Global Warming May Shift Summer Weather Patterns

By altering the heat balance between land and sea, manmade global warming may be altering summer weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, a new study found. The study, published on Sept. 30 in Nature Geoscience, shows that the sprawling high pressure areas that set up shop over the Western North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans during the summer months have become larger and stronger during the past 40 years, and these trends are likely to continue during the next several decades as temperatures increase.

These changing weather patterns could have far-reaching impacts, from redirecting powerful hurricanes toward the East Coast, to making the Southeast and Central states see-saw more frequently between extremely hot and dry summers and cooler, wetter summers. In addition, a shift in the strength and shape of the North Pacific subtropical high could affect the South Asian Monsoon, which is already being altered by warming and increased regional pollution. 

The study does not formally attribute the cause of the recent trends, but says that the future changes will most likely be driven by global warming.

Although highs (the big "H" symbols on your local TV weathercast) are typically associated with pleasant weather, the position and shape of these systems shape large-scale weather patterns, helping to determine the locations of subtropical deserts. More importantly for the U.S., they help steer the most powerful storms on Earth, and modulate rainfall amounts in the Central, Southeast, and Mid-Atlantic states.

The Atlantic subtropical high, more commonly known as the “Bermuda High” because of its semi-permanent location near that Western Atlantic island during the summer months, helps determine whether Atlantic hurricanes recurve harmlessly out to sea before reaching the East Coast, or make landfall with potentially devastating impacts.

Hurricanes tend to skirt around the edges of the high by catching a ride on the clockwise flow of air around the periphery.

The Bermuda High also helps draw warm and humid air up the Eastern seaboard, contributing to some of the most intense heatwaves on record.

The study, which relies on climate model simulations as well as weather data for the past 40 years, shows that the Bermuda High has already expanded westward, which could be making summertime rainfall in the Central and Southeast U.S. much more variable.

“The intensification and westward movement of the subtropical highs may cause more landfalling hurricanes/typhoons and cause more intense Southeast U.S. rainfall variability, leading to more extreme events in the[se] regions,” said coauthor Mingfang Ting of Columbia University in an email conversation.

A 2010 study published in theJournal of Climate found that a westward shift in the Bermuda High helped cause a marked increase in the frequency of summers with “strongly anomalous precipitation” in the Southeast. Recent summers have seen dramatic flips between punishing droughts and severe flooding in states such as Georgia, for example.

According to the research of Ting and her colleagues, the sharpened temperature contrast between land areas and the oceans, which is related to manmade global warming, is the main mechanism behind the intensifying and expanding Highs.

“... In the future warming scenario, we show that this pattern is intensifying, and land and ocean heat contrasts are intensifying. This leads to the intensification of the anticyclones,” Ting said.

In the Pacific, the consequences of the intensifying and expanding subtropical high could be just as serious, considering that the high helps regulate the South Asian Monsoon season, which provides vital water for irrigating crops.

By Andrew Freedman@climatecentral.org

Climate Change Video

The US National Research Council has been doing a lot recently to expand background knowledge of the climate system and of climate change. In tandem with a new report discussing strategies for advancing climate modeling, they have put up a an introductory web site on climate models (including some interviews with some actual climate modelers).

More comprehensively, they have helped put together a series of videos discussing everything from the definition of climate to attribution of climate changes and future projections. The series is in seven parts, viewable here. There are additional resources here.

Temperature Target May Doom Climate Talks

                                                                                          The U.N. Climate talks in Copenhagen.

At the much-heralded climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, world leaders agreed to limit manmade global warming to less than 2°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial levels. The agreement at Copenhagen, however, and in multiple rounds of subsequent negotiations, hasn’t led countries to make actual commitments to the kind of emissions reductions that would put the world on a path to meeting that 2°C target.

