displace coal, hence the declining emissions. So how could we get back on track? In the meantime, Obama has directed the EPA to exercise its authority under the Clean Air Act and place limitations on CO2 emissions from both new and existing power plants. Well, Republicans and the odd coal-state Democrat in Congress have an answer for that: because they don’t care about climate change, but they do care a lot about the coal industry. Rep. For new plants, the bill would theoretically allow EPA to set CO2 standards, but only under conditions that environmentalists say are sure not to be met.
Cloud shortage will push temperatures higher as climate warms. Climate scientists have looked to the heavens for help with their latest decades-long weather forecast. Their conclusion? “Oh, my god.” Science has long struggled to forecast how global temperatures will be affected by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial times, which looks likely to occur this century.
Recent consensus suggests that temperatures will rise by between 1.5 and 5 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 5.4 F). With a rise in CO2 levels to 400 parts per million, up from 280 in the 19th century, the world has warmed by nearly 1 C so far. By modeling how clouds will be affected by the rising temperatures, a team of Australian and French scientists reported Wednesday in Nature that they expect the temperature rise to be “more than 3 degrees” – at the upper end of the projected range. “4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous,” the report’s lead author, Australian climate scientist Steven Sherwood, told the Guardian.
Older trees best at fighting climate change. As humans age, we tend to pass more gas. As trees age, they tend to suck more of it up. A new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature has blown away old misconceptions about the roles that the most mature trees in forests play in combating climate change. It has long been believed that younger trees are better than their older neighbors at absorbing carbon dioxide. But the new research suggests that the opposite is true. “In whatever forest you look at, be it old or new growth, it is the largest trees that are the greater carbon sinks,” William Morris, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, told Grist. Morris and dozens of other scientists studied data related to 673,046 trees belonging to 403 tree species in managed and wild forests across the world. In absolute terms, trees 100 cm in trunk diameter typically add from 10 kg to 200 kg of aboveground dry mass each year (depending on species), averaging 103 kg per year.
Why Canada sucks on climate change. If you were old enough to vote in 2004, then you probably remember the refrain “I’m moving to Canada!” It was every disenchanted liberal’s threat after George W. Bush’s reelection. Wags even made a “United States of Canada” map, attaching the Democratic states of the coasts and Upper Midwest to their friendly northern neighbor. The sentiment was understandable. American liberals have longingly observed for decades that most industrialized nations are consistently ahead of the U.S. in adopting their preferred policies: universal health coverage, guaranteed paid sick leave, public child-care services, gun control, mass transit, and a price on pollution. Saying we should be more like Europe may sound faintly un-American to some, and can prompt objections that our culture is nothing like that of, say, France or Sweden. And so Canada has become the American liberal’s lodestar.
Meanwhile, Harper’s government is waging war on environmental science and advocacy. Species Stability Key To Climate Change Response. Climate change is 'killing Argentina's Magellanic penguin chicks' Foundations Band Together to Get Rid of Fossil-Fuel Investments. A Big Fracking Lie - Bill McKibben and Mike Tidwell - POLITICO Magazine. Last year was the fourth hottest on record, or the seventh.
Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños. At least there’s one positive thing happening because of climate change. Australia saw hottest year on record in 2013. White House smacks down climate deniers in new video. 2013 Continues Long-Term Warming Trend. Why the Arctic is drunk right now. Climate change sceptics are 'headless chickens', says Prince Charles | Environment. Djspratt : HOT HOT HOT as temps approach... Mangroves in Florida Expanding Due to Climate Change : Biology. Climate change: Planet to warm by 4 degrees by 2100.
Just add compost: How to turn your grassland ranch into a carbon sink. Death by sludge, coal and climate change for Great Barrier Reef? | Graham Readfearn | Environment. Solar wins: How sunshine will save the planet (really!)