All sorts of things affect temperature measurements, for instance the type of container that a thermometer is placed inside and whether or not air circulates freely within it. Could leap years also introduce a bias in the temperature records used to study climate change?

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters caught my eye recently - the abstract states that the Gregorian calendar introduces a "fundamental bias in four major temperature data sets used in climate analysis". The addition of an extra day in February during a leap year shifts monthly average temperatures every four years, compared to non-leap years, write the researchers (DOI: 10.1029/2008GL035209, PDF, in press).

That something so basic should have been ignored by some of the most eminent meteorological institutions on the planet - the paper mentions a data set maintained by the UK's Hadley Centre and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - came as something as a surprise.

I rang the Hadley Centre to see what they made of the paper. "The effect is real," John Kennedy told me, "but I think they may have overstated its importance."

"The bias is very small, of the order of 0.1°C, and does not affect long-term trends," explained his colleague David Parker. That's because the bias accumulates incrementally every year for four years, then is reset by a leap year.

Trends that show up within four years are not signals of climate change - it takes several decades' worth of data to see the sorts of effects that climatologists look for when studying global warming.

"It is irrelevant to global warming," Parker concludes.

I suspected something might be amiss when I noticed the paper's authors (RS Cerveny, BM Svoma, RC Balling and RS Vose) included some who have held views sceptical of anthropogenic climate change in the past. The paper seems to show that scepticism is not so much a science as it is an expression of results. Both Parker and Kennedy agreed that the effect was real. The problem is not the science or the result (although Kennedy did say he would have liked to know more about the details of the calculations). The problem is calling the result a "fundamental bias".

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics

John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as running mate has sparked a lot of interest, and no little concern, among both republicans and democrats. With all the fuss over hunting, creationism and teenage pregnancies, her views on environmental issues such as climate change, energy and the drilling of oil reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) have been overlooked. So let's look at them.

First up, Palin told Newsmax.com that while a changing environment will adversely affect Alaska, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made".

It certainly tallies with comments made by her spokesperson Curtis Smith in 2006 when she was running for Governor of Alaska, which suggested she wasn't ruling out the possibility that climate change is due to a natural cycle of warming on Earth.

McCain, like his rival Barack Obama, has outlined targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. So it is intriguing that McCain should choose a running mate with such maverick views.

Palin's track record on similar issues has contributed to her reputation as an anti-environmentalist. She sued the Department of the Interior for classifying polar bears as an endangered species, and she is against federal attempts to list Cook Inlet beluga whales as a threatened species. Although the whale population there has fallen from 1300 to 375 over the past 20 years, Palin said classifying the animals as threatened "would do serious long-term damage to the vibrant economy of the Cook Inlet area".

She encourages human intervention in wildlife in the form of shooting wolves and bears to boost caribou and moose populations, and she recently expressed her personal opposition to Proposition 4 which would have restricted gold and copper mine development to help protect drinking water, salmon and the Bristol Bay ecosystem from toxic runoff.

All this is at a time when President Bush is seemingly trying to protect marine wildlife, asking his administration to draft a plan to set aside three massive areas of the Pacific Ocean – the Mariana Trench, Rose Atoll in American Samoa and parts of the Line Islands. So is McCain's choice a case of opposites attract or is it a sign of things to come in his Republican Party?

Take McCain's changing view on oil drilling. Although initially he was against plunging into the rich oil reserves of north-east Alaska's ANWR, it seems someone or something has persuaded him to re-assess his position. Recently McCain called for the federal ban on offshore drilling to be lifted, a move supported by Palin and recently enacted by Bush. Now that the Alaska Governor is McCain's sidekick, will she tempt him into opening up the ANWR? She told Newsmax that "we could have a small footprint, and not adversely impact the land, the wildlife, that's part of Alaska".

Palin apparently believes the US needs to delve into Alaska's natural oil and gas reserves to relieve the nation's dependency on other nations: "We are sending diplomats to the Mideast begging for more oil production," she told Charleston.net. "At the same time, it is so easy to release demand right here in Alaska. It makes no sense to me."

McCain has proposed The Lexington Project as a means to produce "more power, pushing technology to help free our transportation sector from its use of foreign oil, cleaning up our air, addressing climate change, and ensuring that Americans have dependable energy sources." Although he may profess to incorporate alternative energy resources in his plans, I don’t hear much from Palin other than that they "are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop".

I get the distinct feeling that the little pro-environment voice that may be keeping McCain on the right track to addressing climate change will be drowned out by Palin's shouts. I guess only time will tell.

Gursharan Randhawa, New Scientist contributor

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics, endangered species, energy, environment, global warming, North America, oil, whale

I have seen the future for American efforts to rejoin the world community on climate change – efforts that will follow whoever wins the presidential election in November.

And it is happening on the other side of the world – here in Australia.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain say the US must cap its emissions of greenhouse gases, by issuing a limited number of permits to pollute and allowing corporations to trade in those permits. It's called cap-and-trade.

That's great in theory, but watch out for when large industrial and utility emitters discover that the rules will cost them. That's when corporations, even those that currently back efforts to halt climate change, will find reasons why the scheme is unfair and discriminatory and – this is where they will ratchet up the rhetoric – self-defeating.

That is what we are seeing right now on the other side of the world.

Australia pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol right after the US. Then-prime minister John Howard was a soul mate of George W Bush. But last year they opted back in when the new prime minister Kevin Rudd took over.

Some here down under say that Rudd – young, clean-cut, intelligent, understated and a bit professorial – is not unlike Obama. Be that as it may, it looks like Australia is just over a year ahead of the US in rejoining the world on climate. So for Rudd's problems today, read Obama's next year, if he wins.

Like the US, Australia has very high per-capita emissions because of its high living standards, coal-fired energy systems and addiction to the automobile. And last week its industrial attack dogs sunk their teeth into Rudd's plans to cap and trade carbon emissions. A big report from the Business Council of Australia published in the last few days claims a "real world" analysis of its implications show that many big emitters will either go bankrupt or relocate offshore.

That last bit is the killer punch, they hope. Sure, they imply, there will be winners and losers as the national economies moves out of fossil fuels and into renewable. But if the losers – those it dubs the "emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries" simply ship out, the emissions will continue under another national flag, and the only loser will be the Australian economy.

