16 February 2015

Obama is Right: Climate Change Kills More People Than Terrorism

floods

By Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, 16 February 15
Source: Reader Supported News

In an interview with Vox this week, President Barack Obama said the media “absolutely” overstates the risk of terrorism, when climate change and epidemics affect far more people. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest elaborated on Obama’s remarks on Tuesday, saying that “[t]here are many more people on an annual basis who have to confront the impact of climate change or the spread of a disease” than have to face terrorism.

Conservatives like Mike Huckabee ridicule Obama for linking climate change to national security. “I assure you that a beheading is much worse than a sunburn,” Huckabee told Fox News on Monday. They will be disappointed to learn that climate change is, in fact, more dangerous.

Twenty governments commissioned an independent report in 2012 from the group DARA International to study the human and economic costs of climate change. It linked 400,000 deaths worldwide to climate change each year, projecting deaths to increase to over 600,000 per year by 2030. When scientists attribute deaths to climate change, they don’t just mean succumbing to a heat wave or, as Huckabee put it, to sunburn. Heat waves kill many, to be sure, but global warming also devastates food security, nutrition, and water safety. Since mosquitoes and other pests thrive in hot, humid weather, scientists expect diseases like malaria and dengue fever to rise. Floods threaten to contaminate drinking water with bacteria and pollution.

When the report looked at the added health consequences from burning fossil fuels—aside from climate change—the number of deaths jumps from 400,000 to almost 5 million per year. Carbon-intensive economies see deaths linked to outdoor air pollution, indoor smoke from poor ventilation, occupational hazards, and skin cancer.

You can see which countries are most vulnerable to climate change in this map:

And look at the associated deaths worldwide, broken down by cause:

Now, compare that to terrorist incidents between 2000-2013, compiled in the 2014 Global Terrorism Index by the Institute for Economics and Peace. There were 18,000 deaths from terrorist attacks in 2013, a peak year. Over the 13-year period studied, 100,000 people died. Unlike the widespread impacts of climate change, terrorist threats are targeted. Most of the attacks in 2013 affected just five countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria.

The ultimate irony of Republicans brushing off the impact of climate change: Drought and extreme weather can destabilize developing regions, making climate change one of the factors that drives terrorism.

3 January 2015

David Attenborough: Leaders Are in Denial About Climate Change

david_attenborough

By Tom Bawden, The Independent

02 January 15

Sir David Attenborough is calling on global leaders to step-up their actions to curb climate change, saying that they are in denial about the dangers it poses despite the overwhelming evidence about its risks.

The TV naturalist said those who wield power need to use it: “Wherever you look there are huge risks. The awful thing is that people in authority and power deny that, when the evidence is overwhelming and they deny it because it’s easier to deny it – much easier to deny it’s a problem and say ‘we don’t care’,” Sir David said.

In terms of climate change, “we won’t do enough and no one can do enough, because it’s a very major, serious problem facing humanity; but at the same time it would be silly to minimise the size of the problem,” he told Sky News.

Later this year a crucial UN climate summit will be held, at which world leaders have pledged to agree to tough cuts in their carbon emissions, to ensure the increase in global warming does not exceed 2°C – beyond which its consequences become increasingly devastating.

Although that meeting is not scheduled to take place until December, the scale of the task ahead is huge and world leaders are already working towards the summit.

However Sir David is concerned that, despite the increasingly obvious scale of the threat climate change poses, leaders are not taking the matter as seriously as they should.

“Never in the history of humanity in the last 10 million years have all human beings got together to face one danger that threatens us – never.

“It’s a big ask, but the penalty of not taking any notice is huge,” he said.

Sir David’s comments come two days after a separate warning – on the dangers posed by the booming human population.

“It’s desperately difficult, the dangers are apparent to anybody,” he told The Independent.

“We can’t go on increasing at the rate human beings are increasing forever, because the Earth is finite and you can’t put infinity into something that is finite.

“So if we don’t do something about it – the natural world that is – we will starve,” Sir David said.

Last month a newly discovered species of beetle was named Trigonopterus attenboroughi, in honour of Sir David Attenborough. Alexander Riedel, the researcher who discovered the 2.14mm-long species, said he called the beetle after Sir David because he enjoyed watching his television programmes so much as a child.

This is not the first time he has had a species named after him. In 2009, a flesh-eating pitcher plant, so large that it can swallow and devour rats whole, was discovered on Mount Victoria in the Philippines and named Nepenthes attenboroughii.

Two years later, a one-millimetre species of goblin spider was discovered on Horn Island, off the coast of Australia, and named Prethopalpus attenboroughi, or Attenborough’s goblin spider.

SOURCE: Reader Supported News

10 November 2014

Climate Change could increase pollen levels -and allergies

allergy

By Tim Radford, EcoWatch
Source: Reader Supported News

Scientists have identified a new hazard that will arrive as a result of climate change: a huge increase in hay fever and pollen allergies.

A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, U.S., report in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS One that as man-made carbon dioxide and low-level ozone levels rise, so will grass pollen production and allergen exposure—by up to 200 percent.

Many predictions of the problems of global warming are, in effect, simulations: researchers take a climate model, add a few parameters, identify a trend or isolate a possibility, and run it forward to see what happens. Using such techniques, researchers have predicted that heat extremes themselves will present health hazards, and have confirmed that cutting CO2 emissions will certainly save lives.

Notorious irritant

But Jennifer Albertine and her colleagues at Amherst tried the other approach: they grew plants in laboratory conditions, using different atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and of ozone—the O3 version of oxygen (O2) that plays an important protective role in the stratosphere, but is a notorious irritant and health hazard in traffic-choked cities.