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, this seeming inconsistency is not just unsurprising: it was inevitable. By focusing on the 2°C goal, negotiators inadvertently guaranteed that their efforts would fail, because there’s no hard evidence that any specific temperature target marks a dangerous threshold, with clear consequences for crossing it (instead, there is plenty of evidence that more and faster warming entails greater risks of major consequences, such as the collapse of the polar ice sheets). This uncertainty, the study argues, provides an incentive for countries to be free-loaders, jumping on board with the agreement without making potentially costly emissions reductions.

The main message, therefore, is that countries should not rely so much on the notion of a climate change “red line,” beyond which catastrophe could occur, as the basis for making emissions reduction commitments.

This might come as a surprise to political leaders, who for more than two decades have struggled to reach agreement on what level of temperature change, or what atmospheric concentration of planet warming greenhouse gases, would constitute “dangerous human interference” with the climate. For them, just agreeing to the two-degree target was viewed as an accomplishment in Copenhagen.

The study is based on results from a simulation game played by 400 students, who played the game for real money. The students can be thought of as climate negotiators. Scott Barrett, a professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a coauthor of the study, said that in practically every simulation, despite having the equivalent of a temperature target to shoot for, the players in the game committed to emissions limits that allowed the amount of planet warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to soar to what would almost certainly be “catastrophic” levels.

The problem, Barrett said, is that unless uncertainty about the threshold can be reduced to near-zero, individual countries have an incentive to do less than what would be required to avoid exceeding the threshold. In reality, this uncertainty can never be reduced to near-zero, Barrett said, because of the inherent scientific unknowns about what causes abrupt and catastrophic climate change.

If uncertainty could be reduced to near-zero, though, climate negotiations would be transformed from a classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which countries have a perverse incentive to do less than what is required in order to solve a shared problem, and into a coordination game, in which countries would work with one another to ensure they are making sufficient commitments to meet a collective goal.

“The long history of climate talks and climate behavior is pretty clear, countries say one thing and do another,” Barrett said. He said this study, which shows that identifying a “red line” may actually hinder policy action, provides new insight into the failure of international climate talks.

“The purpose of all this research is to understand first of all why things have gone wrong,” he said. “You need a proper diagnosis of the illness before you order treatment.”

Barrett said negotiators should seek ways around the “prisoner’s dilemma,”  perhaps by designing a series of smaller agreements that target individual greenhouse gases, rather than trying to craft an all-encompassing treaty that sets emissions reduction goals for entire economies.

The next round of U.N. climate talks kick off on November 26 in Doha, Qatar. 

By Andrew Freedman@climatecentral.org

Brazil: Rich Nations Owe More to Combating Global Climate Change

Major emerging economies' obligations to cut emissions under a climate change agreement should not be the same as those of rich countries, Brazil's chief negotiator said, signaling a retreat to an old position that has hamstrung years of U.N. negotiations.

Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado told Reuters during last week's U.N. General Assembly that Brazil is committed to working toward a global pact to cut emissions in both developed and developing nations as agreed at last year's climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

But Figueiredo said that agreement should adhere to the U.N.'s principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities," a line between developing and developed countries drawn in 1992 that enabled countries such as Brazil, China and India to escape mandatory carbon cuts, which the Durban summit had supposedly eliminated.

"Different countries would have different contributions in this fight against climate change, and these different contributions have to do with a number of factors of national circumstances," Figueiredo said, referring mainly to the belief that rich countries are responsible for "generating the problem."

The so-called BASIC bloc (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) in the U.N. climate negotiations stressed the point at a joint meeting in Brasilia last week to harmonize their position for the next round of negotiations in Doha, Qatar, which begin next month.

An agreement is to be formalized by 2015 and to take effect by 2020.

BUT WHOSE OBLIGATIONS?

The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the 1992 U.N. treaty that legally bound only developed countries to emission reduction targets because it did not place any obligations on the fast-growing economies, which are also major greenhouse gas emitters.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change and head negotiator, has said the "common but differentiated" principle created an unwelcome "firewall" between developed and developing countries.