The headline-grabbing report says this group of companies – aluminium smelters, cement manufacturers, coal burners and many more – make up half Australia's exports.

So, this matters. If these heavy industries do move to the Gulf or China or India or wherever there are no current emissions limits, then global emissions will keep growing.

Sitting in on a blue-chip conference of Australia's government and business leaders (Rudd was there) last weekend on Queensland's Hayman Island, it was clear that environmentalists and policymakers do not yet have a convincing response to this argument.

They will need one. And not just in Australia. For I predict with absolute certainty that, whoever gets the White House, the same arguments will be heard in the US. And America's attack dogs are a good deal sharper-toothed than the Aussies'.

Call it a threat, or call it real-world pragmatism, but environmentalists have to find an answer to what is coming.

Depending on your politics, you may think off-shoring some industries from the rich to the poor world is no bad thing. But if it stops us fixing climate change, then we will all be the losers.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent, Sydney

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint, US

What's the best way to fix climate change, to stamp out the emissions that are warming our planet? I don't mean what technology. That's actually coming along quite nicely. I mean what are the international legal and financial levers that can pulled to get the technology, on the scale needed, from the test rigs to the national grids?

Later this month, in Accra, Ghana, the UN's lumbering Kyoto negotiations will have another stab at what to do after 2012. They will come up against the familiar stand-off. On the one hand, is the rich world's reluctance to accept emissions limits that will add to the cost of doing business unless developing countries subscribe to emissions controls. On the other, developing countries utter their familiar (and not unreasonable) cry: "You caused the problem; you fix it."

The answer has been staring us in the face for a while now. And more and more people - from business to politics to the greens - are catching on. It has an inelegant name: contraction and convergence (C&C).

It works like this. The world needs to contract emissions by more than half by the middle of the century. It's do-able and it won't wreck the world economy. (Bankers on a spree are far better at doing that.)

But there will be some pain. The only way of sharing out that pain fairly is for everyone to take on emissions targets, but targets that are fair because they are based on a basic parameter of need. That is: population size.

So every country should head towards annual emissions proportionate to its population. Most would have to reduce their emissions; but some of the poorest countries could raise them. That's the convergence part of the formula.

Of course, to ease the pain and make investment more efficiently, there would be massive carbon trading in the same way as is already allowed for under the Kyoto Protocol.

It's simple and it's obvious. Tony Blair's shuttling climate diplomats get it. Nicholas Stern, author of the groundbreaking report on the economic perils of climate change back in 2006, gets it. In Washington and Paris and New Delhi, some influential figures get it. "It's where we will need to end up, of course, even if we can't quite work out how to get there," one UN leading negotiator told me recently.

Why doesn't the world admit it and get on with it? Surprisingly, one reason is the long-term opposition of most environmental groups to the plan. I find this baffling and dispiriting.

Why the hostility? One reason seems to be that it is the brainchild of a maverick and sometimes truculent campaigner living in London called Aubrey Meyer.

So the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth can't claim ownership. And even the more radical climate campaigners - like the Guardian syndicated op-ed writer and blogger George Monbiot - have got cold feet.

Monbiot, a former supporter of C&C, has recently started publicly backing a proposal from his old mate Oliver Tickell, called Kyoto2, which would set up an international agency to control not emissions of greenhouse gases but the production of fossil fuels themselves.

Well, I can see why politically he wants to take on the fossil-fuel leviathans. But the beauty of contraction and convergence is that it doesn't require a global fossil-fuel autocracy; it is transparent, self-evidently fair and tackles the problem, not a surrogate.

If climate change is the central challenge for the world in the 21st century, then C&C is the most, perhaps the only, viable long-term solution on which there can ever be international agreement.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint

The collapse of world trade talks in Geneva this week, after seven years of deadlock, should send a shiver through the climate change community.

Why so?

After all, many see free trade as a major cause of the escalating global environmental problem. Anything that gums up the wheels of capitalism, some might argue, ought to be good for the climate.

Maybe so. But the evidence from Geneva is that, even on the biggest and politically most pressing issues, governments are willing to walk away from agreement if it might give an advantage to others.

And that is very bad news for climate negotiators. Especially because all the big disputes over who should do what to halt climate change boil down to concerns about competitive advantage in trade.

The trade talks foundered because of an impasse between the US on one side and China and India on the other - exactly the big-power confrontation shaping up over a successor to the Kyoto protocol. China and India demanded freer access to western markets for their goods.

The Bush administration feared that this would undercut US jobs. Neither side gave way and the talks collapsed.

Climate talks, which are set to be concluded in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, could founder in a similar fashion, even without George W Bush.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama say that, if elected, they will be willing to sign up to limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

But their priorities do not differ so much from those of Bush. Neither has any intention of signing a climate deal that imposes costs on US manufacturers that would disadvantage them in the battle for markets with China and India.

McCain says he won't accept emissions caps at all unless China and India accept them, too. Obama says he would be willing to make commitments in advance of the Asian giants.

But he warns that if they don't agree to rein in their emissions, then he will impose import tariffs on energy-intensive products equivalent to the extra costs that the carbon cap may impose on US manufacturers.

China and India, as they indicated at the recent G8 summit in Japan, have no intention of accepting carbon caps while their per-capita national emissions remain far lower than those of developed countries. Which seems fair enough, unless you are a US manufacturer or worker.

There are ways through this mire. One would be the "contraction and convergence" formula, under which nations agree both to contract global emissions and to converge national emissions towards some common per-capita entitlement.

That would be fair. But fairness does not seem to cut it in international diplomacy these days.

After all there are fair ways of organising global trade, but after seven years of talks the world has for now given up trying to agree on them. So what chance does the world have of agreeing how to fix climate change in the coming 16 months?

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint, US

The rest of the world is looking forward to the US returning to the international fold, in particular to its reengagement, post-George W Bush, in treaties like the Kyoto protocol. Both Barack Obama and John McCain are committed, but I see trouble ahead.

This could be a marriage in which the US and the rest of the world have very different nuptial expectations, regardless of who makes it to the White House.

Talks began in Bali last December on the next phase of the Kyoto protocol, to come into force in 2013. And the world is desperate to have the US back. Negotiators on the holiday island would done anything for just a kiss from the Bush team. They got a kiss-off instead.

The talks have a deadline for final agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. So come next year, Washington looks like being able to name its own terms for reentry.

