Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Climate change may be sparking new and bigger "dead zones"
Barbara Juncosa, Scientific American
Wasteland” conjures up visions of dusty desolation where life is fleeting and harsh—if it exists at all. Oceans, too, have their inhospitable pockets. Scientists are discovering that climate change—and not just fertilizer from farm use—may be spurring the emergence of barren underwater landscapes in coastal waters. Expanding dead zones not only spell trouble for biodiversity, but they also threaten the commercial fisheries of many nations.

Dead zones are not new; they form seasonally in economically vital ecoystems worldwide, including the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay. Agricultural runoff sparks many of these die-offs; increased use of nitrogen fertilizers has doubled the number of lifeless pockets every decade since the 1960s, resulting in 405 dead zones now dotting coastlines globally.

But lesser-known wastelands are also emerging—without nutrient input from farms. Alarms about such dead zones first sounded in Oregon during the summer of 2002. Usually “we see many schools of fish and lots of different species,” says David Fox of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, but surveys revealed dead fish and invertebrates littering the seafloor. The culprit was hypoxia—low-oxygen conditions, which can occur after the decomposition of organic matter in areas where deep waters well up to the surface.

The emergence of hypoxic areas so close to shore has startled researchers, comments Jack Barth, a physical oceanographer at Oregon State University. A decade ago scientists needed to sail out 50 miles or more to find hypoxic water off Oregon, but he says, the zone was now so close that “a long baseball homer hit off of highway 101” could land in it. To scientists’ surprise and dismay, “hypoxia has become a feature of the coast,” with its reemergence near shore every summer, states Francis Chan, a marine ecologist, also at Oregon State.
(October 2008)

Global carbon emissions rising rapidly: study
David Fogarty, Reuters
SINGAPORE - Global carbon emissions rose rapidly in 2007, an annual study says, with developing nations such as China and India now producing more than half of mankind's output of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming.

The Global Carbon Project said in its report carbon dioxide emissions from mankind are growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the 1990s, despite efforts by a number of nations to rein in emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

Emissions from burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to the increase, the authors said in their "Global Carbon Project (2008) Carbon budget and trends 2007" report (http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbontrends/index_new.htm).

India would soon overtake Russia to become the world's third largest CO2 emitter, it says.

"What we are talking about now for the first time is that the absolute value of all emissions going into the atmosphere every year are bigger coming from less developing countries than the developed world," said the project's Australia-based executive director Pep Canadell.

"The other thing we confirm is that China is indeed now the top emitter," he told Reuters, adding that China alone accounted for 60 percent of all growth in emissions. The United States was the second largest emitter.

The project is supported by the International Council for Science, the umbrella body for all national academies of science...
(25 September 2008)
Related: Global Carbon Emissions Speed Up, Beyond IPCC Projections.

Met Office warns of need for drastic cuts in greenhouse gases from 2010
Juliette Jowit, The Guardian
The world will have to take drastic action within two years to reduce greenhouse gas pollution if it is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a new study warns.

Weeks before world leaders meet to discuss the next big international treaty on cutting
emissions, the scale of risk posed by failing to act rapidly is spelt out today by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre.

The study shows that cutting global emissions by 3% a year from 2010 offers the only possible hope of avoiding a global temperature rise of more than 2C - widely recognised as the threshold beyond which the worst impacts of sea level rise and drought become a significant risk.

In the early years, at least, responsibility for such deep cuts in emissions would have to be borne by the UK and other rich countries, which are responsible for most of the historic build-up in emissions...

...The warning from the Hadley Centre is likely to cause widespread concern, especially as the Met Office has a reputation for taking a cautious approach...
(1 October 2008)

Postcard from a Tipping Planet (animation)
Leo Murray, ArchitectureWeek
Please take a moment to look at this great short animation from Leo Murray. Just click to play.

It starts out with a polar bear floating on a chunk of ice, playing a violin. Then the narrator hops out and grabs the violin, saying "Give me that. This really isn't about polar bears anymore!" And you're off and running, for a compact, very clever, and scientifically sound run-through of some major climate tipping points — all left out of the current IPCC projections — and what these might mean to us.

Toward the end, there's even a rewind of the worst effects scenario, and a chance for a happy ending!

A chance which is particularly happy this week, as news is released on the latest worldwide carbon emissions report card (details here) from the Global Carbon Project. To quote Olive Heffernan, writing in the climate blog at Nature, one of the world's top scientific journals:

"Most striking is that, despite years of effort, carbon dioxide emissions are increasing at an alarming rate of 3.5% a year — faster than the 2.7% predicted by the IPCC in their worst case scenario, and miles ahead of the 0.9% annual rise in the 1990s. Worst still, current measures have been based on a middle-ground IPCC scenario. Pep Candell from the Global Carbon Budget told me that this was 'astonishing'."

Please don't be distracted by some news coverage that will trumpet minor changes in the ranking of the leading greenhouse-gas-emitting countries. Even setting aside real accounting complications due to economic globalization, the United States still emits about 20% of the world's greenhouse gases, some five times more than its per-capita share (with 4.6% of the world's population).

The animation and the latest annual carbon report both highlight this essential truth: climate change is now everyone's problem. ...
(24 September 2008)
Recommended by Bill Henderson.