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UN issues severe climate warning ahead of summit
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
The world is now firmly on the path for dangerous climate change in the coming century, a major new assessment reveals today on the eve of the forthcoming UN climate conference which opens next week in Mexico.

All the pledges of the nations which have agreed to cut or limit their emissions of greenhouse gases, when added together, still leave the world far short of what is needed to halt the coming rise in global average temperatures to 2C, generally regarded as the danger threshold, according to the study from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The study sets a gloomy context for the international climate meeting opening on Monday in the Mexican resort of Cancun, which is the successor meeting to the abortive Copenhagen climate conference of last year...
(24 November 2010)

UNEP Emissions Gap Report Executive Summary
Full report

Avoiding catastrophe
Dr Nafeez Ahmed, The Independent, blogs
The revelation that carbon dioxide emissions are set to increase this year by over 3 per cent, despite temporarily falling 1.3 per cent between 2008 and 2009 due to global recession, signals an urgent warning that current efforts on climate change have simply failed. Even while we are still in the midst of recession – where the recovery is so fragile that another bank bailout is being pushed through in hopes of preventing a full-blown eurozone crisis – fossil fuel emissions have never been higher, and are projected to accelerate in coming years.

Officially, climate policy targets are aiming to cap emissions at around 450 parts per million (ppm), which would theoretically prevent global average temperatures rising beyond a ‘safe’ 2 degrees Celsius. The first problem is that we are long passed the danger point. In mid-2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed that the total atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (accounting for nitrous oxide, methane and so on) was already 455 ppm. This implies that we are already well on course to surpass 2 degrees...

Rapid decarbonisation of the economy is therefore not an option. It is a last ditch emergency response necessary for our survival in the emerging post-carbon age. But we cannot achieve this as long as we cling to the mantra of unlimited economic growth on a finite planet. As University of Surrey economist Tim Jackson proves in his Prosperity Without Growth, efforts to ‘decouple’ growth from availability of cheap fossil fuels have not only failed, they have actually gone in reverse.

This means we need to fundamentally re-think the very definition of prosperity if we are to ensure that our children inherit viable societies on a liveable planet. The economics of the fossil fuel age is now obsolete. It needs to be written for the post-carbon age.
(24 November 2010)

UN: Greenhouse gases at highest level since pre-industrial times
Reuters
Concentrations of the main greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached their highest level since pre-industrial times, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said today.

Concentrations of the gases continued to build up in 2009 – the latest year of observations – despite the economic slowdown, the UN weather agency said in its latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

Rises in the amount of greenhouse gases increase radiation in the atmosphere, warming the surface of the Earth and causing climate change.

"The main long-lived greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have reached their highest recorded levels since the beginning of the industrial age, and this despite the recent economic slowdown," said WMO deputy secretary-general Jeremiah Lengoasa.

The findings will be studied at a UN meeting in Cancún, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December to discuss climate change.
(24 November 2010)

Sipping Margaritas While the Climate Burns
Bill McKibben, Foreign Policy
Copenhagen, at least in winter, has a grim air -- I remember the Ferris wheel at Tivoli Garden kept spinning throughout last December's U.N. climate summit, but the windchill factor seemed discouraging. In a season for hunkering down, the damp squib of an outcome fit the mood. Cancún, where the next U.N. climate summit starts on Nov. 29, has a slightly different feel -- "a margarita for the delegate from Denmark, senora!" -- but drinks and sunshine won't be enough to lift the mood.

Careful observers may recall that last year's conference was weighed down by the fact that the U.S. Senate had failed to act on a climate-change bill. President Barack Obama was then promising very modest carbon reductions -- 4 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 -- and he refused to go along with the better proposals coming from Europe and parts of the developing world on the premise that tough targets would be dead on arrival in the Senate. "We're very, very mindful of the importance of our domestic legislation," his chief negotiator Todd Stern said at the time. "That's a core principle for me and everyone else working on this. You can't jeopardize that."

Or, as it turns out, you can. In the event, the president decided not to commit any real political capital to the climate bill, so it died an inglorious death in the Senate in midsummer...

In fact, I suspect it will be mostly holding pattern and very little landing in Mexico this December. The fundamental problem that has always dogged these talks -- a rich north that won't give up its fossil-fuel addiction, a poor south that can't give up its hope of fossil-fueled development -- has, if anything, gotten worse, mostly because the north has decided to think of itself as poor, too or at least not able to devote resources to changing our climate course...
(22 November 2010)

The Warming of Antarctica: A Citadel of Ice Begins to Melt
Fen Montaigne, Enivronment 360
In 1978, when few researchers were paying attention to global warming, a prominent geologist at Ohio State University was already focused on the prospect of fossil fuel emissions trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. His name was John H. Mercer, and when he contemplated what might be in store for the planet, his thoughts naturally gravitated to the biggest chunk of ice on Earth — Antarctica.

“If present trends in fossil fuel consumption continue...” he wrote in Nature, “a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress... One of the warning signs that a dangerous warming trend is under way in Antarctica will be the breakup of ice shelves on both coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula, starting with the northernmost and extending gradually southward.”

Mercer’s prediction has come true, and a couple of decades before he anticipated. Since he wrote those words, eight ice shelves have fully or partially collapsed along the Antarctic Peninsula, and the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than virtually any place on Earth.

The question now, as humanity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly. The melting of Antarctica’s northernmost region — the Antarctic Peninsula — is already well underway, representing the first breach in an enormous citadel of cold that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice...
(22 November 2010)