Most obviously, they won't expect to be held to the emissions reductions agreed in Kyoto 11 years ago by the Clinton/Gore administration. Those targets required a 6% cut in US emissions by now, instead of the 15% increase seen so far.

Whether it is the emissaries of McCain or Obama who head for Denmark, they will expect a free ride back into the process, with today's elevated emissions the new base point for any future cuts.

That will make quite a few countries upset. The Australians, who rejoined Kyoto last year after departing with Bush, will expect the same. So may the Canadians, who stuck by the treaty in name but have so far taken no steps to reduce their emissions. In fact, despite promising an Uncle-Sam-size 6% cut, they have out-emitted their neighbours.

The Kyoto rules require any country that doesn't meet its target to buy spare permits from under-emitters like the Russians and Ukrainians. But so far Canada has taken no steps to do that. And if they use the US as a precedent, then why not the Japanese, or the Italians or the Spaniards, or anyone else still nowhere near their targets.

At that point, the entire edifice of carbon trading - the one success of Kyoto so far - could come tumbling down.

Even if all the above can be patched together, then another hurdle awaits. If McCain wins, he says he won't agree to any US emissions targets unless China and other major developing countries agree to targets too.

He has not said what kind of targets, but as China made clear after the recent G8 summit in Japan, they will have nothing to do with such a proposal. Which is hardly surprising, when Chinese emissions are, per head of population, only a quarter those of the US and a third those of Europe.

Obama's team agree they will have to make the first pledge. But even they say that, if there is no quid pro quo, than they will ultimately impose tariffs on carbon-intensive products. It is going to get nasty.

We may begin to see how things will pan out pretty soon. The next big climate pow-pow is in Poznan in December. By then there will be a President-elect in the US. He will have his entourage in Poland. They won't officially be negotiating, but every word they utter will be pored over.

Some thought that, when Bush pressed the ejector button and took the US out of Kyoto in 2001, he would doom the treaty. He didn't. But ironically, the return of the US could have precisely that effect.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint, kyoto protocol, US

Climate change deniers have been having a field day with a recent report of the first known case of a patient diagnosed with "climate change delusion".

The 17-year-old man believed that, due to climate change, his own consumption of water could run supplies dry, leading to the deaths of millions of people. He became suicidal, tried to stop drinking, and had been obsessively checking for leaking taps at home to prevent this happening. The case was reported in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

Andrew Bolt, a columnist at the Herald Sun here in Australia, got the ball rolling. He claimed that the "17-year-old [was] tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers."

Ultra-conservative US commentator Rush Limbaugh ran with the ball, reading from Bolt's article on his radio show. (Incidentally, in his show that day Limbaugh also expressed his concerns about children being encouraged to ride bikes to school rather than be driven because of environmental concerns. Mr Limbaugh: we are talking about riding bikes, not switching off dialysis machines.)

Both Bolt and Limbaugh would, in all probability, be aware that both clinical depression and psychosis - components of the young man's condition - are relatively common. The causes are still unclear, although genes, brain chemical imbalances, drug abuse and environmental stresses - things like domestic violence, not concerns about climate change - may all play a role.

Bolt also used the case as a hook to call policy makers who purport to take seriously climate change, such as Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd, deluded. Which makes me wonder how Bolt comes to terms with the drought that currently hangs over many Australians. In Melbourne, my hometown, it is the wettest time of year but the dams are only 30% full and we await summer with trepidation.

Or a report from CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology released on July 4th projecting that droughts are going to occur more frequently in Australia due to climate change.

Interestingly, the original journal article points out that it is well known that delusions are culturally determined. So in Memphis, a man might believe that he is Elvis; in Washington DC, that he is the President. Twenty years ago, apocalyptic delusions might have revolved around nuclear war. Today, it is climate change.

Of course, this case might just illustrate something that climate change deniers may be anxious to deny: in many parts of the world, concerns about climate change are no longer limited to a small group of professionals, but are a societal concern that is widespread enough to become part of 17-year-old's delusions.

And as the article notes, a 2007 poll found that 85% of Australians are "very" or "fairly" concerned about climate change, significantly more than those concerned about terrorism.

Rachel Nowak, Australasian editor

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics

In the latest instance of the US government apparently censoring climate change research, the New York Times reports that the White House refused to accept a report by its own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which stated that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled.

Speaking anonymously to the paper, officials from the EPA claimed that White House officials initially refused to open the email to which the report was attached. They then pressurised the EPA into eliminating several chunks of the report, including an analysis showing that regulating emissions from motor vehicles could produce over $500 billion in economic benefits over the next 32 years.

The report was commissioned after a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA was wrong to refuse to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. An edited version will be published this week, apparently without a firm conclusion.

Early last year two surveys of American scientists revealed widespread efforts by federal agencies to muzzle scientists' statements about climate change. The worst offenders were apparently NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: the latter is particularly alarming as it's the agency most directly involved in climate change research.

Michael Marshall, online editorial assistant

Labels: climate change, US

Well - is it? The charity Oxfam thinks so. They're launching a campaign called Sisters on the Planet centred around four short films which they screened in London last night. Each one features a woman on a different continent and her experience of climate change - or at least changing weather patterns.

The films are interesting - the ones of Martina in Uganda and Sahena in Bangladesh are particularly moving and informative. The message that Oxfam wants to bring across is that women are the cement of society. In poor countries especially, they are responsible for holding the family together, preparing the food, and fetching the water.

All these functions are affected by the weather. Martina and the other women in her village must walk further and further away each day to gather wood to cook on, apparently because of drought.



When the annual floods hit, the women in Sahena's community are responsible for gathering the children and moving the family to safer ground. At the age of 21, she now heads the local "disaster committee" which monitors the radio for advance flood warnings, prepares higher ground to keep the family and cattle on, and makes clay ovens which they store up high with dry wood to ensure that they can keep feeding themselves when the floods hit.



What are women supposed to do once they've seen the films? For Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam UK, it's all about lobbying politicians and telling them you care - a message which is brought home by the films of Melissa in the UK:



and Muriel, a senior member of Brazil's Environment Ministry:



There is no denying that the films cast climate change in a light which we are not used to seeing it in. But for me, climate change is not a gender issue. Climate change will not affect women more than men. In different cultures, where men and women have different roles, it will affect them differently. In African countries I have visited, men plant the fields and make the decision on when to sow the seed based on rain patterns.