Following the conclusion of the Durban conference, Stern had praised the agreement for removing reference to the principle and said it reflected the "kind of symmetry" that the United States has pushed for since the start of the Obama administration in 2009.

Figueiredo stressed that the BASIC countries were not backsliding on what they had agreed in Durban or at previous summits in Copenhagen and Cancun where they pledged domestic voluntary commitments to curb carbon emissions.

"It is my hope that all countries would like to have a system that would recognize their own national needs and their national circumstances.

"If you factor that in, but also the need for a differentiation of action based on responsibility but also on capacity to act, there you may have the blueprint of something," he said.

FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES

The ambassador said that the distinctions between developed and developing countries will also be necessary if the issue of fossil fuel subsidies - estimated to have been $409 billion in 2010 - is addressed in a future climate agreement.

In 2009, the leaders of the Group of 20 countries agreed to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2020.

They reiterated the pledge at the U.N. conference on sustainable development that Brazil hosted in Rio de Janeiro in June.

Figueiredo said the subsidies issue would need to be addressed in a "tailor-made" way to recognize that some developing countries cannot immediately ban them because they have given their populations access to modern forms of energy.

"I think this is a fair discussion," he said.

reuters.com

‘GreenGrok’ Duke Dean Chameides on ‘Climate Conundrum’

Climate goals are ill-suited to ‘how our brains are wired,’ a Duke dean says in outlining the ‘huge task’ ahead on climate change communications.

A two-day retreat includes artists, scientists, students, and cognitive scientists in an effort to better understand climate change communications challenges.

Here’s the recipe:

• Include a dean and several professors, most but not all from Duke University;
• Sprinkle in a neuroscientist here and there and also, for good measure, a dabble from some other prestigious university’s psych department;
• Add an artist, maybe of the photographer/filmmaker variety;
• And, for good measure if nothing more, sprinkle with a few real live students.

So. What’s the dish being served up?

The dean of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Bill Chameides, says it’s all part of an effort to resolve what he describes as a “climate conundrum.” And what he sees as climate scientists’ frustrations over how their concerns are being heard, or not heard, by the public at large.

“We continue to make progress on the science front,” Chameides wrote in a recent post at his The GreenGrok blog. He points in particular to efforts to “unravel the relationship” between climate change and extreme weather.

“But the American public seems at best concerned but unwilling to do much about it, and at worst dismissive,” he wrote, borrowing the vernacular from the “Six Americas” studies. He bemoans the situation in which climate science and climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts “have pretty much disappeared from the national dialogue …. scant few Americans will go into the voting booth on November 6 with climate change high on their list of vote-determining issues.”

Chameides in his post explores the notion of redefining the issue entirely, including changing the fundamental terminology of climate change/global warming and environmental protection more broadly. Some of what Chameides characterizes as “amazing insights” from cognitive scientists taking part in the two-day retreat near Asheville, N.C.

• People rarely make decisions based on information. Despite what most of us think, many a human decision is processed in the unconscious rather than the conscious.
• Subliminal messaging is very powerful. How powerful? Check out this video (and paper) on how millisecond-long exposures to an Apple or IBM logo affected the level of creativity in test subjects. (And if you want to test how easily you can miss a “hidden” message, check this one out.)
• People can receive messages in a defensive posture. For example, if someone has negative associations with environmentalists, a message containing the word “environment,” regardless of its content, can simply reinforce those negative associations, thus having the very opposite of the outcome intended. (That got me thinking about the term “clean coal.” Could it be a lose-lose phrase having the unintended effect of turning off both those with negative associations of dirty fossil fuels and those with negative associations of clean and green energy?)
• When given a non-specific, long-term goal, people tend to lose focus on it even as they make progress toward it — kind of an “I’ve done enough, time to move on” mindset. When given short-term, specific goals, on the other hand, people tend to accelerate toward them as they approach them — a “we’re almost there” attitude.

