Extreme Weather Hits Record High in 07

According to Reuters, the world experienced a series of record-breaking extreme weather events early in 2007. Here is an exerpt of the article.
GENEVA (Reuters) - The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months.
There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.
"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Program told journalists in Geneva.
While most scientists believe extreme weather events will be more frequent as heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions cause global temperatures to rise, Baddour said it was impossible to say with certainty what the second half of 2007 will bring.
"It is very difficult to make projections for the rest of the year," he said.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. umbrella group of hundreds of experts, has noted an increasing trend in extreme weather events over the past 50 years and said irregular patterns are likely to intensify.
South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region.
Heavy rains also doused southern China in June, with nearly 14 million people affected by floods and landslides that killed 120 people, the WMO said.
England and Wales this year had their wettest May and June since records began in 1766, resulting in extensive flooding and more than $6 billion in damage, as well as at least nine deaths. Germany swung from its driest April since country-wide observations started in 1901 to its wettest May on record.
Mozambique suffered its worst floods in six years in February, followed by a tropical cyclone the same month, and flooding of the Nile River in June caused damage in Sudan.
Uruguay had its worst flooding since 1959 in May.
Huge swell waves swamped some 68 islands in the Maldives in May, resulting in severe damage, and the Arabian Sea had its first documented cyclone in June, touching Oman and Iran.
Temperature records were broken in southeastern Europe in June and July, and in western and central Russia in May. In many European countries, April was the warmest ever recorded.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 22 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

A Little Trouble with Big China

China is causing talks on the next Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change report, due out Friday, May 3, to stall, according to the LA Times.

China, on pace to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has emerged as the major stumbling block in approving a United Nations report on how to stabilize global warming and generate the trillions of dollars needed for the endeavor.The report, to be released Friday in Bangkok, Thailand, is the third of four installments being issued this year by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.The first two reports, on the causes and effects of global warming, were largely scientific documents. The new report outlines a specific strategy to charge polluters for their emissions.China, which is powering its industrial development with its massive coal reserves, has been pushing for wealthy nations to bear the bulk of the blame — and eventually the costs.At the same time, China has tried to downplay the responsibility of developing nations like itself, according to some delegates at the weeklong U.N. meeting in Bangkok.Negotiations over the report have slowed to a crawl."China has been the biggest obstacle," said one participant, who did not want to be identified because the talks were closed.A bigger dispute looms as negotiations enter their final day.Debate over the economic feasibility of quick action, which pits the United States against Europe, was postponed earlier this week.In formal comments obtained by The Times, the U.S. delegation suggested that reducing emissions immediately could be too costly."The main issue is the interpretation of costs, whether it is reasonable or affordable," said a European scientist who helped write the draft now being revised. "Some studies say we can afford it. The question is whether we have to do it."The U.N. reports on global warming, which have been released periodically since 1990, are not binding agreements. But they have become powerful in forging an international consensus on climate change.Scientists and policymakers from more than 100 countries have been involved in drafting the documents.The United States is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 25% of all emissions, followed by China and Europe.The U.N. report suggests that stabilizing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere would require charging polluters up to $100 per ton of carbon by 2030, according to a draft of the report, which was obtained by an environmental group and provided to The Times.The idea is that if polluting becomes too expensive, industries will adopt new technologies to reduce emissions.The most stringent, and most expensive, scenario in the draft seeks to hold temperature increases below 3 degrees Fahrenheit. It would require global emissions to peak in 15 years and fall to half of current levels by the middle of the century.By 2030, the annual costs of mitigation would amount to 3% of global gross domestic product — about $2 trillion, or a year's worth of economic growth.The most lenient scheme would cost 0.2% of GDP in 2030. Emissions would peak in 55 years, allowing temperatures to rise by as much as 7 degrees.The last U.N. report, released in April, said such warming would be catastrophic, with rising sea levels, flooding and drought affecting billions of people.

Gas With a Side of Carbon Credits

The New York Times reports that Russian energy company Gazprom plans to bundle carbon credits with gas and sell them.

Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, has made handsome profits selling natural gas to Europe.

Now the company is positioning itself to make even more money, this time from the effluents from all that gas it sells to Europe. Gazprom announced Tuesday that it is selling carbon dioxide emissions credits that companies in the European Union need in order to burn Gazprom’s fuel.

The company is already testing the market for an innovative combination sale of fuel-and-emissions credits in countries that have undertaken to limit the release of gases that scientists say are warming the earth.