But the screening in London last night proved that bringing climate change and gender issues together has one purpose I hadn't previously considered. The audience was clearly moved. A female student wanted to bring the campaign to her student union. Another member of the audience wanted to show the films on a green TV channel. All thought the movies carried powerful messages.

Climate change may not be a feminist issue, but last night showed that feminism can be and is being used as a tool for climate change campaigning. I'm not a campaigner, which I suppose is why the message does not wash with me.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change, sex

At this year's Royal Chelsea Flower Show, a silver medal in one category went to climate change researchers.

The prize went to a team from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. They created a garden comparing the traditional British garden of the 1950s with how such gardens could look in 2050. The scientists came up with two future gardens, depending on how much carbon dioxide humanity had emitted in the interim. The 'low emissions' garden was still fairly British in style, while the 'high emissions' garden had more of a Mediterranean feel, featuring plants adapted to summer droughts.

The photos below show the different gardens. Mouse over the images to see notes explaining the specific plants used. You can also see all the images in this Flickr set.

Overview of the garden



Low emissions future garden and 1950s garden



High emissions future garden



High emissions future garden - detail



Michael Marshall, online editorial assistant

Labels: climate change, plants

On board the Canadian icebreaker cum research vessel CCGS Amundsen, the sighting of open water has brought a group of scientists to life. They push themselves into padded bright orange body suits, don hard hats and steel-tipped polar boots, and head for the decks. Within the hour a host of instruments will be lowered into the freezing water.

The Amundsen has been wedged in ice for three days, sampling and measuring the snow, the ice, the algae growing on the underside of the ice, and the water immediately below. This morning it shifted to a "flaw lead".

Flaw leads are what bring the team of 35 scientists presently on board to the Canadian Arctic.

"The leads are windows on the future," says chief scientist Michel Gosselin of Quebec University in Rimouski, Canada.

Flaw leads are swathes of open water in between ice. They form as the ice shifts around the Arctic basin, pushed by winds, currents, and the rotation of the Earth. In places, the movement forces large plates of ice against each other, creating ridges of blue and white ice rubble. Elsewhere, gashes open up.

Inside and around the leads, life abounds. No ice means more light, more plankton, and so a stronger, denser food chain, right up to the top predators. Belugas and bowhead whales navigate down them, and they are not the only ones. "There are polar bears in the area, I'm sure of it," says Captain Stéphane Julien, as he flies over the waters in the ship's helicopter, scouting out the day's route.

The bears stalk the narrow cracks, the edges lined with hundreds of bearded and ring seals. Others have bored holes in the thin ice that forms overnight.

Seals eat fish, the next ring in the food chain and part of the reason Marc Ringuette and Caroline Bouchard of Laval University are here. The seals mostly eat Arctic cod, a fish we know very little about. On Monday, the pair dug a hole in the ice beside the Amundsen and dropped a gill net down, but adult fish remained elusive.

They are definitely around, though. Finer nets have brought back large quantities of larvae, which the researchers shove under microscopes in the labs crammed into every possible nook and cranny of the ship.

The larvae are just one of the signs that the Arctic spring is kicking off. Other teams have drilled cores out of the ice. At the very bottom, the blue-ish ice suddenly becomes brown: ice algae. Everything is sampled and taken back on board.

The expedition is not simply trying to measure the importance of flaw leads and how they function: it is also attempting to understand what the Arctic will look like in future.

The leads' influence extends far beyond Arctic life, and feeds back on the region's weather as well. Ice acts as an insulator, keeping the Arctic ocean warmer than it would be otherwise. In places where the ice opens up, that warmth is released into the atmosphere. "It's a positive feedback," says Chris Fuller of the University of Calgary, Canada.

The Arctic has warmed more than any other region on the planet as a result of climate change. Ice cover is reducing constantly. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center estimates that the extent of ice coverage in March is dropping by 44,000 square kilometers per year on average.

"That means there's more room for the ice to move, and if it moves more, you get more cracks," says John Yackel of the University of Calgary.

Catherine Brahic, New Scientist environment reporter, in the Arctic Ocean

Labels: arctic, climate change

The recent Nature paper suggesting that the world may experience a few years of cooling prompted predictable responses from climate sceptics. Suddenly global warming had been proved "wrong". Commentators who had actually read the paper rightly pointed out that a temporary drop in global temperatures won't mean much, as global warming is a long-term phenomenon.

But more recently there has been some dissent from within mainstream climate research. The scientist bloggers over at RealClimate don't buy the arguments in the Nature paper. What's more, they are prepared to bet on it.

The bloggers don't go into why they think the authors, led by Noel Keenlyside of Kiel University, are wrong, but the terms of their proposed wager are pretty simple. According to Keenlyside, global mean temperatures for the periods 2000-2010 and 2005-2015 will be slightly below the average for 1994-2004. The RealClimate bloggers don't agree. They want to lay two bets of €2500, one for each time period, on temperatures increasing.

So what does Keenlyside say? Nothing as far as I can see, although I've emailed him to ask.

He would have to be pretty confident to put down his cash. Climatologist Roger Pielke has crunched some numbers on the bet and shown that global temperatures would have to cool by 0.3 °C between now and 2010 for RealClimate to be proved wrong. That, says Pielke, "is a bit like giving 50:50 odds that Wigan will come back from a 3-0 halftime deficit to Manchester United."

But the RealClimate folks still have a point. If Keenlyside believes in his result, then shouldn't he put his money down? If he doesn't, why did he submit it a leading scientific journal? (Or any journal, for that matter). Bets are useful like that. If enough money is at stake, a wager forces us to say what we think will really happen, rather than what we want to happen.

Jim Giles, New Scientist contributor

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics

What are we to make of headlines like this:

"Next decade 'may see no warming'"?

That, and others like it, have been inspired by a paper in Nature this week that has taken a new look at climate change model data. Sceptics are loving it – but what does it really mean?

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and colleagues used sea surface temperatures recorded over the last 50 years to constrain other variables in an existing climate model. They validated the approach by "hindcasting", that is, by checking that the model predicted the right conditions over recent history.

Then to the forecasting: they reckon that over much of Europe and North America, the coming decade will see cooling, while Pacific regions remain the same temperature.