Given the retreat presentations by cognitive scientists, Chameides wrote, “It was pretty clear why messaging on climate science has been and will continue to be its own challenge, a challenge that is strangely a part of and an addition to the challenge of addressing the actual problem of a warming world.”

Despite what he sees as the “diffuse and long-term” goals of addressing climate change issues, “they’re just not well-suited to the way our brains are wired,” Chameides wrote. He looks ahead to a “huge task” of effectively communicating on the climate issue.

Acknowledging that a number of points and questions raised during the two-day discussion remain unanswered, Chameides said he and his Duke University colleagues and others will press forward on a number of fronts.

yaleclimatemediaforum.org

Peruvian Innovators Trying to Save Disappearing Glaciers

A workers carry buckets of paint up the slop of Chalón Sombrero. The paint will be used to whitewash rocks in an effort to recreate a glacier lost to climate change.


Peru is a dry country, dependent on glaciers for virtually all of its water supply. But as the climate changes, the glaciers are drying up and vanishing. But two Peruvian entrepreneurs have conceived homemade solutions to try and reverse the disappearance of Peru's lifeline.

Some 14,000 feet up in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, glaciologist Benjamin Morales stands in a windswept dirt parking lot and looks across a rock-strewn slope.

In the 1980s and 90s, Morales says, thousands of people came here to watch international ski tournaments. Back then, he says “all this was ice.”

The skiers raced down the glistening white Pastoruri glacier, whose broad white ramp unfurled from 2,000 feet above nearly all the way to this dusty lot. Since then, Morales has watched the glacier steadily melt away. Today, its closest edge is about a mile from the parking lot.

Global warming is eating away at glaciers around the world. In Peru, a few intrepid souls have decided not to sit by watching, but to try and do something about it.

“It’s been regressing year after year,” Morales said, “and this has caused the most important adventure tourism site in Peru to be all but closed.”

Morales knows that the Pastoruri glacier is hardly unique. Glaciers around the world are falling victim to global warming. In Peru, Morales estimates the Andes have already lost at least 25 percent of their ice.

And what’s at stake here is more than just a few ski slopes. Peru is largely a desert country and its thirst is relieved largely by glacier-fed streams. So glaciers here are a vital natural resource. 

That’s why a few years ago, Morales decided he had to do more than simply watch the ice melt.

“We want to find ways to stop this loss of good water,” he said as he tromped over the Pastoruri glacier in heavy mountaineer’s boots and a powder blue parka. “We want to start taking action to keep that from happening.”

Morales thought long and hard about how he could stop the local effects of a global problem. Then one day, it struck him: sawdust.

He’d noticed how sawdust is traditionally used in his hometown to protect ice brought down from the mountains from melting. And he thought, if sawdust can insulate a block of ice, maybe it could insulate a whole glacier.

So he bought 150 big sacks of it from a sawmill, hired a crew to cart it onto the tongue of the glacier, and had them cover a backyard-sized plot in about six inches of sawdust.

Today, ten months later, the impact of the experiment is stunning. The entire ice edge melted and sank in the summer thaw—everywhere except the sawdust-insulated portion, which remained stubbornly frozen. It looks like a shaggy mastodon towering above Morales’ head.

“So we have proven that it’s possible to prevent glaciers from melting,” he said.

Inventors call it a proof of concept. And having established that sawdust will insulate glaciers, Morales is now looking at other materials, like locally harvested straw, to do the insulating.

And he’s not alone in his efforts to save Peru’s glaciers.

Several hundred miles south, near the city of Ayacucho, herder Salomon Pichca is part of an effort to bring back a glacier that’s already gone away.

Pichca is a small man with deep set eyes who used to graze livestock in marshes nearby, until the local glacier disappeared and the marshes dried up. Today, he’s part of a work crew a couple of miles above the nearest road that’s slathering homemade white paint onto black boulders near a summit called Chalón Sombrero.

