What's New at IGLO
September 18th, 2009
This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.
by Pedro Leon Azofeifa
Although climate change has only relatively recently become a hot-button political issue, the idea that changes in the composition of our atmosphere could have serious consequences is not a new one. Around the turn of the century, Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Nobel prize winner in physics, was the first scientist to become concerned about green-house gases (GHG). Standing on the shoulders of the great French scientist Jean-Batiste Fourier, who observed that some gases absorb more heat energy than others, Arrhenius estimated the increase in air temperature if atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) were to double in concentration. He concluded that such doubling of CO2 would raise air temperatures by 9°F (5°C). Alarmed by the carbon that was unleashed by the internal combustion engine and the industrial revolution, he stated, “We are evaporating our carbon mines into the air.”
The industrial revolution transformed the way we use energy: humans, who for most of history depended on energy produced by current photosynthesis, were now living on energy produced by ancient photosynthesis: carbon, oil, and gas. The vast deposits of carbon created by ancient photosynthesis were transferred back into the atmosphere during the industrial revolution, to the tune of many gigatons (10¹²) of carbon every year. The outstanding issue is that we have removed gigatons of solid carbon, the result of years of photosynthesis, and converted it into carbon gases by burning fossil fuels, by cutting down our forests, and by emitting methane (another potent GHG, identified by Fourier) from our waste products.
Since Arrhenius time, it has become clear that the accumulation of anthropogenic (or derived from human activities) GHG is not a hypothetical problem, although over half a century went by before his concerns were resurrected. In 1957, the Scripps Oceanographic Institute hired a young scientist named Charles Keeling to establish monitoring stations in Hawaii and the Antarctic. For decades, Keeling accumulated daily records, detecting without a doubt a constant yearly increase in CO2 concentration, whose rate of increase was also increasing. Initially rates were measured at 0.7ppm (parts per million) per year, then later at 1.5 ppm/year, and currently at about 3.0 ppm/year, bringing us to a present day concentration of approximately 387ppm. If we continue with business-as-usual, then by 2050, the actual rate of increase could double the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial concentration, putting us at a concentration of around 560ppm. Remarkably, the advanced computer systems that are now used to analyze climate change have largely confirmed Arrhenius’ calculations.
The consequences of this increase in GHG have been analyzed by many scientists, including the consortium of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) of the United Nations. The IPCC predicts many catastrophic effects driven by the impact of GHG on climate patterns, ice melting, ocean life, and atmospheric transformations. These scientists have also come to understand that the climate system is very complex and subject to many inertial and feedback effects that may not always be predictable and will require continuous refinements of the climate models. At any rate, many experts propose that climate change impacts are already evident and will increasingly represent a hazard and cost to nations at risk. The effects will not be limited to changes in weather–the economic impact of climate change has been addressed by Nicolas Stern, who concluded that rapid action to address climate change now will represent immense savings.
The COP15 meeting in Copenhagen is indeed of great importance to the future of high risk territories like islands and low lying shores. The Central American Isthmus (which includes Costa Rica) is one of those high risk regions due to its proximity to the unstable Caribbean basin and the Pacific Ocean, with a newly found potential for generating storms and hurricanes. It is also a highly seismic region with much volcanic activity. It is clear that regions like ours will require mitigation and adaptation activities. Lowland regions will have to be monitored and readiness plans should be prepared and communicated.
Costa Rica has participated actively in the meetings preparing for the Copenhagen event. Carolina Mauri, an environmental lawyer, has represented the Presidential initiative, working closely with the Ministry of the Environment (MINAET) and the Ministry of Foreign Relations. During the launch of the Peace with Nature Initiative, President Oscar Arias proposed that Costa Rica become carbon-neutral by the bicentennial of independence in 2021, making ours one of the first countries to mitigate for all its anthropogenic emissions. This is a position that is simple to understand and which can, in principle, be adopted by individuals, companies, universities, cities, regions, and whole countries. Several other countries have made similar commitments to complete mitigation before the end of the century.
Of course, the success of Costa Rica in reaching this goal, which principally involves changes in its transport system, will make very little difference if all countries do not make similar commitments. The target baseline reached after human economies become de-carbonized will presumably be about 350ppm. Success in meeting this target will indeed require funding, research, innovation, and sharing of new technologies that can harness solar, wind, water, and geothermal sources. More information at www.pazconlanaturaleza.org.