If it's true, it's a fleeting reprieve, not a commuted sentence; the paper is peppered with the word "temporarily". In about 2020 - and here's the take-home message - the model predicts the temperature curve will begin to rise again, in line with prior predictions like those of the IPCC. Any slowdown in warming would be a decade-long ripple on an upward curve centuries and millennia long.

And it is, after all, a model – built on assumptions and approximations that are not so different from the ones made by your local weather forecaster. While the model looks pretty good for Europe and America, it failed to recreate the conditions in recent decades over central Africa.

In any case we're talking about natural cycles of the Earth's climate, sometimes - and sometimes not - wholly removed from humanity's influences. The global thermostat isn't like a switch that gets turned on and off, a curve that goes only up or only down. It's a whole bank of switches going on and off and try though we might we still don't even know what some of the switches do.

This most recent effort is among the first to even try to do predictions over decade-long timescales, and should be applauded. But the big picture, both in terms of time and of policy, shouldn't be forsaken in light of this educated guess at a close-up.

Jason Palmer, New Scientist reporter

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics

It's the curse of any successful venture that it will almost inevitably become a massive target for easy (and even studiously detailed) criticism. Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is no exception and at this point I really wish it could simply be put to bed.

GeoJournal is coming out with a series of six papers today, under the heading "Scientists debate the accuracy of Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth". I have often found it amusing that the movie has its own acronym (AIT), and naturally the aformentioned scientists use it at great lengths.

One of the papers takes Gore's main arguments and their scientific underpinnings to pieces. I won't review it in detail now. We've done a review of many of them before on this blog.

Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, US, takes special issue with Gore's use of "poster child" events to illustrate the potential effects of climate change - things like Hurricane Katrina and calving glaciers. I absolutely agree. Gore's use of Katrina footage was very, very heavy-handed. It is generally accepted that no single event can be attributed to climate change (and the cause-and-effect link between climate change and hurricanes is still in the balance).

The closest anyone has ever come to that was a team of researchers who showed that greenhouse gas emissions made the 2003 European heatwave twice as likely to happen (Nature, vol 432, p 610). According to Myles Allen at Oxford University, refining calculations such as these may one day make it possible to sue an industrial polluter for a flooded house. It's quite possible that these calculations will one day be built into insurance premiums.

Steven Quiring of Texass A&M University discusses possibly the most interesting point: whether or not climate change is such an overwhelmingly accepted view among scientists that everything is being assessed on the tacit agreement that human activity is causing global warming. This is an argument oft made by climate skeptics - I personally have had several people tell me that the greatest scientific discoveries have come from those who have gone against the majority. This is true. Studies of skeptic theories are essential. But simply because somebody pipes up and contradicts decades of studies is not reason enough to declare it's all a hoax.

Now, if we could all just move on from nit-picking AIT... surely there are other things that can be done to advance science.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: al gore, climate change, climate sceptics

Can capitalism do sustainable development? OK, let's ask that question again without the jargon. Can I really help save the planet by buying products from all these big companies "going green" and selling Fairtrade products?

I have been thinking about this a lot while researching my newly published book, Confessions of an Eco Sinner. You will have seen some of my travel notes here at Fred's Footprint over the past year. Here is where I have got to.

Many companies are making a real effort to cut their carbon emissions and fight climate change. Whether it is Richard Branson's biofuels plane or Rupert Murdoch's carbon-neutral media empire, they mean business.

Some of this is down to emissions caps imposed by the Kyoto protocol, some to consumer and shareholder pressure, and some is real executive interest in long-term sustainability of both their companies and the planet.

The bottom line is they believe they can make money out of cutting carbon emissions. Hardly surprising, when trading in carbon emissions permits and voluntary offsets is now a business worth more than a hundred billion dollars a year. And no wonder major US corporations are leaning on this year's Presidential candidates to sign the Kyoto protocol, so they can join in the new brand of carbon capitalism.

And in my own small way, I am part of this, whether it is offsetting my flights, turning down the thermostat, taking the train or buying an energy-efficient fridge. The potential is so great that capitalism really could save the planet. But will it make a fairer world?

Here my optimism gives out. I don't yet see a way in which companies can make bigger profits by making the world's poorest people wealthier. Rather, we of the rich world seem increasingly to demonise the poor for daring to want a better life.

Sure, some of us buy Fairtrade tea, coffee, socks and bananas. But what I discovered during my book researches was that, though genuinely worth supporting, Fairtrade is a misnomer. Call it: slightly less unfair.

The premium price I pay for my coffee does not reflect what the farmer on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro or wherever should receive. Rather it reflects how much Western consumers like me can be encouraged to pay for feeling a virtuous glow as we stand in the checkout queue on a Saturday morning. And that's a different matter.

Some clothes companies would like to treat workers in sweatshops on the other side of the planet rather better. They have corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments devoted to the task.

But in the factories of sub-contractors in Bangladesh, India and China, I heard endless stories of what really happens. The day after the CSR inspectors come to read the riot act over workers' conditions, the buyers from the same companies show up and threaten to cancel contracts unless they get cheaper prices. Guess who wins.

And we are partly to blame. We may weep crocodile tears over the sweatshops, but we still buy the $10 jeans that create them.

I fear that, in coming decades, a combination of Western consumerism and corporate muscle will conspire to save the planet and starve the poor. Unless we are careful, we will unleash a new green and global fascism.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint

A paper caught my eye this week, thanks to its sheer provocativeness.

Marc Davidson of the philosophy department at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has decided to compare the rhetoric used by US climate "deniers" to that of early 19th century congressional debates on the abolition of slavery.

Davidson claims that historical hindsight shows how preposterous the claims made in favour of slavery were. He suggests they bear striking resemblance to claims made against taking any action on climate change by contemporary members of Congress.

The implication is that some years down the line, in a century or two perhaps, the comments of climate "deniers" will seem just as shocking as those of the slave owners of the 1800s.

What are the comments and how similar are they really? I'll let you judge for yourself. The full text of the paper is available here, though you may have to pay to access it.

Here is a sample:

On the uncertain benefits of the abolition of slavery:

"...the course of [the abolitionists] whose precipitate and ignorant zeal would overturn the fundamental institutions of society, uproar its peace and endanger its security, in pursuit of a distant and shadowy good, of which they themselves have formed no definite conception."
(in: Simms 1852, p 98)

Davidson compares this to the words of current US congressmen who mention the "inconclusive and often contradictory" nature of climate science.