It’s backbreaking work. Pichca says the crew hauls lime up from the road on lamas, unloads it, then turns around and heads back for water. Then they mix the lime, water and other ingredients, lug buckets of the paint up the rugged slope, and slosh it onto the sun-warmed rocks.

Eduardo Gold, an entrepreneur from Lima who’s the project’s architect, says the idea for the project came from a simple idea. 

"The color white reflects light and prevents the transformation of that light into infrared radiation," he said.

Simply put, white rocks don’t get as warm as black ones.

Gold hopes an entire white slope will dramatically cool off high mountain breezes, and that summits like Chalón Sombrero could once again be cold enough to retain snow and ice year-round, beginning the process of rebuilding a glacier.

So far, Gold’s men have whitewashed an area the size of a supermarket parking lot and he says the paint has already brought back wisps of ice to the mountain. He hopes to prove his idea’s value once the crew has covered half a square mile of rock.

If it works here, he wants to do the same on other mountains.

The World Bank has named Gold’s experiment one of “100 Ideas to Save the Planet.” The project has also been embraced by regional officials. But some remain skeptical.

“From a theoretical point of view of physics, one can understand,” former park service chief Luis Alfaro said. “But the question is, at what price?”

Alfaro worries, among other things, about the environmental impact of the paint when it washes off the rocks.

Others argue that tiny projects like painting mountaintops or insulating glaciers can never save the hundreds of square mile of mountain ice that still remain in Peru. Instead, they say, Peru must build new reservoirs to capture and store the water once held in glaciers.

But Peru can hardly afford such huge investments. And with its life-giving water supply at risk, many here, like former Deputy Environment Minister Vanessa Vereau, feel the country can’t afford to dismiss any idea for saving its glaciers.

She says no one knows whether such experiments will work.

“But since we need to experiment and conserve water for the future, I think we should try. I think we should try," she added.


pri.org

Earth’s Carbon Sink Downsized

                                                                           Plants need enriched soil to make use of increasing carbon dioxide

As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to climb, most climate models project that the world’s oceans and trees will keep soaking up more than half of the extra CO₂. But researchers report this week that the capacity for land plants to absorb more CO₂ will be much lower than previously thought, owing to limitations in soil nutrients¹.

Because plants take up CO₂ during photosynthesis, it has long been assumed that they will provide a large carbon ‘sink’ to help offset increases in atmospheric CO₂ caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Some scientists have argued that the increase might even be good for plants, which would presumably grow faster and mop up even more CO₂. Climate models estimate that the world’s oceans have absorbed about 30% of the CO₂ that humans have released in the past 150 years and that land plants have gulped another 30%.

But the latest study, by ecologists Peter Reich and Sarah Hobbie at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, suggests that estimates of how much CO₂ land plants can use are far too optimistic. Plants also need soil nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, to grow. But few studies have tested whether soils contain enough of these nutrients to fuel growth in proportion to rising CO₂.

“This work addresses a question that’s been out there for decades,” says Bruce Hungate, an ecosystem scientist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. "It's a hard question to answer, because it takes a long time to see how ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycles change."

Long-term growth

In a 13-year field experiment on 296 open-air plots, the researchers grew perennial grassland species under ambient and elevated concentrations of both atmospheric CO₂ and soil nitrogen.

“Rather than building a time machine and comparing how ecosystems behave in 2070 — which is hard to do — we basically create the atmosphere of 2070 above our plots,” says Reich.

Reich and Hobbie found that from 2001 to 2010, grasses growing under heightened CO₂ levels grew only half as much in untreated as in enriched nitrogen soils.

Researchers do not have a firm grasp on the complexities of nitrogen and carbon cycle interactions, so “the vast majority of models do not adequately reflect nutrient limitation”, says Adrien Finzi, a biogeochemist at Boston University in Massachusetts. “The real strength in this study is that now we have this 13-year record of a single ecosystem. It provides a really strong case for the claim that soil resources and nitrogen limitation in particular can impose a major constraint on carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems.”