Pedro Leon Azofeifa, Scientific Advisor to the President of Costa Rica – Dr. Leon, a founding member of the Costa Rica Academy of Sciences and the first Costa Rican scientist to be elected to the United States’ National Academy of Sciences.
September 2nd, 2009
This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.
A deal in Copenhagen cannot happen without political intervention…by you.
by Keya Chatterjee
Last week in Bonn, Germany, at a United Nations climate meeting, I had the privilege of sitting down with a small U.S. Congressional staff delegation and ambassador Masao Nakayama from Micronesia. Ambassador Nakayama, a soft spoken, distinguished man who speaks deliberately with slightly accented but otherwise perfect English, opened the meeting by making sure we understood that his people lived on low lying islands that were experiencing devastating impacts of climate change. But his main objective was to convey why this fact was so important to the United States. “Micronesia has a special relationship with the U.S.,” he told us. Apparently under the Compact with the United States, Micronesia has agreed that unless the United States was consulted, the only military that could be based in Micronesia’s territory was the U.S. military. Including water, that means that an area the size of the continental United States is now securely navigable by the U.S. military. But as islands become uninhabitable due to climate change, Micronesia’s territory (and hence U.S. military presence) will start to shrink because uninhabited islands cannot claim coastal waters as part of their territory. This means that climate change will directly impact the U.S. military’s ability to maintain a presence in the Pacific.
What made the ambassador’s testimony so surprising was that it was put in terms of what the U.S. military stood to lose, rather than focusing on what must surely be more dear to his heart–loss of lives, human suffering, and the devastation of Micronesia’s geography, cultures, and languages. He simply said, “The U.S. will benefit from our survival in military terms, so we ask for your help in assuring that our nation will survive.”
These stories always come to mind as I talk to friends here at home about whether the $0.40 per day tag of the U.S. climate legislation is too high for them…
Sadly, this testimony and others like it about the impacts of climate change happened mostly in the side meetings of the UN climate meeting in Bonn, that we were all attending. The stories that we heard every day over lunch conveyed an urgency that stood in stark contrast to the pace of the negotiations to finalize a new UN treaty in Copenhagen this December. Here in the United States, that urgency stands in even starker contrast to the pace and ambition of the US Senate in securing support for action on climate change.
That said, there has been positive movement both in the United States and internationally in the past months, and there is reason to believe that the pace of action will increase. The buzz around Copenhagen is palpable throughout the climate community, and anticipation of this global meeting has been one of the major forces driving the timetable for US Congressional action on climate change.
The pressure to deliver a climate deal in Copenhagen is also evident in the UN process. Last week’s meeting in Bonn, was the third meeting of its kind in 6 months. The formal meetings were focused on consolidating the nearly 200-page document that will need to be cut by an order of magnitude between now and Copenhagen. The process is painstakingly slow, but it is moving, and the facilitators of the sessions are starting to boil down each chapter into a readable text.
Beyond consolidating text, there were other successes at Bonn:
- More countries than ever before now accept that the outcome of Copenhagen must be a legally binding treaty
- There is increased agreement on aviation and shipping, which were left out of the Kyoto Protocol. The proposal being discussed now would both reduce greenhouse gas emissions from those sectors and raise resources to help the most vulnerable communities and ecosystems prepare for the impacts of climate change.
The positive outcomes are still too few and far between, however, and the chairs and facilitators must work to get permission to continue negotiating text changes in the next month and a half, ahead of the next meeting in Bangkok. The discussions to make the text clearer will also shed more light on some of the buried conflicts, involving things like Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), and Assigned Amount Units (AAUs).
To navigate these thorny acronyms and coded arguments, we have to rely on the political will of heads of state, finance ministers, and ministers of foreign affairs. After a side meeting about the G-20 and finance, for example, it became clear that more push is needed from political leaders in order to break the deadlock on climate finance. On the other hand, a side meeting on the topic of deforestation (which accounts for nearly 20% of global CO2 emissions) was more successful thanks to strong signals from the U.S. House of Representatives that there will be support for parties who wish to reduce deforestation dramatically. Because the U.S. Congressional support included support above and beyond ‘offsets,’ countries had confidence that their actions domestically would not reduce the amount of action happening in the United States, which was especially important.