On the cost of change:

"Their [the slaves'] value, at $400, average, (and they are now worth more than that,) would amount to upwards of 900 millions. The value of their annual increase, alone is 24 millions of dollars; so that to free them in 100 years, without the expense of taking them from the country, would require an annual appropriation of between 33 and 34 millions of dollars. The thing is physically impossible."
(James Henry Hammond, senator of South Carolina, 1836)

Davidson compares this to the often cited concerns that limiting greenhouse gas emissions will harm the US economy.

The crux of Davidson's argument is that the US economy now relies on oil in much the same way as the economy of the Southern States relied on slaves 200 years ago – as a key source of energy.

Although the quotes from the earlier congressmen are shocking, I'm not convinced the comparison is helpful. For starters, climate change and slavery cannot be compared. The former is a self-imposed "slavery" to a mineral source of energy; the latter an imposed slavery of one group of humans to another.

And although I agree there is also a moral imperative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, just as there was a moral imperative to the abolition of slavery, I do not believe morals and ethics are what will win the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It is no coincidence that the Stern Review received far more press than the UN Development Programme's 2007 report "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world". Political decisions are based on money, not morals.

That does not mean that morals should be ignored – just that the clever policymaker will make economic arguments to serve a moral purpose.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change

With a last-minute intervention from the top man at the UN, another from the president of Indonesia, booing, hissing, tears and even a call for the US to "get out of the way", a global climate deal was struck today in Bali. The conclusion to the high-level climate summit would have been unthinkable one year ago and as extraordinary as the process which led to it.

And although it is not quite as strong as many had hoped, this is an unprecedented agreement. For the first time, developing nations and crucially the United States have accepted to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

At 3am on Saturday morning ministers adjourned for the night with instructions to return at 8am. By noon and for the nth time this week they were once more at deadlock.

Around noon, the President of Indonesia and then the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon intervened to tell nations to get on with it, urge them to be flexible, and remember that the world was watching them.

“I know most of you are exhausted from lack of sleep. I come before you very reluctantly. Frankly I am disappointed at the level of progress,” said Ki-Moon – harsh words, coming from a diplomat of his stature. They had an effect and were greeted with a standing ovation. As nation after nation took the floor, each expressed their willingness to be flexible and accept the latest draft.

And then came the turn of the US. “We are not prepared to accept this formulation.” A stunned silence was followed by a crescendo of boos and hisses.

But nations continued to accept the draft until Kevin Conrad, representative from Papua New Guinea, put in words what no-one dared say:

“There is an old saying if you are not going to lead you should get out of the way and so I say to the United States: ‘We ask for your leadership but if you are not going to lead, leave it to us. Get out of the way.’”

“We have listened very closely to many of our colleagues,” replied Paula Dobriansky, chief US negotiator and, after a few more of the dialectic detours which the US delegation has become known for, “we will go forward and join the consensus”.

And so the deal is done.

As I explained earlier, it is not as strong as many would have liked. But there is no doubt that this is unprecedented. For the first time, developed and developing nations have both agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Until now, and under the Kyoto Protocol, only rich nations who at present are largely responsible for the higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, were bound by emissions caps.

NGOs concede that the agreement is without precedent, but are disappointed. “People in the world wanted more, they wanted targets” and the agreement is “diluted”, declared Climate Action Network, a coalition of environmental pressure groups which includes Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Meanwhile, the EU is very pleased, Hillary Benn environment secretary for the UK says what we have today would have been unthinkable a year ago and James Connaughton, George W. Bush’s chief advisor on climate, says the US did not back down and was prepared to work, and did work, in collaboration with other nations.

But many here agree with the head of the Pakistani delegation when he regretted that none of us have had enough time “to get out and explore the beaches.”

You know where to find me.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter, Bali

Labels: Bali, climate change

We are used to hearing the likes of US president George W Bush and Aussie prime minister John Howard clamouring for the world to ditch the Kyoto protocol. Their reasons, whether you agree with them or not, are political and economic. But it comes as a bit of a surprise when the scientific journal Nature publishes a commentary saying the same.

In this week's issue, two UK-based social scientists – Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University – have published a commentary saying it's time for the Kyoto protocol process to take a curtain call.

Rayner wrote to me in an email:

"We see no evidence of Kyoto actually leading to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, much less of stimulating the fundamental technological change that will be required to achieve the 60-80% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists tell us the world will need to achieve in order to prevent what the Framework Convention calls 'dangerous interference with the atmosphere'."

Rayner and Prins think the Kyoto protocol is too simple for too complex a problem. To quote the Nature piece itself:

"Climate change is not amenable to an elegant solution [limiting greenhouse gas emissions] because it is not a discrete problem. It is better understood as a symptom of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply-system of fossil energy. Together they form a complex nexus of mutually reinforcing, intertwined patterns of human behaviour, physical materials and the resulting technology. It is impossible to change such complex systems in desired ways by focusing on just one thing." (Nature, vol 449, p 973)

They go on to say that while there may be no "silver bullet" solution to climate change (such as setting greenhouse gas emissions targets) there may be a "silver buckshot" portfolio of solutions. And they outline five elements which they believe are key to forming such a portfolio.

They are:

• Focusing negotiations of emissions caps on the big emitters rather than trying to achieve consensus among all national governments.
  
• Allowing financial markets to figure out on their own how they want to trade carbon emissions rather than imposing a global emissions trading market.
• Putting public investment in research and development into energy on a wartime footing.
• Increasing the amount of money that is spent on helping people adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change.
  
• Working on climate change at all different levels, from nations and international conventions down to regions and cities.

I think it's great that some people are thinking about how to improve the political process that is attempting to deal with climate change. There is no doubt this process needs all the help it can get: a recent study suggested that emissions need to fall more dramatically than currently envisaged for so-called "dangerous" climate change to be avoided.

And their description of climate change as a "symptom of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply-system of fossil energy" is inspired and accurate. I once met a climate scientist who was running a research programme in West Africa, who told me the beauty of developing nations – and of countries in Africa in particular – is that they have a golden opportunity to look at the Western model, learn from its mistakes, and choose a better, more sustainable development path.