They selected for the experiment the grass Phleum pratense, widely known as Timothy grass and common in lawns, pasture and meadows everywhere. Then, at the appropriate moment, they bagged the flowers, captured and measured the pollen production, and used enzymes to get at an allergen protein called Phl p 5.

The news is not good for those who dread the start of the hay fever season in spring. As atmospheric CO2 doubled to 800 parts per million, there was a 53 percent increase in pollen production per grass flower.

But that was only part of the effect. A greater number of plants flowered as a result of the stimulus of the extra carbon dioxide, which has an effect on plant fertility. And that brought the increase in pollen levels to a startling 200 percent.

Allergen levels

The increases in low-level ozone—already widely predicted as a consequence of global warming—had no effect on the quantities of pollen produced, although it did tend to suppress the allergen levels in the pollen.

But since the effect of low-level ozone is to irritate the mucous membranes of gasping city-dwellers and actually make the allergic airway response even worse, this is not good. The researchers warn that ozone increases would bring on negative respiratory health effects quite independently on any rise in pollen counts.

“The implications of increasing CO2 production for human health are clear,” warned Dr Albertine.

Her co-author, Christine Rogers, an environmental health scientist, added: “This is the first evidence that pollen production is significantly stimulated by elevated carbon dioxide in a grass species and has worldwide implications, due to the ubiquitous presence of grasses in all biomes and the high prevalence of grass pollen allergy.”

4 November 2014

UN-IPCC Report: Climate change is happening

Report says world has until 2100 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero or face ‘irreversible’ consequences

Climate change is happening, it’s almost entirely man’s fault and limiting its impacts will require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report published Sunday.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the report’s launch in Copenhagen.

The report is meant to serve as a scientific roadmap for U.N. climate negotiations, which continue next month in Lima, Peru. The meeting will be the last major conference on the issue before a 2015 summit in Paris, where a global agreement on climate action is supposed to be adopted.

Governments can keep climate change in check at manageable costs, but will have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2100 to limit the risk of irreversible damage, the U.N. report said.

The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what, with developed countries calling on China and other major developing countries to take on ambitious targets, and developing countries saying the already developed have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against global warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC carefully avoided taking sides on the issue, saying the risks of climate change “are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.”

The report, which was the fourth and final installment in the IPCC’s climate assessment, summed up 5,000 pages of work by 800 scientists who concluded that global warming was now causing more heat extremes, downpours, acidifying the oceans and raising sea levels.

Failure to reduce greenhouse gas output, produced by the burning of fossil fuels, to zero this century might lock the world on a trajectory with “irreversible” impacts on people and the environment, the report said.

Amid its grim projections, the report also offered hope, saying the tools needed to set the world on a low-emissions path – such as solar and wind energy generators – already exist.

“We have the means to limit climate change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said. “All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the report “another canary in the coalmine.”

“The bottom line is that our planet is warming due to human actions, the damage is already visible, and the challenge requires ambitious, decisive and immediate action,” Kerry said in a statement. “Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids.”

Pointing to solutions, the IPCC said the costs associated with mitigation action, such as shifting energy systems to solar and wind power and other renewable sources, would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.

Pachauri of the IPCC said that cost should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting “all species that live on this planet” at peril.

Source: Reader Supported News – By Al Jazeera America

25 September 2014

Interview: How to charge firms for CO2 emissions without it costing jobs

Ben Eickhout

General : Charging companies for CO2 emissions can be a great way of encouraging them to become cleaner, but also risks pushing them to move production to somewhere with lower environmental standards. The European Commission aims to prevent the practice known as carbon leakage by continuing to give some allowances away for free. Bas Eickhout proposed to block this decision, saying many industries can afford to pay for the allowances. The environment committee voted against his proposal on 24 September.

Charging companies for CO2 emissions can be a great way of encouraging them to become cleaner, but also risks pushing them to move production to somewhere with lower environmental standards. The European Commission aims to prevent the practice known as carbon leakage by continuing to give some allowances away for free. Bas Eickhout proposed to block this decision, saying many industries can afford to pay for the allowances. The environment committee voted against his proposal on 24 September.

Some industrial sectors in the EU are given a substantial share of their CO2 emissions allowances for free, as it is feared they would otherwise relocate if they had to pay for them. The Commission has now prepared a list of sectors at risk of relocating on the assumption of a €30 price per allowance. However, the market price today is only €5 and some say that many of the sectors listed could actually afford paying the current market price or even more for allowances without putting jobs at risk in the EU.

We discussed the situation with Mr Eickhout.

What is wrong with the Commission proposal?

Sectors that are not at all exposed to the risk of carbon leakage are now receiving free allowances.

The Commission’s methodology to identify sectors eligible for the allocation of free allowances is based on a carbon price of €30 per allowance. This price is far too high and puts sectors on the list that do not belong there.

Meanwhile in an impact assessment that was not made public, the Commission uses a price of 16.5. Under this scenario, more sectors will have to buy allowances, member states will earn about €5 billion and several CO2-intensive sectors will have an incentive to innovate.

Is there a risk that some energy-intensive sectors, if removed from this list, might relocate their businesses to other regions?

No. A recent study, which was carried out for the Commission, even questions whether carbon leakage exists at all.

Moreover, the aforementioned impact assessment also concludes that some sectors can be safely removed from the list. The list should only contain the sectors that face unfair competition, whereas it currently the list contains 96% of all industries participating in ETS (Emissions Trading System).

How could the EU make companies pay for CO2 emissions while still preserving the jobs in the Union?

First of all, the revenues can be used to lower labour taxes, which will make it attractive for companies to hire more people. Secondly, companies will have to innovate to reduce their emissions, which in turn will create green jobs.

Europarl.europa.eu