In 2005, the European Union, the major market for Gazprom, introduced a cap-and-trade scheme that allows polluters to buy credits that allow them to pollute and nonpolluters to sell pollution credits that they won’t use. That system is now being closely watched as Congress considers a similar mechanism in the United States.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

The Rich Pollute, The Poor Pay

Wealthy nations contribute about 2/3 of the greenhouse gases that are leading to climate change, while poorer nations will suffer the brunt of the consequences, according to a New York Times article.

The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.

But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Light and Power. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

No Stopping Global Warming

The explosive UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is finally out and it is making headlines all over the world.
The Eiffel Tower is shown just before the 20,000 bulbs went out Thursday Feb. 1, 2007 at 7.55 p.m for five-minutes. The City of Light went dim when thousands of Parisians joined in a five-minutes "lights-out" campaign aimed at showing citizens concern over climate change. (AP Photo/Michel Euler) (AP) -- The Eiffel Tower's 20,000 sparkling bulbs went dark for five minutes Thursday night and the lights went out at the Colosseum in Rome and the Greek parliament in Athens in a demonstration of concern about climate change across the European continent.

Read the LA Times story on the report. (As a sidebar to the story, the LA Times has a graphic illustration about curbing greenhouse gases for registered users. Registration is free.)
Here are the main findings, as published by the AP:

THE CAUSE: Global warming is "very likely'' caused by man, the strongest conclusion to date.

THE OUTLOOK: Now that the world has begun to warm, hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries'' no matter how much humans control their pollution.

TEMPERATURE CHANGE: The panel predicted temperature rises of 2-11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. That was a wider range than in the 2001 report.
However, the panel also said its best estimate was for temperature rises of 3.2-7.1 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2001, all the panel gave was a range of 2.5-10.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

SEA LEVELS: The report projected rises of 7-23 inches by the end of the century. An additional 3.9-7.8 inches are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues.

HURRICANES: An increase in hurricane and tropical cyclone strength since 1970 "more likely than not'' can be attributed to man-made global warming. The scientists said global warming's connection varies with storms in different parts of the world, but that the storms that strike the Americas are global warming-influenced.

According to an article in the New York Times, (registration required)
''It is critical that we look at this report ... as a moment where the focus of attention will shift from whether climate change is linked to human activity, whether the science is sufficient, to what on earth are we going to do about it,'' said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.
''The public should not sit back and say 'There's nothing we can do','' Steiner said. ''Anyone who would continue to risk inaction on the basis of the evidence presented here will one day in the history books be considered irresponsible.''

Read related stories in the New York Times Environment section. (registration required.)

Meanwhile, Al Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise awareness about global warming, according to the Chicago Tribune.
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Chirac to Bush: Sign Kyoto or Else!

French President Chirac has reportedly warned US President Bush that the US must sign on to the Kyoto Protocol and the successor agreement (Kyoto expires in 2012), or face paying carbon taxes, according to the International Herald Tribune.

Chirac repeated his call for the creation of a global environment organization that would centralize about 500 international agreements on the environment and 18 international bodies and departments whose remit is environmental.

"The system is not efficient; it's a fragmented system," Chirac said. "We must have a UNOE — a UN organization for the environment — which would in some sense be the environmental conscience of the world and which would be capable of coordinated action."

He said such an organization would have the power to impose sanctions on member states and could be modeled on the World Health Organization.

Chirac spoke as scientists from around the world gathered in Paris to discuss an authoritative international report on climate change, portions of which will be released on Friday.

Critics of Chirac say that despite his environmental rhetoric, his record as president is far from green. Chirac angered environmentalists when he conducted nuclear tests in a Pacific atoll within months of coming into office in 1995. He has been a loyal ally of French farmers and their highly polluting sector, blocking several proposed Europewide reforms. Most recently, Brussels rejected a French national plan for allocating carbon-emission credits to businesses for being too generous.

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One word: PVC

(Okay, so it's actually two words, polyvinyl chloride.) According to an article in the trade publication Plastics 2456, the race is on to find a more environmentally-friendly, health-conscious alternative to PVC shrink wraps on food, which can contaminate the environment with dangerous chemicals. Many countries have launched regulations to ban or limit the use of PVC films. Europe has prohibited the use of PVC films in food packaging since 1992, and Japan, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan have followed suit.
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Got Snow?

Not this year, not so much--even in the Alps. European winter temps are the highest in 500 years, and the alps are the warmest they've been in 1300 years, according to this alarming story.

Europe Confronts Sprawl

Urban sprawl – which is "when the rate of land-use conversion exceeds the rate of population growth" - is on the rise in Europe just as it is in the United States. If the trend continues, Europe's urban area will double in just over a century, warns the European Environment Agency. Europe is already one of the most urbanized continents. 75 percent of its population lives in urban areas.By 2020, that percentage will increase to 80 or even 90 percent in some member states. Read the full story here.