A study published in March modelled nutrient cycling across the globe to predict how much carbon plants could sequester over the next 100 years when nutrient limitations are taken into account². Those simulations, which included nitrogen limitations in northern hemisphere soils and phosphorus limitations in the tropics, predicted that land plants will absorb 23% less carbon than is projected by other models.

Researchers say that much more work is needed to understand how nutrient dynamics will affect carbon uptake — particularly in forest ecosystems, which are expected to be important carbon sinks. Often, says Hungate, these ecosystems seem to offer a “partial, natural, easy solution” to the climate problem. “But it turns out that in reality, ecosystems are complex and only have limited flexibility.”

By Amanda Mascarelli@nature.com

FEMA Must Require States to Plan for Climate Change's Water-Related Impacts

Today NRDC, together with the National Wildlife Federation, filed a petition with the federal government that, if granted, will improve the way states plan for the water-related impacts of climate change – saving money, property, and lives in the process.

Climate change poses a serious threat to Americans’ water resources, particularly with regard to water-related natural disasters like flooding and drought. Changes in precipitation patterns have already been observed across the country: heavy downpours have become more frequent and more intense, while droughts are also occurring more often in many areas. In fact, this July the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared thatmore than 1,000 counties in 26 states were drought disaster areas – the largest such declaration in history.

The risks of these natural hazards will only increase as climate change intensifies.According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, it’s likely that floods and drought will become more common as regional and seasonal precipitation patterns change. Rainfall events will become more concentrated, with longer, hotter dry periods in between. Sea level rise due to climate change will make flooding worse in coastal areas as well.

And these impacts aren’t going to affect just a couple of states. As a recent NRDC study shows, a third of all counties in the continental U.S. will face high risks of water shortages and drought by mid-century as a result of global warming:

It’s critically important that states plan ahead for these impacts. Natural disasters may not be entirely avoidable, but smart planning can save both money and lives by making sure that communities are prepared. The federal government has found that every dollar it spends on hazard mitigation (in other words, preparation and planning) provides the nation with about four dollars in future benefits.

On the other hand, when communities fail to fully prepare for future disasters, at best, they lose the opportunity to invest their resources in the most effective strategies. At worst, they put lives and property at risk.

Yet the federal government – specifically, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – does not currently ensure that states consider the impacts of climate change in their “hazard mitigation plans.” Under the Stafford Act (a federal law that governs disaster preparedness and recovery efforts), states prepare these plans in order to be eligible to receive hazard mitigation funding from FEMA. The law sets out requirements for what the plans have to contain. One of the required plan elements is an analysis of all natural hazards that can affect the state.

So why is FEMA approving state plans that don’t consider the impacts of climate change on natural hazard risks? Approving insufficient plans doesn’t just violate the Stafford Act – it makes no sense. If states are receiving federal funds for their disaster mitigation efforts, national taxpayers have a right to demand that the states engage in thoughtful planning that takes all potential hazards into account.

Since FEMA isn’t enforcing the requirement for states to consider climate change impacts, only a couple of states have voluntarily done so. Connecticut and California are two of them. But the vast majority of state plans either underestimate or completely ignore the effect that climate change will have on their flooding and drought risks.

That’s why NRDC is petitioning FEMA to comply with its legal duty to require consideration of climate change in state hazard mitigation plans. Preparing for more frequent and intense floods and droughts is a legal requirement, and more importantly, it’s just the smart thing to do.

Rebecca Hammer’s Blog@switchboard.nrdc.org

Can the World Save Lives and Combat Climate Change?

                             An innovative effort in western Kenya is attempting to provide clean water as well as reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Environmental, humanitarian and economic challenges do not exist in isolation, but that is how the world most often deals with them. To take just one example: one of the key challenges facing cities around the globe in the 21st century is flooding. Flooding is determined by environmental factors, from climate change to overcrowding of floodplains with habitation. Flooding is also often a humanitarian disaster when it strikes and can be an aftereffect of big development projects, like hydroelectric dams.