As evidenced by our conversations with Micronesia’s ambassador, the voices of the vulnerable countries provided the most clear and compelling clarion call throughout the meeting. In the closing plenary of the meeting, Bangladesh made a plea to negotiators to shorten the negotiating text, so that a deal could be struck in December and Bangladesh could have a chance for survival.
Bangladesh’s statement was clear: The next four months will decide our place in history books and whether we can ensure the survival of the most vulnerable communities in every country of the world.
The readers of this web site all know that an international agreement that curbs emissions and prepares for climate change impacts will help our global economy and secure a better future for generations to come. In the United States, it will start to reverse the trend of larger, more devastating fires in the West, increased drought in the Southeast, and increased storm intensity on the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard. Finally, it will have key elements that will help us prepare for the impacts that we are already experiencing.
Those of us who understand all of this cannot afford to be silent. A deal in Copenhagen is at stake, and the future of the planet is at risk. It’s time for all of us to tell our politicians to act now, and to talk to our friends and neighbors and ask them to do the same. To paraphrase the ambassador from Micronesia: I ask for your help in assuring that the planet will survive.
Keya Chatterjee, Deputy Director, Climate Change, World Wildlife Foundation – Ms. Chatterjee is part of WWF’s climate team, working on every level to bring awareness about climate change to the public and to faciliate progress at the highest levels of government toward a new global climate treaty.
August 19th, 2009
This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.
Latest U.S. Climate Assessment Flags Impacts Ongoing Today
by David Herring
Having served for more than 17 years as a science writer, editor, and public speaker for two U.S. science agencies, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to communicate effectively about science. So it is with some chagrin that I call attention to the highly effective communication campaign that various “dismissive”* entities have been waging to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) among the public regarding climate change.
“FUD” is a shorthand term coined by marketers and public relations experts to refer to a particular communications strategy. It’s a strategy that is well understood and widely used to influence public opinion. Sadly, it’s a strategy that works, and we’re seeing it used a lot today in public forums about science policy topics facing our nation (consider health care insurance, stem cell research, and evolution as recent cases in point).
For practitioners of FUD, the rules of the game are simple: question everything your opponents say and seek to prove nothing. Invoke uncertainty if you can; exaggerate, obfuscate, or even outright lie if you can’t. Objectivity isn’t the objective; winning is. You win at FUD if you can prevent your opponents from successfully enacting any public policy action that would change the status quo.
Thus far, the practitioners of FUD have been winning the climate “debate.” Mind you, theirs isn’t a scientific debate; it’s a rhetorical one. And witness: no national or international public policy has been enacted to significantly address the roots of the climate change problem. Study after study on public understanding and attitudes about climate change reveal a growing majority of Americans are convinced that “climate change is real” and represents “a serious problem.” Yet there also remains a lingering, false public perception that climate scientists are “uncertain” and that there’s still some debate among scientists about what’s causing our world to warm. This is precisely the false perception fomented by the proponents of FUD.
To help to put that lingering perception to bed, please note that in June 2009 the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) issued the last in a series of 21 major climate science reports (available here: http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments). Together with the IPCC Climate Assessments, these USGCRP reports represent the best information that our nation’s best climate scientists have learned about climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) led the development of the latest report, titled “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.” The authors of this report are from multiple climate science agencies and academia. The reports state that global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Specifically, the “Impacts” report reads: “Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.” The scientists amply cite their evidence and invite others to examine the data for themselves.
The report’s authors warn that the impacts from climate change aren’t abstract, far-off, far-in-the-future, or undefined things. On the contrary, they say, “Climate change is apparent now across our nation.” The report cites melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, increased occurrence of wildfires, increased stress on fish populations and coral reefs, more intense heavy rain events that happen more often, rising sea levels, and larger storm surges hitting coastal communities. They cite increased risk of heat waves, increased impacts to water and energy utilities, greater adverse impacts to farmers, and increased health risks. All these documented impacts are among the mounting, mountainous scientific evidence that climate change is being observed and felt today.
At this point, some readers may speculate that I’m engaged in a FUD campaign of my own. My reply is simple: what do the scientists’ climate data show, and what explanation best fits the observations? Each and every observation published in the IPCC and USGCRP reports has been documented and verified by multiple science teams independently from one another. Because those observations line up very well with scientists’ understanding of how the climate system works, and with climate models’ predictions of past and future climate conditions, scientists are increasingly confident that they understand the main root cause of climate change: human emission of carbon dioxide. The case has been made by leading climate scientists, both in the United States and internationally.