But I confess that I'm not entirely comfortable with a call to scrap the UN process entirely.
And if you look at the five points, what Prins and Rayner are suggesting does, in fact, have quite a bit in common with ongoing UN negotiations. Two of their points – energy R&D and adaptation – are actively discussed in all climate policy forums, and are on the agenda for the UN annual climate summit in Bali in December.

Where they do radically depart from the UN process is in their call to limit negotiations of emissions caps to the big emitters. The pair argue that striving for consensus among nearly 200 governments is unrealistic and counterproductive. I agree. The fact that the US government in September held talks among the world's top polluters is an encouraging sign that those whose emissions matter most are putting their heads together.

But what is not helpful is when these sorts of talks are not fed into the UN process. Then there comes a risk that one will detract from the other. Bush's climate change meeting in September took place four days after a UN meeting on the same subject, and unlike many of his peers Bush was absent from the UN meeting. Why not attend both meetings?

Bush's government also launched the Asia-Pacific climate agreement in 2005, which brings together the US, China, Australia, and others, in a pact to develop and exchange clean energy technologies. But, so far, this agreement doesn't seem to have yielded anything. Until such initiatives can demonstrate that they are concretely addressing the problem of rising global emissions, they will continue to appear as mere diversion tactics.

So, to come back to Prins and Rayner's commentary: yes, the process needs to be diversified. But it should not be frayed by a multitude of high-profile, low-impact initiatives.

Catherine Brahic, online environment repoter

Labels: climate change, kyoto protocol

There's always a chance that climate science has got things wrong, a fact which is illustrated by the IPCC's confidence intervals - which tend to be large - and error bars. (The IPCC says, for instance, there is "at least a 9 in 10 chance" that human activities are causing changes in our global climate.) Given that chance - how lucky do you feel?

A US high school teacher called Greg has created a series of 10-minute videos that illustrate the point nicely, and released them thanks to the wonders of YouTube.

The saga started with The most terrifying video you will see, which a user drew my attention to. Since launching its launch, Greg has received thousands of posts from sceptical viewers which spurred him on to produce a series of updates. The final version, entitled How it all ends is below.



I liked the style of the first video a bit better, so check that out too.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change, global warming, risk management, video

It has been a week of contrasts for Al Gore. No doubt he has spent much of it wondering if he should prepare champagne for breakfast on Friday, with rumors running wild over whether or not he should and would win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Just this morning, the announcement was made: the prize is his - or at least half of it. The other half goes to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, a judge criticised Al Gore's Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth for a series of inaccuracies. The ruling concludes a case brought to the UK High Court by Stuart Dimmock, a parent of two who was concerned to find that the UK Department for Education and Skills had distributed a copy of Gore's film to every state secondary school in the UK.

He argued that the film was political material, had no place in the classroom, and that its distribution to schools should be made illegal. Moreover, his legal team pointed out a list of alleged scientifically inaccuracies in the film.

The judge, Justice Burton, declined to make it illegal. In his ruling, however, he says Gore committed nine counts of scientific inaccuracy.

But was the judge right?

Sea level rise of up to 7 metres will be caused by melting of either west Antarctica or Greenland in the near future.

Burton: This is distinctly alarmist... It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of 7 metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.

Gore does not explicitly say that Greenland’s ice will disappear in the immediate future, merely that coastal areas will be dramatically flooded very soon. That point aside, there is, as Burton says, some debate over how quickly the ice caps – and Greenland in particular – could melt.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report predicts a sea-rise of up to 59 centimetres by 2100, but explicitly states that this excludes any water contributed by melting in Greenland and Antarctica because of the huge uncertainties involved. Many scientists agree that neither is likely to melt significantly before the end of the century. One exception is James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, US. Hansen strongly believes we may see several metres of sea level rise by 2100.

Low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls are being inundated because of global warming.

Burton: Mr Gore states "that's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand". There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened.

In 2005, the people of the Carteret atoll in Papua New Guinea announced their imminent evacuation. See this article for more details. According to this Greenpeace blog, the evacuation is due to begin in 2008.

The "Ocean Conveyor" in the North Atlantic will shut down

Burton: According to the IPCC, it is very unlikely that the Ocean Conveyor (known technically as the Meridional Overturning Circulation or thermohaline circulation) will shut down in the future.

Gore suggests that this density-driven ocean circulation system could collapse in the North Atlantic if it were to receive a large influx of cold water. The 2007 assessment of the IPCC states that it is very unlikely that the ocean conveyor belt will shut down, but very likely that it will slow down by 2100 (p. 16 of WGI summary for policymakers).

Gore implies that this could happen if the Greenland ice sheet melts. In 2006, a team of researchers led by Kirsten Zickfeld of the University of Victoria in Canada carried out a poll of 12 scientists on this question. Eight said they believed there was a 40% chance the conveyor belt would collapse if global average temperature rose by more than 4°C above pre-industrial levels. How much temperatures rise depends entirely on how society evolves and on our future energy supply.

There is a direct relationship between historic rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and in temperature

Burton: Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.

Historically, global warming events at the end of ice ages have not been triggered by rises in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, as explained in Climate myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming, this does not disprove that CO2 warms the atmosphere and that rising CO2 emissions have cause warming since the 20th century.

The receding snows of Kilimanjaro are due to global warming

Burton: Mr Gore asserts that the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming. However… the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

Only 21% of the 1912 ice cover on Kilimanjaro was still around in 2003. Whether or not the melting of Kilimanjaro's snow and ice cap is a symptom of global warming has long been a subject of debate. In 2006, a team of scientists apparently put the controversy to bed with a 2006 study led by Nicolas Cullen of the Tropical Glaciology Group at the University of Innsbruck. Using recent high-resolution satellite images, Cullen's team came to the conclusion that "rather than changes in 20th century climate being responsible for their demise, glaciers on Kilimanjaro appear to be remnants of a past climate that was once able to sustain them".

Read more about the study here.

There is, however, uncontested evidence that the world’s mountain glaciers are melting fast.

Lake Chad's disappearance is due to global warming

Burton: The drying up of Lake Chad is used as a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming. However, it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.

According to NASA: "Using model and climate data, Coe and Foley calculate that a 30% decrease took place in the lake between 1966 and 1975. Irrigation only accounted for 5% of that decrease, with drier conditions accounting for the remainder. They noticed that irrigation demands increased four-fold between 1983 and 1994, accounting for 50% of the additional decrease in the size of the lake." Read more here.