Or take the metals in a cell phone. As Judith Rodin, president of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, noted at her organization's event about "resilient livelihoods" on September 25, tungsten is the "metal that puts the buzz in your cell phone." Mining that tungsten is an economic development opportunity but also too often creates a humanitarian crisis when such economically valuable minerals become a source of conflict—as has been the case in the eastern Congo. At the same time, the mining practices used to extract such metals can be more or less bad for the environment and human health.

The U.N. buzz phrase of the last decade—"sustainable development"—is slowly morphing into a new sustainable buzzword for the development and humanitarian communities: resilience. Resilience means, at its core, an ability to bounce back fromstress in a healthy way, Rodin said. But, as development expert Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina rightly notes, resilience of what, to what? Enabling the poor to be resilient in the face of challenges like climate change may require a fundamental rethinking of the methods used to address both poverty and global warming.

After all, poverty and climate change are inextricably linked: The developed world has progressed, thanks to fossil fuels, and burning them has resulted in the elevated levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trapping heat, raising global temperatures and spawning weird weather. To resolve the energy poverty of billions will likely require burning more fossil fuels, but preventing catastrophic climate change definitely requires reducing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gas. "You cannot tackle one without the other," Rodin noted.

Thus far, despite some recent success in reducing poverty thanks to rising living standards in China, the world has mostly failed to truly tackle either. Although drought in the Horn of Africa is predictable and cyclical even under the present climate, famine still stalks the region. "To have drought at the level of 2011 and no deaths in Ethiopia? That was progress," argued Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme at the Rockefeller event. Yet, thousands perished of starvation throughout the region and populations in Somalia, Kenya and elsewhere remain reliant on aid—a decades-long failure that also encompasses civil war and political instability. "How do you eventually graduate from aid?" asks Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, CEO of Vestergaard Frandsen, a Denmark-based company that makes disease-control products.

Plus, "we are not winning the war on hunger. We are losing it," argued European Union Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva at the Rockefeller event. One of the big reasons that levels of hunger have started to grow again is the impact of climate change—variable weather means variable harvests whereas programs to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of cars have ended up taking away food to make biofuelslike ethanol. The lack of investment in agricultural innovation and the devastating impact of food aid on local farmers hasn't helped either. "Yes, we feed the hungry but we kill the farmers," Georgieva noted. Or, as food security specialist Amadou Diallo of the government of Niger said: "The basis of peace is food security." When people lack food, they turn to rebellion or terrorism.

Switching from food to cash grants except in those cases where food cannot be provided locally may be the key, argued Degan Ali of Adeso, an advocacy group for development in Africa, at the Rockefeller event. Such "flexible interventions" give the poor the ability to invest in their homes and villages rather than abandon everything and become permanent refugees.

In fact, one of the goals of humanitarian assistance now is preventative: keep people home rather than trekking to refugee camps, argued Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, at the event. Interventions that have been proved to work in that regard are as simple as selling off livestock or providing fodder for lactating goats. These ideas "solve the problem in a far more fundamental manner than rushing in with food aid," Shah argued—a fact that has been born out in academic research for the past several decades.

At the same time, the world will continue to urbanize, as one-time villagers abandon everything and move to the city for a better life. That may improve economic circumstances but it also tends to increase the impact of natural disasters. Floods are more devastating, thanks to migrant villagers building in neglected floodplains or other undesirable areas.

So finding new ways to fund environmental improvement and economic development at the same time will be crucial. And a new project in western Kenya may provide an all too unique example of how the two might be linked.

Life saver?
The LifeStraw is a plastic tube with a hollow-fiber membrane tucked inside. The membrane filters out bacteria, particles, viruses and other nasty stuff from freshwater, making it safe for drinking according to both U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization standards. That is no small thing in the all too many parts of the world where there is no guarantee that drinking waterwill not induce illness. All told, nearly one billion people worldwide lack access to such safe drinking water—a long-standing humanitarian crisis.