So now the stage is set for the next match between proponents of climate science literacy and proponents of climate FUD—the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Already I can hear the propaganda machines revving their engines. I don’t know whether or not our policy leaders in Copenhagen will reach an agreement to limit humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Whichever way the climate policy negotiations go, I hope our policy leaders will give primary consideration to three important facts: (1) we have ample scientific evidence that human-induced climate changes are underway today and are projected to grow; (2) widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase; and (3) while there will be economic costs associated with any given climate policy, there will also be economic costs associated with a failure to act. Climate scientists warn that, in the long run, the economic costs of inaction will likely prove to be far greater.
In the end, I believe (I hope!) proponents of truth and scientific objectivity will prevail. But if they fail to adopt new policies to address the global warming problem, I hope our policy leaders will have the courage to admit that it’s simply because they didn’t get it done, and not because of some bogus claim of scientific uncertainty. As the late, great physicist Dr. Richard Feynman observed: “Reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.”
*My use of the term “dismissive” refers to the 7% of the U.S. population who are “very sure that global warming is not happening” and are “actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”—as measured and defined by Ed Maibach, et al., in their 2009 reported titled “Global Warming’s Six Americas.”
In March 2008 David Herring joined NOAA’s Climate Program Office, where he serves as Communications Program Director. Before coming to NOAA, David worked for 16 years as a science writer, editor, and project manager in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
August 11th, 2009
This is the second in a series of guest blog posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.
By Flora D. Martino
The science center community today plays a prominent role in communicating science to the general public. Science centers, science museums, and aquariums are well recognized by their visitors as ideal places for gaining scientific knowledge. In recent years, this role is not only informative; science centers are also deeply interested in generating dialogue with their visitors for a mutual exchange of information, experiences, and points of view to stimulate debate on climate change issues. For instance, presenting the social, economic, and ethical dimensions of climate change has become as important as describing the science behind the phenomena. Since science center and museum audiences are quite broad, from students to families to senior citizens, science centers have learned to use various different communication tools.
The expanding role of science centers in the field of science communication is exemplified by the recent launch of the Action on Climate Change through Engagement, Networks and Tools (ACCENT) project. Reflecting the decision of European science centers and museums to strengthen local efforts on issues of climate change, ACCENT gathers and coordinates science communication and public engagement practices about climate change issues in 15 partner institutions.
ACCENT proposes to contribute to the global campaign on climate change from the “informative” to the “active” phase by exchanging and disseminating practices, by taking specific actions that encourage the involvement of citizens in active participation and establishing dialogue among scientists, stakeholders, and the public. A large range of activities concerning climate change (hands-on learning, exhibitions, school labs, science demonstrations, games, lectures, and debates) will be organized by each of the partner institutions in order to increase visitors’ knowledge and to engage people in positive actions.
Events and activities implemented by ACCENT’s partners will be endorsed in a common global communication strategy under the message: “I DO. Commit yourself to action for the climate”. This message includes a dissemination plan for ACCENT to reach outside the consortium to any organization that deals with public engagement in science and technology.
ACCENT will organize a formal launch event at the Experimentarium Science Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark during COP15 this December. The overall goal of this event is to present the ACCENT initiative and activities to an audience composed of professionals engaged in communication on climate change. These individuals are the multipliers who will help the ACCENT activities reach a wider audience so that the public will benefit from ideas exchanged at the conference. The event will focus on international climate and energy issues and will include members of the international press and key persons in the area of climate research and policy.
ACCENT partner institutions include: Fondazione IDIS-Città della Scienza, Napoli, Italy; ECSITE-the European Network of Science Centres and Museums; Observa (a social science research organization), Vicenza, Italy; Genoa Aquarium, Italy; Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre, Vantaa, Finland; Arctic Centre, Rovaniemi, Finland; Techniquest, Cardiff, Wales, U.K.; Technopolis, the Flemish Science Centre, Mechelen, Belgium; Universeum, Göteborg, Sweden; Teknikens Hus, Luleå, Sweden; Nausicaa, Centre National de la Mer, Boulogne-sur-Mer, France; Experimentarium, Hellerup, Denmark; Teaduskeskus AHHAA, Tartu, Estonia; MadaTech, Israel National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space, Haifa; and Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.
Flora D. Martino, Communications projects, Fondazione IDIS-Citta della Scienza