The impact of Hurricane Katrina was due to global warming

Burton: Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is ascribed to global warming. It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that.

There is still considerable debate over the link between the strength of hurricanes and climate change, yet given that hurricanes collect their power from the temperature of surface water, there is a plausible physical link. One paper published recently comes down more strongly in favour of a link than any other previous study. I recently discussed this finding with a hurricane specialist at the UK Met Office and according to him the debate is still not resolved.

Certainly, when Gore’s film came out there was no definitive evidence for a link. Also, very few scientists would try to link a single weather event to climate change. Studies can say whether the probability of an event happening increases with global warming, though, so far as I know, none has yet been carried out on Katrina.

To get a flavour of the debate, see Global warming link to hurricanes likely but unproven and Coral reveals increased hurricanes may be the norm.

Polar bears are dying due to disappearing ice

Burton: Mr Gore says: "A new scientific study shows that for the first time they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find the ice. They did not find that before." The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm. That is not to say that there may not in the future be drowning-related deaths of polar bears if the trend continues.

In September 2004, four polar bears were found dead, floating in Arctic waters - an unprecedented observation. The authors of the report in Polar Biology speculate that they may have died of exhaustion and this might have been a result of shrinking sea ice. They propose that polar bears may increasingly meet an untimely death for this reason.

Charles Monnet, first author on the paper, told New Scientist that "he doubts this was simply the result of exhaustion from having to swim further from ice to shore. More likely, weather conditions are becoming more severe in the growing expanses of open water, making swimming more difficult." Read more about the fate of polar bears and other animals here.

Coral reef bleaching events are due to global warming

Burton: Mr Gore says: "Coral reefs all over the world because of global warming and other factors are bleaching." [According to] the IPCC report, if the temperature were to rise by 1 °C to 3 °C, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adopt or acclimatise, but that separating the impacts of climate change-related stresses from other stresses, such as over-fishing and polluting, is difficult.

The IPCC states that most corals will bleach if temperatures rise by more than 1 °C over what they were in the 1980s and 1990s (Table SPM-1 in IPCC's WGI - pdf). Temperatures over the past 50 years have warmed by 0.13°C per decade (p 5 of WGI summary for policy makers).

Many scientists agree that limiting warming to 2°C above 1900 temperatures will need CO2 emissions to be cut by more than half from their 2006 levels by 2050. So unless drastic, world-wide policy measures are agreed, increased coral bleaching looks pretty likely.

Bleaching is caused by other factors as well, namely disease. There is some evidence warming will also increase the incidence of disease.

I will let you judge for yourselves whether Gore's movie deserves the label "unscientific".

For my part, I would say that strictly speaking, Gore oversimplified certain points, made a few factual errors and, at times, chose the wrong poster child (Mount Kilimanjaro should have been replaced by any number of Alaskan or Andean glaciers, for instance). It's unfortunate, but it remains the most comprehensive popular documentary on climate change science I have seen.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: al gore, an inconvenient truth, climate change, gore

Bjorn Lomborg's last book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World has been one of the most controversial of the last few years. So when we heard that he has a new book out we couldn’t resist getting him into the New Scientist offices to tell us more about it.

The book is called Cool it: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming and it argues that, instead of cutting carbon emissions, we should be spending money on more important global problems, such as poverty and disease.

Scientists slated Lomborg for the way he used data in his first book, so will he win them over this time round? Watch the video below to see what Lomborg had to say, as well what our own environment reporter Fred Pearce thinks of his arguments.




Jo Marchant, New Scientist opinion editor

Labels: bjorn lomborg, climate change, climate sceptics, environment, video

The irony is inescapable: today, Monday 24 September, representatives from more than 150 countries will meet at UN headquarters in New York to discuss future climate change agreements. More than 70 heads of state and government will be present - but not US president George W Bush.

He will not appear until the closing dinner. Instead, one might speculate that Bush will spend time planning his own climate change summit, which takes place on Thursday and Friday this week in Washington, DC.

How do the two stack up?

The UN meeting, "is aimed at securing political commitment and building momentum for the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, where negotiations about a new international climate agreement should start", according to the organisation's website. This conference, an annual event, is this year expected to lay the foundations for a successor to the Kyoto protocol whose provisions expire in 2012. "The time has come for decisive action on a global scale," secretary general Ban Ki-moon recently declared in the UN's General Assembly.

Bush's meeting, however, is not for everyone. Laudably, it will gather the world's biggest polluters: 16 countries that together represent 85% of the global economy and 80% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. This includes the leading "Western" economies and large "developing" ones such as China, India and Brazil. Sadly, it does not include the countries that are most at risk from the impacts of climate change: places like Bangladesh and most African nations that do not have the funds to build dykes and grow drought-resistant crops.

Bush's meeting, too, focuses on climate policy post-2012: when it was first announced in May, it was labelled "an effort to develop a new post-2012 framework on climate change". The two meetings' approach to post-2012, however, is likely to be very different.

The UN will no doubt focus on limiting global emissions of greenhouse gases. In August, a UN-led meeting concluded that scientific evidence suggests emissions need to be reduced to between 25% and 40% below what they were in 1990 by 2020 in order to avoid "disastrous climate change" - i.e. disastrous floods, droughts and other changes to the biosphere.

Bush has never backed such compulsory caps, and I'll eat my hat if he does this week. Instead, all signs suggest that he will call on nations to each adopt their own methods for addressing climate change. His favourite indicator has long been something called "greenhouse-gas intensity", which refers to how many tonnes of these gases are emitted in order to produce one unit of GDP. In other words: a nation's emissions divided by its GDP.

Bush favours this method because it promotes efficiency and because the US economy, generally, is becoming more efficient. Others criticise it for ignoring the fact that temperatures rise according to the overall amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, irrespective of the global economy.

I do not mean to brush away Bush's apparent willingness to discuss future climate-change policy with other big polluters. He has, at least, managed to convene a discussion between himself and those he has opposed for so long: the developing country emitters. But it has been pointed out that his time frame for "developing a post-2012 framework" is the end of 2008 - i.e. the end of his term in office.

This could simply be a way of convincing other big nations to delay action in Bali. Personally, I'm expecting to read at the end of this week another US agreement to increase energy efficiency and "transfer" (read: sell) technologies to developing countries that will help them become more efficient too.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: Bush, climate change, global warming, UN