More than 870,000 households in western Kenya now have family-size capacity versions of these straws, part of a program to deliver, maintain and make sure such potentially life-saving technology is used. And this humanitarian program is funded byselling carbon dioxide emission reductions.

What's the connection between CO2 and humanitarian aid? One word: firewood. In the absence of the LifeStraw, these Kenyan families must boil their water to ensure its safety. To do so, they must gather extra firewood (more than that they would need just for cooking), which spurs both bigger the cutting down of trees as well as times when such critical safety practices have to be skipped due to a lack of resources. Skipping even one day of safe drinking water can mean a health disaster. "It's not a vaccine. You can't relax and stop using it," Vestergaard Frandsen says. As it stands, more than 1.5 million children die of diarrheal disease annually around the world, mostly due to bad drinking water.

In order to generate its 2.7 million metric tons worth of verified emission reductions to date, the LifeStraw effort sends field workers out every six months to ensure the technology is both working and being used—and have committed to keep doing so for a decade. Already, according to the company, they are "seeing a statistically significant reduction in the odds of a child under five presenting at a clinic with diarrhea," Vestergaard Frandsen says. Each LifeStraw can filter at least 18,000 liters—enough to supply a family of four for three years with their clean drinking water needs.

The carbon credits fetch between $11.50 and $14 per metric ton, generating at least $30 million for the project. But such a charismatic carbon project is all too rare these days, both because the carbon market is dominated by less robust emission reductions from heavy industry in China and India as well as development efforts that proceed with little thought of the environmental cost or co-benefits. At present, there is simply no way to scale up such innovative efforts because there is no larger market for such "premium" credits as well as no interest from aid agencies. "In development aid, we give upfront dollars and start hoping," Vestergaard Frandsen notes. In order to solve environmental and economic problems, that has to change.

By David Biello@scientificamerican.com

100 Million Will Die by 2030 if World Fails to Act on Climate

As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.

It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

More than 90 percent of those deaths will occur in developing countries, said the report that calculated the human and economic impact of climate change on 184 countries in 2010 and 2030. It was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of 20 developing countries threatened by climate change.

"A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade," the report said.

It said the effects of climate change had lowered global output by 1.6 percent of world GDP, or by about $1.2 trillion a year, and losses could double to 3.2 percent of global GDP by 2030 if global temperatures are allowed to rise, surpassing 10 percent before 2100.

It estimated the cost of moving the world to a low-carbon economy at about 0.5 percent of GDP this decade.

COUNTING THE COST

British economist Nicholas Stern told Reuters earlier this year investment equivalent to 2 percent of global GDP was needed to limit, prevent and adapt to climate change. His report on the economics of climate change in 2006 said an average global temperature rise of 2-3 degrees Celsius in the next 50 years could reduce global consumption per head by up to 20 percent.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Almost 200 nations agreed in 2010 to limit the global average temperature rise to below 2C (3.6 Fahrenheit) to avoid dangerous impacts from climate change.

But climate scientists have warned that the chance of limiting the rise to below 2C is getting smaller as global greenhouse gas emissions rise due to burning fossil fuels.

The world's poorest nations are the most vulnerable as they face increased risk of drought, water shortages, crop failure, poverty and disease. On average, they could see an 11 percent loss in GDP by 2030 due to climate change, DARA said.

"One degree Celsius rise in temperature is associated with 10 percent productivity loss in farming. For us, it means losing about 4 million metric tonnes of food grain, amounting to about $2.5 billion. That is about 2 percent of our GDP," Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said in response to the report.

"Adding up the damages to property and other losses, we are faced with a total loss of about 3-4 percent of GDP."

Even the biggest and most rapidly developing economies will not escape unscathed. The United States and China could see a 2.1 percent reduction in their respective GDPs by 2030, while India could experience a more than 5 percent loss.

The full report is available at: daraint.org/

reuters.com